10 Android Apps Tech Lovers Can't Live Without

Most of us can't live without our phones and that is especially true for us tech lovers. We need them to communicate with co-workers, socialize with friends, keep up to date with the latest news and entertain ourselves. Most of us consider our phone as our link to the outside world. My phone is fairly old but I supplemental that with an Android tablet. I've definitely replaced my laptop with my Android tablet for a lot of things. The beauty of these apps is that they work on both phones and tablets. Your phone might be the latest Galaxy S3 or maybe even an iPhone 5 - it's not so much about the phone you have it's about the apps that are available.

I organize my whole life around my apps. I save my contacts, store my calendar, jot down my ideas, monitor my social networks, do my shopping entertain myself and more. Without them I would be wasting time looking for where I'd written down a number, forgotten some of my best ideas or, worse than that, missed the latest cat meme on Facebook!

Collection of Apps on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Must Have Apps for Tech Lovers

Here's a couple of apps that all tech lovers should have installed on their Android devices. There's information apps like the NASA App and TED - a complete Ideas Worth Sharing video app. Efficiency apps like Ad Block Plus and the Hacker's Keyboard and even a game or two thrown in there to keep you entertained while living the boring parts of a high tech lifestyle.

• TED -  The app allows you to search and download the TEDTalks from the TED site onto your Android phone or tablet. You can then watch them whenever you want. It even includes a feature to download a Talk as an audio file (downloading faster and saving you bandwidth!) so you can listen to them when your on your way to work or otherwise out and about. Remember TED is all about "Ideas Worth Sharing" so you can always find something there that will interest you. It's basically the YouTube of the ideas world.
• Google+ - It hasn't exactly dominated among my group of friends but it's a must-be place for Tech news. The Technology industry uses Google+ heavily in their social broadcasting so if you want to find out about the latest tech fast then subscribe to tech magazine and websites' G+ pages.
• Adblock Plus (ABP) for Android - Every self-respecting tech lover should block adverts. It makes pages load faster, fixes broken text flow caused by mid-page ads. Sure it means small website owners don't get paid for showing the adverts if we block them but, be honest, when was the last time you purposefully clicked an advert? Banner Blindness started for tech lovers long before it was even a buzzword lol
• Hackers Keyboard - Not just for hackers, this custom keyboard is a full QWERTY keyboard with numbers alongside the letters, no need to switch to another menu for numbers or punctuation! There is also arrow keys. I don't know about you but I use arrow keys a lot when I'm typing, even short messages. If you don't like the Hackers Keyboard then there are other ones to choose from but in my eyes a replacement on-screen keyboard is a must.
• Droid Scan - Droid Scan is a document scanner that's been around since 2009. It's been in constant development and improvement since then. It has automatic document size recognition. You can scan business cards, contracts and even whiteboards. The app converts them into both high and low resolution PDFs (or .jpg in the free version).
• NASA App - The NASA App is filled with videos and pictures (over 140,000 of them) taken from space. It's also filled with hundreds of articles to help you learn more about stars and planets.
• Angry Birds Space and Angry Birds Star Wars - What kind of tech geeks would we be if we didn't love space? Keeping yourself entertained is essential to staying positive and gaming is one way of doing that. These games are a better choice than most for us gaming tech geeks.

News Readers and Feed Readers

There is no shortage of news reader apps in the Google Play store. Most of them come with the same set of basic features and only a small handful of unique elements, normally in the styling. Even when you find one you like there's still a feature or two missing. I use 3 different news readers myself, each one serves its own purpose better than each of the others. A big draw for a newsreader app, for me, is a web-based counterpart I can access from outside the app.

1. Pulse - Pulse is a standard news reader app allowing you to categorize feeds into individual pages. Then display those pages in image rich wigets. It looks nice, shows lots of thumbnails and caches the feed for offline reading very well. I recommend this if you do most of your reading when on the go.
2. Google Currents - Currents is one of the most under rated Google apps in my opinion. It's a beautiful, magazine style, feed reader. It has hundreds of popular feeds built-in and you can add RSS feeds. It pulls featured images, builds indexes and lays it all out just as if you were reading a magazine. It's a beautifully designed app which makes getting through some of those lengthy articles far more bearable.
3. Google Reader - Google Reader is a popular choice for keeping track of the feeds of the tons of websites you visit on a regular basis. It is a web app primarily but has an Android app too.  I use Google Reader because the Homescreen Widgets are nice and simple. I make use of the categories and tagging ability of Google Reader to collect feeds into topics and display each topic in its own widget. Doing this becomes particularly useful if you subscribe to a lot of feeds or the sites you follow post a lot of times a day.

If your more of a book reader than an RSS reader then check out these Android reading apps.

What Apps Do You Use?

This is a list of some of the apps that I, as a tech lover myself, can't live without. If an awesome app you use is not in this list and you feel it deserves to be then chances are I haven't heard of it! I may be missing out on something amazing, so please let me know what your list of must-have apps are in the comments section below.