Endless possibilities with Android!

Getting back to my story...

As I said I was missing some kind of notification for my phone without having to turn on my screen... That's when BLN came into play... It wasn't immediately available when I got my Galaxy S II, but after a few weeks one of the great developers from XDA, Hacre, came up with a kernel that made it possible for this great phone to be even better... Eventually Hacre (who has a great sense of humor, and if you click on his name you'll understand, he's pretty much like the comic strip on this link) got fed up with the complaining and repeated questions and simply quit developing for the GSII... :-( but other developers picked up the slack...

And now the biggest flaw in this otherwise great device was fixed!!! For it to work you need to get the BLN Control from neldar, which lets you personalize your Back Light Notifications... Now it was a matter of keeping the phone up to date with the VillainROM...but wait a second, that's boring...can't I change anything???? Well, of course you can, one of the best features of VillainROM is VillainTweaks! It offers the kind of customization that android is all about to me...

It offered some interesting tweaks in earlier versions of VillainROM, which are not available anymore... One of them shows me how much you can change WHATEVER you want in your Android device...
My mother, about two or three weeks after I did, got a Galaxy S II for herself and she didn't like one thing about it - the positioning of the power button - for a very simple and feminine reason, when she puts her phone in her purse the power button got pressed by whatever was in her purse and the phone turned on, which obviously is a big waste of battery... So how to fix what seems like an unfixable design flaw??? Well, anything is possible with Android!! All you need to do is edit a file and it's fixed! Yes it's that simple! And it's not a complicated computer programming kind of editing. All you have to do is erase the word WAKE from the file! Granted the file is quite hidden, but if you use Root Explorer, or some other file explorer that lets you mess around with your system files, it's not hard. If you want to do it you have to be rooted and do this:

- Open Root Explorer
- navigate to /system/usr/keylayout
- click and hold on "sec_key.kl"
- click on "Open in Text Editor"
- erase the WAKE word from the line which you don't want your phone to be awaken, be it the home or power button

- click the menu button then save and exit and reboot your phone

- DONE!!

It's highly recommended that you backup this file and if possible the whole system, but it never caused me any problems...

PS: If you don't have Root Explorer I highly recommend buying it, it's by far my favorite file explorer on Android!

Google Drive

And it has arrived!! The Google Drive is live already for pc, mac and your android. If you have Google Docs installed in your phone or tablet it should be automatically updated to Google Drive, although you might receive the message that your Google Drive account is not ready to use and it'll show you something like this if you choose to be notified...

So now it's just a matter of waiting for it but we'll have 5GB of storage for our needs, I'd say things don't look too good for Dropbox, box.net and others...

For those who don't have Google Docs installed in your device and want to try Google Drive here is the Google Play link for it...

The Next Galaxy

For those who haven't been paying a lot of attention to the tech world, Samsung launched their website thenextgalaxy.com, and it's not exactly what a lot of people, including myself, were expecting, there are still no specs or pictures of the Galaxy S III, or whatever name Samsung decides to go with, but there's a teaser video that continues to poke at the competition...

Here's the video in case you can't access the website, it's received a lot of traffic so it's down a lot...

Android vs iPhone

Hey guys, I stumbled upon a video that I really liked and wanted to share it with you guys...

It shows a comparison between Android OS and iOS. It uses the flagship devices from both Operating System. The Samsung Galaxy Nexus vs the iPhone 4S, the two devices that pretty much represent all that there is on iOS and Android in it's pure form. The author, Mr. Wicked4u2c, lets us know how he got convinced by the media to exchange his Android smartphone for an iPhone and shows how he feels about it after about a month of using his new iPhone.

It's a very good video to watch, the author is not completely biased one way or another, especially since he owns an iPad 3,  he just shows factual differences between the two systems. If you have a friend who says that no matter how good your Android phone is his new iPhone is just better because it's from Apple, show him this... ;)

Source: TalkAndroid

PS: I know that some of our readers use iPhone, iPad and other Apple products to access the blog, I'd like to say that you're all welcome and if you have any opinions as to why iOS is better I would love to read about it in the comments... ;)

And we're BACK!!

Hi guys, sorry it's been so long but we're getting back to action. And I say we because there's a new contributor to the blog. A great friend of mine Young Soo Moon. Moon has had his fair share of Android devices, including a tablet so he'll have a lot to tell you guys...

On the last post I was talking about getting Android Open Source Project on my Xperia X10, it did a lot for my device but it was never 100%, never reached a stable enough state to make me happy about it. So after about a year with my X10 it was time to move on... My first choice at the time was the Sony Xperia Arc. It was a beautiful device with good hardware and arrived with an up to date version of android. But it wasn't to be... I went to my operator's store but the VIP section of the store wasn't available because it was a weekend. So I had to wait a little longer, and then in the following week I spotted this article on the blog from my operator (I'm sorry it's only in Portuguese), which means that the Galaxy SII was coming to Brazil and more importantly to my operator!!! By then the Samsung Galaxy SII was the best cell phone available in the world, I wanted it badly and on top of everything, being the thinnest, lightest and faster phone out there it had an UNLOCKED BOOTLOADER!!! In case you don't know why that's important having a locked bootloader was the biggest reason the X10 developers had problems doing anything good for it. So on top of being a top of the line phone it was going to be easy to develop for!!! In other words it's pretty much everything you want in an android device!

So two weeks after that I went to my mobile operator's store to get one for me. I still had a month and a half left on my contract so I had to haggle a bit to get a good price for it. I managed to get it for about U$200,00 which was pretty much my budget for a new phone so I went ahead and bought it. WOW!!! Was I impressed, the phone was ridiculously fast and looked great, the screen looked incredible! But it was riddled with bloatware, but now I knew how to make this device even better.
So I got home and immediately dived head first on XDA forums and found the ROM that looked to be the best one available VillainROM, eventually I discovered that pulser was a recognized developer with great track record on XDA already. So I knew I'd found a keeper. I installed it and then it seems I was too excited about it and forgot to wipe anything when I first installed... That was a big newbie mistake and it caused the phone.apk - which is basically the app that makes your phone a phone - to force close constantly!! After freaking out a bit I calmed down and did it again, wiping everything now, and this time everything worked great!! I had the best phone in the world running the best ROM available for it!!!!
Life was good, but nothing is perfect, one of my favorite features from the X10 was missing completely from the GSII, the notification led... And then BLN came... (Back Light Notification) but that's a story for the next post...

PS: In this time I've been away I got myself an android tablet the Asus Transformer Prime and still have my Samsung Galaxy SII and I'm looking forward for the next Samsung flagship device... http://www.tgeltaayehxnx.com/

PPS: I know it's a little late for the party but if you haven't tried Temple Run you should try it! It's a great and addictive game and it's free!!