In case you’re interested, here are a few of my favourite Android apps. This is out of email to a friend who was getting an Android phone, hence odd phrasing and poor formatting.

Here are a handful of my favourite Android apps.  (You should be able
to find them by searching in the Android market.)

* SMS Backup and Restore
  (That's what I use.  There's also another SMS backup app that syncs
  to GMail.  That's convenient because you can access your text messages
  from a web browser; I forget why I switched to SMS Backup and Restore.)

* Google Voice
  you can use this in lots of ways, but the way I have it configured is
  to send all my missed calls to my Google Voice number instead of my
  carrier-provided voicemail, which means I can get to my voicemail on 
  the web and/or download it as audio files.

* FBReader
  a nice and lightweight ebook reader; integrates with online catalogues
  of free ebooks so you can download stuff to read.

If you want to *buy* ebooks and read them on the phone, there are
* Kindle for Android
* NOOK for Android
for Amazon and Barnes & Noble, respectively.

* Barcode Scanner
  lets you scan a UPC symbol and do a product search to look for a
  better price, or scan a 2d barcode on your computer screen to install
  a new app or go to a URL, or any number of other things.

* My Tracks
  essentially why you wanted an Android phone. :-)
  [she wanted it so she could track her walks as she was training for a
  fundraiser walk.]

* Andoku Sudoku
  lots of Sudoku variants

* BeyondPod Podcast Manager ($)
  lets you subscribe and listen to podcasts; I use this a lot.
  Google's own Listen is free, but doesn't mesh as well with how
  I listen to podcasts; it's more oriented towards generating an
  automated playlist for you than towards you picking out what you
  want to listen to right now.  There's a free trial of BeyondPod.

* Google Sky Map
  point at the sky and see which star/planet that thing is

* Replica Island
  This is a great free platform game, with humanoid characters but 
  vaguely reminiscent of Bounce, that game you liked on my old
  Nokia phone.  This is the app that prompted me to start typing
  this list.

* Weather (by Michael Bachman, since there are probably a few things
  called that)
  home-screen widget that shows the current weather conditions, plus
  an app that shows you a five-day forecast (both from Google).  Lets
  you add multiple cities and switch between them easily.

* 3D Level
  uses the accelerometer to turn the phone into a level so you can see
  when you've got that picture straight.

* OI Notepad
  what I use for taking notes.  I wish it automatically synched with
  Google Docs or the desktop, though.  (Easy enough to mail yourself
  notes to get them off the phone, though.)

* Coloroid
  fun free puzzle game

* Solitaire (Ken Magic)
  I've been looking in vain for a good Solitaire game that works in 
  portrait mode (so I can use it when standing on the T and I don't 
  have two hands free to hold the phone), but this is the best one
  I've found for landscape mode.

* SameGame
  puzzle game

Since I wrote that I would add Angry Birds, which wasn’t out for Android then. Also AK Notepad, which synchronizes with an online note-taking site called catch.com the way Contacts, Calendar, and GMail synch with Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and GMail on the web -- very handy since I can jot notes to myself from my computer or on my phone, and read them either place.

Feel free to unscreen if you like, of course.

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Dude, this is incredibly helpful. Thanks for the starting pointers! I had a lot of fun playing with the sky map on hermitgeecko's phone so I'm definitely grabbin that and running around the house with it.

And yeah, there sure are a lotta weather apps out and about, aren't there?

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ANGRY BIRDS WILL EAT YOUR LIFE

Now that I am an Android developer of sorts, I should probably get an Android phone. I'm reluctant to part with the old prototype Sidekick that I've been carrying around as the legacy of my job at Danger--I haven't seen any contemporary phone with a keyboard this good, the email handling is superb, and the old Sidekick data plan is a steal. But it'd be nice to have a phone with a better web browser and modern apps, on a provider that actually has 3G coverage out here.

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Angry Birds is a horribly finicky game on my phone, I've found. I have to start each game with a round on the first level before I can go play the one I want. Otherwise if I go straight to that other level the framerate goes to hell. Not really sure why or what, but that's the solution. I've gotten to those nice yellow divebombing birds, tho, and that's fun.

Fruit Ninja has become the simultaneous joy and bane of my existence. Almost every game ends in an uttered or hollered pejorative. And then I start a new one.

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The best Solitaire game for Portrait OR Landscape mode is 250+ Solitaire Collection by Alexei Anoshenko. Best of all, it's free.

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ConnectBot: SSH for Android (and it's free).
When I found that I almost wanted to go log into a BBS again just for the total mindfuck of logging into an old text-based BBS via a nifty-spifty handheld-computer-with-a-phone-in-it. Once upon a time that right there would've changed my life or something. :)

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Yes! A thousand times, yes! I discovered it yesterday and the first damn thing I did was go to eə. I then said I hadn't felt so shiny-crazy about new technology since I posted "hay im posting to this web board on my dreamcast" to a web board on my Dreamcast.

Before that, it was actually connecting to the Internet and using a MU* for the first time, talking with multiple people in realtime and wandering around a virtual world flush with the knowledge that I could build my own, too.

These moments seem to occur once every ten years, which I feel is enough time to grow blasé About It All and then make a shiny-comeback. If only for a brief moment. I'm already complaining that I can't find an email client that doesn't force top-quoting on reply. And trying to figure out when a process is killed outright versus merely suspended. (Hooray for the ConnectBot local shell!) I'm beginning to think the thing leaks memory like a sieve.

But the fact that one can now have a damn BBS in their pocket is still pretty shiny.

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I knew you'd appreciate it! :)

As for the memory vampires, you can also try Advanced Task Killer (the free version works just fine). You are absolutely right about processes not being killed and leaking memory and eating braaaaaaaaaaaaaai I mean battery life.

Dude. We're talking about the OS for our PHONES. Our camera-tv-recordplayer-telephone-BBSreader-PHONESinourpockets*brain asplodes*

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