Tracks tops Android Apps of the Week

This week brings us lots of variety, from great social photo sharing apps like Tracks, to the continued impending enslavement of the world by Google with Google Calendar. We've also got a new RSS Feed reader in NewsBlur, the latest iteration of the Dolphin mobile web browser, and a really unique way to find music for your next rave! Here are this week's top Android apps.

Tracks (Free)

Tracks is basically another one of the many attempts to fuse social media and photo sharing, but in a pretty novel way. You can create shared photo albums with your friends, upload photos to the same album, which the developers dub a "track." Lots of the standard social networking features make an appearance, but there are also Joinable Tracks, which are public photo albums centered around a specific topic, or Magic Tracks, which pull photos from your device and group them into albums automatically. It's a nifty new app worth checking out.

Google Calendar (Free)

Another one of the Google staple features gets a mobile sibling, and Google is that much closer to world domination. They even released Zagat just a few days before this! The official Google Calendars app allows you to do the standard stuff, like creating and editing events, and quickly emailing event guests customized notifications. You can also view all your calendars at once, even from non-Google calendar services. This formerly device-specific app is finally available for all the public, though with some expected draw-backs. For example, the app does not work on several devices. But Google is hard at work on fixes, as always.

NewsBlur (Free)

Speaking of Google, NewsBlur offers a similar service to a Google app, providing an alternative for consumers. In this case, it's an alternative to the RSS Feed news spewer that is gReader. You can import your previously existing gReader feed directly into NewsBlur. There is also some social connectivity to be found, as you share and comment on the news with friends or meet new people with similar interests as yours. The app is missing a few features so far, but it was very successful on iOS, and the developer is quite responsive, so you can expect lots of improvement.

Dolphin Jetpack (Free)

Dolphin Browser has been a very popular alternative mobile web browser for quite a while now, with several different versions and many satisfied customers. Now, the latest iteration hits Google Play, and it's all about speed. Using Dolphin's own HTML5 rendering engine, Dolphin Jetpack seeks to deliver the fastest web-game/app experiences out there. People are confirming that it is indeed faster than most of the competition, and it already has the added benefit of being based on an established browser with a streamlined design and an intuitive interface. Anything beats that standard Android browser anyway, so you should definitely upgrade. Happy browsing!

Beat Bang (Free)

This is a very unique music discovery app with a very specific audience in mind. Specifically, it targets fans of electronic music. Unlike Pandora Radio or similar apps, you don't explore by inputting artists that you already like. You start off by selecting a certain number of beats per minute, and from that a web of songs and artists springs forth, always expanding as you explore. It's very novel, and generally interesting to mess around with even if electronica isn't really your bag. It gives you much more of a sense that you're actually exploring and discovering, which is awesome. Just make sure you switch the language to English from the options menu.

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