What : A game that lets you use four basic elements – Fire, Water, Earth and Wind and wants you to combine these and figure out 330 elements.

How : A home screen gives you the 4 basic elements and lets you move these elements over one another to generate a new element.

You can also add the new elements that you have generated to bring more elements into the combination. All the elements that you have created are saved and can be accessed by pressing the ‘+’  symbol.

Usefulness : If you have a curious mind, then this app is quizzically engaging.

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What : FiabeeSync allows you to acces, instantly search through and share any of the data you have stored across all of your devices, even when offline. Find any files from any device.

How : Having moved on from Firefox to Chrome, I am pretty impressed with the Chrome web store. Agreed, most of the apps are just links, but some apps are excellent.  If you haven’t played around with it, do try the NY Times on the Chrome web store. NY Times and Jolicloud alone can give you hours of geeky fun.

Install Fiabee on your chrome. In Fiabee , through a selective syncronization, you will be able to access all of your files as if they were locally stored.

Here is how it looks on the chrome browser.

• Access, modify, search and share, even offline from any of your devices, no matter where the original is stored.
• There’s no need to download files locally; you can share them directly via email, Facebook or Twitter by creating a share link to your file(s).
• Use the drag and drop feature to send files directly to your Android device through the Chrome browser.
• View your MS Office fies through Google Docs integration.

Choose one of your devices and upload files into it and it automatically appears in your device. Easiest way to transfer files.

Click on the file when you want to access it.

Usefulness: Really good to easily transfer files. Since it is in beta, it has a limitation of 1GB storage.

What: The best  ‘Getting Things Done’ productivity app that is out there.  A paid version is available, but a free version would be good enough for a majority of us.

How:

• Full sync with ToodleDo online task website
  • Contexts
  • Folders
  • Tasks
  • Task reminders (notifications to Android task bar)
  • Repeating Tasks, with support for repeating by due date or by completion date
  • Task notes (this is not general Toodledo Notes, which are not supported)
  • Start Date / Time
  • Due Date / Time
  • Tags
  • Task Priority
  • Task Status (11 to choose from)
  • Starred Tasks
• Subtasks will be displayed, but cannot be created or have their parents changed
• Each list can have its own sort order configured, chosen from:
  • Priority then Due Date
  • Due Date then priority
  • Importance (as defined by Toodledo)
  • Task Title – alphabetic
  • Task Creation Date
  • By Context Name
  • By Folder Name
  • By Starred
• A global filter can be applied, so that all lists show only tasks that match the chosen folder or chose context (inbox remains unfiltered)
• Global filtering of task due further than a configurable period in the future
• Task search, based on title or notes
• Toodledo Hotlist summary item
• Folder/context/tag grouping
• Task templates – allowing you to configure new task addition to be as efficient as possible, fully configurable to your own workflow.
• Show/Hide summary items to configure the screen to meet your needs
• Configurable Widget
• French, Spanish, German, Russian Translations

How I use it: I create folders for all the things that I have to keep track of.

I add contexts, so I can filter by context for each Folder. For example in things to buy, I have JC Penney and Meijer. So, when filter the Inbox, by Things to Buy, I can also change the context to JCPenney, Meijer or Best Buy if I want to.

My favorite part is that it syncs with Toodledo. My family has an account and use the internet to add things it automatically gets updated on the phone.

The Inbox shows the folders and the contexts in a different color as shown below.

Usefulness: It is the best GTD app that is out there for Android.

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What : Let’s you listen in on different radio Air, Marine, Police, Rail and Weather radio.  It has feeds from LiveFireFeeds.com, RadioReference.com, RailroadRadio.net and Wunderground.com.

How : A very simple app. In the 5 minutes that I spent listening to the Chicago police radio, I heard them talking about a fallen tree in someone’s garage, a student being held for having a knife in school, two gangs shouting at each other.  It made my otherwise uneventful day, eventful.

It was interesting to know that it also had the Police and Fire radio right where I live. You could also browse by area, genre and source. We were able to listen in on the Australia and Austria police radio too.

Usefulness : It is not an utility app.  If you have some time to kill or if you are interested in listening in on radio, then this is the simplest app you can find.

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What : Backs up your SMS messages to a gmail account.

How : It lets you specify a gmail account and the password.You can choose to do an auto backup when you get new messages.

In the advanced settings, you can name the label that you want these messages to be backed up with. That is it. As simple as that. Then click on back up now. All your texts have been backed up to your Gmail with the specified label.

Remember if you are doing this the first time, the maximum number of messages it can back up at a single time is 200. So, you will have to do it a few times depending on the number of messages that you have.

Usefulness : If you are heavy texter, you might have the need to back up your messages and get all those message threads out of your phone. This is a good app to do exactly that.

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What : If you follow Digg,   this is an Android App for Digg.

How : There is not much to explain. This is a way of keeping up with popular posts on the Internet. Between this, the Google News widget and the other social networking sites like twitter and FaceBook, it is easy to get tied up for a couple of hours every morning. Here are some screen shots.

Here are the menu options

and some more….

Usefulness : There are some limitations in this app.  You cannot login and Digg a story. It does not sort the top stories which is what most of us might want to do. You can install the official Digg application to do those, but there are limitations in that too, which we will see when we cover the official Digg app.

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What : Simply put, this is a private video stream between two phones running Knocking live. Currently, it is supported both on Android platform and iPhone.

How : Install Knocking Live on your phone and search for your friends. You can search using their username or email address. You could also invite them to use this app.

You could add your friends if they are already using this app.

If you want to stream video to a friend, select them and it automatically sends a knock to their phone and tells them that you have a video to share and if they are interested they can accept the request. Once the initial handshake is done, it starts the video streaming.

Though it has proved really useful in times of need, this app is still climbing the curve of maturity. There are a couple of things to keep in mind.

1. This is just video and is not accompanied by audio.

2. Cannot stream to more than one person.

Usefulness : If you need a basic video streaming software between phones and is okay with the limitations mentioned above, then you can give this a shot.

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If I had to name a single app that I spent a lot of time on everyday, it would be the Google News and Weather widget. When a friend of mine who is quite tech-savvy and has had an Android device for the past year didn’t know about this, I knew I had to write this.

What : The name says it all. It is News and Weather. It comes with its own topics like Sports, Health, World news and  so on. The best part  is how you can add your own news topic to watch.

How :  If you are reading this, you already know how to add a widget to your home screen.  Add a widget and choose News and Weather. Open the widget and go to Menu -> Settings.

Here are the different topics.

Add your own news topics that you like to keep a watch on. Since I am from Michigan, I have Michigan as a news topic and then Lansing as another news topic and of course, Droid and Android.

Here is what the actual news listing looks like. All the topics that were selected appear in tabs and it is very easy to navigate through them.

Usefulness : Go get it.

This should already be bundled with your Android device. Choose to install a widget and choose News and Weather. Let us know how you like it.

What :

If your idea of having fun is browsing the market for new apps, downloading them, trying them out and then uninstalling the less tasteful ones, then this is a very useful app. If you share my agony of going to Menu -> Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications and then searching for the application you wish to uninstall, you will like this app. I know I do.

How :

If you are about to have a session of uninstalling apps, open this application to get this screen.

Enable the service and then open up the app that you want to uninstall and shake your phone.

I like to  disable the service after I am done uninstalling the apps, as I don’t want to accidentally uninstall any apps.

Usefulness:

If you browse the android market heavily for apps,  use this to easily  uninstall the ones you don’t like.

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What :

Walkie Talkie lets you have walkie-talkie style voice communication. We have found this app to be very useful.

Messages can be sent to a group of people. Received messages are automatically played. If program is running, incoming messages arrive as soon as 15 seconds. If program is not visible, it polls in the background every 1 minute (to save battery).

History log allows replay of messages and reply via a simple “Record & Reply” button. Replies are sent to all recipients.

How :

All that you have to do is select a person or a group of people that you want to send your message to and press the hold button and talk. That is it. When you release the button, it automatically sends your message to the recipient(s). Does the person you want to communicate to not have an Android phone? No problem.  Set them up as your contact on this app and send a voice message to their mail accounts. As simple as that.

The best part is yet to come – it does not use your SMS or your talk time.

Features

• No monthly fees
• No SMS fees
• No use of talk time minutes
• Broadcast voice messages to a group
• Response sent to all recipients
• History allows replay and out of order response.

The Beta version has advertisements and the paid version does not.

Here is a screenshot of the contacts page.

You can also check the old messages by going into the history tab.

Usefulness : Excellent way to communicate with a family/friend who has an Android phone. If you have the need to send voice messages  to someone’s Inbox, then this makes it very easy.

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