The reading experience is excellent, though the text may appear a little washed-out in bright lighting such as under direct sunlight. This T-Mobile myTouch app sticks to the design patterns of the original New York Times website, with its familiar fonts, color schemes, and text  placements. You can also share articles you’ve read very easily. The main interface presents a list of articles with an associated thumbnail, tapping on any one will take you straight to the content (which will include any photos in the piece). You can browse through a couple of dozen sections just like the main website. You can easily move between stories by swiping across the screen. Overall, an excellent myTouch 3G and myTouch 3G Slide app for Android.

 

The preferences pane allows you to set your preferred audio quality based on whether or not you’re on a good network. Buffering is smart and playback is stutter free even on slower WiFi channels. You can share and buy songs through the menu as well. It’s easy to create a new radio station based on a songs name, album, or artist. Note that Pandora doesn’t actually let you listen to a specific song by a specific artist whenever you want – you can only listen to similar songs in an intelligently created radio stream. This is similar to what Last.FM offers. The Pandora app on the myTouch is a high-quality smart-radio application that brings your music tastes right to your smartphone.

 

The search feature gives you full access to the catalog. Note that this is not a streaming “radio” service like Pandora – you have full access to any song that’s available on the catalog, and you can skip as many times as you want. Streaming quality is top-notch, with no stuttering or lags on 3G or Wi-Fi. The interface is simple and intuitive, and the tabbed interface for the player does well to get out of the way once a song starts playing. As expected, Spotify does have a noticeable impact on battery-life, but this is true for these services on any smartphone. There’s currently no way to automatically generate a playlist for you based on a small sample of songs – a feature available in Pandora and Last.FM. Overall, this is a very polished and comprehensive music streaming application with offline syncing rounding off one of the more feature-rich and useful myTouch apps.

 

You can send a tweet right from within the application, and tweets automatically include links to the right location and restaurant, which means people who aren’t using UrbanKite will also be able to act on your recommendations. UrbanKite is currently in beta and future updates look promising, including a potentially intelligent recommendation service that bubbles new locations based on what other like-minded users have as favorites. If you are a regular user of Twitter, you will probably find that this is one of the myTouch apps that slips smoothly into your existing habits without a hitch. If you’re new to Twitter or hate it with a vengeance, this may not be the app for you. But the app acts as a useful discovery tool even without requiring you to use Twitter – so it may be a worthwhile download for just about anybody.

 

This award-winning application comes with four language packs for now (you’ll need to download these separately from the main application on the Android market). The four include English, French, Chinese, and German for now with more on the way. Once you download the main application, you’ll need to install at least one language pack. If you install more than one, you can go to a “mixed” language setting that allows you to seamlessly type in both languages whenever you like. This soft keyboard has amazingly good predictive capabilities, beyond anything else available for Android phones at the moment. Needlessly to say it works perfectly with all capabilities in landscape mode. Touchpal is free for the moment on the Android Market, but is unlikely to remain so for too long.

 

The service sends you relevant emails as events take place with your lost or stolen phone, including whether or not your myTouch is locked. Another invaluable service is a notification that tells you when the SIM in your myTouch is changed, and actually gives you full details about the new SIM – including the phone number. This is a whole another layer of information that you can use to escalate your loss or theft to the appropriate authorities. Mobile Defense also pays attention to battery life, and is not a significant drain on power at all on the myTouch. This is one of the most useful myTouch apps on the Android market today, and the developers remain very responsive to problems and issues. A must-download for all myTouch owners.

 

The application offers several choices of layars already: Flickr, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Google Local Search among others. Several other layars are expected to come out as the platform matures. The apps “Reality Browser” includes categories for popular and featured points-of-interest to help discover new places more easily. If you prefer, you can change back to a regular map or list view. Many layars offer the ability to call the establishment right from the application, and other layars come with the ability to share a link or interact with the location in other manners. This is one of the most amazing and promising new myTouch apps that is both functional and just plain cool to use.

 

Unfortunately, the current version does not support collapsible sections. You may find that longer articles can be a long wall of text which can mean losing track of your position relative to other sections. Navigation itself is not impacted, since most Wiki pages offer the ability to jump to a section from the top of the page with a single click. Wapedia also does smart auto-complete of article titles which can save you a significant amount of typing on the myTouch’s soft keyboard. In addition to collapsible section headers, features that you might miss right now include the ability to switch to a text-only mode (which can significantly speed up the application), and the ability to bookmark articles for later reference. Overall, this is a wonderful app for browsing Wikipedia in a fast, clean, and intuitive manner.

 

This feature-packed app comes with even more surprises under the hood: you can set a reminder on your myTouch based on your  note, and you can share notes quickly and easily via SMS and email. The interface is free-flowing and gets out of your way for most tasks. Within a few minutes of using the app, you’ll find that note-taking is completely hassle-free and you can do most operations without thinking. This app is already easily one of the best productivity apps on the Android Market at present, but adding a more powerful search and more customization options will really make this app indispensable for myTouch users.

 

The contrast between fonts and background colors could do with some work, since many elements appear a little washed out and can be hard to see under certain lighting conditions. At present there is no way to create new events from within the app but you can certainly view and map out existing events. Another missing feature that some might consider a must-have is Facebook chat. There’s also no real way to update your profile pic with a photo taken with your myTouch. All in all, this is a solid Facebook application on the myTouch and the rumored “official” Facebook app will need to be very feature-rich to takeover the lead form Babbler. Right now, this is the best Facebook app on the Android Market.