Posts Tagged
streaming
Last week we gave you some advice on how to keep your data, email, contacts and calendar perfectly synced between your Android phone or tablet and an iOS device. Although these are essential elements to synchronize between your devices, replicating media from your iPad or iPhone to your Android device — and vice-versa — can also prove very useful.
Indeed, whether you run out of battery, lose your phone or prefer to use a larger screen, you shouldn’t have to worry about manually transferring your content to every single device you have. To make this chore seamless and transparent for you, we’ve selected a handful of apps and tools that will automate the process.
We recently selected 46 great applications to synchronize content seamlessly between your Android device and your computer so you can enjoy the same content on the go and on your computer without having to worry about manually transferring data.
Today, we’d like to push things a little further and make Android interact directly with your computer. We’ve handpicked a bunch of apps to remotely control or access your computer from your phone, stream content from your computer directly to your tablet or phone, and even use your Android device as an extra monitor.
With the rise of the Internet, most people have turned to online music solutions, causing many radio stations to lose a significant amount of their audience. In addition to downloading songs on iTunes, on-demand streaming services, such as Spotify, Deezer and Grooveshark, have grown very popular by letting you listen to virtually any track on your mobile phone, provided you pay a monthly subscription.
While these services are very convenient, radios are essentially different in the sense that they play a specific genre without allowing you to make your own playlist. Pandora has tried to recapture this analogue radio concept of letting you pick the genre but not the songs, as it automatically generates playlists based on an artist, genre or composer you select. Songza takes the concept even further: instead of asking you to pick a genre or an artist first, it analyzes context and suggests playlists accordingly.
As you know, I’m a pretty big fan of movies! Earlier this year I reviewed Movie Mate Pro, an app for tracking theatrical releases. There is another side to the coin though; what about movies out of theaters that are released for purchase or streaming? With the amount of different online options out there, it can get tough to keep track of them all. That’s where eTrizzle comes in.
One of the things I was most excited/curious about when I got my Nexus 7 was multimedia. How would the experience be for watching videos and using it for various media functions? My friend assured me that it was fantastic, but to be honest I was a little skeptical because a 7″ screen seemed a little small. Boy was I wrong! Watching videos and reading look great on it and it’s comfortable to hold in one hand to boot.
In honor of that, here are ten multimedia apps I’ve enjoyed using on my Nexus 7.
The Android Market is booming. Amazon’s own Android Appstore is giving away a free paid app every day. AT&T has reversed their position on installing apps from unknown sources. Apps like PicPlz and Socialcam make it easy to create and share video with your friends. The bottom line is, there is just not enough space on your average Android device to keep up. Never fear, the cloud is here! Rather than upgrading your storage, here are a few apps and services that you can use right now to help you offload your data to the cloud and extend your device’s capabilities.
Android media has come a long way in recent times, with more and more media apps being released for the platform. Just take a look at the sheer volume of alternative music apps that have been released for the platform, such as doubleTwist and Instinctiv. This demonstrates that the demand is there and people want new and intuitive ways to play their media on their Android device.
Now, however, the spotlight is on Plex. Think of it as AirPlay for Android. Plex is what every Android user has been dreaming about – a way to stream your music, videos and much more either over your local WiFi connection or, if you’re willing to play about with port forwarding, over any 3G connection. There are similar apps that offer this functionality with regards to music (such as doubleTwist, which does it better) but Plex allows you to stream all your media, no matter what it is.
Is Plex a solution for all our media needs? Read on to find out. (more…)
I love Netflix. I think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread (even better than sliced bread!). One thing that Android users have been longing for is a way to stream Netflix on their device — especially since the advent of Android tablets. This is also something that iOS users I know like to hold over my head when rattling off the list of reasons iOS is “superior” to Android…until now. Last week Netflix started rolling out their official streaming app to select Android devices.
Some of us like to buy their music and have it stored for an eternity. Or at least, that was the behavior common when mobile Internet wasn’t popular amongst the population. With the rise in smartphones and 3G data plans, Spotify is one service that offers a native app for the world’s most popular smartphone platform.
Back in 2009, the popular-in-Europe streaming music service launched their own, native application for their premium customers. The app works with Spotify’s online streaming service but also has an offline mode to listen to songs offline. (more…)
Apple, one of Google’s main rivals in the mobile (operating system) industry, is also the operator of the number one digital music store in the US. However, recent reports suggest Google may be planning its own attempt at breaking the market and reclaiming some share from the Cupertino crew. An alleged Gingerbread screenshot shows the ability to sync music with an Android handset, but the real question is whether it will be a success like Android itself, or a failure due to a lack of mainstream user adoption as was Wave.
