With Android 4.2, Google completely revamped the camera experience with a brand new interface and features like Photosphere. While the new UI may seem like a welcome change, it is poorly laid out which can make selecting the intended option cumbersome.
The lack of some downright basic options like scenes and timer mode does not help the matter, either. Worse, on the Nexus devices, the camera app has an auto-focus bug that can often lead to blurry photos.
While Motorola phones are not particularly known for their camera performance, the camera application on their handsets is perfect for most, with just the right amount of settings. Here is how you can get the Motorola camera app on your Android 4.0+ handset.
The days are gone when you needed to connect your device to your PC/Mac using cables to transfer files, with much more convenient options now available. With Wi-Fi, for instance, you can transfer files from device to device wirelessly. Here’s how.
A few weeks ago, Canonical released the first look of Ubuntu for phones, and soon after released developer preview builds for the Nexus devices from Google. While the OS in itself is not yet ready for consumers, the preview build does show off the interesting gesture based UI that Canonical has come up with.
One of the highlights of Ubuntu for phones is the app launcher that comes up with a simple swipe from the left edge of the screen, allowing you to quickly launch an app from anywhere in the OS. A relatively new app in the Play Store – Glovebox (free) – aims to bring similar functionality to all Android devices out there. Here’s how to set it up.
The Nexus 4, being a smartphone geared towards Android developers, is relatively easy to root; the whole process requires the use of some simple fastboot commands, which even novice users can master relatively quickly. Here’s how to get started.
Rooting an Android device has many advantages, including the ability to remove some of the pre-installed bloatware, add new features, and do much more. Samsung has been pretty liberal about the whole root thing, which makes its devices some of the easiest to root — after the Nexus series from Google.
Here is a detailed step-by-step guide on how to root the international Galaxy S III (I9300) from using a Windows-based PC.
Google removed the ability to view only your purchased applications in Google Play sometime after Ice Cream Sandwich was released. Instead of just displaying your purchased apps, the “My Apps” section started listing all the apps that you may have ever installed on your Android device.
Google did roll out a new version of Google Play sometime last year, which allowed you to manually remove the free apps from the My Apps section. But even then, if you have multiple Android devices and more than a few hundred apps installed, it can be quite cumbersome to find all the apps you’ve paid for. To make your life easier, a new app called My Purchases only lists those apps that you have paid for.
With the Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note II, Samsung introduced a ton of gimmicky features in an effort to impress us. Some of them just don’t work all that well, but others, such as Multi-Window, are pretty useful.
Another feature that’s become quite popular is called SmartStay, which uses the front facing camera to detect when a user is looking at the display. This allows it to keep the display on when their eyes are on the screen, and then turn it off when they look away, conserving previous battery life.
Unfortunately, Smart Stay is exclusive to Galaxy devices, but there are third-party alternatives you can use on your devices. Here’s how to set up one of them called SmartStay Ex.
Have a blazing fast net connection but find it still takes ages to load a website? Blame the slow DNS servers of your ISP. Alternative and free DNS services like Open DNS and Google Local DNS are much faster, more reliable, and safer compared to the DNS servers used by your ISP. They’re also handy if your operator’s DNS server is down.
While none of the Android devices come with an option to change the DNS server used by your device when on a 3G or 4G network, an application in the Play Store — SetDNS (free) — is capable of doing so, provided you have root access. Here’s what to do.
Notification LEDs in Android devices can be very useful if they are properly setup. The main purpose of a notification LED is to let you know at a glance that you have missed notifications — negating the need to turn on the screen or unlock the device.
However, Android manufacturers don’t provide any kind of in-built application to customize how the LED notification works. Due to this, most users are unaware that they can customize the notification LED on their Android devices.
Light Flow from Rage Consulting allows you to gain total control over the notification LED of your device and customise it according to your liking. The app will work without any issues on a majority of the Android devices, except for the ones from HTC. Here’s how to use it.
If you have root access, you can easily install the update manually. If not, you can try to pull the update manually from Google’s server. Depending on your region and your luck, you might just be able to manually initiate the OTA update on your Nexus device. Here are the steps you’ll need to give it a go.
