One common question I see getting asked by new Android smartphone owners is – what are the must have apps for Android?  I thought I’d list those that I either can’t live without or just plain love.  So, without further ado, here are what I consider to be my must have apps (your mileage may vary).
Locale
One of the winners of the first Android Developers Challenge, Locale is a great piece of software that changes phone settings dependent on certain conditions being met, such as your current location or the time …

I’ve updated the Best Deals section to reflect a couple of new HTC Hero deals I heard about this week, including one superb deal which sees you potentially getting a contract Hero at an overall cost (after cashback) that’s a good £40 cheaper than buying an unlocked, SIM-free Hero outright!Check my findings out here.

 The official Samsung Mobile page has a message for any i7500 Galaxy users who are considering flashing their phone with a custom, unofficial ROM-

“Dear User
We are aware that there is unauthorised Samsung Galaxy software currently available on the internet. This software has been produced by certain third parties to enable customers to change factory settings on the handsets. We have been made aware of instances where this software has been downloaded and has instead resulted in permanent damage to handsets. Downloading unauthorised software may also result in invalidation of …

Another 7 days have passed since my last set of data usage results.  We should now be at a position where we can build up a much better picture of what the average amount of data consumed by the HTC Hero on a monthly basis is likely to be.  Again, this week, I’ve streamed a little television from BeebPlayer (one episode of Harper’s Island if you want to get exact about it), but I’ve not been using Last.FM as much as I had last week.  Here are the data usage …

I read a thought-provoking article yesterday on the Android and Me site regarding the dangers of blindly rooting your phone.  I highly recommend giving it a read as it raises some good points about rooting and how it’s possibly too easy for those who don’t truly know what they’re doing to root their phone, opening up a whole can of potential security issues, not to mention the voiding of your warranty.  The article got me thinking- with the Android Apps Market being so open, it’s surely a tempting prospect for …

Ok, time to revisit the data usage.  For the last 7 days, I’ve been downloading apps from the Market far less, but conversely, I have been streaming music a lot more through Last.fm.  I’ve also streamed a half hour or so of television through beebPlayer (which I’ll hopefully post a video review of over the next couple of days if I get time).  Because of this, my data usage has jumped quite dramatically.  Here are the latest figures since the last check (on 11th September)-
Wi-Fi usage – 198MB
2G/3G usage …

***UPDATED- 2nd October 2009***
Looking for the best price for an Android phone or device?This is the first of what I hope to be a regular feature for the blog.  I’m going to have a scout around for pricing on Android devices and post up the best deals I can find.  Please feel free to let me know of any deals you’ve heard of that you feel are better than I’ve listed, or even let me know if you’d like an Android device added to the best deal list.  (for phones, …

Ok, so that’s day 2 done.  I’ve not been doing any streaming of music or video today and haven’t downloaded any apps either.  I did do a little more web browsing than yesterday, but otherwise, it should have been a less bandwidth-heavy day.NetSentry has the past 24 hours’ worth of data usage at 13 MB, split between 12MB from the WiFi connection and 1MB from 2G/3G.  So, it’s fairly close to Day 1′s usage.I’m not going to post every day from here on.  I’ll continue to monitor the usage and …

Ok, so the first 24 hours since I turned on NetSentry have come and gone, so it’s time to post my first bout of results to help us determine how much the HTC Hero uses on average each day.
For reference- my phone is set to have the always-on data connection enabled. I may experiment with turning it off at a later date so we can see how much difference it makes.
Over the past 24 hours I have downloaded 3 apps from the Market, watched 5 minutes of tv on BBC …

Ok, based on a comment from one of this blog’s followers, Chris, I thought I’d try a little experiment to see how much data I’m transferring on a day to day basis.  I’ve done a bit of digging around the Android Marketplace and found an app called NetSentry which looks like it should do the job of logging my data usage.I’m going to continue to use my phone as I have been (downloading apps from the marketplace, browsing the web, streaming radio, etc) to give as fair reflection as possible …