Archive

It's the holidays, and if your Android smartphone is feeling a bit neglected, I've got the perfect gift for it. Forget automating your life with remote-controlled garage door openers, motorized big-screen TV mounts, and electrically driven drapes -- that's all so last-century. Controlling your phone...

iMap Weather Radio from Weather Decision Technologies may be the first Android app- style weather-warning push product that accurately parses public safety announcements. It delivers timely alerts only to those within a geo warning box, rather than to everyone within a broad-brush area. I've been l...

I've gone a bit mad for smartphone GPS and everything that goes with it, including back country topo maps, tablet mounts and in-car mode screen assistant widgets. If you've been reading some of my TechNewsWorld and LinuxInsider columns lately, you already know that. I've also been kitting out my ph...

Developer Alex Gavrishev's free, widget-oriented app lets you assign home screens specifically to be used in the car, and it lets you create large, easy-to-punch buttons for six shortcuts per screen. The buttons render well at tablet-strength high resolutions, unlike other car apps I've tried. One ...

Minimal signal bars? In the middle of nowhere? Your phone should automatically roam onto alternative networks designated by carrier roaming agreements, but sometimes it doesn't -- the phone can appear biased towards your home network. I've been looking at Roam Control, an Android app -- not avail...

Consider how far we have come as a communications-driven society since the days of the messenger pigeon and telegraph. It's about 150 years since the Pony Express rode in the West. From horses to microwave, one of life's mysteries is that battery technology is still dead-ending us. Portable power c...

Privileged control of your smartphone is one of the killer features of the Android operating system. This control, known as "root access," allows users to remove manufacturer and mobile operator hardware and software limits to takeover the device. I've written about competitor ClockworkMod's ROM M...

If you've ever been frustrated by the inaccuracy of a television weather report, in particular the graphics, there's always been a way out -- you could go to the National Weather Service website and look at the online radar images pulled straight off the actual radar. If you're fishing, hiking or wo...

Some of my earliest memories of smartphones are of the hassles involved with getting bookmarks loaded across devices. Why was it that Web properties thought -- and some still think -- you needed different information at your desk from what you wanted on the road? The issue has never been properly a...

Want to launch a music app when you plug in your headphones, or wake up to a specific app? You can do things like this with sets of automated routines that you program via the Tasker app. Crafty's Tasker app automates settings on Android devices and lets you micro-manage them. Does this level of in-...

With the preponderance of data quotas imposed by telcos on mobile phone usage and the rapid introduction of data-hogging apps -- in particular, those related to TV and music -- it may well be time to investigate counters. Counters let you see how much data you're using, and warn you of potential ove...

Spritefish's Fast Burst Camera may be just the app for sports photography. I've reviewed camera apps for Android OS before, and I've been particularly fond of Vignette, with its 76 customizable photo effects including infrared. That app is superior to market leader Instagram. I'm now raving about C...

If you're a regular reader of this column, you may remember that I recently took a look at Cloud TV's HD Widgets, an app for creating your own elegant, translucent widgets to replace ugly stock widgets that appear to permeate today's Android phones -- Motorola, I'm referring to you mainly. I've had ...

I picked a beautiful day to road-test Earth's WeatherBug Elite app. It was a late-summer day on which the National Weather Service had just issued a Red Flag fire weather warning for my brush-fire-prone, tinder-dry neighborhood. Android weather app WeatherBug provides a set of current conditions, fo...

With ubiquitous Google Maps installed as standard on smartphone OS market leader Android's devices, why anyone would need anything else? Well, the principal benefit of an app like BackCountry Navigator Pro GPS is that it provides offline access to topographic maps, which represent terrain using grap...