Welcome to the weekly roundup of the best newAndroid applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Market or were spotted by us in the previous 6 weeks or so.This edition focuses only on new tablet apps or ones that added tablet support. Regular apps and games are coming soon.
Rogue AI
Today’s tablet roundup is sponsored by a prettyawesome game called Rogue AI. Rogue AI is a defensive strategy with a tower defense feel, built exclusively for tablets. Launched into space, you are a machine with a single objective. Return to Earth and annihilate the entire human race.
The game was recently updated with a new campaign consisting of 8 new levels, doubled the number of enemy types and buildings, and added new backgrounds, music, and sound effects. That’s a pretty nice update if you ask me.However, my favorite part about the description is this:
TiVo for Tablets
TiVo DVR and non-TiVo DVR customers can get the TiVo experience in the palm of their hands with the FREE TiVo app. Turn your Android tablet into command central for your TiVo DVR. Now you can search, browse, discover and share without ever interrupting the show you’re watching. Quickly surface new content, view guides, schedule and manage recordings, get recommendations, or dig deeper into a particular actor’s entire resume—all using intuitive, gesture-based interaction.
SocialFrame Free HD
SocialFrame sucks in your local, Facebook, and Twitter photos and then turns your tablet into a digital photo frame. It has a little widget for time and weather too and is overall quite well made. If you have an old tablet laying around, you may just want to turn it into a full-time photo frame.Maximize your tablet usage. You can now use your tablet when you are not using your tablet. Do you own a digital photo frame at home? You then understand how troublesome it is to sync your updated photos and wondered only if you could sync Facebook/Twitter photos more easily.
Now you can do so with SocialFrame! It automatically syncs all your tagged photos. This is a great gift for your parents. From Facebook, simply tag parents’ names in photos, and voila! you can now share photos of your lovely baby, surprise birthday events, romantic trip to Hawaii, etc. You can do the same by sending photos to their Twitter. You wake up in the morning, SocialFrame tells you the time, weather, and RSS feeds to get you updated with the happenings around the world.
SpaceChem Mobile
SpaceChem is an obscenely addictive design-based puzzle game about fake science. IMPORTANT: This game is designed for tablets with a resolution of 1280×800 or greater. Take on the role of a Reactor Engineer working for SpaceChem, the leading chemical synthesizer for frontier colonies. Construct elaborate factories to transform raw materials into valuable chemical products! Streamline your designs to meet production quotas and outperform other engineers. SpaceChem Mobile is a faithful adaptation of the award winning PC game SpaceChem, and includes the full selection of player-created “ResearchNet” puzzles and a modified campaign tailored for the iPad.
Tabstagram
The official Instagram app supports tablets, but the UI is not optimized for them very well. If you are looking to browse Instagram photos on your tablet, Tabstagram seems like a good way to go.Tabstagram brings you the Instagram experience with an interface specifically tailored to utilize the screen estate on your tablet. Browse through the latest images in your feed, or check out the most popular images currently on Instagram. Tabstagram fully supports commenting and liking images, all with a sleek, good looking Ice Cream Sandwich inspired interface.
It was roughly this time last year that Amazon’s Kindle Fire showed us just how successful an aggressively priced 7-inch tablet could be, becoming, arguably the go-to gift of the last holiday season. This summer, Google upped the ante, showing the world that a $200 tablet could be more than just an OEM-ed content delivery device, enlisting ASUS to design a really solid piece of hardware at a seemingly impossible price.
Barnes & Noble’s journey in the space, meanwhile, has been decidedly more convoluted. In mid-October of 2010, the company gave the world the Nook Color — a product with a wildly original industrial design, but decidedly limited functionality, which was, for most intents and purposes, an LCD-based color e-reader. Halfway through the following year, the device got a Pinocchio-like upgrade, transforming it into an honest-to-goodness tablet, apps and all. The device’s celebration was cut short, however, eclipsed entirely by the arrival of the aesthetically (nearly) identical, but internally superior Nook Tablet.When Amazon announced the release of the Kindle Fire HD and all of its many variants, there was little question that Barnes & Noble had something waiting in the wings as well. After all, much of the bookseller’s hardware game plan seems to revolve around going toe-to-toe against Amazon offerings, and since the company beat its chief competition to the market with a glowing reader, a Nook Tablet seemed all but inevitable. With this week’s announcements, however, the company has managed to offer up some surprises — for starters, there’s the fact that it’s doubled its efforts with the release of two tablets — with the 7-inch Nook HD and the 9-inch Nook HD+. Then there’s the fact that the company has clearly put great effort into the hardware this go-round, rather than offering up yet another rehash of the Color / Tablet lineage. Let’s start with the Nook HD, shall we? Join us after the break.
