LG WP7 Apps Available To All! [Who Can Sideload]

You may remember the jealousy I expressed at the quality LG apps that were exclusive to LG, partially because I thought some of the apps were so advanced that Microsoft should have taken the initiative to bundle them with the OS.  What a difference a day (and Tom Hounsell) makes. Most of the apps are now available to sideload regardless of manufacturer except for Panorama Shot (no biggie as Samsung gained this ability with Photo Studio) and PlayTo (which is the DLNA app but requires custom drivers). But we did get Look n Type, Photo Stylist, ScanSearch, Voice to Text and Toolbox.

Getting to them again, Look n Type is the app that lets you see your camera as the background as you type emails or texts so you can at least stand a chance at not falling into a fountain while texting. It works fine without bugs (see the picture below looking at my monitor through the camera).

Photo Stylist is a photo editing app. It’s neat enough, but a little slow. I’ll stick with Pictures Lab but Photo Stylist does work. Toolbox is a…toolbox for your phone. I didn’t even load it but it’s reported as working fun, just a little slow. And then there’s ScanSearch which is the augmented reality app. It mostly sort of works. Well this is the one that tells you places in your area based on location. It works but always thinks you’re pointing east. Also, the search results I found pretty poor. But on top of that you can scan items and get results – this includes book covers, music albums, movie posters and barcodes. They all seemed to work except barcodes failed for me since it failed to zoom/focus properly, and if the flash were triggered that bad boy just stayed on until you killed the app. Still it does work for some items and it’s neat to have. You can see the book cover results in the image at the end.

And then there was Voice to Text. Speak it, to the cloud and it was written. It works 100%. I wish they’d get rid of the splash screen and get the load time quicker but it works as it’s supposed to. Yeah – cool.

OK so to get these, they are all here on XDA except for Voice to Text which is here. I’ve loaded these on my Samsung Focus and yes, you need to be able to sideload to enjoy these.

e.