Free stuff: Some Android apps

I don’t lean too heavy on the tech angle these days. That’s for two reasons. On the unhappy side of things, most of Saipan’s pockets aren’t deep enough to chase expensive gadgets. And on the happy side of things, tech seemed to hit a sweet spot a few years ago and many of us are perfectly happy using our old equipment, especially since the new stuff is so often obnoxious these days. But I can’t entirely ignore the outside world, and I did jump onto the tablet bandwagon. For those of you who are joining me in the leap, I‘m going to mention some highly useful free stuff I found.

The free stuff I’m referring to is commonly called “apps.” That’s the hip diminutive for “applications,” which itself is just another way of saying “programs.”

The tablet world, incidentally, is generally split between Apple’s highly popular iPad, up against a slew of competitors most of which are using various forms of the Android operating system. The iPad is the gold standard in tablets, but I’m going to inevitably destroy anything I haul around, so I went the Android route because of some cheap prices. I’m not going to belabor the distinctions between various versions of Android here, but the enthusiasts and experts (I’m neither) are very mindful of such things.

Unlike the tamer and tidier world of iPad apps, Android apps can dwell in the Wild West, where it can take trial and error to ascertain if a given app will work on a given tablet. The apps I use were all downloaded from Google’s application “Market,” using the tablet itself to connect to the Market via the Internet. I’ve read that some tablets don’t provide a pipeline to the Market, so this is one thing I’d want to research before buying a tablet.

Many apps offer free versions and paid versions. I’m only writing about the free versions here, though I’ll soon be upgrading to their paid counterparts in certain cases. Many, but not all, of the free apps I’ve seen place a little advertisement on the tablet screen when online. For paid Android apps, from what I’ve seen prices seem to generally run from about $1 up to $10 or so.

OK, first things first: When I first booted up my shiny new tablet, I couldn’t figure out how the files were organized, or even where they were. This drove me bonkers. Whereupon I found my first utility app, Astro File Manager. Astro allowed me to navigate the files, copy them, delete them, organize them, back them up to removable media, and so on. I’ve since set up a few tablets and Astro was the first thing I wanted to install.

Another nice app is Note Everything, which turns my tablet into a sketchpad. This is very handy for jotting down quick notes. I’m afflicted with the writers’ burden of being jolted awake by essay ideas at odd hours. My tablet is now the perfect notepad for these occasions, since I can use it without having to turn on a lamp, and since I don’t have to then keep track of little scraps of paper.

And yet another useful app is Simple Spreadsheet. Spreadsheets have an infinite amount of uses, of course. One obvious tactic for Saipan’s tourism industry is to use tablets to calculate exchange rates. If a manager is willing to invest five minutes in making a template, then presto, any retail or hotel clerk can easily compute exchange rates and can show a customer how prices were derived.

Speaking of tourists, there are, as you can imagine, various language translation apps out there, including Google Translate. This accepts handwritten characters, so if you’re dealing with exotic languages you can just scribble on the tablet screen itself and the program digests them.

But that’s not the final say in the language realm. The abundance of dual-language electronic dictionaries for tablets is amazing. I’m incapable of traveling with a physical dictionary: I never find the small ones useful enough to use, and I never find the useful ones small enough to pack. Mercifully, the tablet now makes that entire conundrum obsolete. As for Chinese, I’ve found the Hanping dictionary app to be impressive, and this is one case where I am certainly going to upgrade to the paid version.

On a more general note, I’ve found that the Dolphin Web browser and the Winamp music player are also handy apps.

As for Saipan’s situation, although the consumer sector is watching its pennies, there are probably a lot of ways that the business realm can wring productivity out of tablet technology, so maybe that’s what will set the pace locally.