Setting up your Android smartphone: The sequel

Video players

MX Player

The MX Player has been unanimously rated as one the best video players on Android for quite a while now and there are good reasons for this. One of them is the built-in hardware acceleration which is very efficient due to a new hardware decoder. The MX Player also supports multi-core decoding, making it up to 70% more power-efficient on dual-core devices than on single-core chipsets.

MX Player

Additionally, there are features such as pinch-to-zoom, allowing you to zoom in on the video during playback. A wide range of subtitle file formats are supported; there's a subtitle scroll feature as well. Finally, there's a kids lock option for locking the controls so that kids can't make calls or fiddle with the phone.

Best of all, MX Player is free at the Android market with plenty of codecs available for those pesky files that wouldn't play at first.

Get MX Player (free) | Get MXPlayer Pro ($5.70)

Emit

If you don't want to necessarily play files on your Android device, but rather stream them from or to your PC, then the Emit player is definitely worth a look. You can use Emit to download videos to your Android smartphone or tablet for offline viewing. iTunes transfers are supported, as are multiple audio tracks. The player has support for various subtitle formats, as well as DVD covers.

Emit video player

To make it work, you have to install both the Android app and the corresponding desktop software for PC, Mac OS or Linux. The service works best over Wi-Fi, but if you have a fast data plan, it'll work as well, if not as reliably.

Get Emit (free) | Emit website

BS Player

Originating on the PC app scene, the BS Player is also available for Android smartphones and tablets, bringing all the core features users are looking for. Hardware decoding and acceleration, Android 4.2 support as well as support for a slew of media files and formats, and playback of files from shared network resources are just a number of the available features of the free, ad-supported version of BS Player.

BS Player

If you are not a fan of in-app ads, you can purchase the premium version of the player, which is expensive.

The user interface supports additional custom-made skins. With so many features on tap, the BS Player is a video player app that you should definitely have on your shortlist the next time you visit the Google Play Store.

Get BS Player (free) | Get BS Player Full ($6.50)

Archos Video Player

The Archos video player is among the premium offerings in the media category. The app has a very stylish user interface that puts the videos from your device and network on the main stage with their respective cover art.

Archos Video Player

Naturally, for the relatively high price for an app of this sort, Archos provides a slew of handful features. It can automatically retrieve movie as well as TV show posters and information, and also download subtitles off the web. The player is compatible with keyboards as well as remote controls when hooked up to a TV set.

One downside of the player is that it doesn't support as much video file formats as the competition, but it covers the basics with MKV, MP4, AVI files.

Get Archos Video Player (free) | Get Archos Video Player Pro ($4.99)

Music players

Now Playing

Built around Google Now's design etiquette, the Now Playing music player is a clean-looking, straight-to-the-point music player that packs a lot of punch whilst sporting a nice suite of features.

One of them is support for Last.fm and scrobbling, as well as fetching album and artist arts from there. Lyrics are fetched automatically with subtle scrolling animation and gesture navigation: swipe right to see the song queue, while a left swipe gets the lyrics for the currently playing song. Shuffle and repeat controls are brought up with a swipe from the bottom.

Now Playing music player

Sadly, the player doesn't feature a separate equalizer, but can use the phone's built in one. Additionally, the app doesn't have a free version, just a 5-day trial option, but that should be enough to give you an idea of its functionality.

Get (free) | Get Now Playing ($1.08)

Earbits

While Spotify, Pandora, Rdio and Google Music All Access are dominating the online music streaming, they're all paid options. If you want to experience the service without spending a dime, Earbits is a great place for a first dive. Granted, it doesn't yet offer the most famous artists out there, but it has a beautifully designed website, and the Android app isn't shabby at all either. You'll get the chance to explore not so mainstream artists and music in various genres, which can't be a bad thing.

Earbits

Best of all, the app is completely free, and it has features like favorites and search. The Earbit music library packs north of 100 thousand songs at the time of writing. Once installed on your Android device, the app will analyze the already uploaded music and recommend channels and artists based on it.

Check out the Play Link below to try Earbits out and find out the cool way the company has managed to stay off ads, sponsors and fees to keep its service alive.

Get Earbits (free)