Let's fill up that Galaxy S3 (Photo credit: Stereopoly Blog)
Following on from five apps for iOS, it's time for Android's turn with Santa's wishlist. With a huge range of devices, from Nexus flagships, Galaxy tablets and notes, through a mix of high, middle, and low range smartphones, there are hundreds of thousands of apps and games that can be installed on the platform. Let's pick out five that work well for the holidays.
It's already a hugely popular social game on Facebook, but it's far easier to play the musical quiz on a smartphone screen. You'll hear five snippets of music and be asked to name the song or artist from a multiple choice list. Once you get your score, you'll challenge a friend to answer the same five questions, with the best score winning more coins to spend in the game (buying new categories of questions, bonus shuffles, and other goodies). Not only is it a great quiz game, but because of the asynchronous play it's a great multiplayer game full stop.
There are countless games where you are asked to travel through a landscape with limited control, and many of them are little more than engines for in-app purchases While Going Nuts does have the in-app system for power-ups, the game is well balanced enough that you can succeed through skill alone. Tilting your Android device left and right to fly your squirrel through the dense forest, catching nuts falling from the trees, is graceful and accurate. The nuts fall at random, and the only thing that kills you is your own lack of skill. A must have freemium title.
Putting aside the competitive issues of Amazon's forked Android devices and the generic Android tablet market, it's a delight to have Amazon's eBook reading software available on your smartphone. Yes it's also available on iOS and Windows Phone, but the biggest advantage of Kindle on the majority of Android devices is that you have access to the file system of your device. That means if you have an existing library of eBooks, you've purchased books from other platforms, or you roll your own with tools like Calibre, than you can read them in the Kindle application. Try and do that on an iPhone or a Lumia!
It shouldn't be any surprise that Google's social network has a pretty good Android application, but it's always nice to see a client app done well. A host of features, including Google Hangouts and Google Chat, as well as the option to automatically upload images taken by the smartphone, smart alerts, and a clean interface add up to a good G+ experience, and a lesson to other developers in how to make the best use of Android's features.
Okay, not everyone is a baseball fan, but for those of you who are, MLB's At Bat application is a perfect addition to your Android device. I've linked to the 'Lite' version here, which provides game day scores, news headlines, and video highlights, but the full priced version comes with an extensive archive, and live coverage when matches are under way. This is how to cover a topic, niche or otherwise!
Looking for some stocking fillers for iPhone and iPad? That's covered here, and Windows Phone is on the way!
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