Welcome to the weekly roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Market or were spotted by us in the previous 3 weeks or so. This is PART 1 of the app roundup. You can find PART 2 here. The game roundup from this week can be found here and the tablet app roundup here. Please wait for this page to load in full in order to see the AppBrain widgets, which include ratings and pricing info. Looking for the previous roundup editions? Find them here. Today's roundup is sponsored by HeroCraft's latest game - Musaic Box. Our own Liam Spradlin reviewed this game a few weeks back and found it to be excellent for both lovers of puzzle/hidden object games and music. In HeroCraft's own words: -- Musaic Box is an unusual combination of musical puzzle and a detective quest. Its scenario Read More

Never forget, The Washington Post’s investigative journalism — specifically the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — was instrumental to uncovering the Watergate political scandal of the 1970s. The ability to challenge the government marks one of the elements that make America and news agencies like The Washington Post great. This app keeps the bar high by delivering a lot of news in a well-designed small-screen space. News app often struggle with navigation — create a huge menu of newspaper sections or just parse down the content to fit the tiny screen of a phone. Here, The Post strikes an excellent balance with a thoughtful user design. It provides a scrollable top menu of select sections (with a "More Sections" option at the far end), and lets you bring up sub-topics by long-pressing the menu bar. A site map icon in the upper right-hand corner reveals a full-screen menu of Read More

It’s been a big week for the Android Market, with an onrush of new apps from top companies. Microsoft crossed enemy lines to launch its Hotmail app, which quickly skyrocketed up the charts for free Android apps. Yahoo! launched a long overdue Android app with Flickr this week, tapping-in to the mobile photo-sharing trend. Adobe also ramped up its mobile suite, unveiling a fresh version of Adobe Flash Player 11. The official Hotmail app has finally arrived in the Android Market. In the event that you still use Hotmail, now you can skip the Android web browser and access a full-featured app for viewing, sending and managing emails. Sync your calendar and contacts, view folders and subfolders, and get alerts for incoming messages. The free app supports multiple Hotmail accounts, and the clean layout is easy to navigate. The app launch is part of a Hotmail overhaul as Microsoft makes its Read More

The Washington Post has finally figured out there are enough Android users for their content. Hence they’ve launched a mobile app to provide them with access to “best in politics, international, finance, arts & culture and local news.” The application is touted to offer an “intuitive, mobile news experience” and having played with it for half an hour and I can prove this claim. This is not to say I enjoy reading The Washington Post that much — I prefer some other sources. Aside from the mentioned news content, there’s traffic information — including real-time Metro arrival times and alerts, traffic cams and continuous updates from Dr. Gridlock. Moreover, users will get to access “comprehensive weather information,” which involves updates from the Capital Weather Gang, 7-day and hourly forecasts for cities across the globe, and weather maps with radar images and weather alerts for the D.C. metropolitan area. The central part Read More