Aaron Long: Best Android Honeycomb apps

Apps you must download
Best Android Honeycomb apps . Apps, Honeycomb apps, Android 3.0, Android Week 0

With Honeycomb tablets hitting the stores now, and many more to come, finding the best apps for your shiny new Android 3.0 device is going to be a challenge. Unlike the iPad, Android Market won’t just serve you up a platter of Honeycomb ready apps and we've already found that apps that really work on Honeycomb aren't as abundant as they should be.

Some apps don’t work well, some scale nicely, some are superbly optimised for Honeycomb. So what we’re starting here is a growing list of the best Honeycomb apps we’ve dug out, tried, tested and found to be worth getting excited about.

Of course, we’re open to suggestions, so if you’ve found an app that works really well on your tablet then feel free to leave us a comment and we’ll check it out.

Pulse

Yes, it’s Pulse again. We’ve told you about Pulse already as it was our App Of The Day recently and it’s one of our top Honeycomb apps. Coming from the guys at Alphonso Labs, Pulse is basically a news aggregator that you can easily customise to bring you the news from the sources you like the most.

It works really well on a large screen because you have the space to browse the different news tiles and read the story on the same page. You can change the size of the tiles the info is presented in, as well as the font, and whether you want a white or grey background when reading.

It’s easy to skip over plenty of sources, the images it pulls in adding interest to the headlines. The app will let you pick from Pulse’s featured sites, or search for your own and with plenty of categories to browse, you can have a full range of content set-up and being delivered within a couple of minutes.

It looks good, it works well on the large screen and it’s definitely one of our favourite Honeycomb apps so far. If we have one criticism, it’s that it doesn’t properly use Honeycomb’s menus in the Action Bar at the top of the page.

Android Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.alphonso.pulse

Price: Free?

Rating: 4.5/5

Weatherbug for Honeycomb

Obsessed with weather? Sure, if you’re eyeing up an HTC Flyer when it lands, you can guarantee that HTC will serve you up some glorious weather action. But fear not Honeycomb fans, as Weatherbug has given their app a good polish to make it fit for your tablet.

Weatherbug for Honeycomb makes use of all the space available offering tiles for individual locations and offering to automatically locate you. There is a wealth of additional information that you can click through from the graphical summary, moving in to see a brief forecast for each day. You can even delve deeper and pull up a satellite map.?

Weatherbug has been optimised for Honeycomb so takes advantage of the Action Bar for the menus and the result is a slick app that will offer you more weather information than you probably need, but doesn’t go as far as giving you fullscreen animations.

Android Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.aws.android.squall

Price: Free

Rating: 4/5

Movies by Flixter

If you’ve even been to the Android Market or even Facebook, you’ve probably heard of Flixter. The Movies application provides all sorts of movie details, from what’s in the box office, to what’s playing at your local theatre.

Movies by Flixter makes use of a two column system, with everything well presented for a large landscape view on your Honeycomb tablet. You can head over to movies to read the synopsis or view the trailer, which, although only presented at a medium resolution gets playing pretty fast when connected to Wi-Fi.?

You can explore the cast list and pick out details on particular actors, including viewing their filmography and photos. It isn’t as detailed as IMDb, but overall Movies by Flixter feels as though it offers you more than its rival currently does.

Android Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=net.flixster.android?

Price: Free

Rating: 4/5

Amazon Kindle

If Amazon is your e-bookstore of choice, then you’ll already know that they support a wide range of platforms outside of their own Kindle hardware. The Android app for the Amazon Kindle is not only convenient, but looks great on large screen devices.

The advantage that the Kindle ecosystem offers over some others is that you can sync your device, including where you’ve read to, so if you find yourself stuck in a hotel without your Kindle ebook and you want to read a little more, then you’ll be able to dive right in on your tablet.

It’s not perfect and we’ve found that thanks to the glossy nature of most LCD tablets that in daylight conditions you can’t really see much on the screen to make out the words - but the text is sharp and clear, despite the step-up in size. It's not optimised for Honeycomb, but a great example of good scaling on Honeycomb.

Android Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.amazon.kindle

Price: Free

Score: 3.5/5

SwiftKey Tablet

Ok, so we’re playing the system. SwiftKey isn’t available yet for tablets, but we’re big fans of the keyboard app so we got our hands on the beta. Our complaint with the native Honeycomb keyboard was that we kept closing it down with our left palm when bashing out messages.

SwiftKey offers you two things on Honeycomb. Firstly you can have a conventional on-screen keyboard that applies SwiftKey’s intelligent (and often hilarious) predictive suggestions so you can bash out messages without actually having to write every word.

Secondly, and this is where we get really excited, you can have a split keyboard that means you can easily use it with two thumbs (there are alternative thumb keyboards, but we rate SwiftKey's predictive system). The stock keyboard on Android is just too big on devices like the Motorola Xoom to reach the keys with your thumbs when gripping it from the sides so splitting the keyboard makes it much easier to bash out messages along with SwiftKey’s predictions.

Unfortunately for you, dear reader, you can’t get your hands on this version of the keyboard just yet, but trust us when we say it’s excellent.

Android Market: Not yet, sorry

Price: ?TBA

Score: We’ll score it once it launches

Tegra Zone

This one is likely to be a little more controversial, but bear with us here. Tegra Zone is an area where Nvidia can offer up apps that have been designed specifically for devices based on their Tegra 2 chipset. The content isn’t exclusive to Honeycomb or Tegra 2 devices (although it is notionally optimised for Tegra 2) but Tegra Zone is a central place to find content that’s pitched at more powerful devices which your Honeycomb tablet is likely to be.

It’s the app itself that we like rather than the current content - we’re still waiting for a lot of the most interesting games to arrive in Tegra Zone, but the slick presentation and the effective use of space makes it a pleasure to navigate, and it looks fantastic.

It is free, so you might as well download it as a way to keep an eye on some fantastic looking games but we accept that at the moment it isn’t overflowing with content, hence the restrained score. It did lead us to our next app though.?

Android Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.nvidia.tegrazone

Price: Free

Score: 2.5/5

Samurai II: Vengeance

If you’re looking for a slick game to show off the potential of your new tablet, then Samurai II: Vengeance is a good place to start. We’ll be honest, we haven’t got that far into the game itself because we’ve been marvelling at the visuals too much.

The comic book-style intros and the quality of the graphics in the game almost justify the price, but you are paying for this sort of gloss. The controls seem easy enough and getting to grips with battling enemies has been easy enough for us so far - plus you don't have to worry about obscuring all the action with your thumbs as you would with a smaller device.

Price may be a deterrent on this one, but it is only €3.49 (at the time of writing) and it is a good showcase of how fantastic gaming can look on Honeycomb. Yes, you could always grap a free copy of Angry Birds, which also looks great, but Samurai II: Vengeance is a little more original and there’s a good chance you haven’t already completed it on your mobile phone

Android Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.madfingergames.SamuraiII?

Price: €3.49

Score: 5/5

Dolphin Browser HD

The default Honeycomb browser is pretty good, but when it comes to dealing with Flash video it seems to bite off a little more than it can chew. As a result, we’ve found ourselves using Dolphin Brower HD instead.

Dolphin Browser HD comes with a couple of really handy features, like being able to swipe from the side to up it your browser history and bookmarks, or offering up Add-ons (if you feel you want them).

But the thing we like the most about Dolphin Browser is the control that you get. You can opt to have the browser identify itself as a desktop browser (or iPad browser) rather than an Android browser. For those living in the UK, you’ll find that the BBC iPlayer website doesn’t like all Android browsers. No problem with Dolphin Browser HD, you’ll be able to head over and catch up on Eastenders on iPlayer without a problem. If you're in the UK, don't quibble, just download it.

We also found that it is generally more stable when it comes to dealing with Flash video playback and Flash heavy sites, so it handled 4OD better than the native Honeycomb browser does. It can be a little unstable, but generally speaking we’ve been able to catch-up on TV online without too many problems.

Android Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=mobi.mgeek.TunnyBrowser

Price: Free?

Score: 3.5/5?

Tags: Apps Honeycomb apps Android Week android 3.0