Because in Android each part of your device (hardware modules) can be used/accessed by the application easily. Some software house or developers had came up with some very interesting applications for your everyday use. Here are some I currently owned.
Gentle Alarm: I'm sure you would hate as much as I do when the alarm clock rudely wakes you up early in the morning with its loud blaring ring. Gentle alarm understands your sleeping cycle and wakes you up from your deep sleep by invoking the phone vibration and gradually fade in your favourite music. It still can function like your regular alarm clock if you choose so though. Free version would disable the alarm on Wednesdays (duh)
Sleep Now: Another application by the creators of Gentle Alarm. This app can play you some soothing sound to make you sleep but wait, it also have a feature called PowerNap in which you can take a short nap whilst placing your finger on the touch screen. Any slight movement of your finger is a sign that you are still awake which will reset a counter that you define how long you need to nap. Once the counter had reached a certain time, the built in alarm will go off telling you to awake from it. Pretty cool huh?
Spectrek: An outdoor game that helps you exercise by asking you to travel on foot and capture virtual ghosts. It combines the use of accelerometer, Google maps and your phone camera to come up with a very interesting game. You need to try yourself to see it. Check out
their website though
*Not recommended if your neighbourhood is very suspicious of you and your actions... :P
SpeedSense: Like the dashboard you see in Honda Civic ? Those that comes with fancy digital numbers that shows you how fast you are travelling ? Well, wait... look at the image above ! This is also a speedometer but a skinned one. It comes with a compass, altitude sensitive (altimeter ?) and are able to measure time and distance you had travelled since you started the app. For skins, you can have paper drawing as your background, more futuristic ones would be like the standard LCD display or even your surrounding background (using your back camera). The pro version allows you to change the skins while the free version would just allows you to use the normal features like detecting speed and distance. A recommended download !
Instant Heart Rate: Do you know that your Android device can tell how fast your heart is beating ? Well... not really heart beats but more like pulses. The app uses a light source (be it flash or sunlight) and camera to "detect" your pulses as you place your finger over the camera itself. I can't say that it's better than any of those HR monitoring devices out there in the market but well, if it's free, why not just install it and play with it ?
While some are free and some offers additional features on paid version. Go check it out and pay only when you're happy with what you see ! Enjoy your Android ! :)
