One of the great advantages of using Android over, say iOS, is the ability to use home screen alternatives, otherwise known as custom launchers. They take all manner of forms, and offer a range of features, with some going for sheer features, while others seek to alter the general look and feel of an Android smartphone or tablet. In the case of the Bazooka Launcher, aesthetics are very much the order of the day.
It’s rather hard to overstate the importance of backing up personal files and data for the sake of their protection. In the digital age of today, the content stored on our PCs, smartphones, tablets etc., is perhaps more valuable to some than their lives. While some people worry too much for trivial items like holiday photos (and I repeat, I do not downplay their importance – I just don’t consider them a matter of life and death), others might have much more sensitive information that could differentiate between the success and failure of their businesses. Data security is the top most priority for most users of digital forms of storage, and hence, backup solutions are a must have to be of the safe side.
Ingenious modders have turned LG's Optimus G into a fully fledged Nexus 7, complete with a broken LTE chip, and have released the mod into the wild.
The three major mobile operating systems are all very advanced, but they are certainly far from perfect, and still lack some quite standard features many users would like to see. The ability to block calls and text at will, for instance, is something we shouldn't have to request or pine for - it should just be there - however, developer Cristiano Tagliamonte has come through with a noteworthy solution in the form of an app called Sanity.
Over the last few years, many device makers have been flirting with the idea of rolling out flexible displays on its handheld devices, but no other company has been most outspoken about it than Samsung. At the Consumer Electronic Show, the company showed off its new generation of bendable displays, which have a huge potential for changing the traditional form factor of smartphones.
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.
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.
