GigBeat is an app that hasn’t been around for a while, but has developed very quickly since its introduction. This app lets you quickly and easily find concerts from your favorite artists in your area. It lets you see when they’re on tour, where they’ll be performing, and all sorts of information about each individual event. This is a must-try for concert-goers. If you aren’t already a big concerts person, you may discover you first few gigs through this application. When you first open it, it scans through your local music library and pulls artist names and shows which ones are on tour and where. Very neat! Read More
Wunderlist is a Task Manager app similar to Google Tasks, and is available for iOS, Android, Mac OSX, Windows and the Chrome Web Store. It’s a beautiful productivity application with a ton of sync features that made the switch from GTasks pretty easy. Check out the full video review to decide if this is the life-organizing app for you: Read More
In today’s field of mobile technology, cloud storage has become an increasingly popular trend for storing media, documents, and other data that you would normally access on your phone, tablet or computer. The number of options has recently increased largely for anyone wanting to join in on the cloud revolution. SugarSync, an app made by a developer of the same name, has created just the ecosystem to make cloud storage easy on the go. It is available now on Android, iOS, Blackberry and even some of the older, obsolete less popular platforms like Windows Mobile and Symbian. SugarSync puts a strong emphasis on two things in its applications: pictures and documents. When you first open the app, in asks if you would like to backup all the photos on your phone to its service. Once uploaded, it is a breeze to access them across devices. The other major feature, documents, is easy to access as well. This may not be very mobile specific, but is a nice feature to have as you can access everything from your desktop. Other media like music and random files can be accessed and uploaded. One problem with an app like this is the fact that carriers have implemented tiered data, and some files can be larger, eating lots of bandwidth. Depending on what carrier you have, this could pose a problem. I uploaded a few files, and had no trouble accessing them on 2 Android devices, an iPhone 4, an iPad, a Windows 7 PC and an iMac. My only complaint is that music buffering times are horrendous, and this is not a good streaming music option. In my opinion, SugarSync got the pricing down. For $4.99 a month you get 30 GBs of data, or $50 a year. There is a variety of different sizes, and if for some Read More
SoundCloud is a web-based music sharing/streaming service that has been around for a while now – Long enough to adjust and refine their mobile experience and develop an Android application. The recent release of Spotify in the United States has attracted a lot of buzz to cloud music streaming lately, so let’s take a deeper look at a competitor that has been around for a while to really get it right. Read More
As crazy as this sounds, I still have friends who don’t have a cell phone. Those same friends, believe it or not, all have a laptop, desktop, or iPod Touch (since Android is seriously lacking in an alternative at the moment) which they use to stay glued to Facebook. So if I can’t easily text or call them, what am I supposed to do? Facebook has a chat client built right in for their Android client! Theoretically, I can transition from my laptop to my phone and continue a conversation in real time — but there’s a problem. the Facebook chat that is cooked into the app is terrible. Absolutely terrible. It has never worked properly for me, therefore, would never work as a solid line of communication for anyone on Facebook (whether they have a cell phone or not). I miss messages, auto sign-out, and the UI is less than ideal. Fortunately, there is an alternative. I began my quest for a Facebook chat client by simply searching “Facebook chat” on the Android Market. The first app that popped up was Go!Chat. Now I have tried other clients after my initial use of Go!, but I always found my way back. Why? It works better than any other client I’ve tried. Plain and simple. When you first start up Go!Chat for Facebook, you have to agree to some terms, and then login. A Facebook authentication box will pop-up, and once filled out, you’re good to go. A list of all your friends will appear in an alphabetical list, with your active friends on the top, and your idle friends near the bottom. You can long press any name and choose to add as a favorite, view profile, change alias, ignore, or mute. If you just touch on a name normally, Read More
Did you know that if you mix fire and water, you get alcohol? Did you know that if you mix alcohol and wheat, you get beer? Or how about if you take beer, and add a brick house, you make a bar? Welcome, to Alchemy. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, alchemy is “an inexplicable or mysterious transmuting.” Alchemy for Android is an interesting puzzle game that’s based around just that: taking four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and combining them back and fourth to eventually create 370 different unique items. When the game first starts, you are presented with your “workspace”. Here, all four original elements are positioned in a cross on screen. You simply drag one element onto another, and presto chango, if those elements can be combined, they change into something else. You can add previous elements already created to make more elements, by using the small plus sign on the bottom of your workspace, going for crazier and crazier combinations every time. You can also undo combinations in the premium version of Alchemy, by using the undo button, and use the “?” button for a quick intro to the game, as well as one other thing; quite possibly my favorite feature of the game that’s generally overlooked. If you drag any element you’ve created onto the ? button, then a quick intro for that element’s Wikipedia entry pops ups with a link to continue reading. I’ve put this function to the test, and in all my experiences, it’s very well done. Alchemy for Android currently has 5,000,000 – 10,000,000 installs, with a five star rating from 139,800 reviews. If you’ve spent a lot of time in the Android Market, you know that this is phenomenal. I can assure you, there is a good reason for those Read More
Today’s Memorial Day edition of Root Reviews will be a short one, but the featured app is one I’ve been waiting a long time for. As you may have guessed, from previous Root Reviews, I love CyanogenMod 7 themes. The theme engine makes it so incredibly easy to apply them, and the number of themes is growing ever larger. The only thing I don’t like about the system, is that you have to reboot your device for all of the changes to occur — like with your notification bar. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to get around rebooting your device to see how a theme changes your notification bar? Now there is: Notification Restart. Notification Restart Notification Restart, 345k in size, is available now in the Android Market as version number 1.2.1. The only requirement is Android 2.1 and up. Currently, Notification Restart is free. Features As I said in the opening paragraph, this review is going to be a short one. The only feature of Notification Restart has already been explained. It simply restarts your notification bar in order to see changes made by CyanogenMod 7 theme engine themes. It can also be used if anything has gone wrong with your status bar, but it does require root access. To get a good look at how the menu for Notification Restart looks, check out the picture below. Final Word It’s clean, elegant, and does exactly what it was intended to do. Eventually, I’d like to see this feature integrated into CyanogenMod, but for now Notification Restart is the best app I could ask for. If you use CyanogenMod 7 themes, then you’ve got to download Notification Restart today; it’s one app I’ve been dying to whitelist for a long time. Read More
Three weeks ago, the “wheels when you want them” company, Zipcar, launched a beta version of their application in the Android Market. At the time, I had trouble accessing the functions of the app because the credit card associated with my account needed updating. Now that I’ve resolved my account problem, I am able to use the app to make and extend reservations, lock/unlock the car and honk the horn with the touch of a button, and view existing reservations. I used the app exclusively to make and manage a reservation yesterday, and was, for the most part, very happy with my experience. Before I get into the app itself, a quick run down of the Zipcar service is in order. Zipcar parks autos all over medium and major cities across the country. Members of their service pay a low annual fee and are given a card in return. The card is held over a sensor mounted on the windshield of a Zipcar, thereby unlocking the vehicle. Each auto has keys, a gas card and sometimes parking validation inside. In order to reserve a car, one simply goes on the website or uses the mobile app to call dibs days in advance or 30 seconds before a lift is needed. If the desired slot conflicts with an existing reservation, users can view the overlap and adjust their reservation accordingly. Quick. Easy. It’s car rental without the lines and signatures. A one-time setup establishes preferences, and each individual reservation thereafter is a piece of cake. Cars are rented at an hourly rate, with gas and insurance included. Apart from the occasional force close (which can be expected during beta testing), I’ve found the Zipcar Android app to be friendly and functional. I extended a reservation no less than 4 times yesterday, and Read More
This post certainly has a limited appeal, but I know there are some Portland, Oregon readers out there who will appreciate it. The Unitus Community Credit Union has published an Android application for managing accounts while mobile. View transactions, transfer from one account to another, and access Total Finance, if enrolled. The app is now free in the Android Market. An iOS version is available as well. Read up on Unitus’ mobile banking features here. Unitus is also on Twitter, @UnitusCCU Read More
Finding games that really push the Nexus S to the limit of its processing power are surprisingly hard to come by. Out of all the graphic-heavy HD games I’ve tried so far, only one has been able to really stress the device: Dillo Hills. I originally found Dillo Hills by searching for Tiny Wings, an iOS game, in the Android Market. Dillo Hills isn’t necessarily a clone of Tiny Wings, but it’s pretty close. The first thing that stood out to me, and made my wonder how the Nexus would handle Dillo Hills, is this line in the game’s Market description: “We strongly encourage you to download and run the free version of game to see if it is compatible with your device before purchasing or reviewing the game.” Never have I ever… seen an app that encourages writers to shy away from reviews. Could it really be that intense? A game so advanced that you need to download the trial before purchasing, or reviewing? It was after reading that line, that I knew what I had to do. I had to download Dillo Hills, and give it a thorough review. Dillo Hills Available in both Lite and paid ($0.99) forms, Dillo Hills requires Android 2.2 and up since Adobe Air is a necessity to play. Both versions of the game are on v1.1.9, and 7.9M in size. For the purpose of this review, I’ll be taking a look at the paid version. Gameplay When first starting Dillo Hills, you are presented with everything you can possibly do in the game, accompanied by some soothing acoustic guitar. You can choose to view the leader-boards, choose your character, shop, quit, play, and view the options. The leader-boards, quit, and play choices are all pretty self explanatory. There are daily, national, and all-time Read More
