It’s that time of the year when rumors of the next Android version start flowing in. We’ve so far seen numerous leaked photos of the Nexus 5, its specifications, possible photos of Android 4.4 KitKat and even a possible date for the launch event. Fake or not, they sure are exciting.

While everyone is busy talking about the leaks and rumors, we thought it’d better to distance ourselves from the crowd and instead talk about the features we’d like to see in Android 4.4.

1. Notification Window

Starting with the notification system, it’s one functionality that Android had nailed on day one — at a time when a centralized notification hub was still alien terms. iOS had to eventually copy Android’s implementation, Windows Phone still has no clue and Blackberry isn’t even counted these days.

While other platforms still struggle to design a good system for notifications, Android continues to move ahead with its excellent implementation. Now, I want to see Android taking notification shade*, which was introduced in 4.1 Jelly Bean, to a new level. How about starting with quick reply for messages?

Quick Settings

At present, Quick Settings is accessed by tapping its button in the notification window or by swiping down the status bar with two fingers. But these are not intuitive. The first requires two taps and the the second option requires the use of two hands — one for holding the device and the other for performing the gesture.

This can be replaced with something better, such as:

• Double swipe — swipe the status bar twice to open quick settings.
• Swipe from the right edge of the status bar  — similar to tablets.

2. SuperBeam!

Have you used SuperBeam app yet? If not, you need do it now. It supercharges Android’s NFC capabilities and lets you transfer files over Wi-Fi (using Wi-Fi Direct) and that too at an average speed of 30 Mbps. More importantly, even phones not having NFC can use it.

Now, why isn’t a feature this essential already baked into Android yet?

With the introduction of AirDrop, iOS has suddenly drifted ahead of Android with its file sharing capabilities. It lets iOS users share files over Wi-Fi with a single tap and doesn’t even require NFC. Sure, it has its own set of flaws, but I’m honestly jealous.

Friends list?

Similar to paired devices in Bluetooth, we can have paired devices with Beam. A friend list, tied to our contacts. This is, for sure, going to make file sharing experiences 2X faster as well as simpler since bumping our phones with known contacts will no longer be required.

3. Improved NFC

Next is NFC. First introduced with the Samsung Nexus S (2010), it has now turned into a largely overlooked functionality, apart from the addition of Beam in Android 4.0 in 2011. Since then, 3 versions and 1.5 years of Android life-cycle have passed without anything new.

In Android 4.4 KitKat, I want to see something new. I’ve got no good ideas for this one. Just surprise us, Google.

Combine it with Wi-Fi Direct

One thing that Google can start with is use Wi-Fi direct for transferring files with NFC. At present it uses Bluetooth, which slower than the slowest tortoise in this world. It’s about time Android put Wi-Fi Direct to some use.

4. Better Music Playback Controls on the Lock-screen

With Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, Google also brought a new lock-screen widget for controlling music playback, which could be used by any music app. Prior to this, developers had to design their own implementations. This obviously solved a major overhead for them. However, it’s a very bare-bone with next, previous and pause / resume as the only buttons available.

A more functional widget with options for fast forward, rewind as well as a seek-bar will be more than welcome. Oh and a better design too.

5. Improved Download Manager

The Downloads app is probably the most basic app you can find in your app drawer. It simply provides APIs to apps with which they can use it to download stuff. However, it only supports starting and stopping of downloads. In case data gets turned off for some reasons, the downloads will fail and re-downloading them from the beginning is the only option you’re left with.

So, options for retrying along with resuming and pausing downloads are something I’d like to see in Downloads.

6. Improved Gallery

Moving on to the Gallery, it’s time for Google to give it an overhaul too. The current user interface has started to feel mundane now for me. However, the biggest shortcoming isn’t its UI design, but the fact that we still cannot organize photos i.e., perform move, copy, etc.

Whenever I receive photos — of that holiday trip I went to with my friends — using Bluetooth, email, etc., I prefer moving / clubbing them in a separate album instead of receiving them all in the Bluetooth folder, which is sadly not possible. This is where the need of a file explorer app kicks in, which also defeats Google’s idea of not having to deal with file explorers to use our smartphones.

Multi-touch support

This one’s a very small suggestion, but I really want to see multi-touch support added to gallery. With this, it will be possible for us to use two fingers while cropping photos or setting them as wallpaper / contact image — in a pinch-to-zoom fashion.

7. Gestures Everywhere

Switching tabs by simply dragging the address bar. Frame rate is choppy; it’s much smoother in actual. Captured by SCR app.

Apps like Chrome (beta), Hangouts, Keep, Reddit Sync, etc. have made me realize how important gestures are. They make our experience pleasant and fun to use. Can we please see them in more areas in Android? For instance:

• Swiping from left edge to go back one level — this can be used in Settings and the stock apps
• Swipe to delete — Messaging, Play Music, People, etc.

8. More Sync

Now, this is another area where Google excels at — managing our data. At present, it keeps our contacts, emails, app data and a bunch of other stuff in sync with its servers. But can’t this list be further extended to include more data? Data such as our keyboard dictionary? So that I do not have to save words again from scratch when I do a factory reset or switch to a new Android device?

Saved Wi-Fi networks, data usage records, sound profiles, etc., can also be added.

9. A Proper Dictionary

Yep, that’s a screenshot from iOS, whose “define” feature is something I honestly miss in Android. Having English as my second language, I often come across words that I have totally no idea about. Having this define feature in Android would be a big advantage from my view and users alike.

The Play Books app already has this feature, where you can simply select a word and a dictionary card will appear. Implementing this on a platform level so that it’s available anywhere would be simply awesome.

Until then, I suggest users the WordLookup app. It lets you select a word (from webpages, for example) and share it with the app to view its meaning in somewhat a manner similar to the Play Books app.

This list ends here. Here’s to hoping that Android 4.4 KitKat will be awesome  — maybe more than what we expect!

The post 9 Features that We’d Like to See in Android 4.4 KitKat appeared first on Blogsolute.

The recently added ‘rich’ Notifications functionality in Google Chrome is perhaps the best feature of any browser ever! For those unknown, Google has introduced a new way for apps and extensions to display desktop notifications in a streamlined fashion — even when the browser is not running with options to dismiss it or perform extra actions.

This new rich notification in Chrome system shares striking similarities with Android’s notification system. Notifications are presented in almost the same manner with two quick actions along with clear, mute and preferences buttons.

With this functionality still in its infancy, the number of Chrome extensions that have added support for notifications is a bit low. And with the gigantic Chrome store containing several thousand extensions and apps, it’s totally difficult to find them.

Thankfully, we at Blogsolute had been working hard, sweating our pants under the strong sun to handpick the best extensions for you:

1. Fruumo Notifier for Facebook

The internet is incomplete without Facebook and so is the Chrome store, where Facebook has the maximum number of third-party extensions. Fruumo brings notifications from Facebook directly to your desktop even when Facebook is not opened. Fruumo currently only supports Facebook, but plans to bring in more services soon according to the developer.

2. Checker Plus for Gmail

As you must have already guessed, Checker Plus is an extension that notifies you about incoming emails from your Gmail accounts with options to mark as read, archive, delete, reply, star and mark as spam directly from the notification. And it even reads aloud the email summary if you’re away from your computer.

3. Notifier for Twitter

Apart from being a fully fledged Twitter client as an extension for Chrome, Notifier for Twitter displays notifications whenever you’ve new tweets, mentions or direct messages.

4. Keep

With offline support, location and time based reminders and even an Android app, Google Keep is the best note keeping app ever. Period. Quickly save, access and organize the information you want with Google Keep. Create a text note, add a photo, or type up a quick list.

5. Feedly Checker

Feedly, a pretty old RSS service, shot into limelight after Google Reader’s shutdown was announced. It has an incredibly designed web interface and app for Android. If you’re looking for a RSS reader service, I’d strongly recommend Feedly. This extension shows new and unread items in your Feedly along with quick options to save an article for later or mark as read.

6. Android Desktop Notifications

This app allows you to receive Android notifications in your browser. In order to use this app you also need to download and install an app for your Android phone or tablet.

After installing the app on the phone, it randomly generates a code. Enter the code in the settings of this Chrome extension to start receiving notifications.

7. Krome

Krome is another great alternative to Android Desktop Notifications that does more than Android Desktop Notifications. Apart from displaying normal notifications, it even lets you quickly reply to text messages directly from your computer as well as displays app icons on desktop.

8. Quote notifier

Quote notifier delivers inspiring quotes twice every day. It’s a very basic app that shows quotes, nothing else.

9. dA Message Notifier

For those who’re active users at DeviantArt, this extension is for you. dA message notifier will track your message counts for you and notify you when new messages appear in your deviantART Message Center.

10. reddit companion

Reddit companion is a Reddit extension for Chrome that adds a toolbar to Reddit links with options to quickly vote, save and view comments on posts. Along with this, it also displays notifications for new messages (orangereds) as they happen.

11. twitchtv notifier

twitch.tv is “the ESPN of gaming”. It’s a live streaming video platform that lets users watch live streams of gaming tournaments, personal streams of individual players and gaming related talks.

With twitchtv notifier, you can follow your favorite streams and games without having to follow them on twitch.tv. This extension will notify you whenever your favorites go live.

This list ends here. Unfortunately, there aren’t many extensions for Chrome who’ve added support for this excellent new functionality. If you think that we missed any extension, do let us know by dropping in a comment.

The post Rich Notifications in Chrome is the Best Feature Ever! Here are 11 Extensions that Support it appeared first on Blogsolute.

Near Field Communication technology or NFC in short, is one of the coolest additions in smartphones these days, especially Android. One tap and your phone can transfer contacts, files, website URLs, notes, even money and so much more with another NFC enabled device!

These days, NFC tags are available as accessories that can be used for automating tasks in phones / tablets. Some people use it for performing simple tasks like toggling volumes before leaving for classes / meetings while some go a step ahead and automate their whole house with it.

Unfortunately, India isn’t a country where you can find these NFC tags online for cheap and the list of such websites is very short. Even on Ebay, one of the most common marketplace for selling and buying almost anything, NFC tags are being sold at a premium (2x-3x of their original prices).

As a person who was recently on the search for buying tags, here are a few websites that can be trusted for buying NFC tags online in India and that too without burning any holes in your pocket.

But before that

According to standards, there are four different variants of NFC tags (Type 1-4) and their compatibility varies with different phones. Furthermore, there are some tags that aren’t even recognized by the NFC Forum. For instance, Mifare Classic 1k NFC Tag is the most commonly available NFC tag available in the market, but it is not supported with the Google Nexus 4, Nexus 10 and several other devices.

So before you start your search for tags, it’s recommended that you first verify your phone’s compatibility with them. To be on the safer side, look for Type 2 NFC tags (NTAG203 for example) as they’re compatible with all NFC capable devices.

Websites that Sell NFC Tags in India

1. NearYouTech

Based in Singapore and having operations in India, NearYouTech.com is a site that is solely dedicated to selling NFC tags, stickers and posters online and that too at probably the cheapest rates in India. Having bought a couple of tags from these guys, I highly recommend them. They’ve an excellent customer service team which is always ready to help and also accept returns in case you receive defective NFC tags.

One detail that is missing from their website though is the operating range of their tags i.e., the distance up to which the tags can be read by a device — something which can be very useful to the customers.

The NTAG203 (Type 2) tags which I had ordered from NearYouTech had an operating range of around 1cm.

2. aTuch

Next is aTuch, which — as they claim — was the first website to offer NFC tags in India. They not only sell NFC products for personal usages, but also for business solutions. Their catalogue includes NFC tags and stickers (mostly Mifare Ultralight C), nicely designed ready-to-use posters and cloud based solutions for small businesses.

The only problem with aTuch, however, is that they’ve a stock management issue. At the time of compiling this list, they did not have most of their products in stock.

3. RFTS

The third website in our list is RFTS (RFID Tags & Services), a company which bring various general purpose and specialty tags from around the globe to India, including NFC tags. It sells Mifare ultralite, Mifare Standard, Mifare Ultralight C and NTAG203 tags.

Among these three net-stores, RFTS has the smallest collection of NFC products of them all (Just 7 at the time of writing this article). And all the listed products are a pack of 5 tags — something that is not stated clearly — for Rs.399.

NFC Tag Writing Apps

Done ordering NFC tags for your phone or tablet? Cool, now let’s explore apps for putting them to use.

Android users have plenty of apps to choose from for programming NFC tags. My personal favorite is NFC Task Launcher, which is very easy to use and has a plethora of options. TagWriter is another great app, but has lesser options.

Windows Phone: NFC Launchit, Nokia NFC Writer

BlackBerry: Smart Tags, NFCShortcuts

Nokia: Nokia Tag Writer, NFC Interactor

Small fact

The extent of programmability of NFC tags is actually very less than what the various NFC tag writing apps support. For instance, the ‘Speak text when you tap an NFC tag’ feature present in NFC Task Launcher for Android is totally out of bounds for an NFC tag. The app manages to make it possible by assigning the tag an identifiable ID instead of writing the whole data in it and then triggers the text-to-speech module whenever an ID match is found.

This ends the list here. Feel free to send questions (even if they’re stupid) if you have any by submitting a comment.

The post Where to Buy NFC Tags in India for Cheap appeared first on Blogsolute.

Writing a diary or maintaining a journal of memories is a hobby shared by many, who prefer keeping an archive of their life events privately instead of posting them to Facebook. Similar to all tangible things, this hobby is also slowly transitioning its existence to a virtual one — from pen & papers to now smartphones & styluses.

For Android, there’s no dearth of diary / journal apps. Unfortunately, only a handful few of them are worth using and if you were looking for such apps, this list if for you.

1. Flava

Flava is the first app in our list and perhaps also the best one. It sets itself apart from the competition with its incredibly designed user interface and its large set of included functionalities — all for free.

Presenting memories in a timeline fashion, Flava is exactly how diary apps or other time machine apps should be designed. And with every memory, Flava lets you attach huge amount of data — photos, voice recordings and videos as well as songs, books, movies (all three fetched from Amazon), locations info and web addresses.

Furthermore, memories can also be tagged with weather conditions and your mood at that time along with a theme, using which, memories can be sorted later on.

Most importantly, Flava is cross platform. Apart from Android, it’s also available on iOS as well as a web interface. And not only this, it even lets you download your memories. What this essentially means is that you’ll always have your memory archive with you even if you decide to switch platforms (Blackberry and Windows Phone obviously do not count) or apps.

My personal favorite feature of Flava is definitely its Replay option that presents a slideshow of past events. My timeline is kinda empty right now, but it’ll obviously hopefully be very enjoyable in the future when I look back my memories. Sadly, it only supports photos for now and text-only memories do not find a place in it, which is a bit disappointing.

You get a storage of 305 MB for free when you sign up which can be increased on demand by paying a price.

Quirks

• Praises aside, there’s definitely some room for improvement in Flava. For instance, Flava has a separate search pane, but I’m yet to figure out how to get it working. Even after tagging memories with random tags, the search page doesn’t return anything — it always stays blank.
• Next, either Flava’s servers are incredibly slow or the app is. It took me multiple failed attempts to log into my account in the app.

And as a person who’s in love with the new ‘hamburger’ sidebar trend in apps like Play Music, Google+, Gmail, etc., I personally think that Flava’s sidebars would look a lot better if re-designed in that manner.

Flava has a PRO version as well, which provides the user with additional storage of Gee-Bees for storing media — aimed specifically for long term users. What really increased my likeness for Flava is that, unlike various others apps, it does not poke you at regular intervals for upgrading to a pro customer. Users are initially provided with 250 MB storage and if you start enjoying using Flava, you’ll definitely want to upgrade for logging more life events with attached medias.

2. Friday

This one is an unique journal app for Android. Unlike Flava, Friday is an automatic journal that records your life events using your social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google and Last.fm. Once setup, it’ll start capturing events happening around you without requiring you to input anything — like the people you talk to, the places you visit, the photos you capture, the songs you listen (on last.fm) , the emails and messages you receive or send and much more — automagically.

Friday helps you forget to remember. The app does the remembering for you.

It also includes an option for manually adding memories in a la-Twitter 140 characters, but that’s not really the point of Friday. The concept is super cool, but the UI seriously needs a visual overhaul — it’s just bland.

In case Flava and Friday do not satisfy your requirements or are too complicated for you, you might want to try out Private Diary – a very decent diary app with a very decent design and a very decent set of functionalities.

3. Private Diary

Private Diary is the simplest diary app among this list. It doesn’t boast a plethora of features, but at-least supports adding photos (pro feature), categories, tags and moods to memories as well as an option for online synchronization of memories with its website.

It would have been an excellent app if only the UI was not so bad — it still resembles Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Nevertheless, it isn’t even half bad as the slew of other badly designed and coded diary apps floating on the Play Store.

Simply put, if online interfaces, memory tags, weather conditions, moods, etc., seem too fancy to you, Private Diary might just be the diary app you were looking for — A simple, no frills one.

With these mentioned three, the list of worth-using diary apps for Android ends here, although the quantity of such apps available in the Store is much more. Yes, just 2-3 apps was all I could find which didn’t look as if we were still living in the 1990s. But for most of the casual users, these three should be enough.

Drop in a comment if you’ve a better suggestion!

The post Best Diary App For Android appeared first on Blogsolute.

Micromax Canvas 4, a mid-range smartphone is seeing hype and excitement comparable to the likes of multinational brands — perhaps for the first time for an Indian manufacturer. Promising specifications better than many high-end devices, it has led people into thinking that this company is offering much more value at much lesser price.

Which is wrong.

For a nation that has always been highly price-conscious, it’s very easy to mislead people by advertising the number of cores a phone or a tablet has.

Same goes for Lava, Karbonn, Intex, Spice and all other Indian manufacturers, which are having a dream run this year. From a meager handset market share of less than 3% in 2012, they now account for nearly 30% of it (source). This obviously could not have been possible without Android, which has been lately driving an explosion of budget smartphones and tablets.

Being an Android enthusiast for long, here are a few important tips from my side that you should keep in mind while you are looking for Android devices.

Too Good To Believe Hardware Specs

CPU Cores and Clock Speed Mean Nothing

Unaware of how microprocessors work, the biggest misconception among the non tech-savvy crowd is that a device’s performance is measured by its number of CPU cores and the speed at which they’re clocked.

Thankfully, CPUs don’t work this way. A detailed explanation of their working is taught in colleges (I personally hate the subject which deals with this), but for the laymen — what actually matters is the architecture of the processor.

Think of CPU as a group of engineers working on some project. Each worker is a separate core. The amount of work done by the group does not depend on the quantity of the engineers, but on their skills as well as their speeds. A group of two highly skilled engineers can finish their assigned project faster than a group of four less skilled engineers working on the same project.

In a similar fashion, it’s totally possible for a dual-core or single-core CPU X to outperform a quad-core CPU Y. The single-core Lava X1000 might be the best example for this, which performs 10% better on the quadrant benchmark test.

Taking advantage of this unintelligence, manufacturers lure customers by releasing multi-core phones of mediocre architecture at 1/4th the price of high-end phones having the same number of cores. This leads people into believing that they’re providing the same level of performance at comparatively dirt-cheap rates.

Tip: Try to avoid CPUs of Cortex A-7 Architecture if Budget Allows

Almost all budget Android devices use CPUs made by MediaTek, a company known for its low cost semiconductor chips. And a majority of them utilize the Cortex A-7 architecture. If possible, avoid them as they are considerably slow and instead look for devices having Cortex A-9 CPUs or processors made by Intel, which are significantly better.

For instance, the quad-core A-7 MediaTek MT6589 that is being used in various recently launched phones scores marginally less than the single-core Intel Atom processor packed in with the Xolo X1000 on the Quadrant test, despite having more number of cores.

One can argue that the performance of phones having A-7 processors is fairly justified because of its low price (which is true), but the sole reason I decided to write this article was to inform people so that they do not end up buying a budget Android device expecting world-class performance and regretting thereafter.

Edit: It seems that a few readers are getting a wrong impression that I’m criticizing the Canvas 4. Trust me, that’s not the case. It’s name was only used for it’s awareness among the crowd. In fact, the Canvas 4 is an excellent phone at its price point.

Low Internal Memory is a No Go

For a mobile platform where games tend to reach 500MB – 1GB of content, it’s advisable not to buy devices having internal storage of anything less than 4GB, which should equal to around 2.5 – 3 GB of usable storage after excluding system space.

And no, buying a separate SD card if the internal memory is low is NOT a solution. Apps in Android are installed in the internal storage by default. Although Android lets you move apps to SD card, a lot of apps do not support this feature, especially those having widgets since widgets do not work when installed in the SD card.

A trickery that manufacturers seem to have started playing lately is using a combination of internal flash storage and internal SD card.

The Lava Xtron+ tablet, for example, has a 500MB internal flash storage and an 8GB inbuilt SD card. The problem with this combination is that the internal flash storage gets immediately filled with just 25-30 non-movable apps downloaded from the Play Store.

Software Issues

The hardware is only one half of the story. Even if companies are able to sell devices having Cortex A-9 CPUs at affordable rates, it is totally possible for them to still mess up the software.

The best example I can think of regarding this issue is, again, the new Lava Xtron+ — a tablet having stellar hardware but plagued with so many software flaws that using it is sometimes an irritating experience. To give you an idea, the Wi-Fi often stops working, cell standby continuously drains 60% of battery and multiple user accounts (a key Android 4.2 feature exclusive to tablets) is missing.

This gives us another important lesson that a manufacturer can only buy hardware parts with its money and not skilled engineers to work on the software.

Future Support

This one’s tough.

When you’re buying a sub-10 thousand phone, it’s difficult to expect the manufacturer to support it for long by releasing future updates and bug fixes. And you cannot complain about this. Even with Android, which has a 6-months update cycle unlike 1 year of other mobile platforms, it’s difficult for manufacturers to promise future updates for its budget phones. So, be aware of this fact that when you’re buying a budget phone, you’re possibly also buying it with nearly zero future support.

For the first time however, Micromax has introduced Over-the-Air (OTA) updates functionality in the Canvas 4, which is a welcome change and could possibly mean that users might receive upcoming version(s) of Android.

That’s it. Keep these four tips in mind and you will never regret your buying decisions when it comes to Android devices.

(Photo credits: TechOne3, Mashable)

The post How Indian Android Device Manufacturers are Fooling and Misleading You appeared first on Blogsolute.

Flash forward to 2013 and we can definitely see this trends improving significantly. Due to the recent efforts by companies like MediaTek, who’re leading the way for development of faster and cheaper chips, it has now become possible for companies to manufacture tablets with better hardware while keeping the cost low at the same time.

One such example is Xtron+ — the latest Wi-Fi only budget tablet from Lava that promises impressive performance at a low price of only Rs. 7,000. Here’s our review.

Initial Impressions

When held by the back, the Lava Xtron+ can impress anybody with its sleek silver faux-aluminum plate and the model name printed on it. But when turned over, the Lava Xtron+ looks like any other budget 7-inch tablet with a bland front and a large bezel. While I do acknowledge that the Xtron+ is a budget tablet, but Lava could have at least tried a little to differentiate it from the Chinese crowd.

The ports and buttons are located at their usual positions including an HDMI port and a hot-swappable SD-card slot at the top. The speaker grilles are also, thankfully, located at the top and not at the back. Interestingly, the tablet also has a separate physical back button at the right edge. This is ridiculous, Lava!

It even uses an outdated DC-IN charging port, similar to what a generation old Nokia phones used to have. USB charging is also unsupported, which is a huge drawback.

Hardware

Talking about the Lava Xtron+’s hardware, the tablet boasts a dual core Cortex A9 CPU with each core clocked at 1.5Ghz and a Mali 400 GPU. I was unable to find any further information about the CPU except for its architecture, but my best guess is that it’s a MediaTek produced one. The A9 CPU architecture definitely places the tablet a step ahead of the competition, where almost every tablet in the Rs. 5,000-10,000 range has an inferior Cortex A7 CPU.

Other than that, the tablet has 1GB of RAM, which should be enough for a decent multitasking experience for all users.

Praises aside, GPS and Bluetooth are sadly omitted from the Xtron+, probably for keeping its price low. Since the tablet does not support mobile networks, relying on mobile network towers for pinpointing of location is also striked out, making GPS navigation completely impossible on this tablet unless you’re connected to Wi-Fi.

The omission of Bluetooth means that tethering, pairing and file transfers over Bluetooth isn’t supported as well.

Storage

On specifications sheet, the tablet claims to have an internal storage of 8GB. However, there’s a small caveat.

Instead of using a single 8GB flash internal storage, the Xtron+ actually uses a combination of 500 MB internal flash storage and a built-in SD card of 5.84 GB (excluding the space used for system files). The outcome is that the user is left with very less space for storing apps since they’re by default installed in the internal storage.

In practical, most apps can be moved to the SD card, but those having widgets (Facebook , Twitter, YouTube, etc.) as well as system apps (Hangouts, Calendar, etc.) are immovable. This can be a big problem once you start accumulating such non-supported apps.

Built-in SD storage are also not known to have good transfer speeds as compared to internal flash storage. Though the Xtron+ managed to achieve a write speed of 6.22 MB/s and 11.19 MB/s read speed, which should be fairly enough for normal data transfers.

Display

The front of the Lava Xtron+ holds a 7-inch sharp IPS LCD display having a resolution of 1024 x 600. It’s a bright screen and with a pixel density of 170 PPI, it is pretty sharp too. The best part about the display is that, despite being an LCD screen, it’s not a battery consuming monster. I always found its battery usage to be lower than processes. The screen is prone to scratches though and is highly reflective.

This resolution, however, doesn’t seem to fit very with Android. I noticed a few visual artifacts in various places such as the recent apps screen and the launcher. Unfortunately, Lava probably decided to ignore them without any corrections.

Software

Lava needs to hire better engineers.

While everything looked good about this tablet until now, the software is a disaster. The Lava Xtron+’s firmware has been poorly setup for a tablet. It seems as if Lava has accidentally used a phone specific firmware for the Xtron+ rather than a tablet specific one, since several key tablet features of Android are missing.

High Battery Usage by Cell Standby

After spending a few hours with the Lava Xtron+, I noticed that the battery was diving downwards at a ridiculous rate. This kind of usage was very strange, so I opened the battery stats page only to find that Cell standby had consumed nearly 60% of the battery.

What?!

Cell standby is the battery used by radio cells for mobile networks. This tablet DOES NOT have any radio cells! The engineers working on this tablet didn’t even bother to setup the firmware properly and instead chose to simply download Android, flash it in the tablet and put it up on sale.

A further visit to the settings page revealed that the Mobile networks page is still present there — in a tablet that doesn’t support mobile networks. Classy, Lava.

Multiple User Accounts is Missing Too

Multiple user accounts, which was one of the key tablet features introduced in Android 4.2, is missing from Xtron+ as well. This further confirmed my suspicion that Lava might have accidentally used a phone specific ROM of Android.

Launcher has not Been Setup Properly

The 1024 x 600 pixels resolution doesn’t seem to fit properly with the Android launcher and results in un-even grid sizing and spacing issues. On home-screens, the last row of icons overlaps with the dock separator. A majority of the users are not going to notice this until they put their hands on some other Android device.

Next is the virtual buttons. If you observe carefully, they’re not symmetrically placed at the center. As a graphics designer, this irked me a lot.

Wi-Fi Connectivity Issues

The tablet tends to lose Wi-Fi connectivity a few minutes after it goes to sleep. I’ve no idea whether Lava did this on purpose for saving battery or not, but it’s definitely not a good thing since the user will be missing out of all sync notifications during that time period.

Near Vanilla Android 4.2 Experience

Thankfully, the Android experience is nearly uncluttered by any OEM-installed cruft, other than a few pre-installed apps, which included Saavn (an excellent free music streaming service), an anti-virus app and a terrible file explorer. I obviously uninstalled the latter two soon after setting up the tablet and others are recommended to do the same too.

A budget tablet maker Lava cannot afford to create a custom skin for its Android devices like Samsung (TouchWiz) or HTC (Sense) do and that’s a good thing since I’ve always preferred the vanilla Android experience over custom skins.

None of that excuses the poor software of Xtron+ though and it leaves much to be desired. The fact that all the issues can easily be solved by a firmware update, could still make it a great tablet nevertheless. But going by the release-and-dump trend among Indian manufacturers, I highly doubt if it is ever going to happen. I hope you prove me wrong, Lava.

Performance

Apart from a handful few, most of the apps loaded quickly and doing casual gaming on the the Xtron+ was a cinch too. But do not expect it to run this boy to run graphics intensive games (for example, all Gameloft games) without significant lags.

Chrome, as usual, runs terribly on Xtron+, but it’s Google at the fault here since it refuses to run smoothly when feeding it anything less than quad cores. I’d recommend users to use the much faster, good old Browser.

Camera Quality and Multimedia

Another section, another huge mistake. Budget tablet manufacturers, including Lava, don’t seem to understand that tablets are not camera devices. They are largely used for making video calls rather than taking photos with two hands.  The Xtron+ comes with a 2MP rear camera, but only a meager 0.3MP camera is fitted at the front, which although shoots some good photos, demands a reversal of role.

Front camera: Viewfinder (left) and the actual photo (right)

Rear camera: Viewfinder (left) and the actual photo (right)

Adding to the list of bundled software issues, the zoom ratio of the camera app’s viewfinder is also badly adjusted and fails to display the view being captured in full.

The rear camera’s performance is exactly what one would expect from a 2MP camera  — best when left unused. But hey, it’s a budget tablet. One cannot ask for anything more at this price point.

Battery Life

The battery life is perhaps the most important aspect of any device and is hard to overlook. The software, camera quality, etc., no matter how amazing they are, become totally unusable if the device cannot run for more than a few hours.

The 3000mAh* battery that comes with the Lava Xtron+ isn’t anything special, but its battery life is something to talk about. It exceeded my expectations by a fair margin and that too when it’s software is plagued by the Cell standby issue.

The Flipkart listing page reports the battery capacity to be 3,700mAh, which is probably wrong since the official specifications page on Lava’s website reports it to be only 3,000mAh. The battery is non-removable so verifying the claim was not possible for us.

Battery life tests

Screen on time: 6:30 hours

(Continuous playback of videos with the display and speaker volume set at 50% brightness and volume respectively)

Web browsing: 5:50 hours

Moderate usage: 12-15 hours

(Regular web browsing, gaming and reading eBooks with auto-sync turned on)

Overnight battery drain: 10% in 12 hours.

Again, remember that these figures include the battery consumption by Cell standby. The battery life can definitely be further improved if the the issue is fixed.

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read)

Score: 5/10

To wrap the impressions in a few words, the Lava Xtron+ perhaps has the best hardware in its price range, including both the internal goodness and the sharp display. But the poorly optimized software and missing functionalities from Android 4.2 demands more attention from Lava and until they’re fixed, rating it anything at above 5 is totally impossible for us.

Should you buy it?

Yes, if you’re looking for a tablet only for casual gaming, web browsing, reading and the battery issue isn’t much of a problem, then you should definitely go for this tablet.

No, if you expect future updates (read: new Android versions) and the lack of Bluetooth and GPS is a problem for you.

The post The Lava Xtron+ Review- A Tablet with Stellar Hardware but Poor Software appeared first on Blogsolute.

It is sluggish and it is slower than the slowest turtle on the planet. To give you an idea, I’ve never been able to boot it under 6 minutes on my laptop having less than stellar configurations. Simply put, it is a tool that no one likes to use.

The dreaded boot-up screen of the official emulator

A great ecosystem around a mobile platform requires a great development environment. Until the developers are provided with efficient tools, it’s tough to expect polished apps from them.

Enter Genymotion.

Installation & Getting Started

Genymotion is a cross platform android emulator. It can be used on Windows, Mac and Linux. We have tested the android emulator on a system running Windows 8. To use Genymotion, you will have to make a free account. Once the account is active, proceed and download the right package for you.

Genymotion requires Oracle VirtualBox 4.2.12 dependancies to run. Hence, if you do not have it pre installed just download the package including VirtualBox for Windows. If you download any other package without Virtual box installed, you will get ” Unable to load VirtualBox ” error.

Setting Up Genymotion

• First run of the emulator contains no Virtual device.

• You will need to sign in using Genymotion account in order to add virtual devices.

• Select the preferred device and download them. You can download as many device you want.

• Once your Virtual devices are downloaded, you can start them by selection any one of them and clicking on the play button on the emulator home screen. The device will boot up in no time.

Genymotion Features & Overview

Unlike the official emulator, Genymotion takes advantage of the x86 architecture virtualization and even supports OpenGL hardware acceleration. As a result, it performs incredibly fast — faster than even an actual Android device!

Why is it Fast? The major reason behind the slow performance of the official emulator is.. that it’s an emulator. An emulator, in its literal sense, pretends to run a software made for some platform and duplicates its functionalities on some other platform having a completely different hardware architecture. When you run an app in the emulator or execute some functionality, the code has to be first compiled to the emulator’s architecture (ARM), which takes time.

Genymotion, on the other hand, runs Android in a virtual environment inside Windows (or Mac and Linux) taking advantage of the parent machine’s hardware and doesn’t require Android packages to be re-compiled for it. On a contrast note, the iOS simulator and the Windows Phone emulator too run on virtual machines.

To talk about its other features, Genymotion also lets you control sensors including battery, GPS and accelerometer in a simulated manner. Developers whose apps take advantage of these sensors are going to find Genymotion incredibly useful. Support for Gyroscope, Light, Temperature and Rotation Vector are also on the way!

As one would expect, Genymotion supports ADB commands as well and comes pre-rooted.

Genymotion vs. a Real Device

While expecting Genymotion to be faster than the official Android emulator was completely acceptable, seeing it perform even faster than a real device was something hard to believe.

For testing purpose, I wrote a small app that’d connect to a database and insert 5 records in 250 cycles and ran it on both Genymotion and my Nexus 4. The app would finally display a Toast notification displaying the time it took to process the whole operation.

The outcome was staggering, not just because Genymotion took lesser time for execution, but because a virtual device performed faster (13.5%) than a real device, a feat. which we developers are not used to.

Genymotion vs. The Official Android Emulator

Unfortunately, the official Android emulator is refusing to run at my side anymore so that I could compare it with Genymotion. So, I guess this gives me another reason to ditch it and move over to Genymotion.

But the fact that Genymotion never took more than 30 seconds on average to boot up on my two year old laptop model* is enough to provide a reason for the switch.

Update: Genymotion requires hardware virtualization to be enabled in your PC. If you’re unable to start a virtual device, please check whether it is turned on for your PC or not by entering into BIOS (tutorial).

*yep. I’m an underpaid employee who still relies on his a dying laptop and my employers refuse to give me a promotion. If you’re reading this, please pass this message to them.

The post Fed Up of Slow Android Emulator? Try Genymotion (Windows, Mac and Linux) appeared first on Blogsolute.

“Black magic”.

No words better than these two can describe Scatter, a new application that lets you sync files between Android, Windows, iOS and Mac. While such apps have existed for long, none of them provide a cross-platform support so wide and work so seamlessly (can’t stress this word enough) like Scatter does.

Simply press Ctrl+C on Windows to copy a file and Scatter will make it available on your other connected device(s) faster than you reach them. Be it a photograph, a document, a website URL or even your clipboard content, Scatter handles it all auto-magically.

The Good

A sense of Scatter’s ‘it just works’ functionality shows up as soon as you install it on multiple devices. It configures itself automatically and connects all the devices with each other, ready to sync data within seconds.

In its current beta form, there’s not much to talk about Scatter. It works as expected and syncs files nicely, both over cellular data as well as local Wi-Fi network. An option for limiting files based on their sizes is the only configurable setting currently present.

Interestingly, the Android app also lets you automatically backup photographs taken by the phone’s camera and thus, Scatter can also be used like a photo backup service.

A big factor behind Scatter’s efficiency is its method of checking for updates and syncing them. Unlike other apps that regularly poll for updates, Scatter checks for events for triggering the synchronization functionality. For instance, it syncs your clipboard content on Windows as soon as you copy something, instead of checking for file updates to sync them every few minutes. As a result, it is much faster and syncs are instant.

Next, to sync (or “scatter”) data across devices, Scatter uses peer-to-peer syncing technology and does not rely on the internet if the devices are on the same network, unlike Dropbox, Drive and other popular cloud storage products. This is also the same technology behind the BitTorrent protocol, the most widely used protocol for sharing files on the internet.

The Bad

Nothing. Seriously.

And it’ll also be a crime to complain about a product that is currently under development.

What’s Missing

In its current form, Scatter doesn’t provide much control to the user apart from, as mentioned earlier, limiting transfer of files based on their sizes.

The biggest feature that we found to be missing in Scatter was a better file filtering system. Since Scatter relies on the frequently used ‘Copy’ event on Windows, one could easily end up accidentally transferring a large set of files to the connected devices without even knowing.

Automatic labelling of files according to their file formats is another feature that I’d like to see in Scatter. And as a person who stores music, photos, and documents in separate folders on my phone, I wish Scatter was also capable of re-routing files to their respective folders.

Lastly, the Android app needs a bit of visual treatment and a few stutters in the User Interface need to be fixed too, but the team is already working on them.

Download

Scatter is currently available for Android and Windows. An iOS version is on its way, awaiting approval by the App Store team and a Mac client is planned for the future too.

Update: The iOS version is out!

via Geeknizer

The post Scatter App Syncs Files Between Android, Windows, iOS and Mac Automagically appeared first on Blogsolute.

Dubious applications for Windows that offer you free smileys and dictionary (cough Babylon cough) and automatically install annoying browser toolbars & add-ons are no new thing. But of late, scores of trusted applications have also joined the league by packing in similar spamware in their setup.

Applications such as µTorrent, KCleaner, AVG, Veoh Player, GOM Media Player are a few examples of widely used applications that try to slip in browser toolbars, add-ons and even try changing the browser settings. They not only slow down the browsers, but sometimes can be malicious too.

Dealing at the Browser Level

Modern browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Chrome, thankfully, block installation of extensions / add-ons from third party applications by default. Internet Explorer, unlike others, requires the setting be enabled by following these steps:

1. Open Tools by pressing Alt + X and go to Internet Options
2. Navigate to the Advanced tab
3. Un-check the Enable third-party browser extensions option

From my experience, however, the default restriction on toolbars and extensions from third party applications doesn’t always ensure a spam-free browsing experience. The applications often somehow manage to sneak in, bypassing the restriction.

Avoiding Automatic Installation of Browser Toolbars and Add-ons – The Right Way

No matter how advance the browsers become, developers will always manage to find a way of sneaking in their toolbars and other spam-wares. But avoiding them doesn’t require a genius mind either. All you need is a careful pair of eyes.

During app installations, do not keep clicking the Next button without giving any heed to the installation options. If there are any check-boxes then you need to read their labels carefully. By not doing so you let apps take advantage of your ignorance and silently install browser toolbars and even change the way how your browsers behave.

For instance, µTorrent and GOM Media Player, two applications that everyone is aware of, bundle toolbars and even changes browser settings. But the amount of annoyance they cause is still very minimal when compared to what some others do. KCleaner, a CCleaner alternative, which allows you to clean temporary and useless files from your computer, is one of the worst offenders we’ve ever seen despite its super efficient functionality.

KCleaner includes several spamware add-ons, whose information is wrapped in a disguised License Agreement dialog — something that we are accustomed to agreeing without reading a single word. To give you an idea about KCleaner’s nuisance, it installs no less than three different spyware add-ons along with a Google Chrome extension that displays its own advertisements in various website (this took me a while to figure out).

That’s it! A careful pair of eyes and single click to uncheck unwanted things. Nothing more is required to keep your browsers safe.

The post How Single Click Can Save Your Browser from Unwanted Toolbar & Addon appeared first on Blogsolute.

According to an anonymous malware and botnet operator, securing ourselves from such attacks is no rocket science. In a discussion thread that was opened by him on Reddit a while ago, he shared a few important, but simple tips for the average folk for keeping malwares at bay and securing our credentials while being online. Although the thread is about an year old, his tips are still relevant.

1. Change the Behavior of Plugins to Click-to-Play

One of the ways through which malwares can silently enter your computer are 0day loopholes in browser plugins.

0-what? A 0day or “zero-day” attack is the attack that occurs on “day zero” of awareness of a vulnerability in a plugin (Adobe flash player is the most commonly used one). Malwares exploit such vulnerabilities stealthily and pretty easily since antiviruses don’t have any previous knowledge about their behaviors. This makes it extremely tough to tackle them.

Such loopholes are generally closed within hours of awareness, but that short gap of time difference is enough for malware operators to infect thousands of computers using those plugins. The best option is to disable the auto-launching capability of browser plugins and allowing them to start only when you click on them.

To do so, open your browser and carry out the following steps:

Chrome

1. Open Settings
2. Scroll down and expand the “+ Show advanced settings” option
3. Choose Content Settings under Privacy options
4. Change the behavior of Plugins to Click to play

Firefox

1. Open the configurations page by typing “about:config” in the address bar
2. Search for: plugins.click_to_play
3. Next, right-click on the click-to-play preference and toggle its value to true.

There’s a video tutorial on How to activate Firefox plugin only when required in case you need further help.

Opera
Opera users can enable this feature by turning on Opera Turbo.

1. Launch preferences by pressing Ctrl+F12
2. Navigate to the Advanced tabs
3. Choose Content from the left sidebar
4. Check the Enable plug-ins only on demand option

Safari
If Safari is the browser of your choice, then you can download and install the ClickToPlay plugin.

Internet Explorer
As usual, enabling such a simple option in Internet Explorer is hardly straightforward and involves going through a lot of steps. Thankfully, Rich Menga of PCMech has compiled a step-by-step guide for doing enabling click-to-play.

2. Use GMER to Detect Rootkits on your Computer

GMER is a free utility that detects and removes rootkits by scanning your computer for hidden stuff. Download it here:

Launching GMER will automatically start a short scan of processes currently running on your computer. After it is completed, perform a deep scan by selecting all your hard drives from the right sidebar.

A rootkit, if found, will be displayed in bold red. To remove it from your system, right-click on it and select Delete file. If that doesn’t work, read the Frequently Asked Question section on GMER’s official website.

3. Mobiles and Tablets are Safer than Desktops for Online Banking

In fact, they’re the safest.

The firmware architecture of mobile devices, unlike desktops, do not allow applications to access the hardware. Thus, designing a malware that intercepts your keystrokes, for instance, while entering your credit card information online, is completely impossible. This is why it’s recommended to carry out any online banking activity on your mobile or tablet.

One can argue that malwares do exist for Android, but the fact is that they are at most capable of spying on our contacts and location info or send SMSes to premium numbers. However, one can easily avoid such malwares by checking the permissions required by the app. If a moto-racing game is asking permissions for directly calling numbers, something’s fishy for sure.

4. Use On-Screen Keyboard Wherever Possible

This is the most important tip that will always keep you safe against malwares from logging your keystrokes, whether your computer is infected or not. Whenever you’re entering your bank account or credit/debit card details, use an on-screen keyboard for typing your credentials. This way, malwares will never be able to steal your credentials.

Windows XP: Start > All Programs > Accessories > Accessibility > On-Screen Keyboard.

Windows 7: Start > All Programs > Accessories > Ease of Access > On-Screen Keyboard.

Windows 8: Type On-Screen Keyboard in the Start screen.

Tip: Most of the Internet Security suites offer this feature. I use Bitdefender and it has a SafePay feature which detects Bank website and activates automatically to secure my transactions.

5. Look Out for Attachments Ending in .EXE or .PDF

Most of the email services do a good job of blocking suspicious attachments and warning the user about it. If you ever receive an email with an executable (.EXE) attachment from a suspicious sender, it’s better to avoid it.

Furthermore, attachments having a compressed folder (.ZIP, .RAR) can carry executable malwares inside them as well. In short, avoid attachments from unknown senders.

Same goes for PDF attachments as well, which is the most popular format for sharing documents on the internet given that the Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin is installed in your browser. For safely viewing PDF documents from untrusted, Gmail users can choose the ‘View on web’ option.

6. Stay Away from Fake Advertisements

Ever came across advertisements announcing you as the winner of a huge Nigerian lottery? Or the 9,99,999th visitor of some website? Stay away from them even if they’re offering you free smileys, which will silently install spam wares as well possible malwares on your computer.

This list ends here. Stay safe!

The post What Hacker Suggests to Secure Yourself Online from Malwares appeared first on Blogsolute.