It is rare that an application is made with children as the primary target audience. However, Spy Parent LLC have made Bully Block, an application that helps your kids keep the not-so-nice kids at bay. Children are getting mobile phones at younger and younger ages, and since parents know they are at risk of getting dropped, cracked, sat on and so forth, they choose happy-medium phones where affordability meets functionality. Many small Android phones are being flung at kids when they ask their parents for a smartphone, because a cracked screen on a Desire HD or iPhone 4 is neither easy nor cheap to replace.
Bully Block offers something that older phones did offer, but a lot of modern smartphones seem to have missed out on: the ability to selectively block recipients from calling or texting you.
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You’re Android handset comes with a built-in camera application that is fine for taking the odd shot. I’m not sure whether this is specific to my HTC Sense phone, but my stock camera app has options to change photo saturation, brightness, and other variables. There’s also the option to add some very basic filters like sepia and negative. This is a nice set of features that my iPad 2 (and, presumably, an iPhone) doesn’t have and, especially if your phone has a nice five or eight megapixel shooter on it, can be helpful in taking some valuable shots you can look back on.
Cisco’s recent decision to kill off the Flip video camera family also demonstrates that smartphone cameras are becoming the tool of choice for most people’s photo and video capture needs, so these options are becoming increasingly important.
The quote, “the best camera is the one that’s with you”, is tossed around a lot and, although I can’t seem to find its origin, I certainly know it’s true. Everyday moments can be captured with relative ease and with quality to compete with most point-and-shoot cameras. However, these cameras are smart and not like their dumb-phone counterparts. (more…)
Live wallpapers are one of Android’s most unique and wonderful features. Available for anyone on Android 2.1 or above, they are one of the best ways to customise your Android experience. Today we will be going through some of the best live wallpapers for your Android device, so sit back and enjoy the ride. Where possible I have linked to the free/lite version; as always, if you love it, we encourage you to support the developers and buy the full version.
Be cautious, many of these live wallpapers can drain your battery.
For each wallpaper that had one, I’ve included the developer’s official video below the screenshots.
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Your ringtone is the most basic and common way of customising your phone to better suit you. I live in an apartment inside a bed and breakfast, so I’d like to set my tone to Madness’s classic track, Bed and Breakfast Man. I’ve already got the MP3, but how do I set it to play whenever someone calls me?
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As an aspiring journalist and writer you can rightly assume that the current situation in Libya, Syria and Yemen has me constantly checking my phone for updates. I’m also following top journalists who are in the thick of the action on Twitter.
I think news applications have started to get stale since their first incarnations on Android. Even Pulse isn’t exactly doing it for me anymore. Understandable I guess; I mean, the news doesn’t exactly excite the general population like other genres might. Yet it’s an important cornerstone in any country. Finding, sharing and critiquing as fast as possible is what 21st century journalism is all about.
I normally use several applications to get my news throughout the day (and night): Al Jazeera, BBC and Pulse, to name but a few. They all do a fine job at delivering it to me but when I discovered a different application that had so much more to offer they were quickly removed from my homescreen and relegated to the abyss that is the main menu, lost in a sea of other rejected applications I haven’t gotten around to purging yet.
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This week I visited the Gadget Show Live, a huge consumer electronics show in the UK, where a number of companies were showing off their Android tablets. The Xoom is very impressive, but as a self-proclaimed “Android guy” I was actually embarrassed by the other tablets that I saw.
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I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but lately there’s been a lot of focus on this “cloud” thing and how everyone is getting in on it. Whether you’re a student, businessman, or someone who works from home, you can find a reason to use an online storage service to put your files in “the cloud.”
Recently over at Web.Appstorm, I did write ups on both Amazon CloudPlayer and Amazon CloudDrive, stating that it’s great that CloudPlayer integrates with Android devices, but wishing CloudDrive would offer something similar to what Dropbox offers — a multi-platform app so that you can easily sync files. What occured to me while telling my students about CloudDrive was that there is no way to share files. Luckily, DroidCloud fills both of these voids.
Ever since I started getting interested in mobile technologies some five years ago, I have been looking enviously at pictures of desk stands and hoping I would find one that looked great, suited my needs, and wasn’t limited to one mobile device, given how often I’ve switched phones over the years.
Enter the Clingo Universal Podium. I spotted a picture of it a few months ago online and I knew it would be “it”: a surreal looking sturdy stand that fits any mobile device and would look perfectly cool with my HTC Desire Z. (more…)
We’ve featured a couple of articles helping your battery last longer: some general tips, and a post about SetCPU. Maintaining charge is a concern; listening to music, watching videos, playing games, surfing the web, and, er, making phone calls can all drain the battery pretty quickly, and that’s not even thinking about background tasks like automatically syncing your emails.
I usually charge my phone to full power right before I go to bed, and then give it another charge while I’m working during the day. How about you? Vote in the poll to let us know!
Not liking music is like not liking chocolate. Everyone will ask why and you’d make for an awful Oompa Loompa. If it wasn’t for music, taking the bus, exercising and studying would be a whole lot more mundane than they already are.
In fact, a wise old German dude named Berthold Auerbach once said that “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”.
Most of us listen to music on portable devices such as iPods, MP3 players, and for us Android lovers, our phones. The stock media player is a little bland, however so I decided to check out Meridian Player as an alternative.
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