Check out the latest and greatest in apps for your Android smartphone with our monthly app roundup.
Pulse News
Personally selected news, formatted for the small-screen.Pulse is a news aggregation app that displays news stories across a multitude of feeds – including your Facebook stream, Google Reader subscriptions, or any of the pre-installed news sources. There are also a heap of ‘Pulse Packs’ available, that will dedicate a whole page to the best news sources in a selected category, including tech, news & analysis, entertainment, sports, business, fun, and more.
The app shows all of your selected news sources in a vertically scrollable list, complete with an accompanying image for each headline. When you reach a news source that you like, you can scroll right to see more from that source. Reading a story is just a matter of clicking on a headline, where it will take you to a clean, no fuss layout optimised for the small-screen. If the RSS feed for a news source doesn’t contain the full story, it’s easy to view the original article in your browser. You can also share out a good story to Twitter or Facebook.
For those extra-long articles, the Pulse.me service (free signup required) allows ‘starred’ articles to automatically appear in Instapaper, Read it Later, Evernote, or to the pulse.me site for later reading from any web browser.
Free > Alphonso Labs > LinkOpen Signal Maps
This app has two main purposes. The first, and most practical, is to use it to find the strongest signal in a given area. The app will point you in the direction of the nearest tower, with the aim of helping you find better reception. You can also view a map of nearby towers, or run a speed test.
The other purpose of this app is to log your reception dead zones, in order to contribute to the opensignalmaps.com database – a worldwide database of ‘real life’ network coverage.
Free > Staircase 3, Inc. > LinkDiskUsage
If, like me, you’re running low on space on your phone or SD card, but don’t know quite where it all went, you can use DiskUsage to scan your storage and show you a graphical representation of all the apps and files, with the largest ones taking up more space on-screen.
You can zoom in and out to different levels, delete files, and, when scanning apps, differentiate between how much is the actual program, and how much is application-generated (and often clearable) data.
Free > Ivan Volosyuk > Link PhotoWall Live Wallpaper
PhotoWall Live Wallpaper shows photos from your device, Facebook, or Picasa, as constantly changing, live wallpaper.
This free version allows you to show them in four different ways, including my favourite, as a stack of Polaroids. You can also add effects to make the photos look that much better.
You can select which phone or Picasa albums to show, or if you want all of your friends’ Facebook photos, or just those with you in them.
For US$0.99, you can purchase more layouts, effects, and have it refresh more often.
Free > Larva Labs Ltd. > Link