If you've taken the plunge and decided to splash out on an Android phone then you're probably wondering what apps you should install first. Load up the Android Market or visit the new Amazon Appstore and you’ll be confronted with a dazzling array of different apps – and choosing from these seems like a daunting prospect at first.

To help ease you in to the world of Android apps, we’ve put together a small guide below to the first five apps you should install on your new device. You should find them all useful, entertaining and above all, easy to use, showcasing exactly how cool your new Android phone can be!

Astro File Manager

This is a good one to install first because it will help you manage all of the content that you’re going to install on your new device. Astro File Manager lets you organize documents, files and folders; manage tasks and processes, and perform backups. It comes with a handy application manager, which gives you a clear view of all your installed apps and lets you save them to your SD card if you like.

Twitter

Having an Android phone with a data plan is great for social networking – and if you haven’t got into Twitter yet it’s a good excuse to get yourself out there. The official Twitter client provides a clear and easy way to post tweets from your phone. Other features include simple controls for viewing tweets, mentions, retweets, lists and direct messages, options for managing your profile, and on-the-fly trending info.

Facebook

Staying on top of Facebook is going to get much easier now you’ve got an Android device. The excellent Facebook app for Android offers an effortless way of checking the network on the go. Besides posting status updates, you can easily grab pictures with your phone and add them to Facebook, view upcoming events, and quickly exchange messages with your contacts.

TuneIn Radio

Perhaps the perfect app for a long journey, TuneIn Radio lets you listen to radio stations and podcasts from around the World on your Android phone. You can pick from a choice of more than 40,000 stations, searching by keyword, category, or genre. Reception is near perfect when listening via 3G or WiFi, and battery usage isn’t too excessive.

Angry Birds

Another great time-killer for the bus-stop or an airport waiting lounge, Angry Birds is a fun, addictive mobile game. The object of this mega popular game is to catapult birds into structures in order to smash the evil pigs that live inside them. With cute, colorful graphics and absorbing gameplay, this is one of those games that’s virtually impossible to put down.

Opera has just announced that it has updated Opera Mobile to 11 and Opera Mini to 6. James has already shown us that it's his browser of choice on Android, and a hot favorite on Symbian, so it's clear that Opera is an app to be reckoned with. With this double dose of innovation, however, it's even harder to know which to pick - is Mobile or Mini the best browser for you?

As you might have guessed from the name, Opera Mobile is the version of the browser optimized for use on mobile devices and tablets. It's got everything that you would expect from a regular browser, even using the same engine as the desktop version. In other words, Opera Mobile is as close as you can get to standard desktop browsing on a mobile device.

Opera Mini is the version Opera has released to make mobile browsing the fastest, lightest experience possible, saving you money in the process, especially if you pay for your mobile internet as you go. It does this by shrinking webpages down to a tenth of their size before sending them, which obviously makes for a much smaller, quicker experience.

[Image courtesy of Opera]

Although Opera Mobile and Mini are on very different version numbers, this update has brought the same changes to both. Both include improvements to make scrolling and zooming much smoother, something that really enhances mobile browsing. Added to this is new pinch-to-zoom functionality, something that users of other browsers missed when using Opera.

Also added is a Twitter, Facebook and blogging share button, which is pretty essential for anyone with even a passing interest in social browsing. Finally, for all you lucky tablet users, Opera Mini and Mobile have also been optimized for tablet use. Opera isn't shy when it comes to mobile platforms, so there are quite a few to choose from. Have a look here to make sure you get the perfect one for you.

As Angry Birds has proven beyond all reasonable doubt, humans love throwing at other things to knock them down. Crush the Castle 2 continues that trend, this time with a medieval catapult fight - you have to destroy a variety of royal families hiding out in a range of incredibly poorly built castles!

Crush the Castle 2 is well put together, with enough new items to catapult into castles to keep the gameplay interesting as you progress. There are also some funny achievements like 'Ladies First', awarded if the first person you kill is a princess or queen!

Play Crush the Castle 2 over at Kongregate, requires Flash.

Although the official release is tomorrow, Firefox 4 is already available for download from Mozilla. It looks just like we expected after seeing RC1 and 2:

Firefox 3 has been looking old for a while now, allowing Chrome especially to become the browser of choice for many. However, as Elena saw in her review of the release candidate, there are lots of new features that mean Firefox is firmly back in the running.

Download Firefox 4 for Windows here.

Download Firefox 4 for Mac here.

Firefox 4’s launch is only a few days away but the guys over at Mozilla still enjoy keeping us on tenterhooks with articles, videos and other small bits of information about their browser’s next big release. The last example to join this list is an awesome online planetarium where you can check all sorts of interesting facts about the Solar System.

The most outstanding thing about this planetarium is that it’s entirely coded in HTML5 and CSS3, as a demonstration of the amazing possibilities of these new technologies. The Planetarium showcases the use of CSS3 Transitions on CSS3 Transformations, which were already introduced in the Beta version of Firefox 4 and enable you to animate any HTML element on the page.

CSS3 Transitions are applied to CSS properties, showing changes as animations rather than applying those changes immediately. The result is a smooth, seamless animation that works on Firefox 4, Chrome and Safari… and doesn't require Flash.

Download Firefox 4 and go for a walk in space now!

Mozilla announced that official finished release of Firefox 4 will be released on 22nd March. The news was posted on Mozilla's Developer Message Board by developer Damon Sicore:

Today's triage session concluded with all systems go for a Firefox 4 launch on March 22nd. We will continue to have triage sessions on a daily basis to watch for major issues; however, at this point, we've concluded RC1 will become Firefox 4 final.

Fantastic job by everyone involved in this release. Amazing work!

The date comes as no coincidence after the release of Internet Explorer 9 was announced 2 days ago. At the moment, you can download Firefox 4 as a release candidate for both Mac and Windows.

The European Union (EU) has taken decisive action against social networking sites such as Facebook and plans to enshrine a "right to be forgotten online" law. The law will set limits on how long websites and social networking services can store your details as well as the amount of data that is visible online after you've requested its removal.

According to The Guardian:

In a package of proposals to be unveiled before the summer, the commissioner intends to force Facebook and other social networking sites to make high standards of data privacy the default setting and give control over data back to the user. "I want to explicitly clarify that people shall have the right – and not only the possibility – to withdraw their consent to data processing," EU justice commissioner, Viviane Reding said. "The burden of proof should be on data controllers – those who process your personal data. They must prove that they need to keep the data, rather than individuals having to prove that collecting their data is not necessary."

The announcement comes about a year after the EU warned Facebook that privacy settings should be simplified and prompted the company into making them easier to understand.

In an electronic age where our every move can be monitored, it's been argued by some that concerns about privacy on sites such as Facebook are irrelevant and over-hyped anyway. However, if it does concern you, and you feel unsure about how to tweak your privacy settings in Facebook, check out our guide about how to use them correctly.

As announced on their official blog, Twitter has taken an important step in making their service more secure for users: they’ve added a new option in the Settings menu that lets you choose to always use the HTTPS protocol when accessing the Twitter website.

HTTPS is a combination of the regular HTTP protocol used on the web with the SSL/TLS protocol to provide secure identification and data encryption in your communication with web servers. It’s often used for sensitive transactions and online payments.

Using HTTPS in Twitter will improve the security of your account and protect your information, especially when using Twitter over an unsecured Internet connection such as a public WiFi spot. The HTTPS option has already been made default when you log into Twitter – to protect your password – and on the official Twitter app for iPhone and iPad.

In order to enable HTTPS on the Twitter website, log into your Twitter account, go to Settings and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. Tick the Always use HTTPS and you’re done!

Apartment hunting can be a total pain, and the hardest part is often locating an acceptable place in a desirable location. If you do your apartment search online like most people, you have two essential browser windows open: one for a site like craigslist or Rent.com and another for Google Maps to get an idea of where the places you find are actually located. This can get annoying quickly.

Lucky for apartment hunters everywhere, there's PadMapper. Using Google Maps and pulling available apartment information directly from apartment listings across the internet, PadMapper is a fully integrated apartment search engine. If you've ever used Google Maps for any purpose, you'll know how to use PadMapper. The service is completely free and allows you to filter your searches based on a number of different factors, including maximum monthly rent, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, neighborhood location, amenities, and whether pets are allowed.

Clicking on a selection in PadMapper opens a new tab in your browser to the listing's direct web address. From time to time the posting will be out of date, but generally you'll end up with additional useful information about the listing. If you register with PadMapper, you can also save listings to your favorites and come back to them later on.

PadMapper is available for free both as a web app online and also on the iPhone through the PadMapper Apartment Search app. Prepare to find your next apartment with ease. PadMapper puts some fun back into apartment hunting!

Internet Explorer 9 is finally available for download. Microsoft has released the final version of their popular browser for Windows 7 and Windows Vista, both in 32 and 64-bit versions. You can download them all from Softonic.

There are no significant changes since the Release Candidate we tested a few weeks ago. But we thought it would be a good idea to go over the most outstanding features in Internet Explorer 9 once more, especially for those of you who haven’t been testing the previous versions (Platform Preview, Beta and RC).

Web Slices

Internet Explorer 9 lets you add special web elements like top lists to the browser's Favorites bar. These elements are known as Web Slices and their content is updated automatically.

Cactus McCoy is a sideways scrolling beat 'em up, with a western theme and lots of weapons! This is a Flash based cartoon game with a silly story - you play McCoy, who finds a mysterious stone that turns you into a cactus-hero! Strangely, Cactus McCoy doesn't seem to have any super powers beyond being green and spiky, but that doesn't spoil what is a well made if simplistic beat 'em up.

Although there is just one attack button, the range of weapons make it all quite enjoyable. Taking out baddies with a branch is kind of funny, and there's even a water pistol lying around! Overall, Cactus McCoy is a great little arcade timewaster to play in your browser. Head over to Kongregate and check it out.

Have you ever tried to watch a YouTube video and found it painfully slow? Ever tried to watch a TV show streamed online and found it stopping and starting constantly? Or simply tried to download a file from your e-mail and had to wait ages for it to complete? Most of us at some stage have suffered from painfully slow downloads and the causes can be various. More often than not though, the biggest culprit is bandwidth throttling by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) particularly at peak usage periods such as evenings and weekends.

Bandwidth throttling is when an ISP purposely restricts the amount of bandwidth that you're using in order minimize traffic congestion. As HD video and other bandwidth heavy applications demand more and more bandwidth, users are increasingly noticing the squeeze being put on them. That's why todays announcement by Britain's major ISPs that they are going to reveal exactly how they manage traffic and throttle bandwidth should be applauded and followed by ISPs everywhere.

This greater transparency reduces the threat to net neutrality - i.e. the temptation of ISPs to make deals with net giants such as Google that websites such as YouTube will be given bandwidth priority over smaller websites. How exactly this greater transparency will work is not clear though. Whether ISPs will be forced to publish reports of how they've managed traffic over a certain period or whether they will provide real-time updates on how traffic is being managed remains to be seen.

However, although transparency moves like this should be encouraged, it is no substitute for investment in infrastructure which is the main problem. One of the main reasons that South Korean Users can look forward to speeds of up to 1Gbps - 200 times faster than British average of 5Mbps - is that South Korea has invested heavily in its internet infrastructure. This is not only essential to providing a fair service for all but also for maintaining the innovation that makes the net so exciting. As John Naughton points out in The Guardian today:

The reason the internet has been such an powerful enabler of innovation is that it is, at its core, a meritocratic network which is not owned or controlled by anyone. All it does is take data packets in at one end and deliver them to their destinations at the other. And it was designed to be agnostic about the packets – to give them all the same treatment. In that sense, it was "neutral" towards applications. If you had a good idea that could be implemented in data packets, then the internet would do it for you, no questions asked.

That ISPs should seek to provide a more transparent service that continues to maintain a level playing field for innovation in applications is something all software developers and users should support.

Have you ever come up with an idea so epic you think it'd be the next big thing, if only you could find the means to fund it? Your dream might be closer to reality than you realize. It doesn't matter if you're completely broke or just don't want to take a huge financial risk. If other people like your idea, you just might be able to get the funding you need.

Crowdfunding websites have been cropping up everywhere, and they've been making a splash in a variety of different realms, including fashion, photojournalism and software development. While the execution of project proposals is different from site to site, one thing's the same for all of them: the ability to create professional-looking project proposals on each site's web app interface has never been simpler.

Here are four great crowdfunding sites to look into:

KickStarter:By and far the most well-known site of its kind out there, KickStarter is where Diaspora, the open source alternative to Facebook earned $10,000 in under two months. All manner of projects can be proposed on KickStarter, from fashion to music to writing & publishing. The objective is to hit your funding goal in a specific amount of time. If you fall short, none of your donors are required to pay out.

RocketHub: Almost identical to KickStarter, RocketHub is another creative arts-focused crowdfunding platform that lets you propose your projects and try to earn funding backers. It also has the added benefit of having an awards and badges system. This encourages RocketHub users to interact, as well as places projects in need of attention in front of more interested eyes. The site even has its own terminology for its users. Project proposers are called Creatives, while the people offering financial backing are the Fuelers.

IndieGoGo: Want your project featured in popular media outlets? IndieGoGo gives you the possibility of this opportunity. From software apps to other creative art endeavors, there is a wide variety of different project types that can be proposed. IndieGoGo also has great social media platform integration, so it's as easy as a few clicks to share your projects or those you find impressive on sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Quirky: If you're just as interested in receiving feedback for your idea as in receiving funding, Quirky might be a better choice for you. This web app also allows you to submit your project for a fee, but the main focus is the interaction and comments you get from other Quirky users about the viability of your proposal. Quirky will help you refine and focus your idea to give it the best chances for success.

Overall, project proposal web apps like these are a great way to get your ideas noticed and potentially funded. They also offer you a simple way to create a page and show off your idea to the world.  Creative geniuses should be aware that most crowdfunding sites charge a fee, both to host the project and also for processing the transaction of sending you the funding money once your proposal term is over, however. Usually, these fees show up as a percentage deducted from the overall funding you manage to raise and don't cost you anything upfront. Be sure to read the fine print carefully before deciding on a site.

For budding artists who just want a great free place to create and show off their portfolio of work, check out our earlier post about Carbonmade.

Gmail focuses on email organization again with the latest addition to Gmail Labs: Smart Labels, a group of automated email filters that can help you deal with your email in an easier, more productive way.

We all get lots of emails everyday – not only personal messages, but all sorts of social network notifications, order confirmations, promotional emails, mailing lists and newsletters you don’t even remember signing up for. So unless you have a dozen email filters to tidy this mess up, your inbox is probably a huge amount of unsorted messages.

This is where Smart Labels come in handy. Once you enable them in Labs, Gmail will add three new labels (Bulk, Notifications and Forums) and start automatically filtering your inbox according to them. Bulk includes any kind of mass mailing, Notifications refers to messages sent directly to you (like messages from social networks) and Forums is applied to mailing lists.

If you’re already using filters in Gmail you may find Smart Labels a bit interfering, but they can play along your current organization system without much hassle – and be edited in Settings just like any other regular filter as well. And for those of you who are not using filters yet, Smart Labels is an excellent starting point. If you want to give them a try, just click the green beaker (or the blue gear) on top of your Gmail account.

The guys over at Mozilla have surely heard the news about Internet Explorer 9 launching next week, as they seem to be frantically ironing out any remaining bugs and putting the finishing touches to their latest browser, Firefox 4.

After a dozen beta versions, the first Release Candidate of Firefox 4 is finally available for download. This version is already considered to be stable and safe enough to use it for regular web browsing on a daily basis. Mind you, some add-ons may not work with this release yet, and the browser’s features and design could change before the final version comes out.

In any case, Firefox 4 RC gives you the perfect chance to test Mozilla’s latest installment of their popular browser before the final versions comes out. The sleeker interface design, the handy data syncing tool and the overhauled tabs and add-ons  managers are some of the new features you shouldn't miss. With almost all major bugs already solved, the RC just adds overall improvements to stability, compatibility and performance. Download your copy now and tells us what you think.