When I was man-handling the Android phone at the T-Mobile press conference earlier today, I couldn’t help but notice that one of the icons was for the App Market—Android’s answer to the App Store on iTunes. The app market launches on October 22, when the T-Mobile G1 goes on sale, so I was curious to see what apps are already loaded on it.
I took the fuzzy picture at left with my iPhone (natch), and wrote down the names of the apps and what they do. I got a peak at the following apps, which were all listed as free:
AnyCut—Basically lets you program shortcuts using the keys on the phone. Shouldn’t this be part of the phone’s settings?
BreadCrumbz—lets you make a route on a map using pictures of landmarks to enhance the directions.
Cocktail—Tell it what ingredients you have at hand, it will come up with cocktails you can make. Yum.
Compass—What it sounds like. Great for hiking.
Contacts De-Duper—Don’t you hate it when you have the same contact listed more than once on your phone? This de-dupes them for you.
EcoRio—These guys were featured onstage. They help you reduce your carbon footprint. Looked like a ride share app to me.
Krystle II—A touchy, feely Tomigochi. This app turns your phone into a pet that you need to take care of and stroke, using the touch screen, of course. Gross.
Mandelbrot Map—Uses chaos theory to create maps with an “infinite view.” I should have downloaded this one.
Panoramio—Shows you photos on a map near wheer you are. Already integrated into Google Maps.
Photostream—A Flickr photo browser.
Pocket Seismograph—Was that an earthquake? Now, you can check for yourself.
Quicklist—A to-do list. Everyone needs one of those.
Radar—Shows where you are on a radar-like screen. Meh.
Ringroid—Create a ringtone from any song in your music library. Love it.
ShopSavvy—Also featured onstage. Uses the camera as a bar-code scanner to let you compare prices while shopping in a store.
Text-to-Speech Library—What it sounds like. Turns text into speech through the phone’s speaker.
Video Player—Seems like that should come with the phone too
Translate—Uses Google Translate to turn foreign words into your own language.
See our previous coverage of the Android platform and its applications here:
- The Best of Android: Final Challenge Winners Announced
- Android to Get Its Own App Market
- In Anticipation Of An Actual Phone, Android Releases A New SDK
- TuneWiki: Android’s iPhone-Like Media Player That May Become The Platform’s Standard
- Live From I/O: Android Pulls An iPhone, App Engine Goes Public, and Google Embraces the Open Web
- Fifty Android Developers Get $25,000 Each: The List
- Sneak Peak At Android Apps Out of MIT
- Google Gets Android Apps Going With a $10 Million Challenge
- T-Mobile Android G1 Launch Liveblog: It’s Got A Compass!
See all
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About the translation tool, are you going to spend 20 minutes typing in the words that you want translated into a box on your phone?? Or just wait until you have access to a computer and type it then
Erick, i think what you underestimates is the power of the ‘compass mode’ on the G1. this is precisely what will allow true AUGMENTED REALITY applications to be developed.
Yes, the Japanese showed you at TC50 what future could be like but the iPhone has no compass. Their application, on the other hand, could be easily developed on Android.
And you know what? Actually someone has already developped something like that for the iPhone. The company is called Enkin. a team of 2 german geeks.
Check this out: http://www.enkin.com
The difference is that Enkin is a working product is a true revolution. And Google is in discussion to buy their company. Just imagine the possibilities for Google: create something similar to AdWords but in real life: businesses would pay to have promotions and ads displayed in real life on your phone through augmented reality with the G1. And this will come sooner than you think.
sorry. i meant enkin was developed for ANDROID. and the link for the demo is wrong, sorry, here the correct one: http://www.enkin.net
The fact that you have a qwerty keyboard that pops out on this phone means that it won’t take so long to type that word for translating, AND hand-held translation devices are popular. I bought the one that my son uses at school for about $100. To have one right on the phone, with a qwerty keyboard, that would be nice.
Unfortunately, Google doesn’t do Hebrew-English translation. Maybe I should write a Morfix.co.il gadget for Android. *grin*
why does the interface look like it was designed by kiddy for kids for kids . Couldn’t they gone ahead and use some of those free templates?
Great to finally see the G1. We have an Android app to synch and browse several media accounts (flickr, picasa, photobucket, youtube, last.fm) from the phone. Does anyone know how to get into the store ?
Ring Roid - That is a serious product name fail.
And what is someone who works for this company called? A Ringroid’er?
Ewww.
the phone looks ugly, i think i’ll wait for the next model or gen, whichever comes first. and maybe a gui upgrade?
anyone notice how Sergey referred to the App Store and then stuttered but I guess never remembered that they’d called it the App Market? Not a big deal since quite a big release.
Grammar check: Title should be sneak peek. Not peak.
When this will be REALLY interesting {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/friHJrq3Im_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”When this will be REALLY interesting ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/aZcikgwFWX”}}}
This is definitely the first article we’ve seen on the apps that are currently on the phone. Love that we can get full reviews within the first day of launch… still debating on whether this will be a phone worth buying.
I am going to release an app for Android called “I am VERY rich”, and I know our good friends at Google will not take it off. This is not a joke. I am a foo ninja with Eclipse.
The very rich app will feature a black hole event horizon symbolizing where the money goes, and will cost twice as much as the one that was sold on the iPhone, showing that Google users have more financial prowess than their Apple counterparts.
The app’s proceeds will go to my small Socal LLC in Long Beach. I hope to have it ready by launch.
Man handled? …. Natch? er……..ok.
1. What is the voice quality on the phone?
2. What is the call drop rate?
3. What is the battery life?
4. Does it have a speaker phone function?
To often the above things get taken for granted. I have ditched the iPhone + all the previous HTC devices and have gone back to my faithful Nokia 3210 after suffering from lousy call quality, dropped calls and nearly-out-of-battery emergencies
Is there an equivalent to Cocktail for the iPhone? I know there are cocktail apps, however are there any where you can put in the ingredients you have & get a list of possible cocktails? I like that.
Yeah, I was kind of wondering the same thing.
Jake
NoteScribe: Premier Note Taking Software
Its manufacturer HTC called it “The most exciting phone in the history of phones.” I compiled a list of all software, hardware and service flaws of G1 and asked the question, “Would Apple have been utterly crucified and AAPL have tanked if the iPhone came out with so many shortcomings?” in:
The Big List: 30 critical issues with Google G1 phone
http://counternotions.com/2008/09/24/g1/
Hm, I actually think video player on G1 is integrated into music player. At least from what I’ve seen at the presentation when you open a music player you are offered Amazon music and YouTube as possible options for played content. Maybe this video one is just a better version focused strictly on video?
“Seems like that should come with the phone…”
Do you not get it? The whole point of Android is that you can swap out all of those bits that would normally “come with the phone”. And example: the Calendar: It “should come with the phone”, obviously, but you can swap out the default one, and add whatever calendar you like. Most importantly, your choice of calendar will interoperate exactly like the original with any other app that talks to “calendar”. So, picking out your favorite video player, music player, shortcut creator, whatever is in YOUR hands, not the hands of some corporate stooge. Right now there are just a few of these apps available, but I expect that you’ll be seeing a huge proliferation of apps in the coming months, some of which will do basic things in different ways that the phone defaults.
This whole thing has the potential to really push the evolution of smart-phone apps forward with a lot of unbridled creativity. It’s like Spore, only for software creation instead of creature creation.
The G1 has to be the worst & laziest thing htc have ever done.
HTC are the apple macs of the pda world & they’re bringing out a piece of crap. Why?
If you’re goig to do something do it properly! The specs are awful.The 1 gb cap & speed issue is unforgiveable. The lack of an earphone jack is beyond dire. This phone has no excuse for being so shit. Not when the mda vario 3 is so amazig. They should be going forward not back. The vario 1’s better & the vario 3 has a tilting screen, the fastest speeds & is basically the best phone/mda until they invent one that walks. What people usually do is add apps & flash it wih a new rom so it’s more customized to suit their needs. The g1’s crap & not worth a penny. get a vario 3 & wait for the g3 at the very least.
I think the intent with the lack of earphone jack, is to sell bluetooth headsets. I’m sure the phone has stereo bluetooth, no?
And retailers love those high mark up accessories, that people spend more on than on the phone itself.
Really this device don’t likes me. I think it don’t offers anything special to the customers. We’ll need to wait for later improvements in other new devices from Google, it is only a first step in Android live.
Lisha, don’t use Spore as an example of forward looking tech for anything. Horrible game, not at all fun to play, very poorly executed, not at all pushing the envelope for a gaming experience. Oh, maybe that is what you meant with your smiley?
many applications and waiting for more…
Well I’m done being pumped up by Google about this phone and it’s not even out yet…..Why you ask???
Well in the fine print on its G1 site: “If your total data usage in any billing cycle is more than 1GB, your data throughput for the remainder of that cycle may be reduced to 50 kbps or less.” BUT IT GET WORSE!! They can even stop your plan for good..just because I got a cool new phone and want to be a power user!!
Let me break it down: 50 kilobits per second is roughly 6 kilobytes per second — about the speed of the dialup modem
One gigabyte is about how much it takes to download the equivalent of a few albums, a decent quality movie, and a decent quality TV episode — not much. Add to that whatever email, Web browsing, file downloading, app downloading, and whatever else you’ll be doing, and it wouldn’t be far-fetched for the power users that Google is courting to hit that 1 gigabyte cap — 34 MB a day — on a regular basis.
In closing I just want to remind you AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint — offer a more liberal cap: 5 gigabytes
I LOVE YOU GOOGLE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS!!…before it’s to late
forseeing a clear win of android and the gphone over the iphone in the upcoming months
Interesting extract from this post on waht a good mobile app should have. See below
http://tech-talk.biz/2008/09/2.....iller-app/
What criteria should guide developers when designing the next mobile killer app? Here are some suggestions of the ingredients a mobile killer app better have:
- Useful. There must be a clear value to the user. What problem does the app solve? How is people impacted? Who/how many are impacted?
- Usability. User experience first. Simple, fast and engaging.
- Immediacy. Must be useful here and now, where and when I need it.
- Context-Aware. Intelligent enough to know where are you, with whom, what are you doing (on a call, or a meeting) , your weather, and have the app behave accordingly.
- Viral / Social. Know your community and your friends.
- Coolness. Beautiful, elegant and enjoyable.
Do you agree?
with the android OPEN app-platform, it’s far ahead of the iPhone closed shop
Hi everyone,
I have build an application for the G1 called mShare. Let me know what you guys think. You can download it from the app store.
If you don’t have a G1, you can get a version for other OS, http://mhome.guiang.net.
Or text message ‘mtools’ to 41411.
Hi everyone,
I have build an application for the G1 called mShare. Let me know what you guys think. You can download it from the app store.
If you don’t have a G1, you can get a version for other OS, http://mhome.guiang.net/cpp
Or text message ‘mtools’ to 41411.
On the other end, I got this android last Christmas and surprisingly I’m kinda liking it and I also enjoy the apps. I have no problem at all.