Author Archives: Patrick Nelson
All Things Appy: Top 5 Android Camera Apps
- May
- 01
- Posted by Patrick Nelson
- Posted in Reviews
As the geek world drools over the first 13-megapixel smartphone camera — the Android-driven Samsung Galaxy S4 — we take a look at the current state-of-play in the must-have camera app genre for Android. Ready, set, go. Occasionally an app comes along that blows everything else away.
read moreHailo Is a Hellaciously Good Taxi-Hailing App
- Apr
- 19
- Posted by Patrick Nelson
- Posted in Reviews
Chicagoans and Bostonians, you have a new way of hailing a cab. It’s called “Hailo,” and it lets you grab a taxi by app command, rather than an arm raise at the curb. Hailo is coming soon to New York and Washington, D.C., and already is available in Toronto and several European cities. Hailo is different from some other taxi apps in that its relationship is with the individual driver, not with an entire fleet.
read moreTripit Trips Up at the First Sign of Anything Tricky
- Apr
- 12
- Posted by Patrick Nelson
- Posted in Reviews
Tripit is a frequent flier travel organizer. It claims to sculpt your mishmash of itineraries, dinner arrangements and meetings into a functioning, unified whole — all accessible through your mobile device. The idea is that you email your airline, and other itineraries to it, and it then “does the rest.” That’s a big claim, and in my experience big claims in new technology concepts often don’t deliver.
read moreNews360: Getting to Know You at a Snail’s Pace
- Apr
- 05
- Posted by Patrick Nelson
- Posted in Reviews
News360, a learning news aggregator for Android, has recently been updated. I decided to take a look. Uniquely, this app uses a thumbs-up button style of interaction in combination with collected statistics to provide stories that are supposed to be customized for you.
read moreRelax and Sleep: Whatever Floats Your Dream Boat
- Mar
- 29
- Posted by Patrick Nelson
- Posted in Reviews
Relax and Sleep Plus lets you choose and play ambient sounds that might help you sleep. I tried this app during a grueling jet-lagged visit to London. The UK has a seven-hour time difference from Los Angeles, which is my home base, so my day started there just as I normally would be going to sleep. For me, the net result of the time change was sleeplessness in the dead of local night.
read moreHow to Run Android Apps on Your Windows or Mac Machine
- Mar
- 28
- Posted by Patrick Nelson
- Posted in How To
Have you got some favorite smartphone apps? Not convinced by Microsoft’s new Windows app selection? Itching to see some Android action on your MacBook Pro? Don’t worry, just install an Android emulator on your Windows or Mac machine and run all of the Android apps that you’ve grown to love. A version is even available for Windows 8 Surface tablets.
read moreAll Things Appy: 5 Best Android News Apps
- Mar
- 27
- Posted by Patrick Nelson
- Posted in Reviews
With the unexpected news that Google’s RSS feed reader, Google Reader, is being put out to pasture, many users are scrambling to find new tools for news consumption. There are still plenty of excellent free news apps out there, and here’s a look at the top five available for the Android platform. Google Currents is a pretty, magazine-like aggregator with a true offline solution that works well in airplane mode.
read morePie Control Pro Is a GUI Delight
- Mar
- 22
- Posted by Patrick Nelson
- Posted in Reviews
The early-90s Windows 3.11 operating system offered a graphical user interface that was a breakthrough for me. It was, in fact, my first GUI. I’d been using command-line, error-prone MS-DOS for two or three years before that, and it was a delight to suddenly be able to maximize screens, switch programs, and point around with a mouse, after living with the syntactically regimented MS-DOS.
read moreSlices Pro for Twitter Cuts Through the Chaos
- Mar
- 15
- Posted by Patrick Nelson
- Posted in Reviews
We’re seeing an entire genre of Twitter clients proliferating within the Android ecosystem — each app with its own idea about the best way to interact with the monolithic, 500 million-strong social network. OneLouder’s Slices Pro for Twitter is the latest client to grab my attention — not least because it provides a way to browse Twitter directories by category to find the best Follows.
read moreStorage Analyzer: A Must-Have App That Has No Business Being Free
- Mar
- 08
- Posted by Patrick Nelson
- Posted in Reviews
I’ve been running into major headaches with file-storage memory on my Android tablet. If you too have been having problems getting files to fit on your device, it may not be that your device’s memory or SD card is full, but that phantom files are hogging resources. I’m usually — carefully — buying cheap gear. In the device business, that usually means limited on-board memory.
read more