Tag Archives: Android
Best place to buy Android Smartphones?
Hi everyone! I’m making this blog post since time and time again I keep getting asked the same question. Where do I go for my Android phones?
Having been a owner of two Android phones, a HTC Desire and a Sony Xperia Play, I always look for one of the cheapest place to buy the smartphones. I’ve always recommended going to the network provider themselves for the simplest process. For me, I find O2 the best Network provider for the UK having tested several others in the past few years, since around my area, mobile signal isn’t great at all. Mainly because they not only offer the best deals for Android (Pay-As-You-Go or Tariff) devices.
You can find the O2 Webstore here. It will guide you through the Android platform and also show you some of the best Android devices around today!
For example, they were selling White Sony Xperia Plays a couple of months ago for just £149.99! Obviously they got snapped up quick so you have to keep your eyes peeled and act fast!
I hope this article helps several readers who are looking to make the leap into the Smartphone world or who are looking for an upgrade from another phone.
A comparison of Android Launchers
There are quite a few popular launchers for your Android phone to breathe a bit of freshness into it, they all have different features it’s all about finding the best one that suites you! All of these can be downloaded from the Android Market and some also have the .apk available for those who don’t have a Market enabled Android device. The list below is a few that I have picked out that I personally think are worth checking out, so lets get started!
Launcher Pro
I’m currently using Launcher Pro myself and absolutely love messing around with all the features such as the 3D Drawer, Home Screen transition animations, define how many home screens/docks you want, which is a great option to include is it means you can make some really minimalistic interfaces just like mine:
Currently using the “wp clock light” live wallpaper on a single home screen and a single dock with just one button to open the applications menu. I have made it so that Launcher Pro can hide the status bar at the top but can reveal it by pressing the home button on my HTC Desire. Launcher Pro is free but you can pay for Launcher Pro Plus which will come with even more features and special widgets!
Download Launcher Pro from Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.fede.launcher
OR
Download the APK: http://www.launcherpro.com/
Zeam Launcher
Zeam launcher is designed to be lightweight on your Devices resources, this is great for the more cheaper, lower spec phones since it should make browsing through the phone a bit more snappier! Customizing the launcher is slightly more fiddly than say Launcher Pro (Trying to customize the dock, for example) but defiantly a must-have launcher if you want one that is light on your device’s hardware.
Download Zeam Launcher from Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=org.zeam
ADW.Launcher
ADW.Launcher is very similar to Launcher Pro, although it does feature a few different compared to Launcher Pro, such as Horizontal scrolling in the Applications menu which is great for Tablets since it means you don’t have to keep sliding your finger all the way across the display. 
The Launcher has got a fairly big community behind it which release all sorts of themes for the launcher since ADW.Launcher has theme support.
Download ADW.Launcher from the Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=org.adw.launcher
Go Launcher EX
Go Launcher EX is another launcher that is worth checking out, the reason why I like this launcher so much is it’s built in “Task Killer” so it means you don’t have to download any additional task killers. You can access the built in Task Killer by opening up the applications menu and clicking the third button on the top of the menu.
Download Go Launcher EX from the Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.gau.go.launcherex
OR
Download the APK: http://www.goforandroid.com/
Slidescreen
Slidescreen has got a very different interface compared to all the other Launchers, the layout means that you can access your Facebook stream, Twitter Feed, Missed calls, messages, emails and much more all from one home screen!
On the top half of the launcher you can quickly view any Missed calls, Messages, Emails and the Calendar. If don’t have any new missed calls, but have a lot of emails it can hide the missed calls tab to save space. On the Bottom half of the launcher you can have the following services: Google Reader, Stocks, Twitter and Facebook. Any of these services which are on the Top and Bottom of Slidescreen can be turned off if you don’t use them in the Settings menu, just press the menu button (Home Settings > Services).
There is a free version but it has advertisements on the bottom of the interface, though the full version is quite pricey since it’s $6.99 USD (around £4.23) for no other features other than there is no advertisements.
Download Slidescreen from Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.larvalabs.slidescreen
So there are 5 of the most popular Android Launchers to try out for yourself, if you have another suggestion of an Android Launcher that you enjoy using and think others should give it a try, suggest it in the comment box below!
Android Netbook & Tablet Wallpapers
Want some free Android wallpapers? Something Simple? Something clean? Something Android? Well I have got 3 free android themed wallpapers for you to use on your Netbooks or Tablets who have a resolution of 1024×600. Take a look:
This first one is for all you lucky Honeycomb users out there.
Don’t have honeycomb? Have these standard Android wallpaper.
Look Android AND Skateboarding? How about this for you?
If you do need them in a different resolution I am more than happy to make one to your required resolution, just specify which wallpaper you want and what resolution you want it at! Also, if you have made some awesome wallpapers and would like to share them with the rest of the world, I am more than happy to display them on my blog with a blog post each month dedicated to wallpapers providing you’ve made it and the resources you’ve used are free to use!
Viewpad 10 Review
The Viewpad 10 is a Android 1.6/Windows 7 Tablet by the company Viewsonic. I recently received one of these as a Christmas Present, if I had to describe it in one word it would have to be fantastic!
Image taken from: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/i/z5/rv/2010/12/viewpad_10_i1.jpg
It features a Dual Threaded Atom Processor (N445) clocked at 1.66GHz, 1GB of DDR3 RAM, a Intel GMA 3150 Chipset and a 16GB SSD and has about 5 hours of Battery life in Windows 7. So the hardware in the Viewpad 10 is pretty common to what you find in modern Netbooks. To put the specs into context for you Windows 7 Users it scores a decent 2.3 in the Experience Rating test (The processor has the lowest score) but 2.3 isn’t a bad score considering it has the same hardware as a modern netbook.
Looking at the top of the Viewpad 10 it has a reset button and a SIM Card slot, it also has a vent between the two. Looking down the left hand side is the AC Adapter socket, a MicroSD card (Supports up to 32GB, I think) and a Mini HDMI port for plugging the device into external monitors. The Viewpad 10 also has two USB 2.0 slots on the left hand side of the device so that you can plug your external USB devices into it such as mouse, keyboards, MP3 and cameras, for example. It also comes with a built in Microphone and also a bog standard headphone jack.
On the right hand side it just has a black plastic strip so that the antennas inside can have good reception. Along the bottom of the Viewpad 10 is a vent so that heat can escape from inside the device.
Flipping the Viewpad 10 over to see the metal back case is the word “Viewpad” printed in the centre of it as well as two speakers on the top and bottom of the device. There is also an additional vent on the back of the device as well as the standard stuff such as Serial Number (For Customer Support), the Windows 7 Home Premium Product Key and of course the Windows 7 and Intel Atom stickers.
Finally, at the front of the netbook it has a big 10.5” Screen (Roughly) and has a native resolution of 1024×600 again pretty common resolution used in modern netbooks. It also has three hotkey buttons on the right hand side of the tablet. The top one is the power button the next one is the home key (for showing the desktop/home screen) and finally a back button. It also has along the top right of the device, three LEDs indicating (From left to right) WiFi, Battery Status and Power. Above the screen is also a 1.3 Mega Pixel Camera to be used for Video Conferencing etc.
Turning on the device you’ll be presented with the Viewsonic BIOS image a few seconds after you’ll be taken to the GRUB loader where you can either select to boot into Android or Windows 7. You can navigate up and down the boot loader menu by doing a short press of the Home hotkey to move down or a long press to move up. Once you have highlighted which OS to boot into you can select it by pressing the “Back Arrow” hotkey.
Booting into Android is fairly fast you’ll first be presented with the generic Android boot splash logo which is a hint that this is just a plain x86 port of Android so no fancy Viewpad 10 features here I’m afraid. Even more disappointingly it comes with Android 1.6 compared to the Viewpad 10’s “little brother” the Viewpad 7 which comes with Android 2.2. Because Android 1.6 is a old version of Android it means not a lot of popular applications for Android support it anymore, it also doesn’t have the official Google apps such as the Android Market, however it does have a third-party app store which a few apps, never really got around to trying them out.
Luckily there seems to be an unofficial Android 2.2 port in the works made by a guy called Al Sutton apart of the Android x86 project which is tailor made for the Viewpad 10. Unfortunately the most recent (Today’s Daily Build) it’s still very unstable for example the hotkeys don’t work yet and the developer strongly suggests not to replace the Android version that comes with the Viewpad 10 yet, but progress does seem very promising so keep an eye out for that!
Last of all if you chose to boot into Windows 7 you’ll be first be presented with a window in order to set up your Account, such as filling out your username, password, etc. Once you’ve completed that you’ll be presented with a fresh Windows 7 Home Premium install, when on idle Windows 7 is already using up about 55% of Memory and you’ll only have around 4GB (IIRC) of disk space left so be careful what you install. But other than that Aero seems to be fully working and very snappy indeed!
So I hope that this blog post has gave you a pretty detailed overview of the Viewpad 10. I strongly suggest buying one if you get the chance since they’re a very cool thing to have especially if you were like me and wanting to upgrade from an older Netbook model.
Even though Windows 7 runs extremely well providing the hardware spec there are also a lot of stuff you can do to squeeze out every last drop of the performance. I luckily had a spare Windows 7 Professional disc so I used vlite on the installation and managed to get a fresh Windows 7 installation down to about 8GB so that gives me 8GB to play with, which is a lot better. I also installed a nice navy blue Basic theme(Think of it as being a Windows Media Centre theme) which helped reduce Memory usage by about 10%. Hopefully in the future I’ll be able to give you an insight on how to do cool stuff like that with the Viewpad 10 and also how to optimize it’s Solid State Drive!
But that is it for now…
See ‘ya later!!
Slow Android Phone?
This is my first Android tutorial on my blog. Today, my younger brother got a new Vodafone 845. Which is Vodafone’s budget Android device. I noticed that the response of it was very slow, even doing the simplest tasks like scrolling through the Application menu was fairly sluggish. So I decicded to spend a few minutes optimizing his phone using these easy steps:
Remove widgets
The first thing you should do is remove all the widgets that you don’t use on the home screen. If you don’t use the photo gallery then get rid of it! Just simply hold down the widget and then once the “Trash can” icon appears drag the widget over to the icon to remove it. Doing this you should notice anything from a slight performance improvement or a drastic improvement when switching between the different home panels depending on how many widgets you have removed from the home screen.
Free up RAM
If your Android phone is low on RAM then there are plenty of great apps that will kill off all those uneeded applications running in the background. I would advise using Advanced App Killer to do this, I’ve used it on my borthers Vodafone 845 and even on my powerful HTC Desire. You can even place this program as a Widget so you can kill off all those uneeded programs by a click of a button.
Replace your home screen launcher
There are plenty replacement home screen launchers for the Android. For a low spec Android phone, I find Zeam Launcher to be the best one to use since it’s designed to be very lightweight on your Android’s resources. Once you’ve installed Zeam Launcher select it from the Applications menu on your phone and then set it to your default Home Screen Launcher, you can do this normally by clearing the defaults on your current Home Screen Launcher (HTC Sense for example) And then pressing the “Home” button on your phone, then a menu should pop up asking you if you want to use Zeam Launcher or whatever else you have on there, make sure you tick the Default box before selecting Zeam Launcher.
So there you have it, three tips on how to speed up your slow android device, I hope it helps you like it did for my younger brother’s phone. By default it only had 40mb of RAM roughly left, once I applied the tops above it meant he had around 72mbs out of 128mb to use, that’s almost double!!
Try it out for yourself and comment below how well it worked for you.
Lets get this show back on the road!
Hello, it’s me again back from my break away from my blog I had exactly a month ago. Man, life has been so busy but so relaxing at the same time. College has ended, I’ve had two trips to Alton Towers, got a load of CV’s into a few places since I’m job seeking and I’ve splashed out on a HTC Desire and a swanky new laptop all ready for Uni starting mid-september.
I’ve got so maybe interesting ideas for my blog, so you’ll be seeing a few of these throughout the year. So here is a sneaky peek at what I have got lined up that you should see trickling through the next couple of weeks:
Me and my EEE reboot – as promised in the previous post I will be reviewing how Fedora 13 runs on the EEE. I’ve also got a few useful posts for any Windows Netbook Users too.
Android News/Developement/Etc – I’ll be posting interesting snippets that I either find myself or while I’ve gathered while surfing the web. I’m also hoping to indulge myself in Android Game Development too so stay tuned from any progress updates.
Game Development – I’ve been playing around with several different game tech demos, ranging from 3D top down “open-city” sandbox games to 2D platformers, I’ll be posting screenshots and videos of my work and creations, heck even a demo! (If it’s playable..)
I’m also wanting to widen the subjects I write for my blog, so not every post will be technology related. I hope you all still keep reading and keep checking back for updates!
See ‘ya around!
