Flo Rates How Well You Drive, Helps You Improve [Android]

How confident are you in your driving skills? Good driving can be summed up as avoiding traffic tickets, staying out of accidents, and following traffic rules but really if you didn’t do all that you’d get arrested or have your license revoked. At the very least you’d pay a fine. So if you’re really just following rules are you a good driver? Use Flo on your Android device to find out. It is a very interesting app that scores how you drive. You’re penalized for things such as hard breaking, hard acceleration, sharp turns. When you accelerate smoothly, take a smooth corner, or brake easy, the app gives you points. Your drive is divided into 1KM segments and you get rated for each segment. At the end of the segment, you can see how well you did. Flo lets you record several trips and then compare your driving over the week...

Keep Alcohol Levels In Check With Blood Alcohol Finder [Android]

Last week we reviewed Drink It Smart, an iOS app (worth $0.99) that estimates your blood alcohol level after you tell it how many drinks you’ve had. The app itself is extremely useful and we’ve found something similar in function but far richer in feature for Android; Blood Alcohol Finder. This app not only estimates your blood alcohol level but it also predicts where it will be at over a given timeline. The app lets you add a large variety of alcoholic drinks. If there is a special drink that you brew for yourself, the app lets you add it to the list of available drinks. The blood alcohol estimate is based on your gender and weight, and the number of drinks you’ve had. If you like to go out drinking with a group of friends, you can add a separate profile for everyone. This app features ads. Drink responsibly...

Holo Label Widget Adds Text Labels To Your Home Screen [Android]

Have you purchased a new Android device? Congratulations. Welcome to the club. By going Android, you’ve opted for raw functionality over simplicity. From deep customization to its over the top performance, everything about Google’s mobile OS is awesome. If you were previously using, let’s say an iOS device or Windows Phone, then one of the first things you will have noticed about the new platform is the home screen which you can add a lot of things to such as widgets, shortcuts, folders etc. But after adding so much stuff, organizing it all can get overwhelming at times and that’s where the Holo Label Widget widget comes in. It aims to take care of this nuisance by putting labels over everything you place on your home screen. Think of labels as a way to name a group of apps without actually hiding them away in a folder where you can’t see all the apps in it. The app does not require a rooted device...

Nirsoft’s Wifi Collector Scans For & Gathers Wireless Network Information [Android]

One of the quality software producers, Nirsoft, who has produced several hundred different portable applications for the Windows operating system, has now launched their first Android app called Wifi Collector. As its name implies, the app enables you to gather data about the wireless networks in your vicinity. But apart from that, it also determines its exact location coordinates via your device’s GPS, and exports the same to HTML, CSV, tab-determined, or Google Earth supported files. The app offers a simple and clean Holo-inspired UI and runs flawlessly even on low-end Android phones and tablets...

CallWho Widget Adds A Smart Context Aware Speed Dial To Your Screen [Android]

If you have a large network of people, your phone’s address book might be overloaded with their contact information (mine is). But then again, not everyone in our contacts has equal importance and there are folks that we want to keep on speedial. If you occasionally end up hunting through endless lists of the contacts app on your phone just to pick the right person you mostly communicate with, then all of this comes to a stop the moment you use CallWho Smart Contacts Widget. This brilliant little Android app is the perfect solution when you need to reach people whom you frequently call or send text messages. The app does more than add speeddial to your home screen; it learns who you call the most and when you are most likely to call them. Working on your call behaviour, the app will move the dial buttons on your home screen so that the contact you are most likely to want to get in touch with is at the top...

Notegraphy Is An Instagram Like App For Typography

Poor typography destroys great design; it doesn’t matter whether you are an amateur web designer or a skilled one, the right typography choice plays an essential part of your design. For so long we’ve seen apps like Instragram single-handedly turning our casual images into visual masterpieces. But never have we seen an app doing the same to our favorite font types. Well, not until we put Notegraphy to the test, of course. It’s a new app for Android that aims to bring meaning to your text snippets, to have fun with type faces that you love, and create artistic examples out of them that you can proudly share with your friends. It carries a ton of great features and an interface that just works every time...

 

Flickr App Updated With Instagram Like Filters And Video Capture

Eleven months ago Flickr issued the most significant update ever when it announced a brand new web version and one terabyte worth of storage for every single user. For those who use the photo sharing service on mobile, we have some really great news for you; Flickr for iOS and Android has been updated and it looks more functional and fun than ever. Besides the obvious visual updates which have made the new app look cleaner and slicker, Flickr has introduced some fancy features in this update, the most important of which is Instagram-like editing and filtering options for photos and videos. Apart from capturing photos, the new Flickr allows you to record up to 30 seconds of HD video with live filters on top, and there are new filters and enhancement tools for images as well...

 

Chrome Remote Desktop For Android Gives Remote Access To Your Computer

Chrome Remote Desktop is a really useful Chrome app that lets you remotely access computers. It débuted in 2011 and required you have a computer to remotely access a PC or Mac but Google has just released the Chrome Remote Desktop app for Android which means you no longer need a computer to remotely access your computer. At present, the app lets you access computers that are linked to your Google Account so you can’t necessarily use it to help troubleshoot a friend’s computer but we can hope the app will add the feature soon, or eventually. To remotely access your computer from your Android device, you need to have the Chrome Remote Desktop app installed in Chrome on your desktop, and the Chrome Remote Desktop app installed on your Android device. You must also be signed into Chrome on your desktop with the same account you use on your device. Here’s the step-by-step breakdown to get things going...

Google Camera Lands On Google Play, Boasts A New Lens Blur Mode

From dead simple to the very feature-laden, there’s no shortage of camera apps on Google Play, but the search engine giant is now offering a standalone version of its stock camera app that ships with Nexus devices. Simply called Google Camera, the big G has made a number of improvements and enhancements over the stock variant though, introducing a much slicker user interface as well as throwing in a prominent shutter button for instant clicks. Besides the ever popular Panorama and Photo Sphere modes, there’s now a new Lens Blur option as well that aims to give you SLR-like quality ‘with shallow depth of field’. Read on for our hands-on impression...

Retrica: Apply Live Filters To Your Camera When Taking Photos [Android]

Selfies are all the rage these days, especially on smartphone devices where they have become so popular that Apple was forced to put a dedicated Selfie section in its iTunes app store. Android is no different on that front either, it has a great camera app that is actually very good and powerful at capturing self portraits, and if you want to get a more creative with your images then try locking your sight at Retrica, a free app on Google Play that’s build with one purpose in mind: capturing self-portraits, and turning them into vintage looking selifies. Retrica does the typical image enhancements you’ll likely find in the ever-popular Instagram app, but rather than applying filters after taking the images, you can do all that even before tapping the click...

App Eater Uninstalls Multiple Apps; Makes Them Easy To Filter Through

Previously, we’ve shown you an umpteen number of ways to batch uninstall Android apps that you don’t need anymore. The most exquisite solution so far is the Titanium Backup app which, besides offering a ton of features, also lets you remove apps in bulk. But let’s not forget Titanium Backup’s hefty price tag either. Moreover, Titanium Backup is primarily a backup utility, with uninstall features thrown into the mix to make it more worth your buck. That said, if you simply need to remove some unnecessary bloat from your device in one go, you can try App Eater instead. Not only does it allow removing apps at once, but you may also create widget to easily delete the last app you accessed, and more...

5 Coupon sites to save money when shopping online

Call it the Indian psyche, but we like a good bargain. Haggling for prices with shopkeepers is something that comes naturally to us. But that’s not possible with online shopping. While the discounts offered by the online merchants just about make up for it, it’s definitely not the same. And if you are looking for something more, then coupon codes or deals is the way to go. These codes can be used when making the payment, to get some extra benefit. There are several kinds of codes available, offering different kinds of discounts that can be availed. And you can easily find them as there are scores of sites that will provide you with coupon codes for almost every big or small online merchant...

Whistle Camera Listens For An Audio Cue & Snaps A Picture

What if you could take a picture with your Android phone without needing to tap a shutter button or press one of the keys? If you’re thinking this is a timer-triggered trick, think again. Whistle Camera – Selfie & More is an Android app that is whistle activated; you focus on a subject, whistle and the app snaps a picture. You can set a timer and the whistle will activate it. Alternatively you can always hit the shutter button or press the volume up key to capture an picture with the app which can use both the front and rear facing camera on your phone to take pictures...

Dropbox’s Mailbox For Android Arrives With Swipe Gestures & Smart Search

After months of speculation and teasing, Dropbox has finally launched its popular Mailbox email client for the Android operating system. Originally designed for iOS, Mailbox was added to Dropbox’s ever-lucrative portfolio back in 2013 when the cloud company acquired it for no less than $100 million. Since then Dropbox had bee working on its Android version which has now finally released on Google Play as a free download. It seems the wait was worth it though, because instead of a straightforward iOS port, the Android variant rather includes some really handy features, the most noteworthy of which we found is ‘Auto-swipe’ that not only enables you to archive unwanted emails with a simple swipe gesture, but also automatically archive similar messages you receive in future. Read on for our full hands on review...

Dropbox’s Carousel Is Photo Organization & Back-up In One

When you install Dropbox on your Android or iOS device, it asks you to enable automatic backup of all your photos. Despite being a long-time Dropbox user, I never opted in to this feature, something that I can attribute to being an iPhone user who has iCloud to rely on but Carosel changes that completely; it’s a new app from Dropbox that will back-up your photos to your Dropbox account. Sharing photos with anyone who has a Dropbox account is handled exclusively within the app and you can share a photo(s) without needing to switch to your email app. Photo sharing is handled very intelligently with a drawer that slides out so you can see your recent ‘conversations’. The app also manages and organizes photos by date. It’s somewhat like the Photos app introduced in iOS 7. As an iPhone user, I can easily switch to Carousel and leave my iCloud storage space for other app data, and Android users have a great way to organize and backup photos...

Focus Lock: Bar Access To Distracting Apps On Your Phone So You Can Work

How often do you look at your phone when you’re working and pressed for time? I know that when I need to get something done urgently, just about everything around me becomes infinitely more interesting than it would be if I had a lot of to kill and one very distracting thing is my phone. Where I can go a whole day without checking Facebook, I will check it a dozen times when I’m working and that’s how I procrastinate. Focus Lock is an Android app that locks these distracting apps behind a password. They are something like a cross between a pomodoro app and a vault. You can lock away apps for as long as you want and when the time expires, you can take a short break (you set the time for the break as well) and use the locked apps during that interval...

Wirelessly Transfer Photos & Videos Between iOS, Android, And PC With PhotoSync

When it comes to transferring files between PC and mobile, iOS users have so many tools for the purpose. PhotoSync is one of the most popular from the lot that lets you share photos and videos between iOS devices, as well as from iOS to Mac and Windows computer over Wi-Fi network, or automatically over Bluetooth without any hassle. PhotoSync has now also landed on Google Play Store for Android devices and boasts the same feature set and functionality that has made it a definitive choice on iDevices. Using this app, you can easily transfer photos and videos between Android and iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, as well as your computer.
PhotoSync on Android sports a stylish UI. Although it’s never looked so beautiful on Apple’s mobile OS, the developers have also updated the iOS app for iOS 7.
The home screen of PhotoSync displays a grid of images and videos that are stored on your device. You can tap on a thumbnail to select a device and then tap on the minuscule Refresh-like button at top to specify where you need to send the file, i.e. to your computer or another Android or iOS device. You can select multiple images by long-pressing a thumbnail and then selecting images by tapping on them...
 

Puzzle Alarm Clock Makes You Solve Puzzles And Checks If You’re Awake

Waking up early in the morning is a challenge and the snooze button on our alarm apps does little to motivate anyone to get out of bed. It really is just too easy to hit the snooze button. Some smartphones will let you turn off or snooze your alarm by pressing a volume or power key. While this makes it easy to turn the alarm off, it doesn’t necessarily make it easier to get out of bed. The snooze-button is often a common denominator with most alarm apps on Android; they only carry the snooze button. If you want an alarm app that not only wakes you up but absolutely make sure that you’re out of your bed then give Puzzle Alarm Clock a try. It does two things; one it sounds an alarm at whatever time you’ve set it for and in order to turn it off, you have to solve a simple puzzle that requires you to be reasonably awake and in your senses. Two; it checks up on you two more times to make sure you didn’t go back to bed after turning the alarm off...

90Night Manages Sleep Cycles, Sets Bed-Times & Wake-Up Calls

It sounds mindboggling when you find the number of devices your smartphone has replaced. For instance, no longer do we need an MP3 player for listening to music, a camera to snap photos,  or a notepad for jotting down important stuff, as our smartphone can easily do all that. Another old school gadget that’s no longer needed is the alarm clock. There’s really is no shortage of third-party alarm apps for Android; we all loved Timely,  AlarmPad Alarm Clock is also fairly awesome, with many other options that can stand to compete against these. But 90night (or 90Night: SleepyTime Calculator) is an alarm app that is slightly different; it gives you suggestions regarding the best time to wake up based on a 90 minute sleep cycle.

The core feature of the app is automation. Instead of setting an alarm manually, you can simply input the time when you want to sleep or wake up, and 90night will accordingly give you best suggestions with different timings to either get out of bed or go to sleep. The app is also very customizable, offers a great UI and very user-friendly. Let’s find out how it works.
When launched, 90night asks you to enter the time and select from ‘wake up’ or ‘go to bed’ parameter according to your liking. Afterwards, you’re presented with different time suggestions based on a 90 minute sleep cycle. For instance, a single 90 minute interval equals to 1.5 hours while adding additional 90 minutes will stretch it up to 3 hours and so on. All you have to do is tap on your desired choice and the app will automatically set an alarm for it...
 

4 Ways To Get Data Usage On Your Android Phone Under Control

Roaming on your mobile data plan is rarely cheap but almost always necessary. You can control how much data you use on your device by simply opting for a plan with a data cap and price to match your budget but you can take things a little further and manage your data plan better by limiting how data is used. Here are a few things you can do on any Android device to manage your data plan. These steps do not require the installation of a third-party app, nor do they require a rooted phone. What you will need is a little time to set things up for better data management and nothing more...

Quickly Access & Adjust Sound Settings With Floating Equalizer For Android

I must confess I’m a die-hard music fan and the avid music listener inside me only loves hearing the crisp sounds from top notch hardware equipment. Sometimes, however, poor optimization on the software side can lead to an abysmal listening experience; some of the sound quality may be lost and other times the distorted audio so badly that it’s not even worth listening to at all. Luckily, the Google Play Store has some really nice equalizers that improve sound quality and clarity of songs in a snap. Floating Equalizer is one such free app that lets you adjust different sound equalization settings.
The good bit about Floating Equalizer is that it works really well across a range of music apps. And even though the major Android music players ship with an equalizer out of the box, Floating Equalizer can prove useful with those that don’t such as the official YouTube application. Besides YouTube, the app works with Google Music, Tunein, MX Player and Spotify without any issues. In short, it lets you enhance quality of sound no matter which app it being played from...
 

CCleaner For Android Monitors RAM & CPU Usage, Uninstalls Apps En Masse

CCleaner is like WD-40 for Windows and Mac; besides doing a ton of different things it keeps the junk out of your fading machine. It’s been a while since we’ve been hearing about the popular app coming to Androidand it has finally landed in its beta form. Offering a substantial list of features, CCleaner for Android offers a way to monitor its RAM, CPU and battery usage. According to the official announcement by Piriform, the app developers, CCleaner can thoroughly clean your browser history, application cache, call logs, clipboard items as well as uninstall unwanted apps in a few screen taps.
The company has introduced the app in an early beta for now; to get a taste of it you will need to become a beta tester by joining its Google Group. The process is fairly simple though, just head over to the Google Group page, and click ‘Join Community’...

Here’s How You Can Get Facebook’s Flat UI Version For Android

Back in October 2013, Facebook announced it would be offering a new ‘Facebook Alpha program’ for Android users who want to test out fresh features before they hit the stable release. Facebook has been testing a redesigned version of the Android app that looks similar to its iOS variant, offers a completely new flat UI and many changes under the hood, and brings new tabbed navigation to the table. The flat UI variant hasn’t hit the stable channel yet, and although the social network giant will begin rolling it out in the coming days, you can test it on your device right now by joining the Facebook Alpha program. In this guide, we’ll show you how. Read on!
The first thing you need to do is make sure you’re not already a member of Facebook Beta test program as this may create conflict between alpha and beta updates of the app. If you’re already a beta tester, then simply head over to its Google Group, click the small User button at top right corner and click ‘Leave this group’...

Vine Update: Send Direct Video And Text Messages To Anyone

Everything you share on Vine becomes accessible to anyone who views your Vine profile on web and mobile. But what if you wanted to exchange private Vines with someone? Well, consider your wish granted, as the world’s most popular six-seconds video loop app has brought a fresh feature to its arsenal called Vine Messages available for both iOS and Android. Introduced via Google Play and iTunes App Store updates, now upping Vine to version 2.0, this new feature will let you send video messages (or VMs) and text messages to friends on Vine or through SMS and email. Read on for our hands-on impression!
The new VM feature is clearly Twitter’s answer to Instagram Direct, which was introduced back in December. In case you missed our review, Instagram Direct lets you privately share photos and video messages with your contacts. Vine takes this one step further; it lets you to send VMs to multiple recipients, whether they’re on Vine or not. Private messaging isn’t limited to just Vines; you can also send text messages à la WhatsApp or Viber effectively blurring the line between photo or video sharing apps and instant messaging clients...
The updated version has a new VM section which displays a list of all your contacts as well as VMs you privately shared with your friends. TheVM panel opens when you swipe from left-to-right on your screen or by tapping the newly added message bubble next to the camera button.
 

Coursera & Its Library Of Free Online Video Classes Come To Android

Whether you’re headed to school, college or university, you will probably be looking for the most effective ways to get ready for your new schedules and courses. If you have an Android device, then you already own an efficient tool to learn with ease and without spending a dime, because Coursera, the world’s most popular online education provider, has released their Android app on the Google Play Store. Coursera for Android has come to Google’s mobile OS three months after it debuted on iOS, and just like its iOS counterpart, the Android variant will let you access and stream course videos anywhere and anytime.

For those who aren’t familiar with the service, Coursera offers real college and university courses from real schools to students everywhere, allowing them to learn without spending as much time and money as they’d need to otherwise. The free Coursera app for Android aims to facilitate students in accessing their Coursera courses on the go, and subscribe to more than 600 courses in more than 20 subject areas...
 

Swipe Left, Right, Or From The Bottom To Access Apps & Contacts – Snype

One of the best things I like about Android is how awesome it is at handling multiple tasks. Naturally when it comes to multitasking, it is important to have instant access to apps and  Snype – App & Contact Launcher is an extremely powerful tool for multitasking.  Snype does for Android what apps like Sidebar Plus have been doing for so long for Google’s mobile OS. Using Snype, you can simply access any app or contact on your phone any time over any other task you might be doing. Its integrated, super fast search feature allows you to quickly find contact and apps by simply typing a few letters of the word. But more than that is interesting is the fact that you can activate Snype in a multitude of ways.
There are three different ways to open Snype. The first is to simply put the app’s shortcut on your home screen. Another way to access Snype is by replacing Google Now with Snype on devices that support it. When you activate Google Now, you can just specify Snype as default app to be always used the next time you launch Google Now.
  

HoverChat Is A Messaging App For Android With Facebook Like Floating Bubbles

Chat bubbles introduced by Facebook have become quite popular and not because they look nice, which they do, but because they are incredibly functional as far as on-screen notifications go. Because of their popularity, lots of messaging and chat apps have incorporated similar floating bubbles. HoverChat is one such messaging app that does chat bubbles extremely well. When you receive a new message, a bubble appears on your home screen. You can tap it and view the message in a small floating window without having to switch to the app itself and reply to the message. The floating window can be moved to any one of the screen edges.
Install HoverChat and set it as your default messaging app. When you receive a message, a chat bubble appears on the home screen with a number badge indicating how many messages you’ve received from the contact. Tap the bubble to open the message in a small window that will float atop whichever app you’re using. Once you reply to the message, you can tap the bubble again to close the window or tap the small cross below the bubble to remove it from your screen...

Timehop Brings Its Social Media & Photo Time Machine App To Android

The great thing about social media services like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is that you can always go back in time and see what you posted about something on a particular day. It may not sound useful or productive at all, but it feels pretty cool to have instant access to past memories at any time. Of course, you can’t possibly remember everything. Timehop aims to ensure you’d never need to. A year ago, the company released an iOS app that lets people ‘go back in the past’ to view their posts on popular social networks for the current day. The far-famed Timehop app has now finally landed on the Google Play Store for Android devices.
Timehop basically pulls up status updates from Facebook, tweets from Twitter, photos from Instagram, check-ins from Foursquare, and now, photos from your local gallery as well, that were posted/taken a year, or two, or three ago on the current day.

 

Link Bubble For Android Opens In-App Links In The Background Within Floating Pop-ups

A 2012 study conducted by Google cited that more and more people are beginning to browse the web on their mobile devices. Smartphone and tablet usage has escalated significantly in the past few years, and mobile web browsers have become one of the most frequently used software. Though, they aren’t they only way users interact with the web on mobile devices. The new and innovative app Link Bubble from Australian developer Chris Lacy aims to streamline your entire mobile web browsing experience by making it easier to handle web links that you come across in any app...

The Popular KMPlayer Comes To Android & iOS; We Go Hands-On

When it comes to video players for Windows that have the ability to play just about any format you throw at them, KMPlayer is one of the first names that comes to mind, along with VLC Player. This standalone player comes with built-in codec support for a plethora of video formats without the need for any external codecs, and offers more customization options than you would know what to do with. While Android and iOS both already have many excellent video players available, it never hurts to have more great options at your disposal. If you’re a fan of KMPlayer, you’ll be glad to know that its developers have released it to both Google Play Store and the iTunes App Store for your Android and iOS devices. Join us as we take the Android version of the app for a spin...