Some time ago I published a list of my favorite free software. This time I’ll tell you about my favorite Android applications that I use on my Samsung Galaxy i7500 mobile phone. Compiling this list was hard, but again I took the ‘what I remember’ approach: it’s forbidden to use phone to remember the ‘favorite’ apps – what I can remember straight from my head is supposed to be more needed than the apps I don’t remember.

When writing a list, I excluded the already installed apps that came with my phone and I suppose with a default Android installation. These are the apps that I really like and use a lot:

• Browser
• Alarm
• Maps
• Gmail
• Mail (yes, I use both Android mail applications for my two separate mail accounts and I still tried K-9, but I abandoned it)
• Market
• Google Talk
• Switchers
• Messaging

And this is the list of my favorite Android software that I installed on my phone and frequently use:

• My Tracks – app for recording and mapping tracks using GPS and Google Maps
• Tickr – app that can show a slideshow of images from Flickr by keyword or author
• Photo Slide – a better Gallery application that supports image swipe (the app is not available on the market and the developer stopped the development, but you can get it from here)
• Fring – app that connects to my Skype account so I can make Skype calls from my phone (it supports other IM providers)

And since I’m a control freak I use several more utilities I could do hard without:

• Battery Indicator – app that shows an icon with the exact remaining battery info in the status bar
• 3G Watchdog – an utility that shows how much 3G and EDGE data I have transferred and how much is left in my limited monthly account
• Spare Parts – a system app that can, among other things, show the time the phone was on or was sleeping, which was very useful for me to find out more about my battery issues and solve them
• SDCardWifi – a simple app that runs a web server on my phone and shares my phones files so I can download them from a browser
• Switch 2G/3G – a simple shortcut for enabling and disabling 2G/3G networks

Writing this post surprised me: I’m not really using as many applications as I thought I did. It looks like I use my phone mainly for calling, messaging, browsing the web, using IM and – not surprisingly – for fine tuning it so that it would work better and so that the battey would last longer as it did.

I’m not a really that into games, but on my Android I like some of them when I have a few extra minutes to spend. I will tell you more about which ones I like in a later post.