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.

What happens when an industry gouges its customers for years, and then technology comes along that allows consumers to circumvent the gouger? Customers leave in droves is what happens, and it’s WhatsApp and its ilk that are enabling the exodus. If you’re unfamiliar with WhatsApp Messenger and its brethren, they’re text message alternatives that don’t rely on mobile-to-mobile SMS technology.

If there’s one app that has been synonymous with an innovative, high-quality Twitter experience in the Android environment, it’s Joaquim Verges’ paid Falcon Pro. One of the killer features in Falcon Pro is its ability to live-stream a Twitter timeline. With a 2-minute synchronize refresh rate, Falcon will live-stream your timeline in real-time when you’re using WiFi.

The fashion and beauty industry is fast-moving, and apps are a good way to keep track of developments, because app content lead time can be significantly shorter than for print magazines. This week’s All Things Appy takes a look at the must-have apps in this genre for the Android platform, including apps to buy the gear, track trends, and social network with like-minded fashionistas.

If you’ve used any of the free tracking apps — like Google’s My Tracks, which records your path, speed, distance and elevation change while you exercise and then maps the route, charts elevation and speed, and tots it all up in a set of statistics — you’ll understand the concept behind Runtastic Pro. Runtastic Pro additionally promises to help you reach goals and track health improvements.

Google has refreshed its music app. It’s a big deal, because Google has introduced custom radio and an a la carte music streaming service, All Access, for an introductory price that’s $2.00 cheaper than a la carte streaming leader Spotify. You can try the service free for 30 days, and if you start a trial by June 30, it will then cost $7.99 a month to continue.

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.

My first question to the desk clerk at a hotel in a strange country is no longer, “What time does the restaurant close?” It’s more often, “Where I can get a SIM card?” $2-a-minute voice and $10-a-megabyte Internet roaming in many parts of the world make acquiring a local card a must. I recently had a pleasant first morning in an Egyptian town center haggling for a data-only 3.75G SIM card.

With tablets possibly on track to overtake PCs within a few years, one might wonder just how that’s going to happen. Can tablets really perform as well as PCs in professional environments? I for one am still unpacking my laptop when it comes to power applications like imaging. Well, Adobe claims it now delivers its core Adobe Photoshop functionality in an app for Android tablets.