As much as sales may not reflect it, 2011 has been a huge year for Windows Phone and its apps. Recently eclipsing the 50,000 milestone, Windows Phone (now with Mango) is getting better and better. After all of the hullabaloo over the best iPhone, iPad, and Android apps, I decided Windows Phone needed its own write-up. I got in touch with Falcon, and the following is our combined list of best/essential/etc. apps for Windows Phone.
Rowi (Free (with ads and no notifications) or $2.99)
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
The beta of Rowi 2.0 is the best Twitter app on Windows Phone. Every main flaw that makes 1.5 less-than-great (laggy list scrolling comes to mind) is fixed, and Hidden Pineapple has added a read-status bar to tweets as well as threaded-esque view for conversations. It’s Live Tile is often faster at updating than the one for the Me hub, and paid users can also get Toast notifications for @ replies and DMs. Like many of the other apps in this list, it also adheres nicely to the Metro design language, letting it fit in with the rest of the OS. Also, MetroTwit users, get excited: the read-status bar in Rowi is yet another hook in place for (the perennially ‘coming soon’) The Nest.
AppFlow (Free)
blurb by Falcon
The Windows Phone Marketplace isn't terrible, but it's far from perfect. You've got the typical categories such as "tools + productivity", "news + weather", "social" and more to search by and you can sort by top, free, and new. Unfortunately it doesn't go any deeper than that though. Through all the ways to get the Marketplace you can see the star rating and number of ratings up front, but if you want more you need to dive into the page for that app. It's also not clear as to the order of which apps are listed in the Marketplace.
This is where AppFlow comes in. The first thing that stands out is the visual difference between it and the actual Marketplace. It can load up to 50 apps at a time, depending on which category you go into. On a single slide you see thumbnail versions of screenshots for the app, its star rating as well as how many ratings it has, what the price is, and a short description. You can slide through one by one, or tap on the icons to the right to see just a list and you can jump around via that. You can sort through apps with the same Categories that Microsoft uses. Once you dive into an app's page you can go to this super nifty Stats screen which not only will give you the percentages for how the ratings are distributed, but also even more crazier graphs about how well the app is doing.
But where this app shines are in the Lists section. Here you have a handful of groups, and within each group another handful of categories created by the app developers. From here you can sort apps by things like "Staff picks", "Highest rated", "On Sale", "Hidden Gems", "Best Live Tile Apps", and "Best Mango Apps". Those are all self-explanatory, so I'll finally stop rambling, but I can't express to you how helpful categories like these are. Some are hit-or-miss, but there are enough good categories to make users happy.
This is by far my number one recommended app for Windows Phone users. Not only is the presentation and layout of the Marketplace information phenomenal, it cuts out most of the crap and helps users find great apps quickly.
WeatherLive (Free (limited functionality) or $1.99)
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
Since getting my phone in November 2010, I’ve been desperately looking for a great weather app. Current conditions and forecasts are one of the best use-cases for Live Tiles and the search has been frighteningly difficult. The Weather channel app has a quick-updating tile, and good functionality, but is a touch on the ugly side, and the tile has weird depth effects that are just out of place in Windows Phone. AccuWeather’s app is significantly more attractive, but the tile updates just slow enough to be less useful in Indiana where the joke is “Don’t like the weather? Wait an hour.” WeatherLive on the other hand does a relatively good job of looking Metro, while having a customizable Live Tile, both in content and update frequency. It also has push notifications (like the other two apps) for special weather alerts.
Connectivity Shortcuts (free)
blurb by Falcon
There's not much to this app, but I find it pretty useful. This app provides exactly what you think it would; shortcuts to the connectivity settings of the phone (Wi-Fi, cellular data, Bluetooth, and Airplane Mode). What makes this app good is the fact that within this app you can pin the shortcuts to any of those setting to your Start screen.
It's not perfect though. The live tiles aren't always... well, alive. Sometimes they won't update properly to tell you whether something is Enabled or Disabled. Sometimes they won't display the icon at all and will be just a colored square! However, I think the convenience this app offer users outweighs the potential jankiness. Also, for all but the Bluetooth setting (well, to be fair I don't own a Bluetooth device to test it) you can just tap the top of the screen while on the Start screen to see what's going on as far as your connections go, so you don't need a live tile to tell you whether or not something is on.
Personally, I turn my Wi-Fi on and off a lot throughout the day, so I like how quick I can get to it with this app. Similarly, if you're someone worried about how much data you're using you can use this to quickly get to that setting on a regular basis.
NextGen Reader (Free Trial or $1.99)
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
Google Reader is one of the core pieces of functionality I need on a smartphone. RSS is still one of my primary methods of getting news, and being able to sync between my desktop and my phone is a vital feature. Like with weather apps, finding a good Google Reader app took me a while. I had started off with the trials of Flux and Wonder Reader, but prior to Mango, panoramic apps did not run particularly well, and WonderReader at the time of my search was more folder-focused than I was. NextGen Reader is my favorite: it’s fast, it looks and feels built-in, and (perhaps most importantly) the developer is incredibly responsive, both in email correspondence as well as updating the software. It has a live tile that tells you the number of unread articles you have, and supports GR folders and recently added Instapaper as a mobilizer.
Radio Controlled (free)
blurb by Falcon
In lieu of an official Pandora app, the dev community recently got their hands on APIs for the popular music streaming service. Radio Controlled is the better of the two released so far. There are a few features missing, but there's enough here for those who like using Pandora. You get access to all your stations and are able to create new ones. You can thumbs-up or not-thumbs-up songs, but you can't thumbs down a song you've already liked. You also don't get access to things like putting a song on snooze. Selecting a song will bring you to a page with links to buy it from Amazon or the Zune Marketplace. Somehow you can also see the next two songs coming up. As far as I'm concerned, that's gypsy magic.
4th & Mayor (Free)
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
As should be fairly clear, lot of my picks come from a place of pseudo-necessity where alternatives either did not function great or just simply had better alternatives. 4 & Mayor is one such alternative, this time to the official Foursquare. At launch, the official Foursquare app did not run well and was missing numerous features when compared to its iOS and Android brethren. In came Jeff Wilcox with 4 & Mayor, a fast, powerful, and downright attractive Foursquare app. Like many of my other favorites, it looks and feels built-in. Not long after the launch of 4 & Mayor, Foursquare actually pulled their app and recommend 4 & Mayor on their site. They have since released a new official app, but it was panoramic, and so it had the same issues as Flux prior to Mango. Like NextGen reader, the updates are fast.
Stop the Music! (free)
blurb by Falcon
One annoying thing about Windows Phone is if you have audio playing, be it music/podcasts you have on your device or something you're streaming from an app, the pause/play and skip controls always appear on the lock screen and on the drop down volume bar. Even if you're listening to one track and it eventually plays completely through those controls will still be there.
Well open up this app, hit that stop button, and say goodbye to those track controls!
WP7applist (free)
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
For as many things the Windows Phone Marketplace does right, as Falcon described in his description of AppFlow, it’s not perfect. On top of various filtering/sorting flaws, it’s not particularly fast about detecting updates for your installed apps. The recently updated (and redesigned) WP7applist helps, although my primary function for it is to check for updates. It’s now Mango-supported and has a less harsh orange-on-gray layout (versus the original white on orange). The live tile shows the number of apps listed on WP7applist.com, new updates, and new releases. I don’t remember if the ads were always there and I just ignored them better, but there are now ads in various areas of the app. It’s free, so it’s hard to complain too much about it, but the black on gray makes them stand out a touch more than is appealing.
Wizard's Choice (free)
blurb by Falcon
With this being Windows Phone, the big draw for games are Xbox Live supported ones. More often than not that's where the quality games can be found, and not to mention... PHONE POINTS! But there are still free, indie type games made for Windows Phone. Wizard's Choice is a choose your own adventure where you play the role of a young wizard and are accompanied by your warrior pal. At the end of every page you are given choices of options based upon whatever just happened (duh). Unlike a typical choose your own adventure paper book, this is on a smart device so at the top of the screen you can see your current Health, Manna, Gold, and Morale. If you die you start over at the beginning of the journey. Given all the Angry Birds and Tiny Wings clones out there, Wizard's Choice stands out as unique and I would recommend it even if cost a few Gold pieces.
Baconit (free)
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
Baconit is a Reddit app for Windows Phone. It’s a pretty straightforward explanation, but there’s not a whole lot else to say. Quinn Damerell has done an admirable job of meshing the functionality of Reddit with the Metro design language. It has Live Tile support to show unread messages as well as your Karma, and has unlimited scrolling in subreddits. Speaking of which, if you sign in with your Reddit account, it will pull in all of your subscribed subreddits. It’s a simple touch, but it’s appreciated. There’s some roughness around the edges (mostly just error alerts the claim that the app cannot reach the internet which are virtually always wrong), but most issues are in the change log for the upcoming 1.4 update. Also, it’s free, and has rather full functionality.
MetroTube (free trial or $0.99) - Future support discontinued/no longer available as of Jan 1st
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
So, here’s the thing: Google’s support of Windows Phone has been poor, to put it kindly. The official app is just a container for the website, and (once again) prior to Mango and IE9, it didn’t run well. Lazyworm Applications came in, in December of 2010, with Youtube (by Lazyworm) and Lazytube. Lazytube evolved into Metrotube a few months ago, a beautiful, fast Metro-inspired application. Sadly, as of January 1, the app will no longer be available. According to their letter to their customers, “YouTube’s current API does not have any documented methods for obtaining high quality video content. We have been using a workaround to obtain this content and it has recently come to our attention that this may not be sustainable in the long term…” Unfortunately, the choice of alternatives aren’t great, with the best that I’m aware of being Supertube.
ScreenCapturer (free (Homebrew; requires dev unlock))
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
Frankly, this article wouldn’t have been possible (or would have been less visual) without this app. Sadly, Windows Phone 7 does not natively support taking screenshots. I believe the concern is intellectual-property related, but nonetheless, homebrewers to the rescue! The app works quite simply: open the app, tap “Start Capture Task” and just half-push the camera button on whatever screen or app you want to capture an image of. Strangely, the pictures look very bad while viewing them on the phone, but on computers the lessened picture quality from the native screens seems less severe.
Edit: Fixed broken formatting in the conversion from blog post to forum post.
