Whenever manufacturers make the decision to go through the upgrade process and release a new version of one of their devices into the wild, they always put extra effort into attempting to make sure they get the maximum possible life out of the battery. They may not admit it, but hardware producers like Samsung, Apple and especially Motorola would trade-in a number of features on their phones if they could guarantee exceptional power performance, as it is just so important to users. With that said, we've all been in the situation where our smartphone dies just at the wrong time.
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.
The Google Nexus 4 - designed and manufactured by the good guys over at LG - is arguably one of the hottest Android devices on the market, but it looks like some owners of the sought-after hardware are receiving more than what they bargained for. A number of Malaysian and Brazilian Nexus 4 owners are reporting that their devices have arrived pre-installed with Android 4.2.2, a version of the operating system that hasn't been made public yet.
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.
It’s true that Apple made tablets – portable computers with a slate design – a mainstream gadget with their iPad, even though there existed a lot of similar devices before that. Not only did they make it more accessible by selling the iPad at a price point that was agreeable to the masses, but the support from the Cupertino giant’s iTunes App Store with its massive number of iPad specific apps also helped the device’s popularity. Even though competitive manufacturers jumped onto the bandwagon with their similar Android based offerings, even today, the iOS App Store sports a much larger number of tablet-optimized apps in comparison to Google Play Store.
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.
Samsung Electronics have today announced they will be offering consumers a chance to get their hands on a new smartphone that should be immediately recognizable to those who keep up to speed with the industry. The Galaxy S II Plus was originally leaked back in August of last year, with South Korean based Samsung now officially introducing us to the device that is essentially an upgraded version of the extremely popular Galaxy S II.
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).
Smartphones these days are not mere communication devices, and I’ve said so many times before as well. What they’ve turned into is an all-in-one solution for portable media playback, internet surfing, managing personal information, manipulating documents, spreadsheets, presentations on the go, and so much more. Not to miss out on one of the key uses that a capable smartphone is put through, is photography. The powerful camera units being mounted atop these devices nowadays have practically redefined the whole digital photography frontier, and spawned an entirely new breed of photographers who have a reasonable quality capturing unit for every moment, right there in their pockets.
For Linux-based operating systems, especially Android, bootloaders are more like a double-edged sword. On one hand, you’d want an unlocked one, because that will enable opening up your device to all sorts of modifications, including gaining root/super user access, but at the same time, an unlocked bootloader also means a potentially vulnerable smartphone or tablet that’s open to malicious attacks. With the amount of new apps that the Play Store gets on a daily basis, it’s also hard to figure out whether an app is truly what it claims to be, or some developer with the intent of stealing your personal information that’s unleashed a Trojan horse in the guise of an otherwise-innocent-looking application. Thus, the risk of remaining exposed stays lingering above you.
