Tag: mobile

Unexpected update : Android 5.0.1

It’s just been a few days since I took a leap of faith and upgraded both my phone and tablet to Android 5.0 (the Lollipop thing).  My feelings about it are mixed though.  On one hand, I love the updated user interface.  It just makes more sense to me and closes some of the very dated rants that you can find in the archives of this blog.  On the other hand, that’s been a rather buggy release.  The things that I’ve noticed are:

  1. Battery life.  Both my phone and my tablet eat more battery now and charge slower.  That’s especially annoying with the phone.  Previously, two hours of commuting every day (one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening) meant that I didn’ t have to charge my phone ever – the charge during the drive was enough.  With Android 5 though, it’s discharging while using the same two apps as before – Waze for navigation and SmartPlayer for audiobooks.
  2. Crashes.  My tablet gets stack with the same games which worked before just fine.
  3. Ringtones reset.  I have two mp3 ringtones on my phone – one I use for all incoming calls, the other for all my alarms.  For some reason, I can only use any ringtone once.  If I try to set the same ringtone for the second alarm, then the first alarm resets ringtone to some random built-in ringtone.  Same happens every time in all kinds of combinations.

But the last few days weren’t enough for me to get too annoyed about it.  Yet.  Quite surprisingly, today a notification for the Android 5.0.1 showed up on my tablet.  I wasn’t even following the news yet to see when it will come out.  That’s pretty cool – hopefully it’ll take care of some of my issues.  If you want to know what’s changed, here is a good coverage.

Google Play : Best Android Apps of 2014

And so it starts … With December 1st hitting the calendar, everyone suddenly remembers that the year is almost over.  The endless lists of best, worst, and mediocre are starting to arrive.  Google Play features the list of Best Apps of 2014 for Android platform.  There’s not a single word on how these were selected, but the word “promotion” in the URL might give you a hint or two.

android apps

MailWise – Email for Exchange & Hotmail

If you are one of those poor souls stuck with MS Exchange (like yours truly), here is one application you would absolutely love on your Android device – MailWise.  This app replaces your default email client with all the same functionality, except it makes those horribly long, backward-quoted emails and disclaimerified signatures much much shorter.  Like this:

MailWise

It’s one of those things that you constantly try to learn to ignore, but which comes back to annoy you on a daily basis.  And now, it’s solved.  Awesome!