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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When it comes to system tools and utilities, there is no dearth of options on the Android platform. You can get utilities to analyze, tweak, and mess with pretty much every part of your phone. And if you are adventurous enough to root your phone, the options grow further. The problem with all this choice, though, is that it’s pretty easy to fill up the phone with a ton of applications that each only serve a single purpose. ZDBox tries to solve that problem by clubbing the functions of several such applications into a single, streamlined package.
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Perhaps you’re wondering why there’s been no full review of Amazon Cloud Player on Android.AppStorm? It’s because we’re waiting to see whether Amazon is going to be allowed to continue. Last week, the streaming music app Grooveshark was kicked off the Android Market, and we’re wondering whether the same thing will happen to Cloud Player.
I recently spent a long weekend in France. Now, I haven’t taken a French lesson in ten years, and my exam results were hardly a tour de force, so I thought it best to grab an app that would give me a hand vis-à-vis communicating abroad.
Jacob Schweitzer’s recent roundup of translation apps was very helpful, but the problem with most of these (as with most such apps on the Android Market) is that they’re powered by Google Translate, and so require an Internet connection in order to function. Data roaming is pretty expensive in Europe, so I wanted something I could use offline.
Travel Interpreter, which has a database of phrases that can be downloaded to the SD card over WiFi, seems to be the crème de la crème of foreign language phrasebooks — but how does it measure up when trying to use it in the real world?
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Have you ever been sitting somewhere and fallen into one of those abstract productive trains of thought? Did you want a way to get these thoughts down quickly in a structured form rather than just fly back to reality and lose it all? There is an Android application that lets you do that.
Thinking Space is an innovative application which allows you to mind-map on the move and get your thoughts down quickly whilst still keeping them in a structured and organised layout. With extensive customization, and the ability to export your mindmaps, Thinking Space is hardly short of features.
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It’s that time again! Thanks for all the questions you’ve been sending in; it’s great to be able to help you out with your Android issues. Keep them coming 
This time we’re talking about Android vs. iPhone, tablet screen resolutions, separating your contacts into groups for work and friends, and how to turn off that blasted sound effect whenever you take a photo.
Read on for plenty of Android knowledge, and details on how to have your own questions answered.
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There’s a certain obscure enjoyment to be had from watching live video feeds – particularly amateur ones. Maybe it’s just me (I’m hoping it’s not, but it probably is), but spending ten minutes watching an eagle hop around in its nest or checking out the view from someone’s Manhattan apartment is, for some weird reason, fun.
I think it’s because you shouldn’t be able to see what’s going on in a random street thousands of miles away, but can. Of course you can also check out live vlogs, chat shows and amateur sporting events.
UStream are by far the largest provider of streaming services on the Internet. They also offer an Android application that I think would be of use to anyone who either loves live feeds or wants to broadcast a show of their own.
I had high expectations when downloading this application, I won’t lie. There’s a lot of places it could go wrong if you think about it. Poor quality video and having to spend ages for live feeds to buffer were my biggest fears. Slow response times and lack of incorporation with the main website were also potential fall-downs. Plus, given the fact that streaming live video from a mobile phone is a relatively cumbersome task, power and glitches could be a problem.
Thankfully, I was pleasantly surprised upon installing and opening UStream.
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Shift, a popular and acclaimed Flash game, has made its way to Android! Having been played by over 10 million people in its life as a Flash game, it’s sure to be a success on Android too! But how well suited to a mobile screen is it?
It’s is a well polished platform puzzle adventure game with a few added twists, mainly the one that lets you reverse your black / white world. To really understand this concept your best bet is to try the game! There is a free option on the Market which is limited to 15 levels, compared to over 40 in the full version. (more…)
