X Construction (Android)

A very diverting game for engineer types.  Good for burning a few hours at least.  There are 15 levels.  Full version was free for a day on Amazon.

Soundhound Infinity

Was free on Amazon Appstore.  Identifies music usually within 10 secs.

Weather Bug Elite

Was free on Amazon Appstore for a day.  Easily readable multiday and current weather conditions.  Only works when connected.  Cannot see previously downloaded forecasts without data connection.

Bloomberg App on Android

This app was very highly rated in Market.  It’s might be most useful for people who are fairly active investors, but even if you’re not, the Bloomberg news reporting is quite good.  I noticed it is one of the few ‘information’ apps which works reasonably well off-line (without data connection or wifi).  The trade-off offline is that it will try to poll for data and freeze momentarily [may depend on the speed of your phone] and then eventually revert to using its cached version.  It’s a good idea to start up the app while connected to wifi and you can read in free moments later on.  [A side benefit of offline reading is that ads do not show up.  Shhh, don't tell the app writers. (I'm sure they'll figure out a way to put them back up even when offline.)]

3/16/2011 follow up:  I found out that the app starts to slow down over time.  I think it may be because of some particularly inefficient data structure holding the indices to cached articles.  But there is a simple solution.  Go to settings: applications: clear data.  This wipes settings including news selections and stock tickers (stock quotes are not particularly good however with this app, so I wouldn’t bother entering them; use Google Finance instead).  But it drastically improves responsiveness of the app.  I think it maybe a good idea to do this monthly or even weekly.

6/24/2011: It seems that if you have no data plan, it’s important to go into the settings to turn off data.  You’ll still be able to use wifi to supply your data.  If you don’t do this, then the Bloomberg app hangs waiting for data which never comes — because obviously you have no data plan.