What are some of your Android recommendations?

Matt's answer:

Hi, everybody! I wanted to do at least one video to talk about what are some of your favorite Android recommendations. You know I love my Nexus One. It’s been a great phone and not just app recommendations, nonpaid recommendation or endorsement. Seidio makes an extended battery for the Nexus One. So whenever I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro earlier this year I actually took several of these large batteries and used an Android app called MyTracks. And what MyTracks does is it lets you track your way all the way around on GPS. So I used it all the way up Mount Kilimanjaro with these very large batteries. It worked really well. As far as apps that I use all the time, there’s some pretty standard one things like Gmail, finance, maps, calendar, messaging, you know, the standard ones that I definitely use a lot. I also like Listen. I like to listen to podcasts so This Week In Google, This Week In Tech. Whenever I’m working out that’s my secret. Whenever I’m pumping iron I’ll listen to a few podcasts so that I’m not just getting bored. There’s a really cool app called TripIt. If You haven’t tried TripIt it’s a great way whenever you’re doing travel you forward your stuff to plans@tripit.com and it makes a very easy website or good Android app where instead of printing out all your flight stuff on paper you can just look at it you can say oh OK this is the next thing that I’m going to be on as far as my flight. Louis Gray introduced me to a cool Android app called My6Sense. You can search for My6Sense in the Android market. And what it does is it’ll take your Twitter feed, your Buzzfeed, the things that you read in Google Reader and it basically blends them all together and it sorts them by relevance. So you don’t have to necessarily read eight hours worth of tweets in order to see the most interesting stuff. It’ll surface the most interesting stuff for you. What are some other fun things I like about my Android phone? Music wise I’ve tried a bunch of different stuff. Pandora is fantastic. I’m paying money to M O G or MOG, I don’t know how you say it, because it’s a really good streaming solution. You can also download your tunes. Grooveshark is another one I’m actually paying for right now in order to listen to music streaming. There’s also an Android app called SubSonic. You have to set up a server on your computer but then you can stream the music on your computer to your Android phone which is also pretty nice. There’s a lot of other fun things. I have a lot of like Wi-Fi analyzer. I’ve been known to walk around an airport with the Wi-Fi analyzer looking for the best spot to sit down to get the best Wi-Fi. There’s a really cool app called MapViewer from a company, Sensorly and what that will do is you can fire it up and just sort of walk around and it will upload a very fine grained map of your cell phone coverage and sort of say oh this is the quality that you’ve got. And so everybody walking around generates a much better quality map than just the stuff that you’d see on the brochures for, you know, AT&T or Verizon or T-mobile or whatever. So you can actually start up the application and upload your own data and then find out just how good your signal strength is. And if you’re lucky you might be able to get different Android handsets. So for example this is the Nexus S. It’s a really great little headset. So this one’s for T-mobile. This one’s for AT&T. You can fire up the application walk around or drive around your house and then figure out OK long term is it better to go with AT&T, T-mobile or some other carrier, for example. So those are just a few of the things that I like on Android. You know there’s so many it’s really hard to go into completely but there’s a lot of fun widgets. The Wi-Fi hot spot is fantastic if you guys don’t have the Froyo the version of Android that has that. And then there’s just a lot of other random things to try. If you haven’t played around with the Android market, recently they came out with a new revision that will show you related apps so you can start from one app and you can kind of surf around watching the comments and then also seeing what other apps people are using. By the time you get done you can waste a large number of hours having fun. There’s even a few little, you know, kind of neat things like Chrome to phone which basically let’s you be surfing on your laptop and say you know what this is a cool webpage I want to send it to my phone. So it’s an extension that you install in Chrome and then you install this app. You click a button and boom it’s instantly sent to your phone. That can be very handy for things like you know phone numbers or various things that you want to send. So those are a few of the Android apps that I like. You know it’s really fun to see what different things are coming out, everything from a heart rate thing that you put your finger over the camera and it will actually turn on the flash and let you see what your heart rate is. You know all sorts of fun apps like that. I’ve avoided mentioning some of the common ones that everybody should try like Angry Birds but hopefully that gives you a few things to check out whenever you’re looking into various Android choices.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: