If you find yourself bashing away on your Android device and maxing it to the hilt with numerous background-running apps, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered freezes and slowdowns. As PC makers can attest, we’re using our Android and other newer devices as laptop substitutes these days, and thrashing phones and tablets in the process. However, there are tools to help manage the maxing-out.

Since time immemorial, the Windows computer has been subject to RAM issues — in particular, the issue that there’s generally never enough. RAM is the fast-accessible headspace, or breathing room, in a personal computer that’s used by programs to do their thing, as opposed to hard drive storage that’s usually used for slower, mechanical file storage.

If you’ve ever hesitated when giving out your phone number to someone, Burner may be for you. The app provides disposable, short-term phone numbers that you can use if you feel the need for some number privacy and don’t want your real number known. Use the temporary number, or “burner,” for as long as necessary and then “burn” it when you’re done to eliminate excessive interruptions in your life.

Here’s an app that re-invents the TV guide — and yet is about as far from the newspaper TV listings of old as you can get. Boxfish, available at no charge in the Google Play store, shows what’s trending on TV by indexing every spoken word on TV — live. The idea behind the app is that you should be able to find out what’s happening on television live and then choose what to watch.

I often run into issues playing video media on mobile devices. It’s haunted me since the days of Windows Mobile on the Palm Treo — remember those early smartphones? Believe it or not, it’s still an issue years later with current tablets and smartphones. The problems that I’ve encountered have generally manifested themselves as either the file not playing or audio and video being out of sync.

With the unexpected news that Google’s RSS feed reader, Google Reader, is being put out to pasture, many users are scrambling to find new tools for news consumption. There are still plenty of excellent free news apps out there, and here’s a look at the top five available for the Android platform. Google Currents is a pretty, magazine-like aggregator with a true offline solution that works well in airplane mode.

The early-90s Windows 3.11 operating system offered a graphical user interface that was a breakthrough for me. It was, in fact, my first GUI. I’d been using command-line, error-prone MS-DOS for two or three years before that, and it was a delight to suddenly be able to maximize screens, switch programs, and point around with a mouse, after living with the syntactically regimented MS-DOS.

Distinction’s Cocktail Flow features a cabinet system that lets you inventory your bar and then proposes cocktail recipes based on what you’ve got. This is functionality that really shows off the power of app over website or book. Shopping suggestions for augmenting your bar, along with a budget guesstimate, tell you how many new types of cocktails you’re going to be able to make and at what cost.

Gregstoll’s FlightPredictor app takes FlightCaster.com’s powerful flight prediction data and wraps it into a mobile app, in this case, for Android — and what a great job Gregstoll, FlightCaster and its data supplier FlightStats have done. FlightPredictor for Android uses historical flight data going back 10 years, along with real-time conditions.

Some of the best apps available take existing mobile phone functionality to the next level, and all of our Top 5 featured here are outstanding examples. Our No. 1 choice is WhatsApp Messenger. The attaching of multimedia to messaging alone is a good enough reason to get this app. However, you can also chat and group chat as much as you want globally without paying SMS fees.