Got yourself a new Android phone? Start here!

After lots of confusions and dilemma you've finally settled on an Android phone! Good job! Now what next?

I'm sure you're confused by the abundant level of customization and settings available within the phone and would love some kind of orientation. Let me give you the basics you need to know to keep you glued to your mobile for the next few days (if not months).

Android is one OS which provides a deep level of customization from the basic themes and ring tones to the home screen launchers and font types. The deeper the level of customization you'd want, the more your need to root your phone (I'll talk about that in a different post).

The android market has lots of apps to give you basic level of customization such as wallpapers, live wallpapers, ringtones and themes. The apps are of .apk (.Android Package) format and most of the android phones has a inbuilt installer for .apk files. One thing about these Market apps is that since Google does not cleanse the apps and almost anyone can upload apps to the market, many of these may be Trojan laden. Be cautious about what apps to install by reading through a couple of user reviews and also check the number of downloads that app has had so far. If the app has been downloaded around 50,000 times, chances are that it is a very safe app.

Here are the list of essential apps for your Android phone:


1. The first thing you'd need on your Android phone is the Zedge app. It is a splendid little tool and lets you choose from a huge collection of wallpapers, ring tones and notification sounds classified under functional categories.


2. If you get bored with your default launcher (Motoblur, Samsung Touchwiz, HTC Sense or the like) then you should check out my previous post on Home screen replacement apps. My personal favorite is Launcher pro but if you want lots of themes then GO Launcher is the No.1 choice.


3. Advanced Task Killer : Lots of people think this is not really useful but I'd suggest you install this app to reclaim memory fast. Consider this, You are playing some graphic intensive game and find it to be laggy sometimes. Chances are that the phone memory has filled up completely. Advanced task killer lets you free up the used memory real fast so that you can continue your game without any hiccups.


4. Photoshop Express : This is a good tool for those who take a lot of snaps on their mobile. Gives you a medium level of photo tweaking including the ability to upload to Photoshop.com.


5. Fancy Widget : Really beautiful widget collection for those non HTC phone users who would like to add bling to their home screen. Lots of skins available for both the clock and the weather widgets.


6. Minimalistic Text : My favorite widget app solely for the amount of customization it offers on how to display the text. You can display the time, date, weather, battery, custom text, all in a very simple and sleek format. If you have lots of free time, check this app out for sure.


7. Poweramp : The default android music player is good for sure but good is not always good enough is it? Poweramp is the souped up super music player you were always longing for. It is such a powerful music player that you will not repent purchasing it from the market after the trial period. In its latest update gives the power to crossfade and cut silence between tracks too.

8. Pulse News : Whether you read the News daily or not, Pulse News is a must install app. With ability to add literally every news source there is on the web and a smooth and fun interface, you'd become the walking BBC within your friends circle in no time.


I think these 8 apps will definitely make sure you go for physiotherapy for your neck very soon ;) Install these and give me your suggestions too.

Android Home Screen Replacement

A Launcher is pretty much like the desktop screen on Windows or Mac OSx from where we launch applications and view important statuses such as current time, running applications, battery left, etc.

Android is a highly customizable OS out of the box unlike iOS devices which need rooting/jailbreaking before we can change most of the stuff.

In this post I will try to cover some of the popular and useful launchers that are available on the Android Market (There a hundreds of home screen launchers in Android Market).

ADW Launcher: This is a light weight application that allows the user to customize the number of home screens and dock bar applications apart from the numerous other functionalities being offered The best thing about ADW Launcher is that it supports hundreds of themes that can be downloaded from the Android Market. The themes not only change the color of the UI elements but also the icons which gives a complete feel to the phone.

Go Launcher Ex: The Go Team has always been at it to improve the usability of Android by offering many apps from Home screen replacement to SMS and Contact app replacement. The best thing is that all the apps are for free. Go Launcher Ex is one of my favorite home screen replacement apps because of the long list of features it offers without hogging lots of phone memory. It is a must try for anyone unhappy with the default Android Home screen. Though Go Launcher does not have as many themes on the Android Market as ADW, it sure has a good list. Go Launcher also gives the home screen preview similar to that in HTC Sense. The best thing about Go Launcher is that it also has a Task killer built in. When you open the Applications dock there is a tab that lists the running apps and the user can kill any unused app from there itself.

Launcher Pro: This is the rock star of home screen apps and probably the most downloaded of them all. The reason? It is very light on the resources and also very responsive. Features on this one is similar to Go Launcher and ADW Launcher such as scrollable dock bar and screen previews. The special thing about Launcher Pro is the Launcher Pro widgets. The developer of this app has created many useful widgets which are actually a rip off of the HTC Sense widgets, but who cares as long as they are useful. Friends Stream, People, SMS, Twitter, Facebook are some of the widgets on offer. The full set of widgets are only available on the Pro Plus version which costs around Rs.150 ($3.5) but in my opinion it is worth it.

In my personal opinion Launcher Pro is the very best and I’d suggest it to anyone interested in Home screen replacement. Some of the other popular home screen replacement apps are Android 2.3 Launcher, Open Home, Zeam Launcher, Launcher 7, etc. You can experiment with them safely but quite a few of them have their share of minor bugs and niggles.

Motorola Defy Review

There are phones that claim to do it all and then there are phones that claim to do only one thing but be the best at it. Rarely do we ever come across phones that claim to do it all and be the best at them all. This is where Motorola's newest rugged phone enters the scene. Lets see how it fares right after setting the tone for it.

I am sure you would have heard a lot about the Samsung Marine phone and less frequently about the Sonim brand of rugged phones. These things have only one purpose and that is to weather the elements of nature. These phones can be dipped in water (or put into the washing machine), used for catch practice, bumped around (accidentally of course) and still when you really want to make a call, they can do that with ease.
In the Indian mobile owner scenario, men put their phones in their shirt pockets and bend down every now and then, dropping their phones on anything from the wash basin to the hard tarmac.
The women of the world are a little sophisticated in that they put their phones into their handbags along with the many mysteries that take abode inside.
The first thing that gets damaged because of this is the phone screen. It gets scratched by the keys and pins, cracked due to the drops and drenched occassionally.
The second most vital component is the battery which shorts the moment it tastes a drop of water/liquid.
With these many potential hazards looming around your phone, the concept of rugged phones should have become a huge hit in India but did not.

So what really went wrong? There was just a single big reason.

Many Indians don't settle with a bang for their buck but need a Big bang at that. Irrespective of whether we use all the features or not, we prefer to have Quad Band, Bluetooth (version 1.2 will not suffice), FM Radio, GRPS/Edge (Class 10 will not suffice), A-GPS, maybe a touchscreen too. All these just for the bragging rights that come attached. That's where Micromax, Spice and Lavas of the world became a hit and that's an entirely different topic of discussion altogether.

Gadgetholics and tech enthusiasts who really appreciated all the latest technologies did not have a choice at all when they wanted their phones to be rugged. It was either the small screened, feature deficit Marine and Sonim or nothing at all. That is when someone deep down at the Motorola labs (in some cold desert ;) maybe) thought about adressing this one problem and the Motorola Defy is the result of that.

The phone has Gorilla glass covering the display and the phone is sealed tight by the back panel which can be opened by sliding out the bar at the bottom. The back panel has some lubricating oil in the inner edges to keep the internals air and of course water tight. This is the reason the memory card will be found under the battery within the panel and not outside one the phone. The camera also does not have a physical button for the same reason. You can click on the screen to capture a photo/video.
I have immersed the phone numerous times in water just to look at the reaction of my family and friends(they did not know it is a waterproof phone). I've seen people say they see water in the edges of the phones once they take the phone out. It is quite natural. Motorola did not say Defy will completely defy water. Obviously the connecting panels and the earpiece are areas where drops of water will stay but that will not deter the usage of the phone and the water will evaporate in a few minutes. Don't worry about that.
Also you may not need to laminate your phone screen with the screen guard and don't even bother checking whether you've put any keys or sharp items along with the phone. The screen will never show a scratch.

Now on to the review.

Physical and Hardware - The phone is of the candybar form factor and the front has just a huge screen (huge atleast in terms of the dimensions of the phone itself). Around 93% of the phone front is the display screen, with a thin bezel where the earpiece and the buttons reside on the top and bottom respectively taking the rest 7%. The back of the phone is wrapped in ah-so-awesome rubber that Motorola has used in many of their previous phones. The sides have these cool screws that hold the phone together and also add some rugged factor to the looks. The top has the lock/unlock button and the 3.5mm audio jack. The right side has the volume rocker and the left side has the micro usb port.
Overall the phone is very very light for a rugged phone and that too a phone with so many features.

The screen is 3.7 inches long diagnolly and the capactive TFT display used here with a resolution of 480*854 is the same one found on the original Droid/Milestone. I don't need to mention how good the Milestone screen was with respect to brightness, contrast and crispness of the images. In fact it rivals some of the best AMOLEDs in the business. Thumbs up to Motorola for that.
Based on my personal use I can confidently say that the screen brightness is more than sufficient at its lowest level that you'll never need to notch it up under most situations except under direct sunlight. The auto brightness feature is cool but might not be required at all.

The screen also supports multitouch input for all those pinch zoom fans.
The phone sports a dual mic for noise cancellation and after using the phone for more than a month I can confidently say that the dual mic does what it advertises perfectly. Even when I was in a very noisy environment, the caller on the other side could hear my voice perfectly.
Out of my personal experience I can say that the speakerphone is loud and does not crackle at high volumes. Many times I've used the phone for official conference calls when the VOIP phone did not work properly.

CPU/GPU - The phone sports an ARM Cortex A8 processor clocked at 800Mhz. The best part is that the processor is the same as the HTC Desire and the Samsung Galaxy S and hence all the phones can be overclocked to at least 1.2Ghz without frying the CPU ;)
Having 800Mhz processor does not mean it is not powerful enough in any way. The phone comes with PowerVR graphics chip and it can play some really intensive 3D games without any hiccups. The phone generally performs without any freezes and just like all Android phones it rarely freezes a bit when the RAM is filled up and while the memory manager is in the process of killing stale processes. This happens in a jiffy and does not pose a hindrance to the general operability of the phone.

RAM/Internal Memory - The phone also has 512 MB RAM which will be more than enough for heavy gaming too.
The internal memory is 2GB out of which 1.4GB can be used straight away. The rest being used by the default apps installed by Motorola. The box comes with 2GB micro SD card and the phone supports upto 32GB.
The headset that comes along with the phone is of decent quality and is good only for voice calls and not for listening to music.

Software - The phone comes with Android 2.1 Eclair installed and though 2.1 is a little outdated, one of the major things that come with Android 2.2 is already there on the phone and that is Internet tethering. The other advantage of Android 2.2 was the ability to install apps onto the memory card directly and thus making sure the internal memory is not filled up. Again Defy has solved this issue partially on the 2.1 version by giving us ample internal memory of 2GB. I'm an Apps freak and have installed and uninstalled atleast a few hundred apps till date and never ever came across the "Memory full" message till date.

Motorola has confirmed that Android 2.2 will be coming to Defy in around three weeks from now and so cheer up guys.

MOTOBLUR - I would like to confirm one thing about the phone at this point. The phone does NOT support Motorola Blur service in India. The OS installed is a Non Blur package. So if you were dreaming about using the remote locator/wipe and Happenings widget those things are not available in the Indian Defy but nevertheless those features are available as third party apps in the Android Market.
Another thing I would like to confirm is that the Blur skin IS installed on the phone and hence the super useful light weight widgets created by motorola can be used and resized on the defy.

Multimedia - Since the phone has a large screen watching videos/youtube streams is a pleasure. The processor is fast and hence good quality Divx/Xvid videos can be watched without a problem. The default video player does not support Divx/Xvid but you can download Rockplayer or Arc Media for free from the market.
The audio quality is stellar and clear though not very loud. Installing PowerAmp will let the audioheads blast their ears with loud music but otherwise the loudness is more than sufficient for everyone. The phone does not have any equaliser presets such as Rock, Pop etc but has some kind of Audio effects option that lets the phone emulate different aural environments. It is effective but if you want the usual preset PowerAmp comes to the rescue.
The phone also comes with DLNA and it is an awesome feature when you have a gaming console like PS3. You can stream movies/music and photos to the TV from the phone via the console. Freedom from wires for sure!

Browsing/Apps - As everyone knows Android uses the Webkit browser which tries to emulate desktop like web experience on a mobile device. The phone has a high resolution and hence removes the need for constant zooming of the web page. The phone also comes with Flash Lite for the majority of flash based sites and to add to that Andriod 2.2 will bring Adobe Flash 10.1 to Defy which will enable complete freedom to use any flash based site :-)

Android Market is not as good as App Store but at the same time available on even phones that cost less than Rs.10,000. I'm sure Apple cannot brag about that ever. The latest count of apps on Android market was close to 1,50,000 and that is no normal feat. The Android Market has apps catering to every kind of phone user from the downright Nerd to the more laid back Casual user. The number and quality of games is not as good as iOS but the Android Market is evolving and growing fast. Its just a matter of time before we get some high end games on Android thanks majorly to Sony for bringing Xperia Play and the Playstation One games along to the Android Market.

Camera/Video Camera - I accept the camera quality on the phone is not so great but that is mainly due to the compression techniques used and not because of the hardware. There is lots of information suggesting that Motorola is bringing a better compression algorithm to the Defy in their Android 2.2 update in April. The phone takes excellent shots in daylight and noise creeps in only when photos are captured in low light and dark situations. The LED Flash is sufficient for close objects but does not have enough throw to capture anything beyond portrait photos. This is the case with almost all phone models that have LED flashlight. To circumvent the problem with low light there are many apps on the market that provide lots of options to tweak the camera.
The video can be captured at upto 480p at 30fps and I should say the video quality is excellent. No worries in this department.

Battery and Conclusion - The phone has a With a smartphone 3.7V battery with capacity of 1540mAH. This is huge and the proof is in the battery backup. I've used the phone more than one and a half days with heavy usage. I constantly keep locking and unlocking the phone which usually drains the battery a lot but defy goes on to see another day with a single charge. I'm confident 85-90% of android phones from other brands cannot say the same about their battery lives.

With a phone like the Defy it is never easy to finish off the review quickly. There is so much more to mention about the phone that it becomes difficult to cut the review short. Any way overall this is the phone to get at the price at which it is being offered. Rs.18000 is cheap for a rugged large (beautiful) screen Android phone. Android 2.2 is around the corner and that will further improve the performance of the phone by a large extent. You may get many phones with a meatier camera or processor but as I mentioned in the beginning there aren't many phones that claim to do it all and be the best at them all. So go ahead, there is nothing that can disappoint you in this phone. If you have any specific doubts on the phone just post it in the comments and I'll reply back.

The Mobile phone era

Recently one of my dear friends asked me to suggest a good mobile phone within his budget and I suggested a Samsung phone that crams everything you can think of except the kitchen sink ;-). He asked me why not one other Motorola phone that is doing the rounds in newspapers and TV ads frequently, and then I realized that both the phones were in fact loaded with similar features and fell within the same price band.

My topic for today is exactly on this situation that technological innovations has left us with.

If we go five years back in time when mobile phones having a megapixel camera was a rarity, this situation didn't seem to exist. Samsung phones were marred by poor battery backup, Motorola had the slowest UI response. Sony Ericsson was the only brand that sported a decent music player which was its USP and Nokia's smartphone abilities were meant for business people. Heck, Blackberry was not even within the reach of Indian consumers.

In the early 2000s having a phone that did not weigh more than an oxford dictionary and barely fitted into our pockets was fad. Slowly we moved onto color screens and cameras. In built music players that supported mp3 files was the next step and then came megapixel cameras.
Second half of the decade saw the rising of Bluetooth, Mp4 Video players and touchscreen.

Zooming back to 2010, Samsung is a market leader in both feature and smartphone segments, Motorola sports the most cutting edge hardware and both phones largely use Android OS. Nokia, LG and Sony Ericsson are on the brink of being neglected. The biggest thing seems to be social networking. Phones from every price segment seem to sport a basic facebook or twitter link and some even have dedicated apps for the same speaking of which Mobile Apps have become one of the most important factors in choosing a smart phone. (thanks almost completely to the Apple's App Store)

So where is technology taking us in the future?
I, for one, feel that mobile phones will completely replace desktop computers for casual computing (Browsing the internet and checking emails). Desktops will only be used where heavy computing power is required such as for gaming or media rendering.
With the ease with which mobiles phones render web sites these days and thanks to browsers like Opera and the newer web kit based browsers, it will seem Neanderthal to boot your bulky computer, login to your profile, click on the browser and wait for it to load and then check your mails. With the migration of most of our data onto clouds it will makes more sense to depend on these pocket sized devices though they lack the storage capacity of full fledged computers.
Microsoft Kin was an example of where future mobile phones will go. Though the Kin series failed to rake in enough cash for the Redmond giant, it sure made other brands wake up and reorient themselves to the direction of cloud computing.
Everything that the user consumes or produces on the Kin was stored on the cloud and literally removed the need for gigabytes of memory built into the phone.
Apps have become as popular as social networking if not more, though I seriously do not understand the hype given for the latter (Especially Facebook).
The differentiation in hardware that the phone brands used to advertise some years ago has completely gone and even rookies in the business come up with cutting edge hardware, take for instance the 12 megapixel phone S1200 by Spice Communications.
The future belongs to software the example of which can be seen in Android OS and Apple's App Store.

The rise and fall of brands will be decided by factors hitherto unexplored in the industry such as:
How big is the application market for the phone brand?
How easy to use is the OS?
How many services can the phone integrate (Social networking, Microsoft Exchange, RSS)?
How sound is the Syncing system?
What else can my phone do apart from the plethora of functionalities already offered? (Phones are being used in telemedicine and as a replacement to credit cards)

These are questions that will be in the minds of every educated consumer. The Indian market will expect not much lesser than the western countries (India is the second largest and the fastest growing mobile phone market)

The leaders of the past are struggling to gain back their lost market share and questions like these are good starting points for them to relook at their strategy.

At the end of the day, consumers like you and me will be getting the maximum bang for the buck with competition scrambling for all kinds of differentiation. The future is bright for every mobile phone buyer :-D

HD Pocket Camcorders

Did you ever miss catching that special moment or hilarious thing because of your slow mobile phone camera or because you couldn’t carry a bulky video camera around?Maybe it is time for you to check out pocket camcorders.

Pocket camcorder as the name suggests is compact in size and carries a small screen for the purpose of view and preview. Instant startup and record is what makes gives these pocket camcorders the edge over other camcorders. These things support HD resolution, still photography, stereo audio recording and external memory cards too. Hi quality video sensors, low light compensation and anti blur are recent additions to the features. Flip Mino, Kodak Zi and Creative Vado (not in that order) are the best pocket video cameras in the market and in some ways trump full fledged video cameras. The camcorders usually carry 8GB internal memory and store upto 2hrs of Hi Def 720p videos in .mov or .mp4 file formats which are universally compatible with MACs and PCs. The camcorders sport a mini USB or USB interface for connecting to the computers and also have embedded support software for editing or uploading videos when you connect the camcorder to the computer.

The best thing about these pocket camcorders is that they are really cheap when compared to full fledged camcorders even though they don’t compromise on the video quality. So why settle for bulky camcorders when you know you can get your job done at half the cost. Try one of these (Kodak Zi6, Zi8, Flip Mino HD, Ultra HD, Creative Vado, Vado HD) and post your comments later.