Reader-recommended apps for your shiny new Android tablet

Last week we put together a list of Android tablet apps to help you (or your relatives) outfit the new devices sitting under your trees (or your Festivus poles, if that's more your style.) Ars readers are a helpful bunch, though, and all of you put together a much more extensive list to help jumpstart new tablets. For your benefit, we've rounded up the ones we liked best, sometimes using your own words to argue why you really need to download these apps right now. If your tablet is of the Apple persuasion, don't worry—you all recommended plenty of apps for iPads as well.

Browsers: Opera Mobile (free) and Dolphin (free)

We still recommend Chrome and Firefox for Android as solid browsers with the best rendering engines, but the Dolphin browser also won some praise from our readers, not least because of its ability to emulate different user agents, thus making Web pages always deliver the desktop versions of sites rather than having to make individual requests as you do in Chrome. This is also a feature that Opera Mobile supports. "For me [Opera] was the obvious choice as the best browser," said Ars user Hinton. "It allows itself to spoof as a desktop browser, so you avoid those awful mobile sites. Also you can enable Opera Turbo to conserve bandwidth and load pages faster." Even if you prefer Firefox or Chrome most of the time, it can never hurt to have another browser around to try when something just isn't working correctly (or, if like Ars user TheFu, you prefer using separate browsers for work and for fun).

Games: Rayman Jungle Run ($2.99)

We got quite a few game recommendations to back up our own (which, for the record, included the excellent Jetpack Joyride, the relaxing Eufloria HD, and Solitaire, the original time waster), but the one we enjoyed the most was Ubisoft's Rayman Jungle Run, a game that combines the endless running of games like Jetpack Joyride with more traditional two dimensional platforming split up into distinct levels. It looks and runs great on Android tablets like our Nexus 7, and it uses the same gorgeous 2D art style pioneered in 2011's Rayman Origins and the upcoming Rayman Legends.

Music: Songza (free) and TuneIn Radio (free and $0.99)

We recommended both Spotify and Rdio as great music streaming services, but if you want to listen to them on your tablet you'll eventually have to cough up some cash. For something that's a bit more free, one reader recommended Songza, which offers free curated playlists for a number of musical genres (and has an excellent Android tablet interface, to boot). It doesn't let you choose your own songs or customize a "station" as Pandora does, but the playlists that are there are pretty well done. It will also recommend playlists for you based on how you're feeling: if you need a good pump-up mix to get you through Friday afternoon, Songza is the app for that.

TuneIn Radio is another free alternative to a la carte streaming services like Spotify or Rdio: it allows you to search through and listen to a huge number of live radio streams covering practically every subject matter and musical genre imaginable, and it lets you do it for free. Spending a dollar on the Pro version will net you the ability to record the radio shows you like the most. Finally, if you're into making music as well as listening to it, one reader recommended PitchLab Pro, a free app for both phones and tablets that will help musicians tune their instruments or check vocal pitches. Most common tunings are available in the app, and you can also set your own custom tunings.

Productivity: Evernote (free)

Evernote is a reasonably capable mobile word processor, but it's more than just that: it will also help you organize your notes into different virtual notebooks and add photos, video, and audio clips. This makes it ideal for authors or journalists doing research for their next big project, or for students trying to get their next term paper organized. Evernote has been fully optimized for Android tablets, and Evernote clients also exist for nearly every smartphone, tablet, and desktop platform available, so syncing your notes and other items between your tablet and the rest of the gadgets in your life is nice and easy.

E-books: Moon+ Reader (free and $4.99) and Mantano Ebook Reader (free and $6.99)

The Moon+ Reader and Mantano both came up in the comments a few times as DRM-free alternatives to the Kindle and Nook apps. Ars reader drpfenderson makes a strong argument for the Moon+ reader:

"[It] supports every major format (epub, pdf, mobi, chm, cbr, cbz, umd, fb2, txt, html, rar, zip), has built-in net library (and OPDS support), Dropbox integration, excellent library support, and tons of configuration options. It basically replaced 3-4 apps I was using all at once: one to manage my library and transfer my books, one to read PDF, one to read EPUB/MOBI, and one to read CBR/CBZ. The various themes make it gorgeous on my Nexus 7, but it even works perfectly on my ol' Nexus One."

Meanwhile, Ars reader charleski comes out in favor of Mantano as the best choice for reading e-books as the publisher intended:

"If you're looking for an ePub reader that actually renders the css in the ePub properly, your only choice is Mantano, which also includes a PDF reader and a very capable system for managing the notes you make. All of the other readers (and I've tried all the major ones) seem to have gone down the brain-dead path of over-riding everything in order to give the user a spurious sense of control over the layout. Moon+ offers a crippled 'publisher formatting' mode that scrolls the page and doesn't allow highlighting, but only Mantano manages to render the book the way it's supposed to look."

The one you prefer will probably depend on what your priorities are, but if you'd prefer not to support e-booksellers that use DRM, you've got plenty of options.

Weather: Eye In Sky Weather (free with ads, $1.91 without)

Some of you complained that the AccuWeather app and its background processes were battery crunchers, and we ourselves observed that performance wasn't as good as it could be. Eye In Sky has a clean, minimalistic look, great performance, an array of flexible home screen widgets, and nice phone and 10-inch tablet interfaces (though its 7-inch interface is just the phone interface stretched out.)

Programming and text editing: Emacs (free) and AIDE (free and $9.99)

We've targeted most of our recommendations so far to more general users, but Ars readers are often pushing their tablets to do increasingly complex tasks. Enter Emacs, which is a text and code editor ported over from desktop platforms so thoroughly that it warns you to connect a physical keyboard (or a touch analogue like the Hacker's Keyboard) when you first start it. One reader also recommended the Android Java IDE (AIDE), a coding environment that allows you to write and compile code directly on your tablet. You'll also probably want a full physical keyboard for this one, as for anything that's especially heavy on text entry, but AIDE is one of several programs that makes it possible to write and compile Android apps directly on Android itself.

Next steps

Of course, these aren't all of the apps that our readers recommended, and you'll probably have even more recommendations to make after this article—help your fellow readers by calling out even more apps! If you're looking for other tablet-optimized apps on your own and are having trouble finding them, however, an alternative app store might be the ticket—one reader recommended the free Tablified Market HD, a well-reviewed and frequently updated app store that plucks tablet-optimized apps from the wider Google Play store to make them easier to find. If you're still looking for killer apps after reading these two articles, the Tablified Market should be your next stop.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham