Vinod Live! » Mobility

My Top Android Apps List

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:07:21 +0000

I’ve been using a Google ADP1(G1) and then a Samsung Spica(i5700) on various Android builds (1.1, Cupcake, Donut & Eclair). Following are my essential Android apps list.

ADW Launcher
I am not a fan of the default Android Home app or the ones the Manufacturers installs by default. After various trials of LauncherPro, Helix etc.., ADW Launcher is the one which stays on my Android Mobile. It is highly customizable and has very less memory footprint. It is blazingly fast except for some occasional widget selection issues. But the developer updates this app vigorously.
AndroNoter
All my notes needs to be available everywhere. I use SimpleNote as my notes platform. It has clients on the Mac, PC, iPhone and now Android. AndroNoter is a very good SimpleNote client which supports transparent sync with the SimpleNote cloud. The search options are really fast.

Barcode Scanner – to quickly launch the Market application upon scanning App QR Codes
Fring
Fring is the default VOIP client for the GTalk. It has various other options. But I use only for VOIP over 2G/WiFi with my patents & friends who are on Google Talk.
Camera 360
This is the only Android application I’ve purchased yet. It is worth it. Offers plenty of filters and effects for the Camera.
Handecent SMS
With SPAM SMSs pouring in every minute these days, blacklisting is very important to me. Handecent does the job albeit a bit slow to start.
Swype
Swype is a very intuitive text input mechanism which is getting pre-packaged with modern Android mobiles. I joined their beta and got an early access. Swype’s heuristics algorithms are very accurate most of the time. It is miles above the pretty useless default Android Soft keyboard.
Kindle
I own a Kindle2 and have the purchased books available everywhere – iPhone, iPad and now Android is a boon. The WhisperSync works perfectly. The screen brightness dim options are really useful too.
MinFreeManager
Using a Task Manager helps a lot to save the battery life of any Android phone. MinFreeManager goes a step beyond and helps configure the system much better. Remmeber, you need to be rooted to run this application.
Google SkyMap
Nothing amazes my friends more than this application. When held up against the open sky, it tells how small in the heavens are you!.
Engadget
To get my daily dose of flame baits.
Wireless Tether for Root Users
There are occasions when the power is gone and the Wifi Router blacks out. This tethering application acts as a temporary WiFi router for my WiFi-only iPad. This is useful when you are travelling too.
Official Twitter app for Android
I tried plenty of others in the Market, but settled on the Official one, because it is not friends with fail whale most of the time.
Places Directory from Google
A useful location based application to find out the nearest Gas Stations and ATMs, among others.
Awesome Drop
AwesomeDrop is a neatly done combo of an HTML5 web app and an Android utility. You drop a file in to the web app, the file will get automatically downloaded to your Android Mobile. I would have loved more if the application did a clipboard copy from the computer to the Mobile too and vice versa. Unlike the Pastebot iPhone application, AwesomeDrop works over the 2G/3G and does not need a local WiFi.
Revathi Recipes
Yummmy recipes! – from Biriyani to Dosa!
Opera Mini
Lifesaver on a slow 2G network while browsing the web.

iPad unboxing and Demo

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 08:34:52 +0000

Yep.. The world traveler has arrived!.
Thanks to Madhu (@madhutmenon)

No related posts.

Amazing Video on “Future Computing” from year 1979

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:50:20 +0000

Here is an amazing Video from year 1979 where two visionaries talk about how they see computing will take shape in the future. They talk about LED, Plasma, eBooks, eBook Readers, Tablets and What not!!.. It looks as if they had a peek in to the year 2010!. The video is on Tom Snyder interviewing Durk Pearson (Scientist)and Jerry Pournelle(Science Fiction writer). MUST Watch!

Amazing image enhancing technique

My Obligatory Apple Tablet / iSlate predictions

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:28:51 +0000

[Update after the release]

Welcome iPad!. For now it sounds strange and not as good as iSlate or even iTablet. But that is what it is. So let us see how did I fare on my predictions! :-

1) I got it right. Apple calls themselves a ‘mobile company’ and iPad is a device between the iPhone and MacBook officially. +1

2) Obviously correct. +1

3) Correct. +1

4) eBooks and Magazine are both in! – 0

5) Keyboard is not 3D. and the Interface is same as iPhone too. – 0

6) Got it right. +1

7) MobileMe Cloud sync is not happening yet. -1

8) iPhone app compatibility is assured. +1

9) Still have to sync using USB :( -1

10) HTML5 widgets are supported over Safari and homescreen shortcuts.+1

11) All the games I saw during the event looks promising. We have to see the future success of it. – 0

———-

Ok. Here are my ‘obligatory’ Apple Tablet / iSlate predictions :-

iSlate would be a companion device to MacBook/iMac. Kind of a second screen – which is more mobile.
Users stream Music, Video, Photos, PodCasts, Magazines from iTunes to iSlate
Users carry iSlate around the home as a portable media player and use it as a photo frame
Steve Jobs will teach us a lesson or two on ‘Candela’ and make us believe that an LED backlit glossy iSlate is better for reading than e-Ink – before announcing NYT & WSJ partnership on e-newspaper delivery ;). Books will have to wait.
iSlate will sport a 3D Soft keyboard/hand writing input method. I dont think Apple will make a ‘game-ish’ 3D home screen with interactive objects.
The device would come with and without support for a 3G modem and priced/subsidized accordingly
iSlate 3G will have support for multi-party iChat video conferencing
The iSlate will seamlessly sync all of your iPhone applications and their respective data over the air through MobileMe.
iSlate will introduce wireless syncing with the iTunes for the first time.
Developer support will include native HTML5 widgets apps to begin with.
iSlate will be the perfect portable gaming device ever created.

I will definitely revisit this list after the announcement on January 27th, 2010. :)

How to unlock the Kindle Global Wireless Browsing

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 07:26:49 +0000

Well, It’s not really a software hack!. I have a simple trick to completely ‘unlock’ the Kindle 2 Global Wireless options even while using in India / other restricted countries.

Unlocked Kindle 2 Features:-

Complete browsing experience

Ability to buy any books available on Kindle Store

Here is how you ‘unlock’ the Kindle:-

Keep Two Amazon accounts
Using one purchase a $20/$50 Amazon Gift Card.
Then top-up one of second Amazon account using the Gift Card
Register you kindle to use this Amazon Account.
Try to buy a Free Kindle E-book.
During this process, Change the “1 Click Buy Settings”, put a random USA address with correct PIN Code in the shipping details. This does not matter, as nothing physical will ever be shipped!
Thereon you will have a complete unlimited / unlocked Kindle experience!

What it does:-
The new Amazon account will be interpreted by Amazon as that of a Kindle Owner based out of USA, but on a long trip to India!. Hence the web browsing and unlimited Kindle store buying experience are available for this person (Free of Cost).

Will it be problematic?
If ever Amazon complaints that, you are trying to download/browse from a different country than USA, get any of your friends in USA to Fax them his identity information. OR alternatively you can change the address to your Indian address. Your purchased book should remain and that should solve the problem. I sincerely hope Amazon does not block this alternative option – as it helps genuine Amazon Kindle users and book Buyers. I personally use this method not to browse, but to buy Kindle Books not available for India.

Amazon Kindle 2 in India – A Review

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:05:34 +0000

An eBook reader has been on my wish list for a long long time – in fact, it even precedes the first generation Amazon kindle!. Back then I wrote a blog post comparing the eBook readers available in the market. The chance to buy a Kindle arrived when Amazon offered free shipping and lowered price for their “International Wireless Edition Kindle 2” during the Christmas. A friend in USA helped buy and bring it to me here in India.

The initial impression

Amazon Kindle 2 is a realistic replacement for Books. It is nice to hold, thin and controls for navigation are well placed. The letters on the screen are sharp and well contrasted. The graphics with 16 shades of grey appear nicer too. Reading on Amazon is a purely individual experience with no social touch to it (Perhaps that’s something Kindle rivals could aim at ;) )

The Good

High contrast, Paper like display with no glare
Good GPRS/EDGE connectivity all over India. I tested this in Kerala and Bangalore.
Very thin and rugged (K2 is a great way to fall asleep ;) Sustained a drop yesterday without a single mark)
The ‘Page turn’ speeds are acceptable.
Easy dictionary lookup
Free online Wikipedia access
Good stereo speakers and MP3 support
Calibre’s support for Instapaper makes Kindle a good offline reader for well formatted web content.

The Bad

There is no Library management of any sort. There is no Book Cover Grid display. No support for Categories, Folders or Tags. This should be fixed in a Kindle Software update.
The in-page jog stick navigation could be better
The free general Internet Browsing does not work in India ‘due to local country restrictions’.
The Magazine/Blog subscriptions strips the “Images” from the content for International wireless users of Kindle
The native PDF rendering is just average with no support for Zooming, Search and Font resizing. The Calibre software comes to the rescue with excellent support for converting many file formats including PDFs to the Kindle supported format (.Mobi).
Kindle books are costly (nearly $12) and many titles are not available to non-USA customers.

For now, I am enjoying the Kindle 2. The reading experience is really good and immersive with no distractions. If you are into technical manuals and PDF eBooks with complex formatting, you may opt for the Kindle DX, International wireless edition – with a bigger screen.

iPhone Finance App – MoneyStrands

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:00:11 +0000

I stumbled upon a gem of an iPhone app – MoneyStrands – today. It is an Online financial application, with a notable exception that it works with majority of banks in India (ICICI Bank in my case) The previous one which I tried - Mint (Web and iPhone apps) does not have support for Indian financial institutions. The other one which supports – Buxfer (with an iPhone Web App) – unfortunately does not have a native iPhone app.

I could successfully aggregate my Savings, Credit and Loan accounts with MoneyStrands. You can even unify accounts from different financial institutions. They support over 8000 of them.

MoneyStrands ICICI Dashboard

The Interactive Charts are great to use too.

MoneyStrands Interactive Charts

MoneyStrands even supports allocating/tracking a Budget and Alerts for Balance.

MoneyStrands various Tabs

MoneyStrands iPhone application (iTunes Link) is free, just like their web offering.

Next Generation iPhone to feature an RFID Reader

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:42:45 +0000

Einar Rosenberg , just dropped a bombshell in my Inbox with this:-

Had to share this news. A highly reliable source has informed me that Apple has built some prototypes of the next gen iPhone with an RFID reader built in and they have seen it in action. So its not full NFC but its a start for real service discovery and I’m told that the reaction was very positive that we can expect this in the next gen iPhone. If Apple does it, expect every phone manufacturer and their sister to begin pumping out NFC enabled phones, at least for service discovery and sync. This just reinforces what we knew based on the two separate patents Apple submitted that had the iPhone enabled to read RFID tags. I’m told that the touch project video and the BT SIG’s specs were all driving forces to push this forward as well as other factors. Guess I’ll be touching my iPhone to my Mac to link them together to sync iTunes by next year.

This is really an amazing news. RFID Tags are getting ever popular these days to label, classify and track good of all sizes and values. Some of these tags can also store dynamic data. With these capabilities such tags can be used for various use cases like e-Couponing, Smart Posters, Smart Ticketing, and most importantly Mobile Payments.

If this becomes true, it would be a great journey for iPhone from the wonderful world of multi-touch to the touchless transactions!

Review of Reliance Broadband+ USB Modem

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:28:05 +0000

I bought a Reliance Broadband+ USB Modem a few weeks back. Before purchasing this, I tracked the Twitter for actual brand/product reviews by owners. People were talking pretty positively about this and that was a welcome change after their Wi-Max debacle.

Reliance Broadband+ USB Modem

The product (Huawei EC 168 C / EV-DO Modem) was delivered the next day of booking online – by paying Rs.3500/-. But the activation needed couple of days more for the mandatory ‘address verification’ and such. Overall the Service activation period was very satisfactory. The product literature indicated support for both Mac and Windows. But the one-time ‘Activation Option’ was not available on the Mac support software. I had to do it using the Windows XP through VMWare. After this, the device was readily usable natively on Mac.

Reliance Broadband+ Windows Dashboard

The device is easy to pocket and is very rugged. There is also an extended USB cable in-case you are using it with a USB-Hub. The device has it’s retractable USB connector which is very convenient. There is also a MicroSD-Card slot which makes it a pen drive too. There is a small opening with a latch on one side – of which I have no idea!. The device is plug n play on both Mac and Windows.

Reliance Broadband+ Mac Dashboard

Once the settings have been fed the right numbers, further connections are just one-click. To get connected it normally takes about 10 seconds. The device is capable of working in CDMA 1.x mode in low coverage areas & regular high speed HSD option in good coverage areas. The device is set to ‘Hybrid’ mode by default.

The speed of HSD connection varies between 800kbps to 2Mpbs (average) – sometimes spiking to even 2.3Mbps in good coverage areas with more than 3 signal bars. But DNS lookups fail when it switches from HSD to CDMA 1.x, making me unplug and reconnect again. Thankfully this is not a frequent problem. You can watch YouTube videos / Apple iPhone tutorials etc.. comfortably. Apart from HTTP, other protocols like IRC, SSH, FTP etc.. too worked well. But the upload speeds on all occasions has been dismal. The above picture shows some of the weakest download day scenario.

I opted for an in-city tariff plan, because Airtel EDGE/GPRS on the iPhone is enough to check emails on the move. The Broadband+ USB device’s HSD connections are expected to work in all major cities and CDMA 1.x will be available almost everywhere in India. You can check the bandwidth usage live on their website. Over there you can also opt for a simple e-Bill to save on paper and post. The broadband bill can be paid online using bank gateways / credit cards.

To conclude, I will recommend this Mobile Broadband device to users in Bangalore. But as a word of caution, please do ask the sales agent to come to your home area to do an actual performance & coverage demonstration. This will give you a first hand personal experience before the purchase.

How to deploy an iPhone application without an IDP Membership

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 14:37:18 +0000

An iPhone Developer Program (IDP) membership (costs $99 for Individuals) is required to officially deploy your application on the iPhone – even during the development and testing. Though I have applied for the IDP membership long ago, mine is yet to be approved. Perhaps India is not a listed country for IDP.

Not having an IDP membership will not affect your iPhone development and further testing on a real iPhone. But you would still require a Jailbroken iPhone. You will have to tweak your XCode (Version 3.1.2) and individual project settings – along with the iPhone (Firmware 2.2) – to get the Applications deployed on the phone. Here are the steps. These information were collated by the results of endless queries posted on different forums and by reading various material available on the Web. All the credits are due to their respective owners :)

Common Instructions to Install :-

• Jailbreaking the iPhone requires you to follow the clear instructions given by iClarified. This includes a Video demonstration also. There is no need to Unlock your iPhone. Just Jailbreak should suffice.

• Install the iPhoneTunnel and CyberDuck applications on the Mac

• Install OpenSSH, BossPrefs and Link-Identity-Editor applications using the Cydia application on the iPhone. After installation Reboot the iPhone

• Add source in Cydia (if you have not yet done so), please remember there is a slash (/) at the end of the url Code: http://www.iphone.org.hk/apt/ . Install MobileInstallation Patch version 2.2 in Section “Tweaks”

• Connect the iPhone using the USB Cable to the Mac

• Close the iTunes.

Setting up XCode to Compile and Build the iPhone Application

• Create a Signing Identify on your Mac by following this simple guide from Apple. I suggest you name the Certificate as “iPhone Developer”

• TextEdit the /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Info.plist file to look the respective portions like:-

NATIVE_ARCH
<string>armv6string>
PLIST_FILE_OUTPUT_FORMAT
<string>binarystring>
PROVISIONING_PROFILE_ALLOWED
<string>NOstring>
PROVISIONING_PROFILE_REQUIRED
<string>NOstring>
SDKROOT
<string>iphoneos2.2string>

• Change your own Project Settings by taking [Menu] Project->Edit Project Settings. In the Properties List, find the Code-Signing-Identity and Select the Certificate Name(iPhone Developer) you created earlier.

• Add the following snippet on to your projects info.plist using TextEdit

   1: SignerIdentity
   2: <string>Apple iPhone OS Application Signingstring>

Transferring the Application Binary to the iPhone over USB

• You may duplicate the following steps using an Ad-Hoc WiFi connection too, of which I am not so fond off!. I prefer the USB.

• Start the iPhoneTunnel Application on the Mac. You should see a respective icon on the Superior Bar at the top of the screen. Click on that Icon and select [Turn Tunnel ON]

• Again click on the same icon on top and select [Tools->SFTP]. The Cyberduck should start automatically. Enter the username as ‘root’ and password as ‘alpine’ in the cyberduck login window.

• Copy the TestApp.app (Your Own App) to the /Application folder of the iPhone using Cyberduck

• Click on the iPhoneTunnel icon and select [Tools->SSH(root)]. Enter the root/alpine credentials at the command prompt.

• At this command prompt enter the following two commands:-

ldid -S /Applications/TestApp.app/TestApp

chmod +x /Applications/TestApp.app/TestApp

• Open the BossPrefs application on the iPhone and choose the “ReSpring” option. This will restart the SpringBoard application to show your application on the Home Screen.

• Enjoy Your App!

If you have a proper Code signing Signature from Apple , you can follow these great instructions to deploy on to AppStore.