Calibrate your battery for extended life - should work on Android, iPhone or Blackberry Smartphones

Ever since getting my HTC Thunderbolt 4G I've been battling to figure out ways to extend my battery life. I've covered a number of those issues and alleged solutions here, including: Juice Defender and turning off 4G. Both are pretty effective, but when you have a fast processer in a tiny phone it's still gonna suck the power quickly.

The most effective thing to do is simply change your Smartphone lifestyle and keep a charger with you everywhere you go. Even so, you might find yourself out of juice. In that case I strongly recommend getting a Duracell Instant USB Charger with Lithium ion battery / includes universal cable with USB and mini USB, or another such device. That way you don't need any other power source.

Another way to help your battery hang in there longer according to some "experts" is to calibrate your battery on a monthly basis. I'm not sure if it's effective yet, but it's worth a try. Here's what you do:

1) Turn your phone ON, charge it until fully charged (the light turns green, or goes off, or whatever your phone does).
2) Unplug your phone from the charger and turn it OFF. Immediately plug it back in (with the phone OFF) and charge it to full charge again. This usually takes less than one hour.
3) Unplug your phone and turn it ON. Once it is fully booted, wait two minutes and turn it OFF.
4)  Plug it back in, charge until fully charged again. (Again, it won't take too long.)
5) Unplug the phone, turn it ON and see how things work out.

Let me know how it works for you.

Count that baby and a foul! Android basketball games app reviews.

Just because you like a particular sport doesn't mean you'll like the games associated with that sport. And visa versa. I'm not a big golfer, but I love golf apps like Let's Golf 2. On the other hand, I love baseball but have yet to find a computer game or Android app that can keep my interest.

But, when it comes to basketball games and apps, I seem to love them all. For different reasons. So, let's take a look at three of them, and you can check them out yourself.

Basketball Shot - DroidHen Casual

Basketball Shot is basically the same game that you might play in an arcade. A basket the either moves or doesn't, and you keep shooting trying to beat the clock and score a certain number of points for that round. Simple? Yes. But, a fun time killer. Users give it about a four and a half star rating.

Basketball Lite - Ellis Markov

This was the first Android basketball game app I downloaded, and it's still pretty good. Rather than swiping your finger to shoot (like in Basketball Shot) you stretch and line up a trajectory line, and release to shoot. There are five different game modes, but for the most part you are trying to score as many points as you can in a pre-determined amount of time. Basketball Lite gets 4.2 stars and would have been worth downloading, had it not been for......

Tip-Off Basketball - IOPixel

This is the latest (and might I say, greatest) of the basketball games that I've tried so far. I noticed on the Basketball Lite page in the Android Market that it made a reference to check out the sequel, Tip-Off Basketball. They seem to have different developers, but there are certainly similarities.

The way you shoot is similar to Basketball Lite, using the trajectory technique and a time limit. But, that's almost where the similarities end. In Tip-Off Basketball you are given a variety of specific tasks that you must complete before moving on to the next level. Things like making 12 baskets, making a bank shot or even throwing an airball.

I'm still new to the game, but you get points or coins or something and you can buy stuff with them to make the game more interesting or fun or something.

Maybe it's because it's new to me, but this game seems to be the most fun of these three. And the accuracy of the shooting is much better. I give it five stars. It averages 4.7 stars.

Thuuz is a must app for any sports fan - Android app review



Not long ago, I blogged about an app that claimed that you could Make Money to Download Apps. Frankly, most of the apps that I downloaded to make a few bucks weren't kept any longer than I needed to to collect the 17 cents or whatever. But, as was probably the whole point behind this marketing method of paying people to download apps, I did run across a couple that were keepers.

One of them was Thuuz, a sports app which sends you updates on your selected sports and notifies you when there are really good games going on. They also rate the games on a 0-100 scale and tell you where you can watch the game live if you're so inclined.

I'm not a sports fanatic by any means, but if I'm going to watch a game that doesn't involve one of my home teams, it damn well better be a really good game.

So, after downloading Thuuz as part of the get paid to download apps program, I took a few minutes to enter my faves and must admit that I enjoy the ocassional notifications of great games in progress.

The app is available in the Android Market and has about a 4.5 star rating, or check out their web site at http://www.thuuz.com/.



Google Currents App Review - news reader better than Pulse?

I discovered the Google Currents news reader application for Android while browsing the Technology area of another news reader app, Pulse.

Because I was using Pulse, it's obvious that I like it. It's a really easy to navigate interface that categorizes your personal news and information preferences. Sometimes I'm in the mood for technology, other times I'm in the mood for stupid entertainment gossip. Pulse provides this very nicely. Read more about Pulse here.

So, I was thrilled to see that I may now have a cool alternative. And one created by Google to boot.

The good news is: it's not bad. The bad news is: it's not great.

For me, the attraction of Pulse is that there are a lot of options on the screen, and you can scroll through a number of articles, from a variety of publications conveniently from each screen.

On Google Currents, you choose from the Library listing, which has a scrolling list of the individual publications that you added to your personalized preferences; or you click on Trending which provides all of the hot stories of the moment.

So, let's say you click on a story about Gabby Gifford leading the pledge of allegiance, it still takes another couple of screens to get to the story you want. Then, once at the story you selected, you can continue to swipe sideways (a feature I like much better scrolling up) to continue reading, and if you swipe again it will take you to another article about the same subject. I like this feature when I'm in the mood to read a lot about a particular story, or if you want to get more than one perspective on a particular topic.

Google Currents ends each article with a few Suggested Articles, another feature that fits nicely in my life when I'm in the mood to explore the article's subject more.

Both applications load the articles in their own "reader" format which is definitely more aesthetically pleasing than an RSS feed. And both apps also offer you the ability to jump over to the original article in your preferred Android browser. One thing that seemed a bit odd to me was that if you load the Original Article (into the Currents interface, not on the web), you now need to scroll down, as opposed to the page-turning scrolling on the original article.

My recommendation: download both apps and decide for yourself. If you're a news and info junkie you'll probably be like me and use each one depending on your mood and appetite.

Groupon stock sinks below initial offering - What? No more cheap facials?

Even though I delete 99% of all of the offers I receive form Groupon, Living Social and Moolala, as a consumer I find that the ocassional opportunity to save a bunch of money very appealing and, in this economy, necessary. But, it comes as no surprise that Groupon's (GRPN) advertisers are dropping like flies and their stock has dipped below it's initial offering.

[NOTE: Both Groupon and Living Social have Android apps available in the Android Market. Click on the links above to set up your free account, then download the apps.]

Over the past year I have had a few conversations with advertisers (mostly restaurants) who are using these daily deals programs to get the word out about their food, products or services and every one of them bitched that it was costing them too much money to get customers to come in once for the amazing discount and probably never come back again.

With restaurants, the whole purpose, from an advertising standpoint, is to get customers to try their fare, and if they love it they'll come back. Reality check: they're not coming back because they're down the street at the competitor's place eating their cheap Groupon food deal.

Groupon's stock has now dipped below its initial IPO opening price. And studies show that advertisers aren't re-upping with Groupon because they feel that they are paying a premium to get the customer to come in, but they never come back. It just isn't a good advertising/marketing move.

It seems that if these daily deal programs want to survive, they're going to have to make it more appealing to advertisiers (ie: cheaper), while still offering great products and services to the consumer.

In the meantime, grab those deals while you can.

IRIS - the Android app alternative to SIRI doesn't seem to fill the void

A few days ago, the Android Market offered an app called the "Official" SIRI for Android. It wasn't. And because Google stays on top of monitoring their open market, they were able to remove it from the Market in very short order. Kudos to Google. I'd still much rather have an open market which sometimes needs to be tweaked than not.

But, this review is not of the app which was removed from the Market, but of an app that was created by a group of developers in only eight hours a few months back, cleverly(?) called IRIS (SIRI backwards).

First, let me say that the fact that the developers created this interactive voice personal assistant app to compete with the iPhone's SIRI in a mere eight hours (or so the instant-legend claims), is an incredible accomplishment. Ultimately though, for me it was only a fun novelty for a short while before I decided that as far as personal assistant apps go for the Android, I much prefer using Vlingo.

It sounded intriguing to have an app for Android that would verbally respond to your requests, so i downloaded and loaded the free IRIS app (there are a number of other SIRI clones as well). After I was done asking the usual array of stupid questions like, "Are you a man or woman?"; "Are you married?"; "Are you better than Siri?"; I moved on to informational things such as, "What will the weather be like tomorrow?"; "How far is it to the Moon?"; "Where is Madagascar?" She (I confirmed that) did okay. Just okay.

For instance, I asked IRIS, "How many U.S. dollars are there in a British pound?" The reply, although accurate, was far more confusing than the question. IRIS returned the calculation for a number that she just pulled  out of her cyber-butt  and returned with a reply which told me how many GBP you would have if you had 7,200,000 U.S. dollars. (This ocurred after the Cha Cha integration-see Comments.) Often, I found that you had to continually rephrase questions until you finally got the answer you were looking for.

Then, I moved on to trying more productive things like asking IRIS to open apps and text people for me. She couldn't do either.

One of the features of Vlingo that I love and use often is for texting. You can open Vlingo and speak: "Text Joe I'm on my way period do you want me to bring anything question mark" and it gets it right 95% of the time. Another useful feature of Vlingo which comes in quite handy is when you want to open an app that you don't use all that often, and you don't want to scroll through all of your apps to find it, you simply say, "Open stopwatch" and Voila! it opens right up.

As a novelty, IRIS is rather fun, but not nearly as useful a tool as I had hoped. I won't uninstall though, because when those smug, iPhone users are showing off SIRI, I can at least open IRIS and ask a loaded question that I know the bitch has the right answer to. :)

The top three Android productivity apps of 2011

Let me first begin by saying that I don't even know if these apps came out in 2011. Maybe they came out before that. But, I found them and loaded them and used them in 2011...so I'm calling them 2011 apps. So there.

What criteria did I use to determine the top three? I used the following complex formula:

1) I thought: what are the three productivity apps I like best?
2) The first three that popped into my head won.

Research complete:

Pulse News App

If you're looking for a great source for news and information, you'll love Pulse. Easy to navigate, lots of content, many categories (top news, technology, fashion, entertainment) and my favorite feature, when you want to read the entire story from the web, it loads right into the Pulse interface, rather than making you open a browser to go to the web. Read my entire review here.


Vlingo Personal Assistant 

This app is incredibly useful and they keep making it better and more responsive to voice commands. I use it for hands free texting (just say "text Joe followed by the message" and it does it all), I use it to make calls ("call Jim on mobile") and I use it to open other apps rather than having to search for them ("open stopwatch") Read more here...

Square Credit Card Processing App

I still think this is revolutionary, even though the competition is getting thick (review of Intuit coming soon). Imagine being able to accept a credit card, swipe it into your Smartphone, and have the money deposited into your bank account and the receipt sent to the buyers email, text or you can print it out for them. All with no monthly fee. Only pay when you process a sale. Too cool. Read all about it here...

So, there you have it. If you don't already have these apps, download them now. They are all free, fun and/or useful.