Best Android Apps

Utilities

Gas Buddy (Free)

With gas prices still consistently rising, the quest for the cheapest nearby gas can be a frustrating and pointless task, especially if you are driving around wasting precious fuel to find a better price just for the heck of saying you did. Gas Buddy uses your location to quickly locate nearby gas stations and immediately give you the best price around. The app gives you a list and a helpful map of all of your options. Never again will you fill up only to drive by a less expensive station five blocks later.

Weather Channel (Free)

This is the weather app you’ll find yourself checking before you even crack the blinds in the morning. Besides offering accurate current conditions with extreme detail down to wind speed, humidity and UV index, the Weather Channel’s app offers hourly and 10-day forecasts for planning ahead, plus advanced features like animated weather radar.

Google Voice (Free)

With Google Voice, you get a free number for receiving calls, sending texts, and even receive access to your voicemail and text messages over the Web. With the Android app, you can even keep your true mobile number private by making outgoing calls using your Google Voice number instead. Another handy feature is voicemail transcription, which automatically transcribes your voicemails to text so you can read them like e-mail.

iTriage Mobile Health (Free)

Created by doctors, this app is designed to give users quick and easy access to medical info as well as nearby treatment facilities. With just a few clicks, users can find the nearest medical facility based on need (emergency, urgent care, pharmacy, etc.) and quickly use built-in Google Maps to navigate to the destination. The app also features a symptom-checker, doctor directory, and information about diseases and procedures.

Opera Mini Web Browser (Free)

We loved the drastic speed boost from Opera Mini on the iPhone, and it delivers the same shot of adrenaline on Android. Opera greases the wheels of the Web using special servers that compress pages prior to sending them to your phone. Besides using less bandwidth, pages appear in a fraction of the time, which makes it the go-to browser when you need to know who won the World Series in 1964, the colors of the Estonian flag, or the population of Miami in a flash.

Pulse News (Free)

This free app is a great reader for those who like to get their daily dose of news or gossip on their Android device. Pulse lets users select up to 30 online sources to pull from, and then creates clean, magazine-like pages that feature thumbnail photos and headlines from each source. Most articles or blogs can be easily read within the app, and the sources update in a flash. It’s the perfect substitute for your morning or evening Internet scan. Add sources like CNN, Gawker, Salon, Wet Paint, MSNBC, and Mashable.

Google Goggles (Free)

This app allows users to search for information by taking a photo of a book, landmark, barcode, business card, or work of art and inputting it into the visual Google search engine. The app can recognize products, give users historical information on landmarks, provide basic information on businesses, and copy down information from business cards. Essentially it is a visual search engine for your device. Yet another great app from Google.