The Best Droid Apps are numbered in no particular order but include the most downloaded apps, the most favored apps, and the apps with the most buzz throughout the internet. If you would like to add to the list please leave a comment and let me know of other apps that I may have missed & also comments on any of the Droid apps that are listed.

1. Pandora
   If you haven’t heard of Pandora by now its very possible that you are living under a rock. Pandora uses the Genome Project which is an algorithm used to help find the music that you like based on traits. For example if you like a specific song it may be due to the turn-tables, organ, violin, vocals, or any number of other traits that the specific song may have. Pandora will then only find and select songs to play for you that meet that trait criteria.
   http://www.pandora.com/android
   Free Version Only
2. Twidroid for the Droid
   The iPhone has Tweetie and even though this is not included in Droid Twidroid the Android-based Twitter app has made it easy once again to use Twitter on your mobile device.
   http://twidroid.com/features/
   Free Version / Paid Version
3. Meebo for Android
   Meebo is the all-in-one Instant Messenger app. It allows you to connect to all your apps from one location and manage them easily. The following Instant Messengers are supported with this Droid application: AIM, MSN, Yahoo, MySpace IM, Google Talk, Jabber and ICQ.
   http://www.meebo.com/android/
   Free Version Only
4. Google Voice for Mobile
   Google Voice is one of the best apps to come out ever. Over the past few years Google has used Goog411 and other means to try and perfect voice recognition. And I must say theu have done very well. The voice recognition from Google has the ability to pick up on accents, dialect, etc and still understand with fairly decent accuracy. You also gain easy access to voice-mail and Google Voice-based SMS messaging.
   
   http://www.google.com/mobile/products/voice.html
   Free Version Only
5. Locale for Android
   Take control of your phone with Locale, one of the coolest apps available for Android. Locale lets you customize your phone’s settings based on your location. You could program the app to set your phone to vibrate every time you’re at your office, or set it to go silent when you enter the perimeter of your local movie theater. You can get advanced and make exceptions for VIP callers, too.
   http://www.twofortyfouram.com/product.html
   Free Version Only

This list is growing and I need your help… Tell  me what your favorite Driod Apps are

I try to keep you informed as much as possible with the latest and greatest news in the Social Networking World, Search Engines, and with anything new and interesting with the Internet. The information posted at Twitter mostly points back to here.. Be sure and Bookmark this site.

http://twitter.com/james_st_john

Long are the days when Google was know to the world as just the search engine. Now Google has put almost all of its effort into its mobile devices and not as much into search for computers. The search engine is gearing more towards mobile devices and personalizing itself to you specifically. The latest thing that Google has done to get in the news was the addition of the “Near Me Now” feature.

This allows Google to tap into the GPS functionality of your mobile device and show results only near you at the time of the search. This is great for directions to your local pub, restaurant, library, or grocery store. But has Google been putting their focus in the right place? For quite a while the greatest minds known to man have been telling us that everything is going towards mobile. Several years ago Bill Gates was telling us that everything would be moving towards the PC Tablet. And for all intensive purposes he was right. The world is going mobile and is using more bandwidth than ever before. And thanks to Micro-Blogging like Twitter, and the ability to connect your mobile device to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, and others you are seeing an increase in live activity. But then things have gone another step further with the recent additions to the mobile 3G network allowing most Smart Phones to access the internet at a fast connection comparable or beating several high speed internet connections. Then the final piece of the puzzle is video and photos, we are seeing a lot more activity, photos, and video in almost real-time of events happening around the world.

Do you think the world is going crazy, or just plain mobile?

This video has a great review of the Motorola Backflip with Android

Google Adds new feature called “Near Me Now” for mobile

Google Adds “Near Me Now” to its mobile home page, so here is the reviews and descriptions for Google “Near Me Now”. When doing a Google search you may now select the link “Near Me Now” this allows you to do a search query and to make the query relevant only to the specific location that you are at the time of the query, the function works through the GPS functionality of the phone or mobile device and your location can be updated on demand by selecting “Update”.

The Google Mobile “Near Me Now” feature is currently ONLY available for iPhone and Android phone users in the U.S.

In order to use the “Near Me Now” Google Mobile functionality you must first activate the ‘location feature’ on your Android (Droid), or Appla iPhone mobile device. Then go to www.Google.com and select the “Near Me Now” tab. You can also explore the whereabouts of specific locations including reviews or rants of other people about a specific restaurants and their menus and services.

The new Google mobile homepage feature lets you easily search for popular categories of nearby places. Just by clicking or tapping on the “Near me now” link right on the Google mobile homepage, you will find categories of places. And if you want more you can just select the “browse more categories” link.

Google Mobile Search Engine Feature - Near Me Now

Turns out I was mistaken in one of my last posts “Palm Pre acting slow“. You can in fact restart a Palm Pre without taking the battery out, and this serves the same functionality and allows you to restart your phone speeding up the mobile device. As I mentioned in my “Palm Pre acting slow” post, the reason I was needing to restart my Palm Pre on occation is due to the speed of the Palm Pre, for some reason my Palm Pre has been acting very slow and all the functionality on the device has been slow. Restarting the Palm Pre mobile phone seems to fix the problem at least temporarily.

Here are the 4 steps needed to restart your Palm Pre

1. Press the center button.
2. Open up “Device Info”.
3. If you want a partial reset tap “PARTIAL ERASE” twice. Doing this erases all data on your phone (except your music, videos, photos, etc.)
4. If you want a full reset (proceed with caution, and backup all your data first), then tap “FULL ERASE” twice.

Be careful when doing step 4 as it will do a FULL ERASE!!

My Palm Pre is acting very slow lately, so I’ve taken it in, asked friends, and listed the problem on this site. Ultimately I found the solution from you guys. Ok so it’s not as much a solution as it is a reason for my phone acting up and being slow. It is due to the amount of information I have on my phone, and since it doesnt have a slot for a memory card it fills up after X amount of photos, music, videos, data, phone history, or text messages on the phone. Now unfortunately X amount is an unknown value. The Palm Pre does not let you know how much the phone starts with, how much space the operating system uses, or how much space is remaining on the phone.

A quick temporary fix is to restart the phone, since the phone does not have a way to do a soft reboot you must take the battery out and restart the phone manually. But the good part is that it will fix your phone and get things moving faster. The better solution is to erase the text memory, transfer photos off the phone, and not load so much data on the device.

I decided to post a review video that I found that has nothing to do with my opinions, its a solid review.

There are so many folks who will just take whatever phones their carrier is currently offering rather than switching or changing their service around. You can purchase a cell phone at any time, but contract renewal time is when most people will find their greatest deal on a brand new cell phone.

Is the Droid catching your ears and eyes or do you want to give the iPhone a chance? depending on the carriers in your area and the coverage they have, your decision will probably be based on who commands the best coverage in your area. Most everyone just want something that works, in every sense of the word.

The Motorola Droid has many great features that zip you along from one to the next. The 3.7 inch display on the droid is larger than its counterpart iPhone. The color support is very nice at 16 million hues and the rich resolution of 440×854 is a very rich look that you won’t complain about. The display is very bright, sharp and vibrant as the graphics and touch screen work very well underneath your fingertips.

You will find that the Droid is a bit bigger and heavier than most phones, but it will be a small prove to pay for the screen clarity and speed at which everything works so well. Below the screen display are four main control buttons that you will find very handy when needed, they are the back button, the menu, the home page and the search feature.

The last search feature opens up the Google search engine with the press of just that one button. Most everyone loves searching the most well indexed website listing in the world. The Droid also features the option of sliding the top display portion up so that you can use the keyboard to type in what you need. The keys seem to be a bit too flat and close to one another which makes it more difficult to quickly input your text.

There are so many features that can be reviewed with this phone. It may all come down to your specific preference as far as the feel of the phone seems to work in your hands. You may like the feel of this more solid cell phone as compared to a tiny little thing. The main thing we all want is for the applications and programs to just easily work without the worry about freezing up or locking up.

Easy navigation tends to be one of the favorite items on most wish lists that are encountered when purchasing a new cell phone. Performing your due diligence online with Droid reviews and iPhone reviews will help to shine much technical light on the subject. Make sure to check them out in person for a while to find out if that feel and performance of the phone is what you really are looking for. It’s best to find someone who already has one and is willing to let you fumble around on it for a while. Happy Hunting!

I’ve had the Palm Pre now for a couple of months and have a much more detailed review that I can give. First thing is that the software that runs the Palm Pre is awesome, its easy to use, and it looks great too with a well designed Graphic User Interface (GUI). I had to return my phone several times and am now on my 3rd phone do to lemons. But overall I like the phone, it just took a few times to get one that was not broken.

The problems that I have run into are the following:

1. The charger port on the phone is hidden and impossible to open unless you first slide the phone in the ‘OPEN’ position (very annoying)
2. The phone is VERY, VERY, VERY SLOW.. did I mention that its slow? This mus have something to do with the onboard memory because after doing a restart it will run at a great speed until about a week later.
3. The phone is supposed to slide up and down, and that is great.. but I had issues with the phone wanting to rotate left and right during use. I felt like it was a rubik’s cube.
4. The phone has an earphones Jack, but not a wired jack for a headset, or earpiece. This is annoying for me because I don’t like blue-tooth.
5. The phone does not have a built in Video Camera… when I purchased the phone I didn’t even think to look, I suppose I just expected it to come with a video camera as an obvious included item, but not so.
   P.S. if anyone ever releases an application for this feature please let me know, I would love to have video capability.
6. The phone has a keyboard, but it does not have a keypad for the touch-screen, I thought this was odd since most phone with a full screen give you a touch pad so you don’t have to slide it open every-time you want to type a message or number into the phone.
7. The speakerphone is worthless on this phone. I have tried the speakerphone in my car, in my house, in my office… it doesnt matter, it is too hard to hear the person on the other end through the speaker. And the person on the other end of the line always complains whenever I switch it to speaker (I have tested this with dozens of different people)… so this means that the built in microphone thats used for speakerphone is not very good quality.
8. Applications, this phone does have a good selections of applications that can be used (I wish all the companies would get together and make 1 common language for all the applications to run off of). As far as a phone to be used for business it is lacking a few applications that can make life easier. The main application that I would like to see developed is Skype (Instant Messenger).
9. I have hung up on several people with this phone on accident. The phone will keep turning the screen on when you have it against your ear and if your ear touched the screen it has a high probability of hanging up on the call. I think the solution for this would be to make the screen turn off after a set time and not turn back on unless you press a button or the call ends.
10. The screen seems to scratch very easily.

I cant just give you a list of all the bad things without listing some of the good qualities that this phone has. I am still pleased with this phone, and the above issues are things that I found annoying and would like to see rectified. But for most people I dont think the bulk of these issues will affect them.

1. Multi-touch screen (great for zooming into photos).
2. Great locking device built into the software to prevent mis-dials when the phone is in your pocket. Although one improvement that could be made to this device is to allow the phone to lock without needing a password to regain entry, but instead to just use the sliding unlock button located on the screen.
3. Good selection of applications
4. the online support for this device is widely available on the internet.
5. The camera takes decent pictures
6. The phone has a very nice design and looks very sleek and is thin

Lets face it, you didnt read this review to find out all the good things about the palm pre but instead you need to know whats wrong with it to find out if its something you can live with.

If you have anything to add to this review please leave a comment.