Big day for Google Announcements

Today was a big day for Android here in Brazil as the Galaxy S III debuted here. And it was also a big day for Google as they announced not only major improvements for Google Maps and Google Earth but also the acquisition of Quickoffice. That is probably going to get attention from Microsoft who rumors say will deliver their Office suite to Android in November.
Regarding the Maps news Google said that we'll have offline maps and navigation in the next few weeks (iPhone and iPad users must be getting more and more upset about losing Google Maps in their next update...), many people say that there's no difference between that and the current lab function to store 10 mile squares but I completely disagree. I think that this is a MAJOR step forward for Android as now we'll have a free map app that is truly free as you don't even need to have a data plan to use it - and much more convenient than having to save side by side squares of 10 miles to try and encompass the full area you use - navigation tool.

The Google Earth mobile new 3D mode!!

On the Office side of news Google just got Microsoft worried, as they acquire the best Office app available for the Android platform. That is great news for Android users everywhere because now it can become a truly productive OS if Google plays it right. Quickoffice is very good already but you can't make a case for a full fledged substitute of Microsoft Office. But with Google's money and talent they can change that. And if they do Android tablets will have a whole new use! And may even be free!! (we can dream...)

A great day for Android indeed... :)

PS: Right now Quickoffice pro costs $14.99 in the play store and the tablet version, Quickoffice pro HD costs $19.99. A bit steep but the best office app out there for Android.


PPS: For our iOS readers, Quickoffice is actually also available to iPhone and iPad. Just follow these links - for iPhone for iPad - or get it from iTunes.

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!

CyanogenMod for the win!!

Ok, so custom ROMs were not yet available to the Xperia X10, so I let it be for a while and went on to play with my Milestone...
As some people already know the Motorola Milestone is the international version of the Motorola Droid, the biggest difference being that the Milestone has a locked bootloader :-( whereas the Droid has an unlocked one...
For custom ROMs this makes a huge difference, first big difference is that Cyanogenmod does not support devices with a locked bootloader. And you really want Cyanogenmod if you're planning to use custom ROMs. It's the most popular custom ROM in the Android scene. It offers some nice performance and interface improvements. But not all hope was lost because of the best part of having an Android phone is that you have a great developer community behind it...
So thanks to Kabaldan and other great developers a port of Cyanogenmod was made for the Motorola Milestone!!
And as an added bonus Kabaldan's port was of CM (CyanogenMod) 7, which is actually Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)!! Now that I managed to get my Milestone to run CM7 the battery was better than ever, was incredibly fast thanks to the ROM and to the great overclock for the processor which made my measly 500Mhz processor turn into a 900Mhz machine!!
My Xperia was starting to feel like a bad phone, and it was sluggish in comparison, and it has a much better hardware on it! That just goes to show how much difference can exist when you have Android 1.6 (Donut) instead of the latest and much more modern Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)! But I wouldn't just give up on it...

PS: In homage to the MLB All-Star break (congrats to Robinson Canò for his Home Run derby win and the National League for the All-Star game win) here is a nice app to play a little baseball on your Android, is on sale and I like it a lot! Homerun Battle 3D. Hope you guys like it!
PPS: Thanks a lot for all the visits guys, yesterday there was a boom in the visits thanks to my previous post with the new Android Market app, if you didn't grab it yet go ahead and download it!

Now the real fun starts!

I've managed to get paid apps to work on my phones and I've got root access, now it's time to start messing around big time!
I've started really reading the XDA  forums and started to understand how Android works. I had a Motorola Milestone with Android 2.2 (Froyo) and my Xperia X10 with Android 1.6 (Donut). The Milestone had stock android and was running smoothly, but the battery life was very bad. I had real problems getting through the day with it. The solution came from one of the greatest apps I know in the market: Titanium Backup, with it I could freeze and uninstall system apps. Freezing an app is a less definitive solution to uninstalling. It stops the app from working without actually removing it from your system folder, so if you have a problem after freezing an app you can just defrost it...
So I started freezing the bloatware that was installed on my phone. After I froze a hole lot of apps I've never used and some lame games my battery nearly doubled!! Now was time to address the X10 problems...
The Xperia was laggy and also had a bad battery life, but this time the biggest blame was on the Timescape interface, if sucks battery like there's no tomorrow!! So I froze a hole lot of it, the Timescape app, the Mediascape, and other pointless apps. But the one thing I froze that made the biggest difference to me was the face recognition for the camera, I never used and it worked non stop on the background eating away my battery. The full list of apps to remove after you get root access can be found here. Now that I have a much better battery life with my phones there's no way to improve it....or is there?? That's when I found out about custom ROMs...

PS: You can only freeze apps with the pro version of Titanium Backup. It's not the cheapest app on the market but you'll not regret getting it for a second!

So THAT's how you do it...

Now that I managed to find this great source of knowledge, my beloved XDA forums, I could start messing around to try and make my Android phones better.
One of the first things I started reading about was root access. For those of you who don't know what that is I'll try to explain in a simple way. Root access is what you need to change your android device in deeper ways, it's almost the same as having the freedom to change any file you want in the Windows system folders... For those that want the more technical approach this link has a nice explanation. At first I was put off by the complex tutorials and DANGER signs all over. But then I found this app: the Universal AndRoot, which was supposed to be safe to use, no danger of bricking your phone. So I got my Milestone and tried it......... And voilà!! I had root access to my Motorola Milestone! With that I got more confident about messing around a bit more with my phones. So I got my Xperia X10 and installed the same program and also got root access to my X10!! Now things were starting to look good. With one little detail left, I still couldn't get paid apps...
But then I found this: the Market Enabler. This nifty app allows you to "fake" your location so the Market believes that you're in the US or Europe, or any other place that has paid apps! This app still works for those of you guys who live in countries without paid apps or even without Market!
Since then I could now use my phones to their full potential!!

PS: From now on I'll try to squeeze at least one tip on each post to help you guys, especially those new to android!
PPS: I've made an app for my Blog and it's already in the Market, you have the link right under the title and here is the QR code, enjoy!

Android 101

Coming back from the store I got home and immediately plugged my brand new Motorola Milestone to a wall outlet and started configuring it. Got my Google login in it and booted it up, I was immediately impressed by the fact that by then it had already done half the work as my email, calendar, contacts, were all perfectly inside my phone and ready to be used...
I then went on the Android Market and started looking for nice cool apps to make my phone be more like I wanted... Customizing an Android phone to make it work just like you want is a very satisfying experience, you can change pretty much anything you want in it...
The sad part is that I quickly started noting that there were a lot of things that I wanted to do but there were no apps for it... When I went to google.com and started looking for answers as to why my phone, which was supposed to be customizable in every way, wasn't living up to that promise...
I soon discovered that the apps existed and were in the Android Market, except I couldn't access them because I live in Brazil... and Brazil didn't have paid apps available - don't get me wrong, there are a lot of great free apps on the Android Market, but when you're just starting and don't know much about it you don't get the full experience without the paid apps.... - that really bummed me out, I knew what apps I needed and they existed, but I couldn't use them...

So there I was, a complete newbie in the android scene, without paid apps and no root access - although by then I only had a faint idea of what that was and that it was dangerous to get.
I had bad battery life, struggling to get through the day with a single charge, my phone was filled with useless, and irremovable, apps but I still loved it and knew that I was holding in my hands a little piece of the future...