Good news for the Motorola Droid users out there! The official file for the Android 2.2 (FroYo) update has been located on Google’s servers by one of the early receivers. This means you don’t have to wait for the file to be pushed to your device – you can download it and install it now!
This is the official file directly from Google’s servers and is the exact file being pushed out to phones. The install process is pretty easy and is outlined after the break. (more…)
If there’s a consistent complaint among most Android phones, it’s the battery life. Especially as the screens get larger and higher-resolution, the battery life continues to shrink (I’m looking at you, Droid Incredible!). While there are some options for higher capacity batteries on the market, I’m going to go over some ways you can extend the life of the battery you’ve got.
To discover where your battery issues lie, the first thing you need to do is see what’s eating up your battery. I recommend checking this after you’ve run your battery down most of the way on a normal day of use. To check your battery use, go to your Android Settings -> About Phone -> Battery Use. You should see a screen that looks something like mine. This screen will tell you how long your phone has been unplugged and what applications are using the most battery. Depending on how you use your phone, you can expect to see things like the Display and Phone calls toward the top of the list. If you have any installed applications using much more than 2-3% of your battery (depending on your usage), you might want to see if they have any settings that might reduce their impact. (more…)
Don’t want to wait for Google’s rollout of their new image search to reach you? Then don’t.
Just use this link from the Official Google Blog to enable access on your account:
Enable New Google Image Search
Publisher: TeslaCoil Software
Platform: Android 2.1 or higher
Cost: $0.99 (Introductory Sale)
[AppBrain Link]
Release Date: June 17, 2010
Version Reviewed: 1.1.2
As most of you know, one of the best things about Android is the customization ability of the operating system. Even without rooting, you can do many things to personalize your device and make it fit your style. Besides the home screen, probably the most seen screens in Android is the lock screen. The lock screen is the boring old slide to unlock screen with a clock, and that’s about it. Wouldn’t it be nice to customize the lock screen with some widgets to make it more useful? Enter WidgetLocker Lockscreen. WidgetLocker allows you to completely customize your lock screen with widgets, and even application shortcuts. (more…)
Did you know if you right-click on a tab in Chrome (cross platform) you have an option to permanently place a tab in the tab bar? I’ve been using Chrome as my default browser for the last few months and while I’d seen the option before I’d never actually looked into it.
This really comes in handy for websites you normally load/visit each time you open Chrome, and while I’m a big fan of starting fresh each time I open my browser there are certain sites I open every time, like Google Mail, Google Analytics, etc. so pinning is a nice time saver.
Pinning is pretty self explanatory, on any platform (Windows, OS X, Linux) just right click the tab you’d like to pin and select Pin Tab.
You’ll now get a nice shrunk down tab for that website added to the far left side of the tab bar.
And if you decide you’d like to remove a pinned tab, just right click on it and select Unpin Tab.
