android apps

By way of a new staff-curated page on Google Play, Google lists its picks for best apps of 2012. Titles include big-name hits like Pinterest and Evernote, as well as more-obscure choices like Ancestry and Grimm's Show White. Overall, I find the list a bit underwhelming, but since it is composed solely of staff recommendations (and not best sellers), there's certainly room for differing opinions. See the full list of Google's recommendations below.

Playing the new Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on my iPad (it's coming soon for Android) made me nostalgic for other GTA games. Not so much for the gratuitous violence, but for the radio stations that have become a hallmark of the series.

Indeed, these in-game stations play not only a huge variety of commercial tunes (in GTA IV alone, you'll find everything from Count Basie to Genesis to Kanye West), but also some crackling DJ banter and hilarious fake ads. (The Public Liberty Radio station is bust-a-gut funny.)… Read more

As of today, Snapseed, one of the more unique photo-editing apps for desktop and iOS, is officially available for Android. After enjoying much success on other platforms and even getting acquired by Google in September, it was only a matter of time before this increasingly popular product would make its way onto the Mountain View titan's own mobile OS.

Snapseed offers borders, filters, and a handful of other useful tools for fine-tuning photo attributes like focus, brightness, contrast, and more. And not surprisingly, the app comes with built-in Google+ sharing, which seems to set the stage for an ultimate … Read more

Released yesterday, Adblock Plus for Android offers a no-nonsense way to completely remove ads from your mobile computing experience. Simply download and install the app, and let it run behind the scenes. From there, you should notice that display ads, video ads, push notifications, and even many in-app ads are no more.

So far, I've seen AdBlock Plus kill ads on several Web sites, including Google, and within the ad-supported Pandora app. According to its developers, though, AdBlock Plus does not work when browsing with Firefox for Android, since Firefox does not support Android's system proxy settings.

Adblock … Read more

Having access to a potentially infinite cache of media files at your fingertips is a nice thought. However, you need a stable app that can deliver those files quickly and efficiently to your Android device, and that is exactly what the Netflix app is designed to do.

Placed on a throne as the world's leading Internet subscription service for streaming movies and TV shows, Netflix went an extra mile and created its mini version for Android devices. The interface of the Netflix app is more or less straightforward; there's a shows option, a search bar, and some account-based … Read more

With the holiday season fully under way, there's a good chance many of you are planning to pick up a new Android phone or tablet. Heck, you might even be looking into one of these new "phablet" thingies that people are talking about. Whatever the case may be, if you're rocking a new Android device, there's no question you're going to want to some killer apps to test its limits. Lucky for you, we've put together a list of some of the hottest ones.

Editors' note: For six of the hottest apps on … Read more

It's hard to listen to Paul Davison and not get swept up in his enthusiasm, hard not to want to buy into his grand vision for the app his small company built.

Davison is the high-energy CEO of Highlight, a people discovery app for iPhone that came out last January, and that was widely predicted to start its world domination tour at the 2012 South by Southwest Interactive festival in much the same way that Twitter did in 2007 and Foursquare did in 2009.

Looking back, it's clear that much of the reason so many people expected so … Read more

We were already impressed years ago when Skype was first introduced on a full OS, but when its video call features are applied on a mobile OS, it gets even better.

The familiar blue-and-white interface makes a comeback in the mobile version of Skype. Things are a little simplified, of course, but the critical elements are easily accessible. You can quickly build up your contact list with the option to import all of your contact information from your phone's list. The call quality was high in our tests, and the video calls didn't lag and appeared very natural. … Read more

Most game bundles have one thing in common: the games have been around awhile. They might be solid titles, sure, but many times they're so old that most gamers already have them.

Not this time. The Humble Bundle 4 for Android comes with five games, four of which are making their Android debut. In fact, they're not even available via Google Play yet, so you couldn't purchase them separately if you wanted to.

Don't have an Android device? Don't sweat it: you also get licenses for the Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of each game.… Read more