Predict your return before filing your 2012 taxes with TaxCaster for Android. This app claims to accurately calculate your tax return based on your income and federal and state withholding. The only reason I can’t confirm this is that I haven’t filed yet, but several reviews on the Android Market claimed their TaxCaster return forecast was accurate. The app is easy to use, with fields to input your salary and federal and state withholding. Supplemental income from interest or dividends, and capital gains and losses can be recorded in another submission field, and TaxCaster will continuously update your return or owed amount as you input more information. I do think that Intuit Inc., the developer creating all the Android apps featuring Turbo Tax, could have allowed for integration so that the income information you input into the forecaster could transfer to a form you could use to file with Turbo Tax online, but as a forecaster, this app works nicely.   Less

Check movie listings, manage your Netflix queue, read new release DVD reviews and more with Movies by Flixster. This all-in-one app accesses movie database Rotten Tomatoes and its reviews and recommendations. Another great feature is that Flixster lets you manage your Netflix DVD queue, which is really useful when you find a newly-released movie in the app. You can also create a page to save movies you’d like to see, review movies, and share recommendations and ratings with Facebook friends. Flixster also syncs with Yelp, so after you pick a movie theater, you can search for local restaurants and plan your entire evening out.   Less

Keep your apps and other content on lockdown, with APP Lock for Android. This app lets you password-protect any app from your Android Market, your text message history and lets you require a password to be input in order to answer incoming calls. This app is really easy to use, and besides listing all the applications you can lock there is even a search bar for you to input a keyword. You can set your own four-digit PIN, and in case you ever forget it, you can access it by correctly answering a security question that you wrote yourself.   Less

Take enhanced photos with Lomo Camera, a photo utility for Android. You can’t use this app to alter pictures you’ve already taken, but you can take pictures with special effects like “Film” (your picture will appear with a filmstrip border),” Dream” (blurred edges), and “Rusty” (for your sepia-toned, vintage photo creations). There are six effects in all. The result is usually very nice-looking, and makes mundane things (like this desk phone I look at every day) look interesting. After you’ve taken your picture, it’s easy to share the image on Facebook and Picasa, or to send it via email or SMS. The app could use a few improvements. For one, there is no “home” or menu option, so in order to return to the theme selection page you have to hit the back button on your device, and there is also no way to silence the incredibly loud shutter click.   Less

Are you an introvert? Creative? Find out what kind of personality you have with Personality Test for Android. Choose your favorite image from a page of nine pictures, and let the app tell you your innermost secrets.   Less

Pulse News for Android is an Editor’s Pick on the Android Market this week, and there are lots of reasons why. Pulse aggregates posts from your favorite blog and news sites, then organizes them into a customizable feed. Pulse lets you select content from a variety of sources including The Atlantic, Gawker Media publications, Associated Press niche content, and more, then consolidates the latest stories into your home page feed, complete with thumbnail images. Maybe because so much of my favorite media are represented in this app, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Organizing your feed is really easy, as Pulse News is extremely customizable and intuitive. You can even adjust your font size without having to pinch and zoom, and going back to your home page is as easy as tapping the app’s icon. Pulse also makes it easy to share content with your friends via email or social media. If compelled, the only criticism I’d make is that I’m more used to scrolling to new content vertically, and the Pulse feed appears as a horizontal timeline. Otherwise, the only downside to this app is the amount of time it can sap from your day!   Less

Wattpad for Android has been getting a lot of attention lately as Android users flock to its libraries to download e-reading content. This app boasts over 100,000 downloadable titles, from recent fiction to non-fiction to classics. You can search by keyword or category, then select what titles to download from the filtered results. Unfortunately, the majority of content available in this app is awful. “Colonial romances,” “werewolf” fiction, and stories about cyborgs may be the newest literary trends, but when so much of the content is peppered with syntactical or grammar or spelling errors as to make it unreadable, I take serious issue. Writing is a serious business, after all! But if you are not particular about the content (or you limit yourself to the “Classics” category which I admit contains the incomparable Andrew Lang’s Arabian Nights), Wattpad provides an almost-endless supply of light, vapid reading. Beware that because of this app’s prodigious library, selecting categories, searching for keywords and even opening the application can take a long time to load, and books that have not been split into multiple downloads are often difficult to scroll through.   Less

Track all your workouts with Endomondo Sports Tracker. This app tracks the duration of your workout, plus how many calories it thinks you burned. You can choose from a variety of activities besides running, including like rowing, kayaking, weight-lifting, or swimming (although that seems like a terrible idea to me). It can even track calories burned by golfing. You can either have the app record your exercise in real time, using your GPS coordinates to track your distance, or you can manually input your results after your workout (in which case, swim away). Unlike other activity-tracking apps, Endomondo accesses your phone’s music library, so you can listen to songs while you view your workout results.   Less

PhotoWall Live Wallpaper by Android pulls photos from your phone’s gallery or camera, or your Facebook or Picasa accounts, then randomly generates them to display as live wallpaper on your home screen. Though you can customize how you want your pictures to display (grid pattern vs. puzzle layout), the pre-loaded “Polaroid” layout is the only free option. My friends- and family-heavy photo albums make for an extremely cluttered background, though, and the only way to select which photos you’d like displayed is to dedicate an image folder for wallpaper images, and select that alone to display.   Less

Slice It! for Android is a fun tool to help kids (and adults!) understand fractions, and improve their spatial reasoning. This game presents the player with an object, and a directive to slice that object into a certain amount of pieces, using a limited amount of strokes. Like Angry Birds, players can earn up to 5 points after making their “slice,” then move on to advance to the next level. Once the player slices a shape into however many pieces the app requests, a results page will generate, showing the player the fraction of area his sliced pieces contain.   Less

Send customized greetings to your loved ones this Valentine’s Day, with Sincerely Ink Cards app for Android. With this app, you can create your own customized greeting cards- complete with Valentine’s Day themes- and Sincerely Inc will print and send them to your recipients. This app makes it easy to import your own images and create your cards, or you can search through its library of themes..   Less

Android supports many browsers, available free on the Android Market. This week, I downloaded Boat Browser Mini, a typical browser app that works a lot like the one preloaded onto all Android phone. This app is unique in some respects. For instance, unlike Dolphin Mini Browser, Boat does not let you open new pages in a tab view. You have to open new windows, when you open a link in a new window, you’re redirected to that page. There are options at the bottom of your browser window that let you view a list of your favorite pages, see all your windows, or go back or forward in your session. Adding bookmarks is slightly different with Boat Browser, but the interface is still pretty intuitive. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough differences between this browser and the one already pre-loaded on my phone, and since Google Chrome is only available in beta for devices running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, I’ll probably end up downloaded Dolphin Mini Browser again.   Less

Browse the web differently with Google Goggles for Android. This app lets you photograph a product, then uses Google’s image search filter to find similar web results. Besides scanning your snapshots, Google Goggles can find image matches of any pictures from your library, or scan item barcodes. Google Goggles has an easier time identifying branded products, I discovered out while photographing my lunch, and as it will tell you itself in a guided introductory tour. If Google Goggles is unable to locate a logo or text (Google Goggles likes text) in your image, Google Goggles will find images with the same coloring or motif.   Less

Line Runner is a fun, fast, and very difficult game that used to be popular with iPhone users, and is now available on Android. Right tap to jump and left tap to roll through a complicated obstacle course, as fast as you can. While I suspect memory and my operating system are partly to blame, running the program caused problems with my swipe to unlock my home screen.    Less

SketchBook Express and its paid, enhanced counterpart, SketchBook Mobile, by Autodesk, are surprisingly sophisticated sketch composition apps for Android. Express, the free version, gives you a variety of virtual brushes and pencils to sketch with, with a full color-wheel and none of the clunkiness you expect with touchscreen sketch books. Using this app will make you wish you had a bigger screen, and if you’re like me, some more artistic talent.   Less

Turn your Android phone into a walkie talkie, and send instant messages to your friends, without using your voice minutes. Voxer Walkie Talkie sends messages over a data connection so you can save your minutes for mobile to landline calls. If you and your contact are both signed into Voxer, you can communicate via the “walkie talkie” feature, the standard feature that lets you listen while your partner talks and vice versa. Voxer keeps a detailed recorded history of any messages (live or saved), but it’s easy to clear your history completely. When demoing the app, I noticed that occasionally, it would alert me of a new message even when there wasn’t one. Killing the app from my task manager did keep it from alerting me of old or non-existent messages all night, but once the app is closed, you can only be alerted that someone has left you a message. Voxer also makes it really easy to take and send pictures or other documents over a data connection.   Less

This browser has almost too many features to mention, in addition to the usual functions you’d expect from a mobile browser. Skyfire offers users unique Facebook and other social media dashboard functions, and completely supports Flash. One neat feature is that the app won’t load videos on your web page unless you prompt it to. This means that your pages load faster (and you don’t get that annoying screen jump when the video loads long after you’ve started reading the text), but the downside is you have to prompt it to display video in order to know whether there is one there. The home page is pretty busy, and since it’s a free, upgradable browser, there are a lot of ads. I prefer the cleaner layout of Dolphin Mini Browser and even Opera, though it’s very easy to bookmark pages on Skyfire, and the browser has the most social media shortcuts of any mobile browser I’ve ever used. After I downloaded Skyfire this week, it crashed almost immediately after its first open, but made a good recovery.   Less

One should never shoot the messenger of bad tidings, and so I’ll try to do this app credit in spite of its prediction of two days of blizzards instead of the balmy, spring weather I was hoping for. WeatherBug for Android provides you with detailed, up-to-the-minute weather information for your area (this app utilizes GPS) or areas you have added to your profile. You can either view this information from within the app, or add the widget to your home screen. You can view a calendar weather overview, daily briefs or in-depth forecasts, and hourly predictions. Information refreshes once you reopen the app, and once you’re inside, you can manually refresh, too. The layout of this app, because of the sheer volume of information it provides, is naturally content-heavy, but with a very intuitive interface (click for details, scroll up and down). The only difficulty I had with it was adding a new city to track; it took five attempts before WeatherBug would add Denver, Colo. to my list of locations.   Less

I downloaded this app thinking that you could listen to the radio with it. However, it turns out this app appeals less to music lovers, and more to those of us who like to keep a close eye (or ear) on our neighbors. Radio Scanner picks up a range of police and emergency scanners in your hometown and nationally. You can search by popular feeds, or location. Today must be a slow day in Fort Morgan (thank goodness) because all I got an earful of was dead air, before an officer reported a 1542 or something like that. This app also tells you how many other people are listening to the scanner, which, at the moment, are 16 besides me. The app does have a tendency to cut in and out regardless of your data connection or wireless Internet speeds, disappointingly, since I totally missed just what the guy with Oklahoma plates was taken into custody for.   Less

This challenging, timed word game was popularized by iOS’s Word Warp. Word Mix Lite is a free Android app that provides players with a series of letters to unscramble. Unlike most word scramble games, there are multiple solutions you can find by inputting three-letter or larger words into your solution field. Each correct word you find generates into a solution field, with blank spaces for all the words you have yet to make. This version is supported by ads, though a paid version is also available.   Less