Michael Crider
Contributing since December, 2013
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3608articles
Page 57
About Michael Crider
Michael is a born Texan and a former graphic designer. He's been covering technology in general and Android in particular since 2011. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order. He wrote a novel called Good Intentions: A Supervillain Story, and it's available on Amazon.
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At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeonly old man who can't get any enjoyment out of life (which is normally David's job), I'm going to suggest that maybe roller coasters don't need technological add-ons in order to appeal to people. After all, they're roller coasters, gigantic masterpieces of engineering and physics that exist primarily for the purpose of entertainment, and secondarily for the purpose of making you empty your stomach of ill-advised theme park corn dogs. Do they really need to be tied into the never-ending cycle of incremental upgrades and improvements that typifies mobile technology?
If you happen to be in the market for a new gadget to charge your phone, or perhaps every USB-powered device in your house, you're in luck. Tronsmart and Aukey, two of the more prominent accessory sellers on Amazon, are both offering discounts with coupon codes today. If you have a Quick Charge 2.0 compatible phone or tablet, you can pick up a three-port Tronsmart wall charger for just .50 with the coupon 3USBWALL. The double car charger version is also .50 with the coupon 2USBCHAR. Both are discounted by a little less than ten bucks.If two or three ports simply aren't enough for you, the Titan multi-port charger can send Quick Charge juice to five different gadgets simultaneously. It's normally $38 for the white version, but add the coupon code USBTITAN and you can knock that price down to .49. For those who don't need multiple Quick Charge ports, Aukey offers pretty much the same thing with a lower watt rating and only one Quick Charge port out of five. It's normally $25, but with the coupon code 3PP6COR3 it gets bumped down to just .99. And finally if you need a little power on the go, Aukey has a respectable 10400mAh portable battery for .99 after adding the coupon code JEOSBZMP.As usual, all of these deals offer free two-day shipping for Amazon Prime customers, and these coupon codes are probably limited to the United States. We don't know when they expire, so get an order in soon to take advantage of those lower prices.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
Developer Mocha17 noticed that if you count the wrist where you're actually wearing an Android Wear watch, you actually have to use two hands to access notifications. It's a fair point, and one that's solved with his custom Wear app, JorSay (Hindi for "aloud"). The idea is simple: when you feel a vibration for an incoming notification, shake your wrist twice, and your phone will speak the notification aloud using Android's built-in text-to-speech system. Pretty neat, huh?
LG likes to keep a large, rolling selection of mid-range and low-end phones available for a variety of customers, and today it's revealing two more. The K8 LTE and K5 are both 5-inch phones with a focus on style over substance thanks to somewhat low specifications, but they should do well enough if they're launched at the right price. Unfortunately the press release doesn't say how much the phones will cost, but the K8 will sell in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Russia, while the K5 will be limited to Europe, Russia, and Latin America. Both should be available to purchase later this week in some markets.
Synology is a Taiwanese company that specializes in hardware and software for network attached storage. It's not particularly known as a security company, but with the American government publicly demanding access to more or less all data on the planet, and other countries and less polite entities taking it without asking, the market is ripe to sell security products to wary consumers. Hence MailPlus, yet another secure and encrypted email system, this time independently hosted from a customer's Synology-branded NAS hardware.
Every time there's a new version of Android on the horizon, there's also a rash of speculation as to what dessert Google will use for its next codename. For Android N, now in an early and promising developer preview, the situation is no different. Android fans seem stuck on "Nutella," which would mean another licensed deal like the one with the KitKat rollout, though it's at least faintly possible that Google will use the name of an Indian dessert, as CEO Sundar Pichai hinted in a question and answer session. He also said in that same session that Google might conduct an online poll for future Android codenames... and in a roundabout way, that might just be happening now.
The Galaxy S III, first released back in 2012, only has official software support up to Android 4.3. No matter: the folks at the CyanogenMod development team are keeping the device alive long after Samsung threw in the towel. Today the AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint variants of the GSIII all get their very first nightly ROM builds for CyanogenMod 13, which is based on Android 6.0. You can find them at the d2att, d2tmo, and d2spr listings on the CM download page, respectively.
Ask any teacher or parent: it's awfully difficult to mix real, practical learning with conventional kid's entertainment. That's why those few properties that actually manage to pull it off, like Bill Nye the Science Guy, The Magic School Bus, and Schoolhouse Rock are held in such high regard, even decades after they've finished their respective runs. A new game called ChemCaper is trying to do just that, and after a successful Kickstarter campaign, the first episode is now available on Android.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
When you make a voice search or any other voice input on Android, there's a complex process that goes on behind the scenes. Your voice is recorded, transmitted to Google's servers, analyzed and converted into a text string, then either passed on to the relevant web service (like Google Search) or sent back to your device. It's usually almost instantaneous if you have a decent Internet connection, but therein lies its one weakness: you do have to have that connection in order for it to work. The rudimentary offline system (in Android since Jelly Bean) relies on a relatively unsophisticated vocabulary and detection system that's slow and less powerful than the connected version.
Well you can't say they didn't give it a good try. After years of attempting to break into the lucrative tablet market with its own semi-exclusive platform, US bookseller Barnes & Noble plans to halt digital sales on its app and video stores. Diginomica reports that the company will stop sales on March 15th (Tuesday), and that customers who've bought content from either location have until then to download their apps and videos one last time. Connecting Nook Video content to accounts for either Disney Movies Anywhere or CinemaNow will allow customers to retain streaming and download rights on other platforms.
YouTube Gaming is one of the younger entries in the company's ever-expanding stable of apps, but its development team isn't wasting any time implementing new features. The latest update to YouTube Gaming is positively packed with new stuff, none of which is more dramatic than a pop-out video player which can be viewed while using any other app. To try it, press the menu button overlaid on any video, then tap "popout player" (If you're not seeing the option, try force-closing the app and restarting it).
I'm a big fan of Root Explorer for its powerful featureset and no-nonsense user interface. As utilitarian as it is, no one has ever accused it of being, well, pretty. But the latest update to the app, version 4.0 on the Play Store, gives the entire thing a fresh coat of paint. Yeah, it's somewhat overdue, but dedicated users will be happy to see it anyway. "Material Design" is the only entry in the changelog, but to be fair, that's a pretty big change.
Are you bilingual? And I mean bilingual in the real, fluent sense, not in the "one year of high school Spanish" sense. If so, you'll want to check out a new multi-lingual option in the Language & Input menu in Android N. This might seem counterintuitive, but consider the advantages of your phone knowing which languages you know: when taking advantage of new API settings, apps like Search can show you content in multiple languages that are relevant to you, or skip the "translate to English" message when it knows you don't need it.
Sharing works pretty well in Android - the standard "share" command and its collection of APIs allows for easily getting content from one app to another. But if you're anything like most Android users, you have dozens of apps installed that include Share functions, and you're only used to actually using Share in a few of them. Android N has a little feature that makes that interaction much more user-friendly: Share apps can now be pinned to the top of the cross-app menu.
Sprint customers have a lot to deal with, starting with the fact that they're paying for Sprint service. (I kid, I kid.) But those of them who use a Galaxy S6 or the curvier Galaxy S6 Edge have reason to celebrate, as both phones are being upgraded to Android 6.0 starting today. We have confirmation from multiple users that the OTA files are going out, and Sprint's support pages for both phones say the same thing.
It was a nice surprise when Samsung announced that its new flagship phones would be running Android 6.0, and that they were bringing back the much-requested expandable storage was icing on the cake. The news that the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge would not support adoptable storage, Android Marshmallow's ability to take an SD card and partition it as semi-permanent device storage, was met with less enthusiasm. But all is not lost, expandable storage fans: long-time modder and ROM developer Paul "MoDaCo" O'Brien has got this covered.
Since Game of Thrones seems to revel in jerking us around and House of Cards is now disturbingly close to believable, USA's cyberpunk drama Mr. Robot is Android Police's pick for cable TV binge-watching. While it's not so deep in its own hacker lore that it's incomprehensible to the layman, it's surprisingly accurate in its realistic and often low-tech methods of showing hacking and counter-hacking techniques. One of those techniques is using ProtonMail, an encrypted email service that makes FBI analysts shake their fists like cartoon villains.
System UI Tuner made its debut in the Android M developer preview, and a little less than a year later it's getting some interesting new additions in version N. It's still activated in the same way: lower the Quick Settings shade and hold the "settings" gear icon for a few seconds. After that, the System UI tuner option will appear in the main Settings menu. We've already examined the new color balance calibration tool and the return of Night Mode, plus the new Quick Settings options, which are now exposed to the user by default. Let's take a look at the new Statusbar options, some of which are new and some of which are carried over from Android M: