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For Android tablet owners, shopping the Google Play Store can sometimes be a pain, with tons of scaled-up phone apps hiding among the truly tablet-optimized. Sure, there’s always the curated Staff Picks for Tablets section, but that offers only a tiny taste of all the delicious HD goodness that’s really out there.
Enter Tablified Market–a curated market just for tablet-specific apps. The people behind it have a strict set of criteria that an app must meet in order to be included in the database, which to us means no more phone apps in search results. For one, an approved app must be distinguishable from its phone-specific counterpart (if it has one). This means it has to take full advantage of the larger screen somehow. Also, the Tablified gatekeepers are specifically on the lookout for apps that incorporate Android’s Action Bar and use the tablet-specific Fragments API.
Using Tablified is as intuitive as using any other market. It lets you search for apps based on keyword, browse by category, or sift through lists like Editor’s Choice and Recently Added. Each product page then brings you to a description, screenshots, and comments, along with a link that leads you directly to the download from the Google Play Store. So, Tablified itself is not an actual market. Rather, it merely acts as a filtered version of the market we already have.
One thing I find troublesome about Tablified is its laggy performance. Because the app basically pulls content from its Web site into its frames, load times can be annoyingly long, even with a strong data connection. It’s a small price to pay, though, for the service the app provides.
The basic version of Tablified Market is free, but there’s also a paid Pro version that kills the ads and offers a few other useful features. Most importantly, Pro offers advanced search functionality, including filtering by stars, price, most downloaded, and top rated. I found the upgrade to be totally worth the price.
Tablified Market (download: Free | Pro) is available now in the Google Play Store.
