Michael Crider
Contributing since December, 2013
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3608articles
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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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Remember those baseballs that measured pitch speed with a little LCD screen right on the ball, the ones that only the rich kids on your little league team had? This is the modern, logical extension. For the last year, Adidas has been selling its Smart Ball, a soccer ball (or football, if you insist) with integrated sensors that can detect speed, spin, strike force, and flight time, and a Bluetooth radio to transmit all that data. Previously it was only compatible with the iOS app, but the company has finally released an app for the most common mobile OS on the planet. Took 'em long enough.
Did you know that your choice of color when buying a cell phone is indicative of your personality and character traits? No, really, it's totally based on real psychology - it's not just made up. Well, let me be more precise: I'm not just making it up. "World-renowned British Psychologist Dr. Donna Dawson" might just be having a go at you when she describes the exclusive new colors for the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge. These are quotes from an actual Samsung blog post, and not, I assure you, adaptations from a nineteenth century horoscope.
Amazon, cut this crap out. Seriously, I'm getting really sick of it. As someone who pays you for media on a regular basis, to say nothing of my recurring Amazon Prime payments, I feel like I'm more than justified in telling you to stop sabotaging your own damn products.
If you owned a game console at any point in the last thirty years, you've probably at least heard of Konami, Squaresoft, and Enix. If you consider yourself a gamer, you probably know their major franchises by heart. Castlevania. Final Fantasy. Dragon Warrior. Metal Gear. Konami and Square Enix are giants of gaming, at one point standing toe-to-toe with companies like EA and Nintendo, dominating the console landscape and releasing some of the most beloved video games of all time.
Galaxy S6 Edge Owners Reporting Scratched Screens After Using Samsung's First-Party Clear View Cases
Every time Samsung releases a new high-profile phone or tablet, it also makes a bunch of pricey first-party cases to go with it. And why not - they're high-margin accessories that get stocked by the likes of Best Buy and carrier stores, and most of the time they're actually pretty nice. But the first round of official cases for the Galaxy S6 Edge are showing some remarkable problems: they might actually be damaging the gadgets they're designed to protect.
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- By the way, you can grab the APK for HTC Car from APKMirror. It's working fine on my Nexus 6, so it should do as a standard car dock app for most phones. Nice.
At this point in my life, I never actually know where I am at any given moment. I simply trust Google Maps to tell me, and to get me home with its turn-by-turn driving directions. This kind of incredibly reckless lifestyle requires a decent car dock (like this one) and preferably a homescreen that's easy to use without taking your focus off the road. HTC includes just such an app on its One series phones, and now it's available in the Play Store.
If you've been looking to score a high-end Android Wear device on the cheap, head over to Woot's landing page. The main daily deal for today (Thursday) is the Moto 360, refurbished and sporting either black or gray leather strap, for just 9.99. That's a full $120 off of the original retail price, and $35 off of the price that was dropped last month. It's the cheapest round Wear watch available at the moment, and well below the average price for any smartwatch.
The ASUS Padfone form factors have always been incredibly interesting. It's a real shame that by the time they were picked up by a US carrier, the over-the-top modular form factor was toned down to something with a lower price tag and more mass appeal. Even so, if you'd like to check out this unique phone-tablet hardware, there's no better time than the present. An eBay vendor has a refurbished version of the Padfone X mini, complete with its 7-inch tablet dock, on sale for just .99.
Just about a week after Motorola released update notes for the second version of its Moto E budget handset, it looks like the Lollipop 5.1 update is indeed hitting the airwaves. Multiple posters on XDA have alerted their fellow users that the update (version XT1527, if you're wondering) has reached their phones. Thanks to the Moto E's off-contract nature, it should hit users on all carriers at the same time.
Samsung's Active line of phones have been dull but reliable machines for the last few flagship generations, and it looks like they're bringing them back for another round. GSMArena has posted photos of what definitely looks like a Galaxy S6 Active, and we've been able to confirm that this is what the phone will look like (with a very small margin of error) thanks to a secondary source. If you prefer your Samsung phones a bit more rough-and-tumble, this is the 2015 model for you.
For American penny-pinchers who can meter their phone usage to a tiny sliver of voice and data and supplement with Wi-Fi, FreedomPop offers a pretty amazing deal. If you can snag a compatible phone and SIM card, you can get a small amount of service every month for free, gratis, and nothing. The service is now expanding outside of FreedomLand (he said, with only a trace element of irony) and hopping the pond to the United Kingdom.
The G Stylo is an odd beast: its huge screen and built-in stylus imply a competitor to the Galaxy Note series, but a collection of low-end hardware specs means that it's actually intended for bargain hunters or those on a tight budget. If you're looking to get an interesting phone on the equally cheap Boost Mobile MVNO, you've now got the G Stylo as a choice. Boost is selling the phone for 9.99 without a contract.
External batteries don't have to look good. They're big chunks of lithium-polymer wrapped in plastic and USB ports. But there's no reason that they shouldn't! Check out this Aukey 12000mAh battery, for example: nothing special, nothing fancy, just clean lines, a black case, and an obvious purpose. If you squint it kind of looks like an obelisk from 2001. Today Amazon has a coupon that drops the already-reasonable .99 price down to .99 - that's just .15 cents per milliamp-hour!
Some early users of LG's Watch Urbane outside of the US were a bit perplexed when they tried to use the Android Wear device's Wi-Fi syncing feature. Apparently the current software build only enables Wi-Fi channels one through eleven - not coincidentally, the only ones legally accessible to consumer electronics in the United States. A long support thread on Google's Android Wear forum is full of new owners wondering why they can't connect to their local wireless networks.
Space: the final frontier. Wait, no, that's not right - there's no such thing as a "final" frontier, because there's nothing else, so it can't be a frontier to nothing. Let me start again.
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.
Welcome to the latest entry in our Bonus Round series, wherein we tell you all about the new Android games of the day that we couldn't get to during our regular news rounds. Consider this a quick update for the dedicated gamers who can't wait for our bi-weekly roundups, and don't want to wade through a whole day's worth of news just to get their pixelated fix. Today we've got a self-aware jumping game, a unique tile-swapping puzzler, a top-down shooter with interesting ideas, a doubled-up endless runner, and a VR game sans headset. Without further ado:
YouTube Collections are grouped subscriptions, basically playlists of particular channels or feeds, that can be labeled with a single title and viewed in a new playlist. They're handy, but apparently not enough people were making use of them. According to service messages on both the Collections pages on YouTube itself, and on the YouTube help page for the Collections feature, they'll be going away soon.
As the de facto flagship phone for Android (or at least that portion of Android that isn't covered in Samsung logos), the Nexus 6 gets an inordinate amount of attention. That's not always a good thing, especially when the hardware and/or software exhibits major flaws or defects. For example: a considerable number of users are reporting a total failure of their phone's mobile data connection. The problem is occurring on multiple software versions and across different carriers and locations.
In every popular album there always seem to be one or two songs that get the vast majority of attention, no matter the relative quality of the other songs. Google, for whatever reason, has decided to give this phenomenon a bit of visual representation. Head on over to the Google Play Store and click "music" (not the Google Play Music player interface), then pick any of the various albums featured on the front page. You'll see a new column in the track listing, ranking each song in popularity, presumably in relation to the others on the same page.