Get Suggestions for Improving Your Android Phone’s Battery Life With Carat

You don’t need a task killer because Android can normally manage processes better on its own. However, this all falls apart if there’s a buggy app hogging your resources and running when it shouldn’t be. But how do you identify these misbehaving apps?

Carat, an app developed by a team of researches at AMP Lab at UC Berkeley, is an Android app that collects samples from many devices and suggests actions you can take to improve your phone’s battery life. Carat uses machine learning to analyze the data it collects and identify battery hogs.

From Plastic to Smartphone: When Will Digital Wallets Take Over?

Whatever happened to the digital wallet? We’ve been hearing that smartphones are on the verge of replacing our credit cards and eliminating our physical wallets for years, but it never seems to happen.

6 Ways to Customize Android that iOS Users Can Only Dream About

Android is very customizable – many of its features are just defaults and can be swapped out for third-party alternatives without any rooting required. Some of these things are possible on a jailbroken iOS device, while some remain impossible.

You can replace nearly anything included with the Android operating system, including some things not mentioned here – for example, you can install a replacement dialer or contacts app if you like, too.

Change Your Keyboard

Android’s default keyboard is one of many options. Without even rooting your device, you can install third-party keyboards and switch between them from the Language and input screen in your device’s settings.

This allows third-party developers to experiment with new and different keyboards that may work better for you. Popular alternative keyboards include Swype, which is included by default with some Android smartphones and tablets and available as a free beta from Swype’s website, and SwiftKey, available for $4 from Google Play. Swype allows you to type words by “swiping” over their letters with your fingers, while SwiftKey uses natural language processing to automatically guess the words you meant to type and the words that you’ll type next.

Swap Home Screen Launchers

The default home screen is just another app that can be swapped out. If you’re looking for something with a completely different look or more options, you can install a third-party launcher from Google Play. There’s a thriving ecosystem of third-party launchers out there.GO Launcher EX is a very popular one – it includes skins, widgets, and many configuration options. If you’re using Gingerbread or Froyo, older versions of Android, but like the Android 4.0+ Ice Cream Sandwich look, you can try Holo Launcher to get a similar, updated look.

To select your default launcher, tap the Home button on your device after installing a launcher. You’ll be prompted to select a launcher.

Choose a Lock Screen

You can change your lock screen, too. Alternative lock screens offer different themes and additional functionality. For example, WidgetLocker allows you to add widgets to your lock screen and move them around to design your own ideal lock screen. Custom lock screens aren’t quite as popular as custom launchers – there aren’t nearly as many custom lock screens, and most of them seem to be paid apps.

Set Your Default Browser

Android allows you to install third-party browsers and set them as your default browser, allowing you to ignore the built-in browser (Internet or Chrome) entirely. When you tap a link after installing a new browser app on Android, you’ll be prompted to select your default browser.

Better yet, Google doesn’t place the same restrictions on developers Apple and Microsoft do – these third-party browsers are proper browsers that use their own rendering engines. Firefox for Android uses the same rendering engine that Firefox on your desktop does, and Opera Mobile has its own rendering engine, too. On iOS, these browsers must be “shells” around the built-in browser. In fact, although Chrome for iPhone is forced to be a shell around the built-in Safari browser, Chrome for iPhone isn’t even as fast as Safari because Chrome isn’t allowed to access Safari’s optimized JavaScript library and can’t include its own.

Although you can switch browsers on a jailbroken iOS device, iOS browsers like Chrome and Firefox will remain shells over Safari with inferior performance.

Switch Email Clients

Unlike on iOS, you can also install different email clients and set them as the default email app that appears when you tap an email address link anywhere in the OS. Third-party email applications aren’t that popular (Android’s included Gmail app is very good for Gmail users), but Microsoft and Yahoo produce their own apps for Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail – each of which can be your default mail app, if you like. There are also other email apps, like K-9 Mail.

If you don’t like Gmail, you’ll never have to see it. You can’t say that for the default email app on iOS.

Install a New Operating System (Custom ROM)

Android is open source, so the community can build on its source code and create modified versions with additional features – these are known as custom ROMs. The most popular custom ROM is CyanogenMod, a custom ROM that can replace the included Android OS on a wide variety of devices. CyanogenMod is made possible by Android’s open-source nature – it isn’t just a series of hacks on top of a closed-source operating system build; the CyanogenMod developers start with Android’s source code and build on it to create their own community-developed version.

Chomp Your Way to the Top of the Food Chain in Zombie Fish Tank

Evil scientists took away his love, freedom, and finally his life…but the story does not end there. They are getting ready to learn the hard way that they messed with the wrong fish as he comes back from the dead! Your job is to help this mistreated fish take on the laboratory’s terrifying creations and monstrosities as he chomps his way to the top of the food chain in his quest for vengeance.

Type Faster: 6 Tips and Tricks for Mastering Android’s Keyboard

If all you do with your Android phone or tablet’s keyboard is tap out words, you are missing a lot of great features. There’s more to learn about a keyboard than you might expect.

Of course, you can just type out words without paying attention to any of these features — but mastering them will help you type faster and save time while entering text.

How to Share Data and Files Between Your Android Phone and PC

Android doesn’t have an iTunes-like desktop program, so the process of syncing your data may not be as obvious as it is with an iPhone.  However, you don’t need a desktop syncing app — even iPhone users are leaving iTunes behind.

While you can move files back and forth with a USB cable or wireless network connection, the ideal way to keep data in sync between your devices is by relying on online services that do the work for you.

How to Use iFunBox as a Robust iTunes Alternative

If you love your iOS device but you’re not a fan of iTunes, there’s a way to manage your device without it. Read on as we show you how to spend less time syncing files and dinking around with iTunes and more time enjoying your device.

How to Connect Mice, Keyboards, and Gamepads to an Android Phone or Tablet

Android supports mice, keyboards, and even gamepads. On many Android devices, you can connect USB peripherals to your device. On other Android devices, you may need to connect them wirelessly via Bluetooth.

Yes, this means you can connect a mouse to your Android tablet and get a mouse cursor, or connect an Xbox 360 controller and play a game, console-style. You can even connect a keyboard and use keyboard shortcuts like Alt+Tab.

How to wirelessly charge your Samsung Galaxy S3

The next smartphone generation is likely going to be charged via induction. We demonstrate how the same applies to your mobile

Charging the battery – and that too without a cable via induction – will be one of the most important features of the forthcoming generation of smartphones. In this tip, we show you how you can upgrade this function even today in your mobile phone. eBay is full of individual induction mats and also individual battery compartment lids for several different handsets. Since the technical details of the components are normally not very strong, we generally do not recommend these products. The reason: more, or less, voltage builds up depending on how many windings are present in the coils, in the mat and battery compartment lid. The result could be that the smartphone is not charged, or worse, is maltreated with over-voltage, which could again lead to the battery getting destroyed.

How to root the Google Nexus 7 Tablet

So you want full access to the system of your Nexus 7 tablet? We’ll show how it’s done – in 7 easy steps.

The Google Nexus 7, manufactured by Asus, is known as the “People’s tablet”. Many owners toy with the thought of rooting it so as to gain full access to the system, This will allow them to experiment with custom ROMs or install apps like Titanium Backup et al. This can be done since rooting is very simple thanks to the All-in-one solution Google Nexus 7 Toolkit. In one work step, this tool unlocks the boot loader, sets up the root access and installs important extras like Superuser, BusyBox and ClockworkMod Touch Recovery.

However, there is also a disadvantage. All data gets deleted during the rooting. Therefore, you must manually secure all elements beforehand that cannot be automatically restored directly over your Google account. For this purpose, we recommend an excellent free program called MyPhoneExplorer which can be downloaded off the net here.

How To Back up and restore Android apps and data directly from a PC

Here is a quick tool to help you back up and restore apps on any Android phone.

If you are an advanced user of Android-based smartphones, then you will definitely have a rooted device. And if you are anxious about installing speedy and updated custom ROMs, then you are likely to install a new ROM almost once a week. Installing a custom ROM is most often a time consuming job. The procedure involves taking backups of your installed apps using a backup utility such as Titanuim Backup or My Backup Pro. Then you need to restart the phone, enter the recovery mode and take a Nandroid backup. Then the phone has to be flashed with a new firmware and you have to configure it all over again to install your backup utility and restore your data. Custom ROMs most often include file browsers, which might make work a bit simpler so that you can install the backup utility directly from the SD card. If not, you have to set up your Wi-Fi or 3G, set up the Google Play account and download the app all over again. Irritating, isn’t it? In adddition to this, there are sometimes issues with the backup utility not being able to restore across different ROMs and Android versions. This further demands your patience to select certain apps and restore only those to avoid issues with the new ROM.

How To Root the Xolo Q700 and flash CWM Recovery

We found a method on XDA to root the Xolo Q700 and install CWM recovery.

Just purchased the Xolo Q700? Do you want to root it? Do you want to install CWM recovery and take backups, install custom ROMs and do more? Well, here's a step by step method to root the phone and install CWM recovery. This method was cited on the XDA forums recently and we combined the procedure for you. Lets head straight for it.

How To Weed out bloatware from your Galaxy S4

The wealth of features on the Samsung Galaxy S4 combined with super good looks make the smartphone a very tempting option, but the downside is that  there are a few unwanted applications that might not be welcome by many. For example, you don’t want the stock live wallpapers, such as phase beam and bubbles, floating around inside your phone for no reason; or the printing services waiting to be used in the background. While most might not be active every time you switch on your Galaxy S4, they are dormant and unnecessarily hog useful space. Some features like maps, social networking apps, widgets, weather apps and a few more run in the background even though you don’t use them – eating into your system resources and feasting on the battery life. Why not get rid of these and make your phone’s system lighter and enhance the battery life?

How To: Root the Samsung Galaxy S4 I9500

You just bought yourself a new Samsung Galaxy S4 i9500 and you are impressed with your investment. The smartphone was shipped to you with an older operating system version of Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2 and the shopkeeper informed you to go ahead and update it from the Internet. You readily agreed and went home to start the phone and set up the email accounts and all the necessary applications on it. You also noticed the update from Samsung available and went ahead to install it. Now that you are pleased with the performance, you want to root it. Uh-oh! You went through a lot of websites online to find a method to root it and got the easiest one out. But it happened to be working on the older version of the operating system. Unfortunately, you have already updated to the latest firmware version from the Internet. Now your smartphone shows you the version or build number as "I9500XXUAMDK", which is not being rooted with the older method. So, how do you root your S4?

Fantasy Wallpaper Collection for Your iPad

Sometimes an inspiring background can be the perfect way to kick-start your imagination and get your browsing or work off to a great start. Take your iPad to whole new worlds with the first in our series of Fantasy Wallpaper collections.

Mountains Wallpaper Collection for Your Nexus 7 Tablet

Mountains invoke thoughts of beauty, solitude, and peace that can be quite alluring when life becomes stressful. Enjoy a relaxing view on your Nexus 7 with the first in our series of Mountains Wallpaper collections.

How to Protect Your Apple ID with Two-Step Verification

To help keep online accounts secure, two-step verification is becoming increasingly common. Apple is the latest firm to introduce this extra level of authentication, meaning that logging into your account requires more than just a basic password.

How to Prevent Your Kids From Spending Thousands of Dollars on In-App Purchases

More than $5000. That’s how much one man’s child ran up on his credit card by playing “free” games on his iPad. Many games may be advertised as free, but they actually try to push expensive “in-app purchases.”

Some children – particularly younger ones – may not realize that the “buy more stuff” option in a free game actually adds charges to the credit card you have saved on your tablet or smartphone.

How to Use Your Android Device as a Mouse, Keyboard, Joystick and More

Using your Android to control your computer is a great way to interact with programs. Your phone can be used a trackpad, or could be used to use a media player using custom controls.Monect lets you take things further by turning your Android device into all manner of peripherals.

How to Flash Your Nexus S (or Any Other Android Device) with a New ROM

When you bought your phone it was cutting edge, had the latest version of Android, and made your heart sing. A year or more later, it doesn’t get the new updates and the performance is a little sluggish. Breathe new life into your phone by flashing it with a new custom ROM.