If you love movies, TV, music, beer or international travel, the apps in this week’s Awesome Apps roundup will knock your socks off. If you happen to love all those things … well, first off, congratulations on being a person of many and varied interests.
Secondly, you’d better get downloading so you don’t spend another precious moment without these apps.
Best apps for movie/TV trivia, eSIMs, U.K. music and craft beer
Here’s what’s on the docket today in Awesome Apps of the Week:
- Callsheet — movie and TV trivia done right
- Numero eSIM — secure phone lines and data plans anywhere in the world
- Untappd — find great beer and venues that serve it
- BBC Sounds — stay on top of the vital U.K. music scene
Callsheet
Screenshots: Callsheet
Recently launched iOS app Callsheet is the absolute best way to look up TV and movie trivia. Unlike IMDb, it’s not plastered with ads. Unlike Wikipedia, it makes it easy to find the actor you’re looking for and what else they’ve starred in. It can even block you from inadvertently reading spoilers!
If you’re a movie and/or TV fan, Callsheet will quickly become a must-have app. It’s free to try and pretty cheap to buy. (You can read Cult of Mac’s interview with Callsheet developer Casey Liss for more on the app and its origins.) — D. Griffin Jones
Download from: App Store
Numero eSIM
Screenshots: Numero eSIM
Sponsored: eSIMs make adding a second line to your smartphone a snap. Whether for business, international travel, social media registrations or other reasons, the Numero eSIM app is your gateway to finding the exact type of phone line or data service you need.
Just download the free app, and you can snag a real phone number without fumbling around switching out physical SIM cards. (Numero even lets you collect coins to earn a free virtual U.S. phone number.)
Numero eSIM also works as a calling app, providing calls and SMS services worldwide at discounted prices. (Oftentimes, you can make international calls at local rates.) Plus, jet-setters will love the fact that you can find a data plan for a foreign country you plan to visit, and get everything squared away before you ever set foot on the plane.
Download from: App Store or Google Play
Untappd
Screenshots: Untappd
If you love craft beer, you need to tap into Untappd ASAP. This free app (tagline: “Drink socially”) lets you find and rate specific beers, breweries and tap rooms. Using it to keep track of what beers you’ve tried, and what you thought of them, comes in handy in a world awash in microbrews with weird names and even weirder taste profiles. And, like a sort of Yelp for beer, the Untappd ratings can help other imbibers decide what to drink next and what to skip because it’s not in their wheelhouse.
But Untappd really shines when it comes to keeping you up to speed on the latest kegs hitting your local watering holes. You can subscribe to your favorite venues, and when they add a new and potentially exciting brew to their rotation, you’ll be the first to know. In a city like San Francisco, with multiple tap rooms with rotating lineups, Untappd is your ticket to beer-drinking paradise. — Lewis Wallace
Download from: App Store or Google Play
BBC Sounds
Screenshots: BBC Sounds
The U.K. is a gloomy dump, but it does have one thing going for it: a national music culture that is missing in the United States. Perhaps the only good thing about growing up there in the 1970s is that it made me a lifelong music nut. And now that I live in America, the best way to keep in touch with my homeland’s rich music culture is via the fantastic BBC Sounds app.
This free audio player offers access to a ton of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s content, including live radio, podcasts, music mixes and more. I tune in almost every day to hear music mixes from late-night radio dance shows, like the Essential Mix, Annie Nightingale Presents…, Pete Tong’s Hot Mix and Radio 1’s Drum & Bass Show, among others.
The app is very well-designed and laid out. The Home tab offers live access to the BBC’s numerous national and regional radio stations. A Stations & Schedules button brings up a scrolling menu with all the shows for each station going back a month. It’s a ton of content.
The Music tab brings up music mixes, which range from live festival sets to chill classical. The Podcast section is self-explanatory, and My Sounds collects all the shows you’ve subscribed to, which are refreshed daily, weekly or otherwise depending on the schedule.
You can fast-forward or rewind any show, even if you start listening to a live stream midway through. There are handy buttons for skipping 20 seconds backward or forward, which is great for skipping the idiotic DJ banter. And there’s a great Apple Watch app to control playback from your wrist. You can even download some shows and podcasts for offline listening.
I recommend it highly, and it’s all totally free. If you like radio, you’ll love BBC Sounds. — Leander Kahney
Download from: App Store or Google Play
