Android Scene

Personal Assistant Premium. 10 essential life management applications in one great app: Credit card Control, Bank account status, Investment portfolio, Cell Minute Tracker, Frequent flyer miles, Travel Itineraries, Shopping Management, Bill management, Netflix queue, Alerts.

Price: Free, $9.99 $7.00

Android App Review:

Pros & Cons:

Pros

• Manage many of your personal accounts from within the app and online
• Receive notifications about activity
• Monitor fraudulent activity

Cons

• An application able to access sensitive information like this needs password protection options. You can control what phones access the account but not immediate security authentication at start up.
• The iPhone version offers more features like the Feed (an aggregate of all your latest account activity).

Features:

Personal Assistant Premium Android App by Pageonce is an awesome way to integrate, manage and keep track of your personal and financial accounts in one convenient place… now do it on the go with Android! Great for adding credit cards to quickly check balances, bank accounts, travel itineraries, social networks, Netflix queues and much more; plus receive Android notifications.

Usefulness:

Very useful to those who would like to keep track of their accounts in one app versus using many.

Ease of Use:

Add an account either with online dashboard or via the mobile app. Manage your notification settings too.

Frequently Used:

User dependent, however savvy users would make use of it daily.

Interface:

The interface is not as polished as their website but definitely optimized for mobile use.

The  object of Word Mix is to correctly guess the 6 letter word to move on to the next level. Similar to Word Warp and Text Twist. Hints are available, but use it sparingly! For more fun try to guess ALL the words in the untimed puzzle game. Click words for definitions. Features: 5000+ levels, Hints, Timed games or untimed games, Dictionary look up of words, Simple, easy to use interface.

Price: Free, $0.99

Pros & Cons:

Pros

• Fun & Challenging word game
• Builtin references to online Dictionary.com

Cons

• Not really a con but feature lack. No high scorers list online to compare to.

Android Game Review:

Features:

Word Mix Android App is a cool word game similar to popular titles like AlphaMixer and WordWrench. Try to match as many word combination ranging from 3 to 6 letter words from the scrambled list of letters. Do this in a race against the timer to score the highest points. Use “Mix” to randomize the letters to possibly see more word combos, use “Guess” to submit a word, and use “Hint” to fill in one letter of your remaining words to get a better guess of the word. At the end of the game most words offer the definition from Dictionary.com. If you’re like me and say, “hey, that’s not a word”, you’ll be proven wrong and possibly learn something new when you look it up.

Fun Factor & Addictive:

The game is easily fun and addictive for those who like text twist challenges.

Graphics:

The graphics are simple, don’t expect hardcore 3d rendering engines.

Accelerometer, Vibration & Sound:

The game uses sounds for correct words and when the timer nears zero plus vibration for incorrect words.

Andy Rubin, VP of Engineering at Google for Android, recently commented on Multi-touch for Android devices at CES 2010.

“It’s not an America versus outside America kind of thing. It’s a decision that is a result of the OEM model. I personally don’t like two-handed operations… there is no conspiracy.”

Don’t be naive and forget how significant native multi-touch ability can help Android gaming with on-screen controls.

Android gaming in comparison to Android Apps or even competitor iPhone gaming at this point is futile. Not to say that this won’t change, but to exclude this feature for developers to take advantage of in so many operating system releases further hinders the platform. Actually, multi-touch is in the SDK but disabled unless your phone is “Rooted” (the lesser percentage of Android smartphone customers). Google claims to leave this feature at the discretion of the OEM. But rumors circulate that Apple asked Google not to include multi-touch and Engadget’s reference above hints the reason at one Google Executive’s preference.

The platform is definitely taking steps towards advancing in Android Gaming with hardware releases like the Nexus One and software releases like yesterday’s public release of Android SDK version 2.1, however major obstacles like low internal memory, poor battery life, weak application sales still exists. Natively and unrestrictively allowing multi-touch is one step forward with for Android Gaming.

What are your thoughts on the future of Android Gaming?

Many people were surprised that root was disabled on the production T-mobile G1’s, and everyone knew that we would eventually get root access, but who knew it’d be this easy?!? Some users at XDA-Developers and android-dls.com have discovered a simple hack to enable root access.

Here are the steps you can take:

1. Download and install a terminal emulator on your phone. (Click here for Term.apk)
2. Make sure your phone is not connected to your PC and open up the Terminal Emulator and run ‘telnetd’
3. Now telnet into your phone from your PC (run ‘netstat’ in the terminal emulator to get the phone’s IP)
4. In the telnet terminal you are now root!

5. (optional) To permanently enable root access you can create an “su” command in /system/bin ( Warning: creating su on your system could make you vulnerable to malicious software. You could name it something besides su, but you would still be vulnerable ):

mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system cd /system/bin cat sh > su chmod 4755 su

Now you can fire up the Terminal Emulator and run “su” to be root.

It’s likely that the next system update will fix this hole, but until then enjoy having full access to everything on your phone!

Update: Term.apk updated to include launcher icon

Update #2: Some people were having issues installing the Term app, so I published it onto the Market as “Terminal Emulator” to make it a bit easier

If you were ever wondering, how you could see if someone is using Google Talk from an Android device, here is the solution. In your Google Mail web interface go to Settings, select the Labs tab, and turn on the “Green Robot” extension: this will display a robot icon for the users from an Android device, while the coloring indicates the availability of the person.

It really makes sense: your friends can see, that you are logged in from your phone, so they know if you are available and do not answer, this is maybe because you do not have a free hand at the moment.

To be honest, there is still some room for improvements. The robots only appear on the web interface, and not in the Windows standalone chat client. On the other hand if you are an Android device owner, you have to notify every friend of yours, that they should enable this extension if they want to see whether you are sitting in a front of a PC, or you are on the go. This should happen somehow the other way round: you enable that your friends can see if you are on Android, and then everyone should see the Droid icon…

After buying an Android device, the first thing I started with, is the migration of contacts, calendar entries and tasks from your old phone. I used to have a Windows Mobile phone and actually I did not find the migration process as easy as it should be.

Let’s start with the contacts.
As the contacts were stored in the memory area of the phone, and they were enriched with all kind of details over the years, transferring them via the SIM card is not an option. The first thing that Google search provides is the Google Sync application, which is meant to do exactly the same task we are looking for: synchronizing contacts and calendars with a Windows Mobile device (and some others as well) and with my Google Account.
But then where is the problem? Actually it is in the last chapter of the Google Syns feature page:
“Google Sync uses the Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync® protocol. When setting up a new Exchange ActiveSync account on your phone, existing Contacts and Calendar events may be removed from your phone.”
I already experineced the same thing, so I know they are not kidding. I would have to do some backup of PIM Data, then estabilish new partnership, then my PIM data would be erased, so I would need to restore my backup… Well, I may be able to do that, but this is not really the process a beginner user would enjoy too much.

Let’s look at some other search results for my problem. Maybe OggSync can help me, which is a very popular application, and designed to sync between my Outlook and my Google account. This looks perfect, I can sync my WinMo phone with Outlook, so we have the full chain of connectivity. But this time some technical problems are preventing me to complete the sync: as I start the synchronization, a big exception is reported in a nice red popup, and OggSync is unable to do anything. Well, this problem may already have been fixed, but at the time I was trying this was a dead end for me.

Then what? After a couple of minutes of Googling for a solution, it turns out it is possible to export Outlook Contacts into a CSV file, which can be imported into Google Contacts in the web browser on the PC. OK, exporting goes well, let’s see in Excel what we got. Well Excel reformats phone numbers into some other numbers, as it trims the leading zeros for example, so let’s close Excel quickly without saving anything. A plain text editor shows the many-many headers and the data belonging to them. I can only hope that in spite the Google tutorial only lists a few columns, all the Outlook headers are properly mapped to their Google counterparts. As far as I have read, this is almost the case if you have an English version of Outlook. But as I used an other language, which resulted in non-english CSV headers, none of the headers were recognized. I translated some to English, but as only a few were documented in the Google tutorial, may of them were not correct. Incorrect headers simply landed into the note field of the contact in Google. Because I was almost giving up finding a proper solution, I decided to move the note entries into their correct input fields for each and every contact.

I had better luck with the calendar data at least. There is an other dedicated Google Application for that, which installed smoothly, and even synced Outlook Calendar with my Google Calendar correctly.

Well, after all, I think there is still some room to polish the process of contact migration from other phones to Hero.

Conclusion:

For beginner users, or for those who fear they may loose PIM data and will not be able to restore them from backup I prefer using OggSync over Google Sync. With some experience however, the official Google way: Googly Sync is recommended.

You can now rent a handful of movies through YouTube via this link, and while it may not seem like much of a selection now, think of the possibilities of this for Android users. YouTube could be experimenting with the service and is offering 5 movies from the 2009 and 2010 Sundance Film Festival. If this succeeds, and they are able to secure deals with major studios, we could see a viable competitor to Apple’s iTunes movie rental service. Since YouTube is owned by Google and integrated into most all Android devices, it would be a logical fit.

The rental service is currently only available from January 22nd – January 31st for the Sundance films, but a small collection of others, particularly from the health and education industries will be up for rental in the upcoming weeks. Rentals last 24 hours and are as easy as clicking “rent” and then confirming your stored information via Google Checkout.

Would you be interested in renting full featured films and television shows from YouTube in the future on your Android phone? The potential to turn this into an on demand-like service that is manageable by your computer or phone could be a fantastic way to get customized content on the go.