Android now has voice search with the latest update. While trying to search for "couchdb", it detected the following:

• tennis tv
• change db
• philips dvd

It worked well for non-technical terms, however.

These are some of my favorite Android applications that I actually use on a day to day basis. Some of them are useful, most of them are not, per se. I suppose social engagement can be useful.

Favorites

Besides all of the built in apps, here's my list in the order memory serves me:

• Greed: An awesome Google Reader application.
• The Schwarts Unleashed: It's exactly like the iPhone Lightsaber application, so I can duel all of my friends with G1s or iPhone/iTouches! A bonus feature of this app is walking around with the phone in your pocket while making Lightsaber swooshing sounds as you move (a hip thrust should trigger the "clash" sound effect.)
• The Weather Channel: I used to only have a vague idea of what the weather would be like in moments beyond the present. Not any more.
• ToogleWifi, ToggleGPS, FastBright, etc: I hate menus.
• DroidSans Tweak Lite: Enables cool, aesthetically pleasing transitions when opening, closings, moving between screens and applications. It also lets you enable a compus while in Google Maps. Not terribly useful, but gives you a slight warm fuzzy feeling when using the interface.
• Hypnotic Spiral: I've found that showing off apps is half the appeal of these phones.
• Mario Simulator: Shooting off a fireball in a quite room is always fun. Who doesn't recognize that sound effect? No one, that's who.
• Screen Crack: I'm not sure this should be on this list, but, it makes your screen look like it's busted!
• Magic 8-Ball: "Does so and so FAIL at life?" "Signs point to yes"
• Scrobble Droid: I generally don't like applications that sit around in the background, wasting my precious battery life, but I have to scrobble my tunes. This one doesn't sit too long anyway.

A somewhat immature list, yes. The iFart phenomena is revealed. Like I said, these phones exists, for most people, to entertain.

Still awesome, but used less

• Web Server: Starts a server on your phone and lets people browse your photos. The possibilities of this one make me love it.
• RemoteDroid: I wish I encountered more use cases for this, because it works flawlessly. Though it would be cool to use the phone as a tablet interface to your PC...
• ConnectBot: Awesome SSH client. I thought I would use it more than I have, but maybe it's a good thing that I haven't had to.
• Movie Finder: If I went out to see movies frequently, this would be really useful.

(Nods) Do your thing.

I have to give a shout out to these special ones:

• Mosembro: Adds functionality to the browser by utilizing Microformats. Works very well.
• Mono: What the heck?! Mono lets you run C# on your phone?? Sick!

Necessary Evil

• FBook: Basically a wrapper for the Facebook iPhone site, but lets you upload photos. That's what I use it for. It constantly interrupts your session if you're using Facebook on another computer.

There are some other good applications, of course, that I haven't had time to play with yet. I've listed no real games either, for that matter. But the Android Market is thriving from what I can see.

Mobile Webkit recognizes some useful CSS media queries, which I'm using to include a special mobile stylesheet on my page:

<link href="/style/mobile.css" rel="stylesheet" media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" type="text/css" />

The key here being the media attribute value of only screen and (max-device-width: 480px). The mobile stylesheet contains just a few rules to make things more readable and space efficient for small screens, like reduced padding, etc.

The Android SDK contains an Android emulator which I use to test the page in a browser (Safari should look about identical to Android's browser.)

The media queries work well for including tweaks, but if you're hiding a bunch of extra content for mobile, you'd be better off serving a special mobile version of the page without the extra content to save bandwidth.