Android App Review Marathon Liveblog

The T-Mobile G1 Android phone is now available, and you’ve seen our review. Now we’re going to take on the apps in the Android Marketplace. How are they? Are they good enough to justify a two year commitment to T-Mobile? Read on and find out.

TuneWiki: TuneWiki, the lyrics + music video music player, is fantastic. We plugged in a live track of Flight of the Conchords and TuneWiki was smart enough to have the lyrics to it and sync them in time with the music. Impressive! Other features like “Top 50 Songs” Today/This Week/This Month come up with the music video and lyrics most of the type, and you can even search YouTube for your own favourite videos. Yes, Never Gonna Give You Up works.

PAC-MAN: It’s the same wakka wakka you’ve been playing for the last 20+ years, but now adapted to either the touchscreen or the roller ball. The swiping touchscreen motion works, but it’s not wonderful—the ball is the way you want to go for this. Pac’s sound effects are exactly the same as they were when you were a kid, so if you ever go back in time to tell the childhood version of you to buy Google stock at its IPO, you can bring this with you and blow his mind.

Accuweather: The app has today’s weather, three-day prediction and radar view for easy home meteorology, but that’s about it. No ten-day, no allergy conditions or anything more than just the barebones. What it does have is a very prominent link to their website under each view that launches your browser, which leads us to believe that they want you clicking over there (so they can collect ad money). Still, it’s free and it shows you how hot it is.

ImeemThis Pandora like music service only allows you to search by artist name to play music based off similar artists, but there is also the option to play featured music which range from new and notable artists to the Top 100 imeem songs. The automatic song selection is decent and when listening to a song there is a menu option to buy it in the Amazon MP3 store. Overall the app works great over both WiFi and 3G, and surprisingly song buffer and sound quality are pretty good over either.