Making the switch to Android
Took the plunge and bought my first Android phone, the LG Optimus V on Virgin Mobile. The reason I bought it was it had better battery life than the mifi card and hotspot functionality was easy to turn on using a simple app called Quick Settings. Saving $15/month with a phone/hotspot for the ipod was a no-brainer, plus getting a couple extra hours of battery life was a bonus. The mifi card is going on sale on ebay so I can recoup the cost of the phone and it goes with my anti-hoarder policy of selling one gadget for each one that is purchased. This post was going to have a screenshot of the apps, however, I pushed the power and the home key like on the ipod but I think it turned the thing off instead of took the picture. I guess I need to find an app that lets me take screenshots of the phone screen.

Day 1: Apps downloaded

• Advanced Task Killer – Kills apps running in the background to free up memory. This is the first app I downloaded.
• Evernote to draft blog posts, voice notes for ideas while I’m driving, and using it now to write this post.
• Dropbox to sync files across devices including my ipod.
• Track-R to access Pivotal Tracker from an Android phone.
• mAnalytics to access Google Analytics.
• Hootsuite to manage Twitter and Facebook fan pages.
• Google Voice to make and receive calls/texts with the caller ID showing the GV number, it’s more convenient to give out one number and have it ring the various burner phones.
• Feedly to access Google Reader and to share articles to Twitter.
• Kindle to access and read my books.
• Skype for conferencing.
• WordPress to create blog posts.
• Facebook
• Barcode Scanner this was recommended to me, it reads barcodes and QR codes. I’ve yet to try it.
• Gowalla to check-in to Facebook, Foursquare, Tumblr, and of course Gowalla in one shot.
• Shazam to figure out what that song is on the radio, helps build the playlist on what I want to download.
• Kayak to compare prices for travel.
• Meebo for unified instant messaging.
• Amazon app store to get free [paid] apps daily.

After enabling the hotspot functionality, I found I was often going to the ipod’s version of Hootsuite to type out tweets over using the LG Optimus since I’m more comfortable typing on the iphone keyboard than the Swype keyboard. I also like the slimness of the ipod over the Optimus. This concludes day 1 with an Android phone.

For other noobs, here’s a quick primer on Android 101.

@NickHammond – thanks for your list of must-have apps, I started downloading most of them today.
@digiJustin – I agree, Tweetdeck isn’t as useful on the mobile and dumped it.
@htnguyen – thanks for the comic relief with your #sarcasm. I can always count on you and @vcrazy for that. :p

If you have any recommendations for apps, put them in the comments.