I finally did it: I bought a smartphone. And a halfway decent one at that.
My new weapon of choice is a Motorola Moto G, a device that touts a near-stock Android experience, a quad-core CPU, and a camera that… well… okay, it’s better than the one in my old phone. Storage capacity is only 8 GB, so I’m going to be pretty picky about what goes on it.
That’s where you come in.
Give me your recommendations for the best Android apps, along with your rationale, in the comments section of this article. If I find your recommendation useful, I’ll put it in my follow-up article.
Thanks, and go to it!
The most essential apps I have on my Sero 7 Pro are:
Battery Doctor a very good charging and usage app
CM Browser a secure browser that seems to require less system resources.
CM Security a great virus utility.
And finally:
Clean Master to reclaim memory and clean up “junk” files.
Also worth mentioning:
ES File Explorer
Androidify – Make an Android avatar for your Google + and other online accounts.
Kingsoft Office a very light but useful Productivity app.
Link2SD is a free app that’s absolutely crucial for Android phones with insufficient internal storage. It allows you to store most apps on a specially partitioned microSD card in ways that go far beyond Android’s stock storage functions. The $2.35 Plus version can also move app data to the card, freeing up even more internal storage, and is well worth the cost. My Huawei Fusion (acquired for free at a yard sale!) is a very low end phone with only 512MB of internal storage, and would be much less useful without Link2SD.
It’s important to carefully follow the instructions when setting up the card to work with Link2SD, but it’s not hard, and the app has worked very well for me. Oh, and I almost forgot—the phone must be rooted. Rooting will probably void your warranty and stuff, but I’ve never been sorry I went to bother of rooting (though I obviously don’t have a warranty to worry about).
The only problem is – the Moto G has no SD card slot! :-(
Congratulations on owning a Moto G. I’ve recently upgraded to one of these and, so far, cannot fault it. After two painful years with a low end Huawei Android phone that barely had the processing power to boot up, this phone is a delight!
If you’re an iCloud user, two essential apps are SmoothSync for Cloud Contacts and SmoothSync for Cloud Calendar from Marten Gajada. They are paid for apps but at a nominal cost and work seamlessly with iCloud. There’s also an add-on app called Tasks for iCloud reminders.
A torch app is another essential for me and the one I use is Torch LED Flash from Colin McDonough. It’s a torch, nothing more and nothing less, is free and doesn’t ask for lots of permissions to work.
A really fun app is Google Sky Maps. I’m no astronomer but I really enjoy waving the phone around the night sky, just seeing what’s out there!
Google+, Outlook and Dropbox all offer easy ways of transferring your photos automatically from your phone so you can quickly free up the space again and Google Play Music offers a brilliant way of accessing your iTunes music from the cloud so, as long as you have a good wifi or 3G connection, you will have access to your music without the need to download it and take up precious drive space.
Enjoy your new phone.