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 27 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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April 25, 2013 By 13 Comments

HTC One update improves camera performance

htc one upgradeHTC has confirmed that an update has begun rolling out for the international HTC One (that’s the one available from Clove), which brings a range of enhancements to the UltraPixel camera.

The update is due to roll out gradually over the next week or so. It not only improves the camera and HTC Zoe, but also brings improved system performance and stability, plus an overall speed increase.

The following are the improvements announced by HTC:

  • Improvement to sound capture with Zoe
  • Noise reduction in slow motion movie capture
  • Improved colour reproduction and dynamic range (reduced over-exposure in non-HDR images) in certain conditions
  • Fix to display correct ISO in EXIF information when ISO settings are manually changed by the user
  • Improved system performance and stability
April 15, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Chat Heads can be used without Facebook Home

Facebook Home has now launched and is available for select devices from the Play Store. There are also modified versions available to download from outside the Play Store so that it can run on any device, although performance from these may not be perfect.

If you are unable to run Facebook home or should you choose not to, you can still make use of one of its most talked about features – Chat Heads. Whether or not you have Facebook Home installed, Chat Heads is available in the updated version of Facebook Messenger, which we recently posted about here. 

I won’t go into detail about Chat Heads as we recently covered it thoroughly in our Facebook Home preview, but having tested it over the weekend it is a nice app and runs smoothly.

To make use of the feature, you need to install the available update for both the Facebook and Facebook Messenger app. In Messenger if you then go to settings > notifications, there is an option to turn Chat Heads on. Once you do this, the Chat Heads for your contacts will pop up when you next receive a message. Within the same settings menu, you can also choose to use Messenger as your default SMS app, which is quite a nice feature.

Chat Heads doesn’t add an awful lot in terms of functionality, but it does make it slightly easier to read and respond to messages quickly. Usually when opening a message from the notification bar you need to switch apps, but Chat Heads essentially puts a new layer over the app that you are using and can then be easily minimised.

I should mention that I experienced some adverse battery performance on one of the days using Chat Heads, but at this stage it’s too early to say whether it’s an ongoing problem. The Facebook Home app does not provide system notifications when running on anything other than the HTC First at present, so at least people can make use of Chat Heads if nothing else.

Facebook has created an impressive messaging platform with its Messenger app and it will be interesting to see how it progresses, especially with Google due to make a big announcement about its own offering at Google I/O in May.

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April 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment

HTC One: How to use Sync Manager

In previous demo videos, HTC showed how to transfer files from an old Android or from an iPhone to the HTC One using Sync Manager. This next video looks at HTC Sync manager in a bit more detail and shows how to transfer various file types between your handset and computer. 

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April 10, 2013 By 4 Comments

Android devices can now be easily tethered with Mac OS X via USB

Tether your Android smartphone to Mac via USB

This isn’t breaking news, but it didn’t seem to gain all that much attention when it first surfaced towards the end of last year and having had to recently make use of it myself, thought I’d share it for others that may be interested.

For a long time tethering an Android device to a Mac using USB tethering has not been a simple process. This isn’t a huge problem as there’s the option of tethering by Wi-Fi, but this isn’t always ideal and a connection by USB can often be more reliable.

Thanks to a new driver released by Joshua Wise (available to download here) called HoRNDIS (pronounced horrendous), USB tethering between Android devices and Mac OS X is now simple. 

The driver works with OS X versions 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) through to 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion). It’s been tested on a wide variety of devices and was developed using a Galaxy Nexus. I have been using it with a Nexus 4 and OS X 10.8.3 without issue. However installing such third party software is of course carried out at your own risk. 

Installation instructions 

  • Download and install the latest HoRNDIS driver, following the on-screen setup instructions
  • Make sure you have your mobile internet data switched on
  • Connect your Android smartphone to your Mac vis USB
  • On your phone go to Settings > More (to get to the expanded menu for ‘Wireless and networks’) > Tethering & portable hotspot
  • Click the USB tethering box and you’ll see an icon in the notification bar to say that tethering is active
  • You should now be able to use your phones mobile connection for internet on your Mac. You may need to disable Wi-Fi on your Mac and select the device as the connection source under network preferences. 
Tether Android Mac

 

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April 10, 2013 By 2 Comments

HTC One: How to use the IR control and TV guide

HTC has been releasing a range of demo content for its HTC One handset and it’s now added instructions for using the IR remote control, which can be used to control your television set. There’s also a run through of using the Sense TV Guide, which lets you add channels from your subscription package and select our favourite shows. 

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April 5, 2013 By 4 Comments

Supercharge your Pocket usage with Android, Chrome and IFTTT

Pocket tips and tricks

Pocket is one of my favourite Android apps. It’s cross-platform for mobile, has extensions for several web browsers and also has a desktop app for Mac. It’s free, so if you haven’t tried it yet it’s certainly worth doing so.

Pocket Android App

In its most basic form, Pocket is an app that lets you save content for reading later, either offline or online. However, there are several other great uses for it that are simple to set up. In this article I’ll mainly look at ways to improve your Pocket experience using with Chrome and Android, but also include some tips that are applicable to all Pocket users.

Pocket for Android

Thanks to Android’s sharing intents, adding items to Pocket from any browser is simple. The developers of Pocket have been clever in naming the sharing intent as ‘Add to Pocket’, causing it to appear at the top of the list when using the stock sharing options.This is great, but using Dolphin Browser can make the process even more efficient.

Dolphin Browser has many extensions that can be installed for it. Once installed, these extensions can be accessed with a swipe inwards from the right-hand-side of the screen. I find it much quicker to swipe to the right in Dolphin and tap the Pocket extension than going to Share > Add to Pocket in other browsers. The other nice thing about the Dolphin extension is that it lets you immediately add tags to saved items. This isn’t possible with the standard sharing intent, which means you either need to switch to the Pocket app to add a tag, or do it at a later date (and possibly forget).

It’s not worth switching to Dolphin purely for this feature unless you’re a Pocket power user, but certainly something worth considering when you’re picking a web browser for Android.

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