If you have an Android smartphone, you’ve no doubt already spent too much time exploring the Android Market, which now has over 200,000 apps. Android does pretty well on most counts, but I’ve found four apps that I would definitely find hard to do without now. And you don’t need to root your phone to take advantage of them. You'll find each of these tools with a quick search of the Android Market.
Battery Notifier (Big Text)
The default battery icon is fine for a very rough scale view of your phone’s remaining battery life, but the Android OS actually offers far more resolution. Battery Notifier (Big Text) takes advantage of that extra resolution and puts it up in decent-sized text on the top-left of the status bar. You can customise the app, but the default options work well.
ES File Explorer
Many users love Astro File Manager, but I reckon ES File Explorer is actually better for one overriding reason: it includes network support. That makes it easy to navigate through PCs on your home network. You don’t even need to know their IP address — ES File Explorer has a network scan option that will automatically find every PC on your home network. You can copy videos, photos or whatever without having to physically sync your phone or remove the microSD card. Load whatever files you want access to in your Windows PC’s Public folder (C:\Users\Public on Windows 7) and you won’t need to worry about permissions or passwords. To find your PC, press the Local button at the top and select LAN from the new menu. When that menu disappears, press Menu —> New —> Scan (remember to turn on your phone’s Wi-Fi connection first!). It’ll display any new PCs it finds in the window. Tap to open a PC and you’ll find the Public folder under Users if it’s a Windows Vista/7 computer.
Virtual Recorder
If there’s one thing Android doesn’t do well (at least up to Froyo), it’s voice recording. The built-in app offers low-quality AMR-NB (narrow-band) compression, which sounds pretty horrible. Virtual Recorder captures audio in 22.05kHz/16-bit mono using PCM (pulse-coded modulation — think WAV). It uses up around 2.5MB per minute, but it smartly saves recordings to your phone’s storage rather than to system area. Its quality is just a whisker under FM radio level, which is a lot better than AMR-NB. The trick is that it saves it in raw PCM format (.pcm), not WAV. The files will play in Virtual Recorder, but to play them elsewhere, you’ll need to convert them to something else first. One option is to import them as raw PCM into the freeware Audacity audio editor on your PC and convert them to PCM, OGG Vorbis or MP3. Another is to see FreeMP3Droid (see the box below).
Virtual Recorder’s interface is honestly in dire need of improvement, although you can thankfully turn off the cassette background image. That said, it will record continuously for up to 10 hours, doesn’t suck the life out your phone’s battery and it’s free. If you need to record lectures or presentations and don’t want to carry around an extra recording device, this is the best audio recording app for any Froyo or earlier Android phone.
FreeMP3Droid
If you want an option that allows you to convert Virtual Recorder raw PCM audio files to MP3 directly on your phone, try FreeMP3Droid. It’s a folder-driven app so there’s not much to look at, but once you launch it, look under the Virtual Recorder folder and select one of the files. Next, set the sample rate to 22,050Hz and the bit rate to 64Kbps. Press the Convert button and it will turn the raw .pcm file into .mp3 with pretty decent speed. You’ll be able to play them in Android’s default media player or our RockDroid app from PC User's January 2011 cover DVD.
Three Android essentials
