May 15, 2013 By Leave a Comment

‘Amber’ update to bring Smart Camera and FM Radio to Lumia handsets in July

Lumia Amber update coming in July

Alongside its announcement of the Nokia Lumia 925 yesterday, Nokia has stated that its ‘Amber’ update will bring the 925′s Smart Camera feature to existing Lumia handsets. The Amber update will be rolled out to all Windows Phone 8 devices, but not Windows Phone 7.5 or 7.8 handsets.

The Amber update will also bring FM Radio functionality to all existing WP8 Lumias apart from the Lumia 620, which does not have the required chip. Lumias 820 and 920 will also have ‘double tap to wake’ added to their feature sets. Nokia has said that more features will be confirmed for the Amber update, which is due to begin rolling out in July, closer to its release.

Due to differences in processing power between various Lumia handsets, the Smart Camera features will vary between different devices. It has not yet been confirmed which functions individual handsets will receive.

Smart Camera Action Shot

Action Shot

Smart Camera

On the Lumia 925, 920 and 820 Smart Camera takes a burst of ten shots with a 5MP resolution, whereas the 520, 620 and 720 will take seven shots with a 1MP resolution. The shots are then stored on your Lumia until you are ready to apply some visual effects to them, which include:

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May 15, 2013 By 2 Comments

A word of warning for Saudi Residents

This post cropped up a couple of days ago which acts specifically as a warning to residents of Saudi Arabia, but is also a reminder as to the vulnerabilities of web-based services and in particular, messaging apps.

Software developer Moxie Marlinspike has posted on his Thought Crime blog to say that he has been approached by the Saudi  Telecoms company Mobily about a surveillance project that they are currently working on.

mobily saudi arabia

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May 15, 2013 By 2 Comments

Android phone screen sharing app–share your phone screen with your PC

Sometimes in life you do not realise how useful something is until you actually use something.  The following is one such example.

If you are like me, it is quite possible that you spend most of your day working at your desk with your phone sat beside you.

If you get a text message or want to view your phone content, you stop what you are doing on your PC and jump to the phone.

How about not touching the phone and doing everything from the desktop?!

You could be writing a word document on the PC, get a text message, just jump to the phone screen (on your computer), view and reply to the text message using you computer keyboard and mouse.

How about taking a screenshot of your device, or recording a video comprising of a number of actions on screen all from the desktop computer.  Makes life very simple wouldn’t you say?

 

The recent announcement of Samsung SideSync (more info HERE) allowed this as well as the ability to share content such as text between the PC and the Phone. The problem with this is that it works currently on selected Samsung computers.

However there is a similar and almost as powerful workaround that will work on a wider range of computers and smartphones….image

Xdadeveloper member mcallisaya has managed to allow smartphone users to share their phone screen on their PC with just a few simple steps

What you need to do is:

  1. Download the ‘Phone Screen Sharing’ app for the PC HERE
  2. Download and install onto your smartphone the ‘Phone Screen Sharing’ .apk file found HERE
  3. Run the ‘Phone Screen Sharing’ app on your smartphone and agree to the terms and conditions for the app.
  4. Connect the Smartphone using an original USB cable, and don´t use any USB hubs in the process.
  5. Enable USB debugging mode on your smarthphone.
  6. Start the ‘Phone Screen Sharing’ app installed in step 1 on your PC and let it complete any updates.
  7. Click “Next” on the Phone-window on your PC.
  8. Confirm any necessary notifications on the smartphone screen.
  9. If all is OK, then you will have the screen connected and you can use your mouse, keyboard and copy files from/to your smartphone.

Once connected you can take screenshots, record video and view the contents of the phone on your PC screen as well as share files from the desktop to the PC to the phone and vies versa.  The only things I could not do is copy text from the PC direct to the phone.

I tested a Samsung Galaxy S4 and a HTC One X on a Windows 7 computer, both worked straight away without issue.

See the following video that shows us navigating around the screen of the HTC One and then the Samsung S4. The video was recorded from the PC whilst controlling the phone on the PC.

I am sure you will agree this is a potentially powerful setup.  Especially if you review devices or need to record videos of how to do things on phones.  It could even be a sneaky way of doing things on your phone without your boss noticing!

You can find full information and more detailed discussion HERE at xdadevelopers from which this opportunity was created.

image

PLEASE NOTE: Clove Technology take no responsibility for compatibility or this working in every situation.  You may refer to the original positing on xdadevelopers for more information and detailed discussion.  Full credit to xdadeveloper member mcallisaya.

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May 8, 2013 By 2 Comments

Samsung Galaxy S4 Miracast Demo with Netgear PTV3000 Push2TV Adaptor

The NetGear PTV3000 Push2TV adaptor is a Miracast dongle that will work with any Miracast-enabled handset, which by now is quite a few different phones.

In the video below, Youtube user veryannoyingname shows the PTV3000 being used seamlessly with the Samsung Galaxy S4.

We are expecting stock of the PTV3000 to arrive at Clove within the next few weeks, having initially expected stock to arrive in April. We’ll provide an update as soon as it’s in stock.

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May 7, 2013 By 1 Comment

BlackBerry Q10: Battery Life

How good is the BlackBerry Q10 Battery Life?

BlackBerry Q10

According to BlackBerry, the Q10 should last up to two days without a charge and a good level of usage. It’s got a larger battery than BlackBerry’s touchscreen flagship, the Z10, plus it’s dark theme will help to conserve juice thanks to the AMOLED display.

Naturally the Q10 will have better battery life than other market leaders with their 5″ screens, but if a long lasting battery and improved productivity are more important to you than a big display, the Q10 is a worthwhile consideration. Of course, if you want even more battery than what the Q10 offers out of the box, there’s always the Q10 battery charging bundle available.

Let’s have a look at what some reviews have had to say about the battery life of the Q10′s 2100mAh battery:

CrackBerry

There’s no doubt in saying that CrackBerry were more than impressed with the Q10′s performance, calling its battery life ‘the best ever on a BlackBerry’. Here’s a few more lines on their initial thoughts:

“The Q10 battery comes in at 2100 mAh – that’s 16% bigger than 1800 mAh Z10 battery and over 70% bigger than the 1230 mAh battery of the Bold 9900. With the smaller screen size, dark theme option and other tweaks in the Q10 OS, we expect the battery life to be more than sufficient for both average and power users alike.

While we’ve been able to put the Q10 through the paces for this review, we haven’t had the chance to knock out a “real world” test of the battery just yet. What we can say is that the battery life here is awesome. Even with our constant use of the Q10, the battery has held up strong and made us proud.”

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May 7, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Disable S Voice on your Galaxy S4 to speed up the home button

Samsung Galaxy S4 Pros

Samsung’s S Voice feature has improved considerably since its initial release, but if you’re still not a regular user of the feature it’s worth disabling it to get improved performance from your handset.

Going by the default settings of TouchWiz, S Voice is activated when you double tap the home key. This means that when you press the home key once, there is a short pause while the handset waits to see if a second tap is registered to activate S Voice. If you’re not using S Voice all that much, you may wish to disable the double tap feature to remove the lag.

To do this, load S Voice and go to menu > settings > open via the home key.

If you don’t want to disable S Voice but still want to speed up the home button, you could use gesture controls to launch the app instead. These are included within some launchers or can be configured with other apps, such as Trigger.

S Voice runs on Samsung’s Android handsets that have been updated to Jelly Bean, so you should be able to make the tweak on the Samsung Galaxy S2/S3/S4 and both the Galaxy Note and Galaxy Note 2.

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May 1, 2013 By 2 Comments

Five Great Extensions for Gmail

Gmail

Despite the impressive features that Google provides within its Gmail service, there’s still room for improvement via third-party add-ons and extensions. Some of these are only available for desktop but we are now starting to see a bit more of a crossover between the desktop and Android apps. Here are some of my favourite extensions for Gmail – let us know in the comments if there are any others you think are worthy of mention.

Boomerang

Boomerang is a very handy tool that adds some simple yet highly effective features to Gmail. Users may schedule emails to be sent at a later date (e.g. first thing Monday rather than last thing Friday), or ‘Boomerang’ an email so that a reminder is provided if you haven’t received a response within a set time period. There is a free tier that gives you 10 message credits per month, otherwise the service costs $4.99 per month for the personal tariff or $14.99 for the business tariff.

HelloSign

HelloSign provides legally binding signatures in a digital format. This is a paid service for business, and free for personal accounts. Once you’ve scanned in your signature there is no need to print, sign and scan documents again. The service can be completed from your desktop or smartphone and can be synced with various cloud services.

Having to sign something manually is partly a precautionary measure against fraud, so it may be best to have your account secured with two factor authentication if you are going to use it. However, HelloSign does have a good level of security to protect against the inherent problems of eSignatures.

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April 28, 2013 By 24 Comments

SGS4 only has 9.5GB user-accessible internal storage

It’s commonplace for Android handsets to have a reasonable chunk of their internal storage taken up by system files and pre-loaded apps. Typically we tend to see around 11-12GB of storage available to the user on a 16GB handset. However, recent handsets such as the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 seem to be taking up even more storage space with install files.

Droid Matters reports that its Samsung Galaxy S4 review device (from Sprint) has 9.62GB internal storage available out of the box, while Geek.com says its device has an even lower 8.82GB (carrier not specified). Different carriers load different bloatware onto devices, but the reality is that of the 16GB advertised internal storage, the SGS4 will have up to 9.62GB. Even then, performance tends to deteriorate slightly when the internal storage capacity is close to full, so you wouldn’t get the full 9.62GB either.

SGS4 internal storage

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April 27, 2013 By Leave a Comment

BlackBerry Q10 help guides & demo videos

BlackBerry has released a series of demo videos for the forthcoming BlackBerry Q10, which we are expecting to arrive into stock next week. These are available over on the BlackBerry Q10 support page, as well as BlackBerry’s YouTube channel. We’ve included a couple of videos below BlackBerry Hub and the new Time Shift feature, which both look very impressive.

BlackBerry Q10 Help

There are also some written Q10 how to guides available here, which include instructions for using gestures, messages, maps, security, software features and all other aspects of the Q10.

Other support pages that new owners or prospective buyers may find useful include BlackBerry Q10 Basics, BlackBerry Q10 welcome and BlackBerry Q10 Setting up.

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April 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Sony Xperia P and Sony Xperia Go Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean update rolling out

The Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean updates has begun rolling out for the Sony Xperia P and Sony Xperia Go. This will bring considerable improvement to performance for the two devices – Project Butter is included with Jelly Bean which makes the Android interface run much quicker.

The Xperia P and Xperia Go are midrange handsets, but make a much more attractive proposition to would-be buyers now that they run Jelly Bean. Clove is currently offering a free 60 day trial of Son’y Music Unlimited service with the Xperia Go, which rivals Spotify with the large catalogue that it offers. 

The Sony Xperia Go is one of the first IP67 rated handsets to be updated to Jelly Bean, you can see a video of it being put through its paces below. 

Via XperiaBlog

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