Live Free. Live Happy.

At last, I get my first smartphone - Motorola Fire XT530 which is based on Android. And this was a gift from a very close buddy of mine - Srikanth. He wanted to gift me something for my marriage, and I put it off till my second anniversary as I wanted his gift to be something very memorable. And this has proved to be a really wonderful gift. Let me get into the details of the phone now.

I was inclined to buying an Android based smartphone ever since I've heard about Android. I looked at a lot of budget (Rs.8000 - Rs.14000) Android phones such as Dell XCD35, Samsung Galaxy Ace, HTC Wildfire, HTC Wildfire S and LG Optimus One. There was some shortcoming in all the models such as low battery life, small screen size (<=3.2 inch) or bad camera. I almost decided to go for Samsung Galaxy Ace when I came across Motorola Fire XT530. This phone had everything I needed - decent battery (1540mAh), 3.5 inch capacitative touchscreen, 5 MP camera with LED flash and Android OS v2.3.4. This model has been recently launched in September. I have been using this phone for more than a month now and I am just loving it. At times, the response is slow, but it is quite acceptable. The only real drawback I feel in this phone is its limited internal memory of 157 MB. This pretty much limits the number of applications that we can install in phone memory. While most of the applications can be moved to SD card, unfortunately some of them cannot.

Below are some of the Android apps which I have installed from the market on my mobile and find to be pretty useful. You may want to glance through them as some of them may be useful to you as well.

• Adobe Reader - PDF Reader
• Alarm Clock Xtreme Free - Advanced features such as limit on the number of times you can snooze the alarm and solving math problems to dismiss the alarm ensure that you get up from bed no matter what
• AVG Antivirus - Antivirus for scanning download applications
• App 2 SD Free - An extremely useful app which shows a list of applications that can be moved from phone memory to SD card so that phone memory can be freed
• Astrid Tasks - Another awesome app for managing tasks and setting automated reminders. The Tasks widget further is very useful for displaying an overview of the pending tasks.
• ASTRO - Advanced file manager
• BookMyShow - App for booking movie tickets
• Caldav-Sync - App for adding a remote caldav calendar which integrates with the native calendar
• ConnectBot - SSH client
• Data Enabler - Widget for turning on and off Data Connection
• Dictionary - Dictionary.com dictionary
• Dolphin Browser HD - High-featured browser
• Fackebook - Fackebook Android Client
• iMobile - ICICI Mobile Client
• K-9 Mail - Excellent IMAP client
• KeePassDroid - The most popular password manager for Linux now comes to Android. This app can be used to stored password and other confidential information in a secure manner in your mobile.
• LinkedIn - LinkedIn Android Client
• Opera Mini - Unlike ordinary web browsers, Opera Mini fetches all content through a proxy server that compresses and reformats web pages into a format more suitable for small screens.
• Pulse - RSS/Feed reader
• QuickPic - Advanced Image Viewer
• Simple Spreadsheet - A simple spreadsheet application
• Sipdroid - SIP client
• Skype - Skype client
• SSHDroid - SSH Server
• Voice Recorder - Voice Recorder
• Xabber - Jabber/XMPP client