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Dec

[Quick Hands-On] Comcast Xfinity App Now Live In The Android Market

Posted by Stephen Tenerowicz in Applications, News

Just as promised, Comcast has finally brought their Xfinity application to the Android Market (and it's about time). We haven't spent more than a few minutes with it, but that's enough to provide at least preliminary impressions.

At first glance, the app is very attractive and appears to be pretty functional, including its own Comcast mail client, voicemail inbox, TV listings, and a DVR Manager (which takes up to 24 hours to set up). In addition to this, it contains a listing of all On Demand shows, but no On Demand playback is available at the moment. While fully featured, the TV listings portion of the app is very laggy and slow.

Dec

Lookout Mobile Security Helps Track A Stolen DInc. Oh, And Recover The Car It Was In. And Arrest The Armed Robber

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in News

You have a security app, like Lookout or Theft Aware, on your precious Android device, don't you? I hope you do, as you never know when tracking your handset's whereabouts may lead to not only a successful recovery of the little guy, but also the arrest of the perp who had robbed you a few minutes earlier and took your car with him.

A New Jersey man named Stalin (ironically, he was the victim here) was leaving his home when he was suddenly jumped by a robber, armed with a gun. The robber took Stalin's car and sped away, happily celebrating the easy escape.

Dec

Official Google Reader Android App Now In The Market

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, News

Completely unexpectedly and without much fanfare, Google just dropped its official Google Reader app into the Market. I gave it a quick look and found that it's basically a great interface to the mobile version, lacking any advanced features (such as pre-caching) or settings.

The 3 great things about it are:

Google Reader login integration, which uses your phone's built-in Google auth, after you grant it permission. This means the app never asks for login credentials.
The app syncs everything with the web version very seamlessly.
It's fast and doesn't hang anywhere, unlike gReader.

Now the bad things:

As far as I can tell, there's no pre-caching or any kind of cache control at all.

Nov

Samsung Captivate And Vibrant Finally Get GPS "Fix" Via GPSSamsungRestore App

Posted by Jaroslav Stekl in Apps/Games, AT&T, Captivate, News, Samsung

The Galaxy S phones are, without a doubt, among the best Android phones out there, but for some time now, the handsets have been plagued by one potential showstopper - malfunctioning GPS capabilities. Worry not, though - in addition to an update that rolled out a few months ago, Samsung has developed an app called GPSSamsungRestore which is now available from the Android Market for all users of AT&T's Captivate and T-Mobile's Vibrant. So what does it do? It undoes any modifications to the GPS and basically reverts it to its original state. While it remains to be seen how reverting the GPS to its original, broken state fixes it, I suppose it can't hurt to give it a shot if you're a Captivate or Vibrant owner.

Nov

WakeVoice: Make Your Alarm Intelligent And Enlightening

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Applications, News

Remember that scene in Iron Man where Tony Stark sleeps with the journalist (Christine Everhart), and then in the morning, Jarvis wakes her up by reading the current weather, surf conditions, and so on? Yeah, now your Android device can do that.

_{I was looking for a picture that showed the UI on the glass, but this will do nicely.}

The app is called WakeVoice, and it's a pretty excellent idea - to quote the developer:

... via speech synthesis (tts), your alarm clock will speak to you. It will announce customize message, weather forecast and latest news. Furthermore, due to the enability of voice recognition, you will be able to stop the alarm clock directly from your bed without touching your phone and only by your voice.

Nov

[Review] TeamViewer Lets You Remotely Control Your Friends' Computers, And It Does It Well

Posted by Brad Ganley in App Reviews, Applications, Apps/Games, News, Reviews

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

Yesterday, TeamViewer unleashed its beta app for Android on the world via their website and, boy, let me tell you, it is awesome with a capital "a." Of all the VNC viewers I've used on Android, this is the by far the best. Let's dive in a little bit and I'll show you why.

After you install and run the TeamViewer Android application, you'll be confronted by this screen:

So, at this point, it's fairly obvious you'll need a computer running the desktop software to go any further. In order for your Android device to play nicely with your computer, you'll need the version 6 beta of the desktop client, which you can grab here.

Nov

Full Tilt Poker Rush Mobile, The First Real Money Poker App, Now Available

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, News, Videos

Last Updated: April 14th, 2013

We all knew it was coming - Full Tilt Poker Rush Mobile, the first real money poker game on Android, has finally hit the Android Market, and is available for devices running Froyo, due to the Flash 10.1 requirement. The app still bears a beta sticker, so be careful with those hard earned greens of yours. Obviously, it goes without saying that you should also find a stable connection, preferably WiFi, unless you want to fold every hand you get disconnected from.

Wait a minute, "What is this Rush poker?" you may ask. I'll let FullTiltPoker explain:

This revolutionary new poker format is designed to minimize your wait time between hands and keep you in the action at all times.

Nov

Official Chase Mobile Android App With Online Check Deposits Hits The Market [Hands-On]

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, News

Chase, a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase, today released its official and long-awaited mobile banking app for Android. Since I am a Chase customer with 3 credit cards and a checking account (migrated from WaMu), I decided to take it out for a quick spin.

The Chase app features the following:

instant check deposits by taking photos of the front and back with your phone's camera - it's not the first bank to do this, but it was certainly the #1 wanted feature on my list
viewing account balances and transaction histories
paying bills using Chase bill pay
paying credit card balances
money transfers, including both account-to-account and wire transfers
ATM/branch finder

The app is very secure - it requires your password every time you sign on and does not store it anywhere.

Nov

Remember The Milk Updated To v1.4, Adds Push Syncing Support

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, News

Remember The Milk is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful task management solutions on the market, and its Android app is pure awesomeness. It is extremely polished, and I rely on it reminding me about my tasks, including various Android Police business, every day.

One feature that the RTM app has been lacking is push syncing support, instead making us select a potentially battery-killing polling interval (mine was set to every hour). As I've found out from my own observations, frequent sync is really devastating to the battery life, and should be avoided as much as possible. To address that, today that the company released an update version 1.4 of the Android client, codenamed "Rachael," which introduced what they've described as the "magical push syncing awesomeness," among other things.

Nov

Audiogalaxy Vs Subsonic - Fight! What's Your Favorite Android Music Streaming App? [Reviews, Poll]

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in App Reviews, Applications, Reviews

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

In our last week's poll, we asked you your thoughts on the best overall Android music player, and over 1500 of you responded, clearly putting PowerAMP ahead of the competition, followed by Winamp. PowerAMP released the full version shortly after and still occupies the #1 spot for playing local music in my book.

However, rightfully so, some of you noted that there are some players out there specializing on remote media streaming, and by that I don't mean Shoutcast streams - I mean streaming your own music collections. Google's music service may one day supposedly join the party, as we saw demoed at Google I/O earlier this year, but right now, that solution does not yet exist.