Our smartphones play such an important role in our day-to-day lives that it is extremely easy to think of them as a digital companion that is there for us whenever we need them. Having that reliance on technology brings with it a set of pros and cons, but just like any real-world companion it isn't feasible to expect that we can have access to our phones 24 hours a day to accept and reply to incoming messages. The developer of SMS Replier has obviously given that issue some thought and has developed his own solution for Android owners.
The Galaxy S III handset may be the current darling of the Android world, with more than 190,000 units a day flying off the shelves. But it seems that the South Korean company's current flagship device is just one part of a range of devices that have proved to be extremely successful for the company in the last 30 months. The company has announced that the accumulative sales of their Galaxy S range of devices has now surpassed 100 million units sold.
The majority of us have extremely powerful and capable smartphones and tablets that can perform a large array of wondrous tasks. We do make use of this functionality, but yet a large portion of smart device users love to spend hours tinkering with the settings on their devices and customizing things to get them exactly how they like it to be. Rather than spending countless hours rooting through menu structures on an Android smartphone to find the desired options to play with, users can now simply use Hive Settings to get quick access to most of them.
Although floating apps are an integral part of the desktop computing experience, their presence on mobile devices is a relatively new phenomenon. Still, an app commanding only a fraction of the total display, and which can be moved around at will, is infinitely more useful, and while the likes of Samsung and Sony have both shown signs of implementing floating apps to mobile space, XDA-Developers member pidio1 has swopped the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2’s native browser with a resizable, floating one.
Mobile smartphones and tablets are often thought of as living in their own protected bubble in the consumer electronics world, with users believing that those devices exist in their own class. Whilst there isn't isn't anything fundamentally wrong with that thought process, it is also extremely important to treat our mobile hardware as a portable computer and therefore protecting them and locking them down as such. Android smartphone users can now drastically enhance the protection afforded to their devices by using the relatively new SecDroid app.
Google Chrome Beta Channel Launches On Android, Gives Users / Devs Early Access To Upcoming Features
Fans of the extremely popular Chrome web browser have long been able to get access to pre-release versions of the software through Google's Beta Channel that has been running almost as long as the browser has been around. To compliment that existing system, Google has now extended that privilege to mobile users with the launch of the Chrome Beta for Android channel.
If you're constrained by a data plan, or just plain curious about how much traffic you're running through, you may find Network Traffic Monitor for Android to be of use. As it name quite openly entails, it allows you to keep a close eye on the amount data use in real-time, ensuring you don't use excessive amounts of data, and helping you source the main points of your network use.
An Android device is hardly any good without modifications. Don’t get me wrong; they have powerful hardware with capable software to accompany the former, but in most cases, the manufacturer’s additions and modifications to the stock Android Open Source Project (AOSP) makes the environment a little restricted, to say the least. That’s perhaps one reason behind why we see every new high end and mid-range device getting root, custom recovery and whatnot as soon as they’re released (even sooner than the actual release in some cases). While the casual user might not pay attention to all of these a lot, power users feel suffocated when they cannot mod their smartphones and tablets.
Personalizing your mobile device to your liking is still one popular idea, and a lot of people spend quite a good amount of time setting their phones up with the right wallpapers, themes, graphics and audio effects. Of course, as the smartphones have evolved, so have the customization means, but that still doesn’t mean that the old things have lost their touch. I remember back in the day of Nokia devices when monochord ringtones were the rage, and being able to compose your own ringtone was the height of customization that you could’ve gotten on your phone (along side the funky carrier logo on the monochrome screen of the Nokia 3310).
Amid the constant inroads made in the smartphone and tablet industries, there would appear to be a growing requirement among consumers for so-called smartwatches. Tech fiends have taken the preemptive steps of conceptualizing such products in the image of Apple and Google's respective ranges, with the former said to be teaming up with none other than Intel to bring such a product to market. As we continue to dream of the day when one of the biggest names in the business comes through with an exciting new product, one decidedly smaller firm is ahead of the game. Unless you've been living under a rock - or in this case, a pebble - you'll have caught some of the hype surrounding Pebble's Smartwatch device as it smashed records over at Kickstarter, and it has now been revealed that the device will begin shipping on 23rd of this month.
