Mobile gadgets running Blackberry & Android OS'
Posts tagged Apps reviews
So my BlackBerry has data & voice-calls counters after all! Sorta…
0685 days
I’ve always been gutted that I can’t see how much voice minutes or data I’ve been consuming every month on my BlackBerry. For the voice part, I’ve been relying on my operator: it offered this service for free from the beginning and while, for a few years, the service wasn’t very exact ( a large number of subscribers used it almost daily in order to verify the authenticity of the initial reading) . But for more than 4-5 years now it’s quite OK and the readings are almost real-time. So it’s a good thing: I don’t have to install an application for that and I don’t have to keep it runnin’ in the background in order to know how much data I “eat”.
I can understand RIM’s reticence when it comes to implement a data counter: it’s not easy to see your customers are cutting-down on surfing the web when they see they consume tens of MBs daily because they stream music & video (an area at which BB sucks anyway). There is always the “unlimited data plan” with an asterisk – they might shut-down your data pipe as soon as you hit 200 MB.
I thought I found a way last year: the perfect data counter! I loved it. I used it with the Bold 9000 and if you read the review I hope you’ll use it too – it’s a very nice, simple and UI-clean application. I don’t use it anymore and not because it wasn’t good, but because I have a truly unlimited data-plan and because I wanna keep my RAM as free as possible.
Today I was surfing Crackberry as I sometimes do and I read this and thought: this guy has to have an IT policy on his girlfriend’s phone and that’s the reason he can’t run that app. Which was correct. A thing he also found out after countless call on his operator and reading pages throughly over the net. But he also found out that by going to Options/Status and typing ” BUYR ” (except for the “”, of course) you can find out if your smartphone and an IT policy in place or not. Mine doesn’t have one. And what else?
Data and call counters! Yes. Primitive, one-line counters but they’re there. And they’re kinda general. Why? Probably for the reason above: RIM doesn’t care although the feature’s been requested by a lot of people for YEARS! And if you know something about programing, you know that it might take a programmer a few days to come-up with a nifty solution. Or maybe a “dumbphone” solution: in – calls, out – calls, total counter, reset options and maybe, just maybe a date-set automatic reset.
Back to the counters: if you know about this trick and you have a new phone you can always write down the data when your subscription resets in order to find out roughly how much time you spent on the phone talking every month. With the data counter is a bit tricky, as it only tells you exactly how much data you ate until it reaches 1 GB, then good luck and good riddance.You can hit 1 GB in less than 2 weeks if you stream and watch YouTube…which luckily I don’t because Blackberry sucks at compressing videos.
But having those “one-liners” tells us the system needs those internal “applications” in order to function properly and so would we.
PS: Looks like a lot of people knew that particular code above; why wasn’t I aware of that? Well, maybe it’s because they only wrote about in forums and those aren’t claiming too high in ranks on Google.
How To: Check Your Internet Speed on Your Android Phone
0697 days
Out of curiosity last night I wanted to see what’s the difference in speed between my Wi-Fi fiber cable connection I have at home and my GSM provider – a new provider with its new 3G data solution.
The program used on my Android Pulse is the new SpeedTest.com‘s Android application so many people are so fond of. I have to admit there is no point in checking my Internet speed unless it’s not performing up to the tasks at hand: streaming radio or video, reading web pages or downloading podcasts. I am not a speed freak and I don’t usually stream. But I just got BeyondPod to satisfy my “podcatching” needs, but that’s another story!
As you can imagine, the pictures 2 and 3 represent the 3G network speed, the others are the results of Wi-Fi tests. Yeah, we’re still a long way to go. Or the provider is. The program is self-explanatory, has only for tabs and you only have to fine-tune it in order to get your result quickly. The test takes around 10-15 seconds and I reckon the download packets are no more than a few hundred kbps. You can also chose which server to use in order to have an accurate test.
You can get the application in the Market using the Barcode Scanner.
How To: Back-Up Your Data From Your Blackberry
1706 days
Most of the BlackBerry users are not your “average Joe” when it comes to using a phone. A smartphone. Thus it’s important to recognize and fulfill the need of these users of backing-up data. I’ve seen many people complaining about loss of data when their phones died or got stolen or fell into the tub (yeah, we take our BlackBerrys with us almost all the time!).
This issue has been addressed by many, including R.I.M. I won’t go into detail too much when it comes to Desktop Manager. Everybody employing a BlackBerry knows it. It can stay like this for a long time when you open it, finally connect, back-up everything by going to Backup and Restore/Backup/Options or by going to Backup and Restore/Advanced for a selective backup.
The disadvantage is that you can’t just put your messages or calendar entries back without overriding all your system (apps, settings), when sometimes you just want to restore some messages. Another issue I ran into was coming from a Bold 9000 (1GB internal memory) to Bold 9700 (256 MB internal memory): I couldn’t restore anything previously backed up because the internal memory was too small.
I backup every couple of months but as a last resort.
Another program good at backing-up is Best Buy’s m:iQ Live. Available for all kinds of smartphones, it will backup most of your usual stuff: images, videos, contacts, calendar entries, messages and call logs. You can share them, access them on the web and restore all when you’re in trouble or you have a new phone. Multi-platform is a great advantage as you’re not tied to a particular OS and you can switch. You install the application especially designed for BlackBerry on the phone and backup in minutes. It doesn’t have to be automatic and it doesn’t have to run constantly in the background. It can be used from time to time when necessary. It also has a neat “status update” feature, so others can see it when visiting your section.
There here comes good – ole Google with Google Sync. It’s a broader solution, as it includes all kinds on syncs including contacts by Gmail, calendar entries by Google Calendar, news by Google Reader, pictures by Picasa, videos by YouTube and tasks by Google Tasks. Of course, not all are available for BlackBerry through a dedicated client but contacts and calendar entries are more than enough for me. Both contacts and calendar entries will be auto synchronized every three hours, unless you chose to do it manually (at least for the contacts). I keep the calendar entries on automatic sync because I use it a lot (and modify data a lot), while the contacts are synced once at the beginning. In time, I could try another sync every few months especially because Gmail has a tool of finding and merging the duplicates, thus allowing me to keep the hundreds of names under control. The application itself is self-explanatory, tiny, can be installed Over The Air (OTA) and works automatically.
Of course there are other backup solutions but these are the ones I use and never had an issue with. This combo-solution is the perfect opportunity to backup and keep it simple. And not pay extra for it, of course.
Twitter application by R.I.M – a follow-up
0721 days
As of Thursday, I used the new Twitter application by R.I.M. For 2 days I had the occasion of using every bit of it and make an idea regarding this early version.
Let’s not forget that since being announced by the early adopters lucky enough to be provided with a copy ( by R.I.M, by Crackberry and other sites/developers hand-picked by R.I.M) lots and lots of tweets and blog articles have popped-up over the Internet driving the people in search of a leak which appeared promptly. Of course, you can never tell if this was done on purpose by R.I.M in order to get as much feedback as possible, or that the BlackBerry community is really, really powerful and we’re benefiting from that.
I downloaded this leak and except for the fact that it will expire on March 31st, it’s THE Beta used by everyone. So, what are the PROs and CONs of THIS build ( it’s important to highlight this as many, many users are disappointed and complaining about quality, U.I, bugs, lags, etc):
PROS:
- its very existence; R.I.M is committed to offer best quality applications to their customers and is not relying solely on its developers.
- the application is built in order to offer as much functionality as possible, that’s why at this moment it does seem a bit overloaded with features
- the notification system is great, allowing one to close the application once it’s done with it. You can launch it, read the tweets by going to your time-line, replies, DMs, profile & search functions and then close it down. It will notify you with a little “t” in the notification bar on the home-screen and integrate the messages in the BlackBerry Messages Application.
- upon opening the DMs, they will be marked with a little check, so you won’t have to comeback to them again.
- the ability to send links from the BlackBerry browser to Twitter in one click AND the fact that this function is integrated with the browser menu options.
- upon choosing automatic refresh, when in foreground the application won’t just unload the new tweets into the time-line causing the fast auto-scrolling of previous tweets, but producing a small notification bar on top of the tweet one’s just reading and announces “new tweets available”.
- after running it for two days I didn’t observe and RAM or battery leaks.
- scrolling 20 tweets is fast and the loading time for the new ones (on WiFi and 3G) is 3 to 4 seconds; it’s OK.
- being a native app, one can change font/size by going to Options/Screen-Keyboard.
- sports a “conversation” feature allowing you to see your exchange of replies with someone else.
- includes the native shortcuts we’re all used to : “T” for “top”, “B” for “bottom”, “R” for “replies”. There are some more waiting to be discovered.
CONS:
- buggy, no caching so every time you go from one tab to the other it’ll lose time and data reloading everything
- upon exiting the application or even put it in the background, it will slow down the system causing unresponsiveness for more than 15 seconds at times.
- the Retweet function won’t work. There is a workaround by going to “Send To”, choosing “Twitter”, then “Tweet” and then finally editing and sending the tweet. Tiresome.
- OR if it’s true what some users are saying, the RT function does work but you can’t see your own RT (as in the official RT version), while others do. By logging in your web account, you can find your RTed tweet. So is this a feature?
- no separate notifications for Replies and DMs as we were spoiled by all the others developers of BlackBerry Twitter applications.
- this trial will end March, 31st. I inquired by sending a public reply to @BlackBerry and I got a DM saying they can’t comment on how or why is going to end, but that I should definitely watch them. It’s probably going to be another build and we’ll get to be Beta-testers again? We’ll see.
- lack of push notification. I guess in this kind of application push is not feasible having lots and lots of updates to pull.
- OR when closing the application it will start pushing the new tweets. It might also run in the background and not able to see it – there are some application behaving like this.
- support for tweeting a picture from the Media Gallery would be nice.
Piece of advice: to disable the Twitter application, go to its menu and log off! Yes, a lot of people don’t know how to do it!
Rooting&customizing the Pulse was a long time coming
0726 days
My Android adventure took me on the untested trails of phone hacking. Being afraid I lost my touch (no need for hacking in BlackBerry), I attempted to put a custom ROM on the Pulse, a thing that ate 3 days of my life and was accomplished only partially due to the fact that this smart-phone model is very rare.
By the time I got fed up with it, I did put the Modaco Custom ROM -Stock T-Mobile Style by Paul O’Brien but wasn’t able to put Apps2SD, an application allowing you to install and run all your apps from the SD card – the Pulse is notorious for its limited memory (around 86 MB).
And all of those for what? For ShootMe, an application designed to take scree-shots of…well,the screen! And because of that, in Android you need to take the high-road and master the art of hacking, modifying and customizing your phone!
Here, enjoy along with me this wonderful screen-grab!
BeWeather versus WeatherEye V. 2 Beta
2741 days
Ever since the IPhone emerged and HTC started making beautiful widgets for the weather apps, people started wanting these things. Weather applications are today quite important and appear often in the Best Selling Applications Top 10 . They became more and more complex and the clients are always asking for more.
I used Weather Eye V. 1 for a few months with my last Bold, the 9000. It was OK, but only that. Because the design was quite blunt, most of the forecasts were not working and the other features were useless for me. They still are in whatever weather application I might use. I am the kind of customer I use the weather application to see what’s outside in the morning and how’s gonna be the weather in the next 2 days. I can always check-back tomorrow for the next days’ forecast.
It seems like the guys at Bellshare knew better and developed a wicked weather application for Blackberry. It’s called BerryWeather and it’s number 1 in sales on almost all the specialized websites. Currently, they’re having an open Beta for the 2.1 version and people are flocking to try this one out. Unfortunately, the Beta lasts for 3 days only and this is a drawback; sometimes you need a bit more time to figure out what are features are important and which ones will you use. Except for that, the 2.0 brings a lot of features (as they appear on Bellshare’ site):
Features
- NO SUBSCRIPTION!
- Current conditions including “Feels like” temperature, wind, pressure, dew point, humidity.
- 7-day forecast with high/low temperature and precipitation probability
- 24-hour forecast with temperature, precipitation probability, wind and humidity
- Easily switch between 7 different views (Today, Today with Daily Forecast, Today with Hourly Forecast, Full Daily Forecast, Full Hourly Forecast, Compact Daily Forecast, Compact Hourly Forecast)
- ANIMATED RADAR MAPS (for US Locations only, add custom radar maps and webcams for any location)
- Track your location via GPS/CELL TOWER LOCATION so you always know the weather where you are. (Cell location for GSM devices only. GPS does not work for non-Storm devices on Verizon due to carrier restrictions)
- Sunrise/Sunset times and moon phase
- Weather advisory notifications
- Customizable homescreen icon showing current conditions
- Customizable homescreen wallpaper showing current conditions (OS 4.7 and higher)
- Support for different themes (Widgets, Simple and Simple Dark)
- Customizable background wallpaper
- Customizable font size
- Customizable icon size
- Multiple icon set
New in Version 2.0!
- Weather Data:
- New weather source: WeatherUnderground
- Get more accurate current conditions by switching to a nearby weather stations for any location - Visual:
- New high resolution iconset
- See your current weather as a homescreen wallpaper, includes many customization options (OS 4.7 and higher)
- Full support for OS 5.0 screen transitions - Weather Advisories:
- Get notifications only for specific advisories
- Support for BerryPopup, get a popup with advisory details in any app - Radar Maps/Webcams
- Now you can use multiple custom radar maps/webcams
- Pinch-to-zoom radar maps on any touchscreen BlackBerry
And the new Beta:
New Features/Bug Fixes in 2.1
- Complete rework of the core. BerryWeather will now fully close the UI when sent to background. The homescreen wallpaper and icon will keep updating. Unloading the UI should save a lot of memory and avoid many potential memory leaks.
- Major rework of internal data storage. Only basic location data will be persisted across reboots. Other data is automatically reloaded approx 60s after reboot or when BerryWeather UI is opened
- Using new server protocol to improve update speeds and minimize CPU load
- Changed forecast/advisory update settings. New option ‘With Forecast’ for advisory will update advisories whenever forecasts are updated, ‘Never’ will never update advisories
- Added data+settings backup to memory card
- Added support for setting the icon size on homescreen wallpaper
- Added support for blacking out the settings screen (on by default)
- Added support for selecting whether to show radar/webcam links in internal viewer or browser (allows adding mp3/video/html links)
- Fixed lag on image browser for background image selection
- Fixed lag issues on BlackBerry Tour (and other devices)
- Fixed several potential memory leaks
- Fixed errors on first time built-in map loading
Impressive? From a tech point of view, yes. From (my) consumer point of view, no. But I am not your average weather-application client. People use most of these features. See the link for the open Beta, they really do chip in on customer experience and feature usability!
The main impact, the make/break point (or one of the most important!) comes from the price: 9.95$. In a world in which applications usually cost 3$, the BlackBerry users have to break the piggy-bank in order to have the same quality applications. I intentionally leave all the features and fixes above, so one can see why this application costs almost 10$ . In the end it’s up on the consumer to pay or not. Because if the consumer doesn’t pay, there’s a free version also called BeWeather.
. .
It offers a glimpse of what BerryWeather is like, and I have to say it’s really, really great that they are able to offer basic functionality for free. Yes, you can’t update you weather every 15 minutes (it’ll drain your battery and eat a portion of your plan), you can’t get typhoon alarms (who needs it?) and you can’t have the weather of more than 3 cities at the same time (yeah, right, like I can’t switch it to another location when I get there!). But it works! And it works great! Nice, high resolution icon on the home-screen, highly customizable (yes, even in the free version!) and especially important it is very accurate! Even in Romania which is not very well represented in weather applications, like you’ll see in the next one. There is no lag, no failed updates and home-screen-icon updates as it should (so it WAS an OS 5.0 bug!).
I always like competition. WeatherEye V.2 has just finished Beta and the final version just became available. It’s a big improvement over the first version like:
- New WeatherEye design
- Wi-Fi Connectivity
- Ability to add multiple cities
- Radar maps
- Hourly forecast
- GPS locator
The TWN team set up a thread on Crackberry on December 14th, 2009, which I reckon it helped a lot because on Jan 25th, 2010 they had the final build. Pretty quick since Crackberry is the most popular forum for BlackBerry users across the globe.
. .
. .
The V2 version is pretty close to V1. They say they changed the design. They did regarding the images themselves but the structure remains just the same. The menu has some add-ons la GPS, the Bing (radar) map and the hourly forecast – I’m not sure but I guess in the first version you could be able to update it a max 4 times/day. But looking above I took two screenshots regarding the forecast: no forecast for my region. I don’t know if this happens only to me or if it happens to many other people but the only one working were “current conditions” and “long term forecast”, which means a few days. Other options are sending the weather on email for a friend, watching the map in your region and that’s about it. The design is more rigid and less appealing when compared to Beweather, which is the scaled-down version of a full-fledged weather application. The differences between them? WeatherEye is free. Less accurate, less customizable but doing its job nevertheless.
In the end, it all comes down to user choice: you need a powerful weather application, you are into animated weather widgets that can be set as wallpapers and you are ready to pay, BerryWeather is for you. You are a basic weather conditions seeker you have too free choices: WeatherBug or BeWeather. I went to BeWeather because of the accuracy and much nicer design. But there’s a catch: in order to “convince” you to buy the full program, you need to “activate” the application almost daily. Let me explain: you see the home-screen icon updated, it tell you some info like temperature, hi/low conditions, etc and then you want some extra info like forecast. When you press “W”, which is the keyboard shortcut for BeWeather you get a menu asking you to either continue with the free version or upgrade. And for some 10$ is the price to get-away from this daily chore.
Update Feb, 18th: Because there is a new update on WeatherEye V.2.0.1.4, the old link (in the upper part of the article) was disabled, this is the new link for the new version!
