On a personal level, I hate shopping, but let’s just face it; you can’t always avoid it, or run away from it. At the beginning of the month, you may have to stock up on groceries, kitchen supplies, cat food, or pretty much anything else, and it doesn’t get any better than to have someone to help you out with that. Now, the problem that I face the most (and I am sure a lot of our readers can relate to it), is to keep forgetting what I had to purchase. Sometimes, it’s very obvious little items, while at others, it may be something as small as a pack of candies. Bottom line is, if you forgot it, you’ll regret it later, one way or the other.
Back when smartphones first became a reality in most of our lives, we quickly began struggling with managing all of our installed apps, as app stores have become increasingly filled with games, productivity apps, weird camera apps and even completely useless utilities. AppSpace is a new app launcher for Android that takes a different approach, placing apps in a virtual space, associating your favorite apps with different physical objects which are placed in a virtual “room”.
If you are an Android power user, you undoubtedly appreciate the ability to apply an unlimited amount of tweaks to your device and the operating system. This new easy-to-apply tweak will hide your Android status bar for good, making more room for your apps, while still allowing you to expand the notification area and access important information whenever you feel the need. This is a tweak especially developed for Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
Smartphones and tablets, in fact most computers, tend to deplete with age. Like their human masters, they succumb to viruses and such, and over time, become a little bloated, sluggish, and cannot reach the kind of peak levels they could when new. As is the case when a human decides to take to the gym and eat a little healthier, there's always hope for our beloved devices, and if you feel like your Android handset or slab is not performing at the levels you expect, you may find some respite in the form of All In One Booster PRO.
While all of the main social networks have a fine selection of third-party apps proclaiming to enhance the user experience, the number of alternative Twitter apps is arguably the most thriving, with a vast collection available for those dissatisfied with the official offering. Carbon for Twitter, originally released for Windows Phone last year, has finally arrived on Android courtesy of dots & lines, and it offers an intuitive, clean interface which tries to keep all the relevant info in one, easy-to-digest window. One issue - if you can label it as such - with the current fleet of Twitter apps, is the fact that segments of Twitter tend to be separated, but with Carbon, all of your Timelines, Lists, Favorites and whatnot are on display from the main window, which is polished with beautiful, dark elements.
The fact that many Android smartphones and tablets offer expandable memory via the microSD slot means quite a few users need not worry about how much space they are using up as they accumulate new content. This cannot be said for all mobile devices though, and when a small amount of storage is coupled by the lack of cheap, expandable media support, one must be a little more economical with how much music, video, and images one retains. Image Optimizer, the brainchild of one XDA-Developers member, seeks to reduce the oft colossal file sizes yielded from taking high-res shots, but in turn keeping the quality loss of said images down to a minimal level.
Calling all Trekkies: your long wait for the next installment is now finally over! Well, that is of course, if you were waiting for the Star Trek app, which is now available for those on iOS and Android. Director J.J. Abrams’ next Star Trek release - Star Trek Into Darkness - is set to premiere in May, and in order to tide fans over until then, Paramount has launched an app offering a plethora of content as well as the chance to grab some prizes.
Using Android over other mobile operating systems draws many advantages, and as well as widgets, home screen alternatives and open source apps, the true multitasking is another feature setting it apart from the likes of iOS. With this in mind, XDA-Developers member and Android developer Mohammed_Adib has coded a beautiful app for Google's OS called Floating Stickies, which allows one to create floating, Post-It like notes at will. Said notes can be moved, resized, deleted or docked with ease, and the whole concept means one can easily make notes without deviating from whatever task is at hand. More details below.
One of the best things you can get out of technology is making your life easier by digitizing a huge chunk of your daily routine. Thanks to the smart devices that our phones have become today, we have gotten rid of a lot of stuff, like paper grocery lists, address books, pocket diaries and the like, replacing them with one intelligent device. However, there’s no limit to what you can imagine, right? So imagine if your phone was smart enough to perform various tasks for you on its own, without requiring you to perform actions like, say, triggering the text-to-speech engine through the device’s settings so that emails and messages can be read out load when you need your hands free. Having a smartphone that’s actually this smart would be cool, won’t it?
If there’s one thing that iOS hasn’t changed at all since its very inception, starting with version 1.0 and now to 6.1, it’s the look and feel of the interface. Granted, there have been various feature enhancements, and with iOS 6, there were some visual uplifts as well, such as the color-sensitive status bar and others, the overall feel of the operating system has remained the same. To be honest, this wasn’t a feel that was very catchy, either, so it’s not like Apple deserves any praise here either.
