Apps

My awesome wife got me a Samsung Galaxy Nexus for my birthday to replace my Motorola Atrix 4G. Having used my Atrix 4G for so long, I had a whole bunch of apps on it that I had installed over time. I have cleaned it from time to time, but there was always a few that were left behind. Getting the new phone means that I installed things very carefully and installed only what I needed -- I even found some new apps to help me with my app installing!

Here is a list of apps that got installed onto the Galaxy Nexus:

• Amazon Shopping / Amazon Kindle / Amazon Appstore: All the basics for Amazon that I need.
• Beautiful Widgets: This gives me the really nice (and quite useful) clock and weather widget.
• BetterBatteryStats: A really nice tool for finding out what is keeping the CPU running (PartialWakeLocks).
• Chrome Beta: This syncs up really nice with my desktop Chrome. It runs really fast and I like the tab handling which is clean and efficient. Chrome Beta does not do Flash, but that's a positive.
• CPU Spy: I use this to see if my phone is entering Deep Sleep after installing an app. Deep Sleep lets the Galaxy Nexus get awesome battery life and I want to preserve that.
• Crackle: For those times when I want to watch a movie.
• Evernote: Keeping notes.
• Flickr: A fantastic overall app.
• FolderSync: This replaces PogoPlug which I stopped using because of privacy concerns. FolderSync lets me sync my files to quite a few storage options including SMB, FTP, SFTP, Box, Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, SugarSync, Ubuntu One and WebDAV. This is a very useful tool.
• Foursquare: For playing the game and also looking for interesting restaurants.
• Friendcaster Pro: The official Facebook app for Android sucks. It's slow and eats up battery. Plus, it drops all sorts of other crap on my phone. I switched to Friendcaster Pro and haven't looked back. This app is fast and what the Official Facebook app should have been.
• IMDb: I love movies.
• Kaiten Mail: The Mail program that is included with stock Android is quite limited. It doesn't support IMAP IDLE and requires polling -- I like having push mail and Kaiten has support for IMAP IDLE. Also the stock Android mail app does not support pinch-to-zoom for mail and forces me to scroll side to side (what is this? The early 2000's?)  Kaiten supports pinch-to-zoom.
• Light Flow: Lets me assign colors to notifications on a per-app basis using the notification LED on the Galaxy Nexus.
• Pixlr-o-matic: Lets me edit my own photos to make them Instagram-like then upload my photos to where ever I wish.
• Plume: The Official Twitter app is OK, there's nothing to not like about it. But, I like Plume's interface better.
• Pocket: For offline reading and for also saving stuff for reading later. Very useful app.
• Roku: Typing on the Roku is a pain. The official Roku app makes it easier.
• Shazam: For the "what song is that?" moments.
• Speed Test: How fast is my connection?
• Target: For when shopping at Amazon isn't good enough.
• USA Today: I like the condensed news that USA Today provides.
• WhatsApp: For chatting with co-workers and also with Team 409.