Paid app of the week – Groove IP (VOIP)

You may be frugal like me, or you may just consider yourself a cheapskate and not want to purchase any apps. Well if that’s the way you are, than this paid app is for you.

“GrooVe IP” is an app that uses voice over IP (Voip) technology to link your Google voice number to the outside world. This simply means that with an active Google voice number you can make calls to phone numbers in the USA and Canada FOR FREE. You just install the app, tell it your Google voice information and place a call.

It works (personally tested) on a non active phone and a tablet.  So if you never pay for an app this app is for you. Save yourself a ton of money by making free calls over wifi, or 3g/4g, without using your phone plans minutes.

Phone Troubleshooting

Quick Download: Phone TesterSD ToolsSMS Backup & Restore

If you are having a problem with your phone there are a few apps that can help you get to the bottom of it yourself, without having to take it in for repair (or to at least help the tech at the repair place).

From touchscreen issues to the memory card not working, try these apps to help figure out what went wrong.  Plus, as an added bonus, I have included an app to backup your text messages, since Google doesn’t save those for you automatically…

For starters download Phone Tester. Phone Tester is an app that tests all of the major components of your phone.  The first app I download if I think there is a problem with the phone.  It tests:
*Device’s sensors: accelerometer, gyroscope, compass…
*Wifi: internal & external IP, gateway, DHCP server…
*GPS: latitude, longitude, speed…
*Battery: health, level of charge…
*Multitouch screen: how many fingers recognize your device?(not available in Android 1.6)
Also displays system information about hardware and software like RAM, kernel version, screen, …

 Next up is an app that is designed just to test your SD card.  Most Android devices have a memory card slot and sometimes there can be issues with reading or writing to the card.   With SD Tools you can scan your card to see all of the manufacturer info about the card (like making sure the great deal you bought on ebay or amazon wasn’t a counterfeit) plus the main feature of the app is that it tests the read and write speeds of your card. 

If you do detect a problem and decide to do a hard reset on your phone, or take it it for repair, you may want to do a backup of your text messages. If so you will want to download SMS Backup & Restore.  It will save your text messages to the memory card and then allow you to restore them back to the phone once the phone is reset.

So hopefully these apps will help you out if you are having issues with your phone.  Keep an eye out for additions as I find more great troubleshooting apps.

Use Android as an Ebook Reader

So you have an Android phone or tablet.  You may have been eying one of those e-readers too, like the Amazon Kindle or the Barnes & Noble Nook.  Well the good news is that you can have all those features right on your Android device with the help of a couple of apps.

2 of the most popular apps out there are the Kindle app (by Amazon) and the Nook app (by Barnes and Noble).  Kinda funny that the companies that are trying to sell you an ereader are the same companies that are offering you free apps to do the same functionality.  Both of these apps are pretty straight forward.  They have the built in bookstores that allow you to purchase books, and download free books, plus, you know, read your ebooks.

Along these same lines is an app put together by a little company called Google. Yeah, apparently the big guns of Google decided to jump into the ebook game with an app called Google Books.  The same features as the above books, but the interface is a little more simplified.  Also you have access to a ton of FREE public domain books.

The final app that I will cover here today is one of my favorites.  Aldiko is an ereader that works with epub and pdf files.  By far it is the most flexible ereaders, with a ton of settings you can tweak  It also (like all the others) it has an ebook store that has a ton of free and paid books.  There is also a premium version available too, so if you like it you can get the premium to support the developer.

A thousand Thank Yous

I wanted to post a quick posting, just to say thank you for all of the downloads of the Old Android app.  We are very very close (2 to go) to hitting the 1000 downloads of the app. 

http://slideme.org/application/old-android

It’s amazing to see that number climb and climb. Hopefully we will se another big boost to that number once we get the Android Market thing up and running.

Another quick mention too is that the website should be hitting 10000 page views this week as we are just a few hundred away.  So tell all your friends with Android devices to stop by, and give us a bookmark or download the app!

Beautiful Widgets (For Free)

I just noticed that on the GetJar.com site they are offering one of the best selling Android apps of all time for FREE.  Beautiful Widgets is a widget collection that provides a fully customizable clock with weather along with a large list of toggle widgets that you can use to turn on and off things like wifi, 4g, brightness adjustments, etc.

From the Developer:
– Super Clock widget with weather, battery or just the clock 4×3 4×2 4×1 2×1
– Weather only widget 4×1 1×1
– Battery widget 1×1
– Date widget 2×1 1×1
– Text Clock simple widget 2×1
– Toggles widgets 1×1
– Home widgets with clock and weather and 300 skins 4×1 2×1

To download to your phone:

  1. 1) go to m.getjar.com on your phone
  2. 2) Select Quick Download at the bottom of the page
  3. 3) Enter 231883

uTorrent supporting Android file syncing

If you ever use uTorrent to download files to your PC you might find this interesting.  The uTorrent app has added a feature to it’s Alpha version that allows you to sync downloaded data to your Android device by just dragging and dropping.

First, though… A little background on torrents, for the people who are unsure..

Torrents (or more specifically .torrent files) are files that you can find all over the internets with a simple google search. These files require a torrent client to be installed and the .torrent file loaded into it.  Once that is done the application will download the requested files.

So, with this uTorrent feature, if you were to download a public domain audio book (which would be free and legal) you could transfer it directly to your phone from the uTorrent menu.

But watch out for a couple things…  Copyrighted material is illegal to download via torrent, or through any other process (just saying) and this feature is an alpha feature, and may contain bugs.  it is planned for the premium (payed) version of uTorrent that is coming soon…

WidgetLocker Lockscreen – Paid app of the week

(As a new feature of the site we will be discussing the paid app of the week.  Here you will find a hand-tested personally recommended paid app every app.)

This weeks paid app is WidgetLocker. WidgetLocker is a cool app that allows you to change up your lock screen and add a ton of functionality to your phone.  The main feature is that it gives you the ability to add home screen widgets and shortcuts to your lock screen, therefore you aren’t wasting all that phone screen.

WidgetLocker (on left), Waaaaay cooler.

It also gives you the option to change the look of the lockscreen so that it can look like stock, HTC Sense, Samsung Touchwiz, or even the iPhone…

From the Developer:

Customize your lock screen!
WidgetLocker is a lock screen replacement that puts you in control of the look, feel and layout of your lock screen.
– Drag and Drop placement of Sliders, Android Widgets and App Shortcuts
– Sliders look selectable from built-in styles (Android, Sense, Motorola 2.2, iPhone, and Android 2.0 Rotary) or from user-themes.
– Slider Actions can be customized, for example Slide-to-launch-Camera or Slide-to-call-your-Girlfriend.
– Resizable widgets and custom grid size
– Notification badges on apps/sliders via ADWNotifier ( http://t.co/LDKMQii )
– Customize which widgets/buttons are allowed or blocked at the lock screen
– Optional Easy Wake Mode, allows all hardware buttons to wake, rather than just the power button (Does not work on all phones)
Portions of WidgetLocker are based on the excellent ADW.Launcher ( http://t.co/YvVMkGc ) by Ander Webb and friends.
Official Gingerbread 2.3.3+ breaks trackball wake: http://goo.gl/NaSwN
CM7 widget disappearing fix has been accepted by the CM team, expect it in a nightly soon: http://goo.gl/9xkex

It is available from multiple app stores:
Android Market: $1.99
App Brain: $1.99
Amazon: $1.99

Google Wallet – Pay with your phone

 The future is here!  Well.., The future of mobile payments is here… As long as you have a Nexus S 4G on the Sprint network.  What this means is that you now have the ability to use the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chip that is built into the Nexus S 4G along with the Google Wallet service to be able to swipe your phone at the checkout to pay for goods and services.

The antenna is actually built into the battery cover for the NFC portion of the phone (Short for Near Field Communication – Another name for RFID).  Once setup the checkout reader will see your phone just like a swiped credit card.  So (if you have the Nexus S) get yourself setup and enjoy the future today!

ZDBox (All-in-one toolbox)

If you are like me you like to make sure that your phone is running at peak performance. Android phones, like computers, are sometimes in need of maintenance (along with regular reboots).  To help with this there are a bunch of apps to help with cache memory and uninstalling apps, but ZDBox is the first app that I have found that is FREE and has this many great tools.

Here is a listing of all of the included tools (from the developer):

★ Widgets: Keep screen always on, kill all tasks, WiFi on/off, airplane mode on/off, brightness adjustment, sound settings, rotate screen on/off, bluetooth on/off, start/stop sync, switch between 2G/3G, app lock on/off, GPS on/off, APN on/off (mobile access point), flashlight on/off
★ Battery: Monitoring and showing lots of information about remaining battery time, temperature, health, time since last boot, necessary time until full charge and so on
★ Traffic counter: Monthly/daily mobile data usage overview, shows remaining data traffic, detailed data usage information for each app.
★ Do not disturb: Just set days and the time when you need your privacy and you won’t be disturbed by your phone. Set phone to silent, vibration or airplane mode.
★ App lock: Protect apps with a password or pattern, for exmaple your contacts, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and so on
★ Task killer: Kill all apps at once, define protected apps which won’t be killed, set auto kill when screen gets locked, mark single or multiple apps to kill
★ Notification bar: One tap on the bar shows remaining battery time, running apps, how much data traffic is left and if app lock is active or not. A tap on these informations starts ZDbox.
★ Uninstaller: Shows used/available internal and SD card memory. Apps can be easily uninstalled. Single or multiple (batch) uninstall possible.
★ App to SD: Move apps to your SD card. Single or multiple (batch) move possible. Only for Android 2.2 and 2.3.

Netflix and Quikster

For those of you that have and use Netflix AND have the DVD option this is a change that effects you. Netflix just announced that they are changing things up again. Not the prices this time, but the service itself.

It was announced a while ago that their pricing was changing, breaking apart the streaming video and the DVD at home services as 2 seperately billed items. So today’s news is that they are seperating those 2 services further and branching off the DVD portion into it’s own service. Complete with it’s own name and website – Quikster and Quikster.com

From the email I received this morning:

“I messed up. I owe you an explanation.

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology…”

 So, from the way is sounds the cost and “quality” of service isn’t going to change from what it is right now, but you just have to transition over to another website to manager your DVD queue.  If you just use the streaming portion it will be exactly the same…