There are a lot of Android apps available for any purpose you might think of, from time and work management to documents and photo editing to games, media and entertainment and even live video streaming (I’m talking about Qik).
However, there are also a lot of apps that are seemingly useless for real life, however they are still pretty cool and can be used to impress or surprise your friends and other people. Below is a collection of such apps, the most interesting of them, to be exact.
Metal Detector
This is, well, a metal detector. And the amazing thing is that it works! Not like a real one, mind you, because the integrated magnetometer is too weak to detect anything smaller than a handgun under a layer of clothes (though I suppose you could use it for that). Your phone must have a magnetometer (a compass) for this app to work.
Floating Image
When you’re bored and want to see the pictures on your phone in a cool new way, this is the app you’d want to use. It randomly loads and shows pictures from all over your phone’s memory floating around on the screen. Looks pretty cool, may be used as a screen saver
.
Steamy Window
This is the same app as on the first iPhone, only this one is free. Basically, it creates a layer of virtual steam on the screen and you can wipe it using your hand or fingers. And no, there is no one naked in the shower behind the steam
.
Google Goggles
This is actually a pretty useful application that few people know about for some reason. I always wanted something like this on my desktop computer. It’s basically something known as visual search, where you search not using keywords, but using pictures. Google’s system recognizes the picture you’ve taken with your camera and searches for relevant results. For example, it would show a Wikipedia entry for the Eiffel tower, a recipes site for a photo of a restaurant’s menu, or a relevant site for a piece of text from a book (yes it basically has OCR – Optical Characters Recognition, that “sees” the text written on the pictures you take). Very cool – you just have to check it out.
BubbleBeats
Back to the useless but cool. This application is a music player, one with a twist: your playlist consists of various bubbles of different colors and sizes. Behind every one of them is a song and by arranging them, you get a playlist. Despite being useless, it’s a pretty entertaining way of creating playlists – not only you spend a lot of time (which flies by very fast while you’re doing it), but also discover new songs and song combinations that may sound better than your current playlist.
The Schwartz Unsheathed
This is basically a light saber simulator. It uses the phone’s accelerometer to make the sounds of a light saber when you slash the air with it and the virtual saber opens and closes with the relevant special effects when you tap the screen. You can also change the color of the light saber on the screen.
Ruger SR9
If you’re more into military series than into Star Wars, you’ll like this app, especially if your country has strict gun ownership laws
. It simulates the sounds of the Ruger SR9 pistol, as you may have guessed already. Pretty cool for when you’ve got nothing else to do.
Psycho Droid
If you’re more into butcher’s knives than into handguns or light sabers, or if you simply like Hitchcock’s hit 1960 movie, you may like this Android app. When activated, the phone will make the eerie effects played in the movie, complete with the blood effects and slashing sounds that activate when you move the phone around.
Shottgunn
And when you’re tired of slashing around with a light saber, butcher’s knife and a pistol, you can try a good old shotgun
. This application is basically the same thing as the Ruger app (it even comes from the same developer), but it features shotgun effects instead of the Ruger handgun ones.
Massage
This is an interesting app, but useless with today’s phones. It allows you to permanently enable the phone’s vibro-motor, which then lets you use the phone as a massager. But the vibrators on today’s phones are so weak you’ll barely feel it.
Pineapple
Pineapple is a downright wacky app (no wonder, as it was developed by a Japanese citizen, possibly under some kind of influence
. I don’t even understand what it does. You are supposed to ask the phone something and it answers back, but the answers and questions are pre-programmed and are very weird. It’s supposed to be for kids under 6 years old, but I don’t think even they will find it interesting.
As you can see, there’s really not much use for these apps. They’re just novelty. However, as I said, they’re still pretty cool and can be used for various special occasions or to surprise and impress your friends and other people.
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