Gadgetory

if you're looking for an alternative to the ipad android tablets are a great choice the finding apps for an Android tablet can be hit or miss with any luck you'll get a gamer app that's clearly optimized for a large screen but there's an equally good chance that you'll end up with a stretched out app that was obviously designed for a smaller screen of a smartphone so how do you find the cool tablet-optimized apps here are a few tricks to help first stop open up the app for the Google Play Store and head over to apps in most cases Google will recognize that you're using a tablet and will show you an option here called staff picks for tablets it's a long list of apps and games and you're bound to find a few showcase apps worth downloading it's also worth noting that if you're searching the app store for something specific like say a photo editor including the word tablet in your search tends to narrow the results to something more useful another trick is to use the web based version of the Play Store which offers more advanced search and sort functionality the same search for a photo editor can be filtered by device compatibility and ordered by popularity and once you get to an app page you can look at the user reviews and find any that are specific to your tablet if that's still too much hassle you can download a separate front end for the Play Store that just shows you tablet-optimized apps one of the best ones out there I've seen is called tableau 5 HD you can browse new content or sort by category but everything you see has been hand-picked for how well it performs on a tablet the google play store still handles the purchase and the download this app just takes the sting out of finding great apps now if your tablet runs on an nvidia tegra processor that is a similar app out there called TegraZone that does a great job tracking all the latest tablet-optimized games it's a free app and there's a good chance that is already on your tablet you probably thought it was crap where but it's actually a great way to discover games again Google handles the actual purchase and download so you're still in their ecosystem those are my best tips for discovering great Android apps for your tablet for more tips like these visit how to cnet com I'm Donald Bell thanks for watching you