Android Market Roundup: 5 Apps to Put a Smile on Your Phone

It's Monday, and you know what that means. Yes, another week in the salt mines, but it's also time for another installment of the Android Market Roundup. This is the feature where we dig through the Android Market and bring you the coolest new, and newly updated stuff out there. Just scan the QR code next to each app with Google Goggles or Barcode Scanner to open up the correct Market page. 

This week you'll find out how to get a bird's eye view of your storage, manage your hardware settings with style, peek at your Gmail faster, keep a lookout for movable apps, and rally desperados to stick up some pioneers.  
 

SDWatch

It's not often that we have cause to say this, but this app has no UI whatsoever. That's fine, though. It doesn't need one. All it needs to do is produce the right notification at the right time. SDWatch is from the same folks that brought you the app SDMove that we talked about a few weeks ago. SDMove shows you which app on your phone can be moved to the SD card under Android 2.2 Froyo. SDWatch does much the same thing, but proactively. 

As you go about installing apps, SDWatch is sitting silently in the background, waiting, watching. When an app is installed that offers the option to be moved to the SD card, SDWatch will notify you with a handy status bar message. The notification will have the app's icon, name, and the message "Can be moved to SD." 

All you have to do is tap the notification and the app will open the Android app management settings, where you can move the app. What's really great about this is that it isn't just new apps that you'll catch wind of. Even app updates will trigger SDWatch if a developer has added this functionality. All this can be yours for the low, low price of absolutely nothing.  

Guns N' Glory

Who doesn't love a good tower defense game? These types of games are battle tested on mobile devices, and tend to work quit well. Guns N' Glory is no exception, but it also brings a few unexpected tricks to the table. At first, it appears to be a standard top-down tower defense game. You play the role of the leader of a band of outlaws, looking to ambush settlers moving west back in the mid 1800s. You must use your hard earned cash to recruit desperados from nearby saloons, and other houses of ill repute. Your units are placed along the canyon walls to lie in wait. Let more than 50 settlers escape in a given level, and you fail. 

The game play starts fairly straight forward, the pioneers come wandering through the canyon, and your carefully placed units take them out. For each settler defeated, you get some gold to improve your force. Guns N' Glory manages to keep things interesting by making your units mobile. They're not stuck in one place like towers, they can be moved to shift your strategy like a real time strategy game. Throughout the course of a level, the settlers will change tactics. Sometimes they enter the maze from a different angle, and sometimes from more than one direction. There may even be waves composed of more difficult untis. It's up to you to reposition your forces on the fly to stop them from escaping. 

The landscape is scattered with units to recruit. There are regular gunslingers, dynamite-equipped units, cannons, and even train-mounted Gatling guns. Sure, that last one might not be period accurate, but it's really, really cool. Some weapons are weak against certain enemy units, and strong against others. After completing a few levels, the game will introduce power-up crates, and leveling of your units. 

The control scheme is good. You pan around the maps (which are pretty big) by tapping and dragging. If you do that with a unit, it will walk in the direction you drag. When selected, you can see the range of your hooligan. This is helpful to position them efficiently. You recruit new units by tapping on them, and paying them to join up. If you want your soldiers to focus on a specific settler unit, just tap on it and they will focus their fire. This will help you take out some of the larger wagons. 

The graphics are quite good as well. The whole game has a fun cartoon vibe. Animations are smooth, and we didn't experience any slow-downs on the Nexus One, even with many units on screen. A quick update after the game's release fixed a few force close issues, and also added app2sd support on Froyo phones. Guns N' Glory is available for €2.99 in the Market. There is a free version, but it has a supremely annoying ad at the bottom of the screen. If you ask us, the full version is worth it.    

SwitchPro Widget

Google long ago added the excellent power control widget to Android. While this is a great solution, some developers have come up with some improvements to the widget. SwitchPro offers lots of customization and visual styles to fit any home screen layout or power control requirement. SwitchPro is not a new app, but a few recent feature additions have made it worthy of mention here.  

You add this widget just like you would the stock power control widget. However, you get options for four different sizes. The widget can take up from 1-4 spaces in a home screen row. This is one of the new features the developer has added. Depending on how large you choose to make the widget, that will affect the number of buttons you can have. For example, if you use a one space widget, you can only create one or two buttons to toggle settings. If you pick the four space widget, you can pick anywhere between four and seven buttons.  

Each button can be set for any power control setting that is found on the stock widget, plus a few more. The widget allows toggles for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Auto-rotate, airplane mode, brightness, LED flashlight, speaker phone, and more. In the same menu where you pick the buttons, you can modify the appearance of the widget. The options in this respect have been enhanced; this is the other recent feature addition. You can pick sold, translucent, or transparent backgrounds. If you decide to use solid or no background, you can pick the color of the widget. For any background setting, you can choose the color of the indicator light. SwitchPro Widget is available in the Market for $0.99.      

Gmail Popup

If you find yourself craving a more extensive peek at new Gmail messages on your phone, Gmail Popup could be what you're looking for. This app will display a prominent popup on the screen when a new email arrives. You will see the sender, subject, and the first few lines of the message. From this interface you can dismiss it by tapping OK, open the inbox, or start a reply immediately. In the settings, you can set a tap on the message to mark it as read, delete it, or do nothing (it will just clear the popup). 

After installing the app, you will need to launch it to set up the email account. Just tell Gmail Popup which account you want it to watch, then enable the service. It will run in the background waiting for mail. The popup can be tested, but there needs to be unread mail in your inbox for even the test to work. The size of the popup will vary depending on how many unread messages you have. If you have four or more, the window will become scrollable.  

The background service uses a bit more memory than we'd like to see, about 11MB. The battery use is manageable at about 3% over the course of the day. The app works fast, and we did not have any crashes or slow-downs. The popups could get annoying if you receive a lot of mail, but lightly used personal accounts could benefit from Gmail Popup. You can get the app for £0.99 in the Android Market. A trial version is in the Market, but it is slated to stop working on September 1st. 

DiskUsage

Android allows users to put whatever they want on the SD card and internal storage (if your phone has it). Apps are also granted the ability to dump their files there. If you've been looking for a great way to view what is using up your phone's storage space, DiskUsage is the app for you. A new update has made this an absolute must have for many Android owners. It loads a smooth, efficient graphical representation of your storage medium in a snap. 

When launching the app, you will see a screen where you choose SD card, or Internal Storage. The option to view the internal storage is the new upgrade, and it works perfectly. On phones like the Nexus One, all you're seeing is the small ROM space with app data and system files. But on a phone like the Droid X, you can view the usable 8GB partition here. 

On the far left of the interface is the root directory. Each folder is sized proportional to the amount of data stored in it. The same goes for the subfolders, which are to the right of the parent directories. You can tap on and folder to zoom in. Doing this will expand the folder and file names that were too small to see before. You also have multitouch zooming, but it isn't as fast as just tapping. The entire UI is very slick and usable.  

If you tap on a file (as opposed to a folder), you can then hit menu to select View to open a file. The app will ask what app you want to use to open the file. It does this even if you have a default set for a particular file type. The menu also lets you delete files you have selected, or rescan the storage medium. This free, open source app is available in the Android Market.  

That's it for the Market Roundup this week. Drop any feedback in the comments below. We want to hear your app suggestions, so let us know if there are any apps you want us to take a look at. Until next week, enjoy these apps.