Non-game Android Apps Recommendations Catch-All

I was catching up on my Lifehacker RSS and came across this comparison.

MonoCheli wrote:

Here is a question... If you have a phone that is from verizon/sprint can they be put on to virgin mobile? Virgin mobile uses sprints towers right? This is a bit out of my realm as I have been on cingular, at&t, now t-mobile (and soon to be forced back to at&t with no intention of going back) I really liked that with t-mobile I could buy any unlocked phone, and pay less per month like you do with virgin but am not super excited about the hardware (full qwerty for me please, unless I get wooed by the PS phone)
I am assuming I would have to either buy an unlocked phone or use my hack skills to unlock it from the carrier it cam from.

There's a ROM for the DInc that makes it work on Cricket, so I'm guessing it's at least possible. Whether or not anyone's done what you want, I couldn't say..

MonoCheli wrote:

Here is a question... If you have a phone that is from verizon/sprint can they be put on to virgin mobile? Virgin mobile uses sprints towers right? This is a bit out of my realm as I have been on cingular, at&t, now t-mobile (and soon to be forced back to at&t with no intention of going back) I really liked that with t-mobile I could buy any unlocked phone, and pay less per month like you do with virgin but am not super excited about the hardware (full qwerty for me please, unless I get wooed by the PS phone)
I am assuming I would have to either buy an unlocked phone or use my hack skills to unlock it from the carrier it cam from.

I have spent some time tonight and found out it is do-able. You just need a Virgin Mobile phone, take its ESN, MEID and other information, put it on the other phone, call Virgin to register the phone and done. Much easier to type out than actually do.

ezPDF Reader is Amazon's free app today. Any thoughts?

I'm sure it's better than Adobe. I use FoxIt on my home PC instead of them.

tagged

Any rooted phones out there that like switching it up, ROM-wise, I suggest giving MIUI a look:

http://lifehacker.com/#!5795542/miui-is-a-gorgeous-super-fast-rom-for-android

http://en.miui.com/

It's really quite neat and *might* have persuaded me away from CM7.

HBO Go is out on Android now, and at first glance it's very nice.

Confuses me as to why we still don't have Netflix yet if HBO can work out the DRM and content provider negotiations.

MannishBoy wrote:

HBO Go is out on Android now, and at first glance it's very nice.

All the reviews say the original Droid isn't supported. And it's 13MB with no ability to move to SD.

Guess I'll wait and hope they update...

Just checked, and yes, it won't move. The move to SD option is there and active, but it says "Failed to move application. The application is copy protected." when you attempt to move it.

I wonder if the reason the original Droids aren't supported is sheer processing power?

Netflix. Limited phone support.

* The Netflix app runs on these phones:
1. HTC Incredible with Android 2.2
2. HTC Nexus One with Android 2.2, 2.3
3. HTC Evo 4G with Android 2.2
4. HTC G2 with Android 2.2
5. Samsung Nexus S with Android 2.3.

Works pretty well.

I tried HBO Go on my HTC Aria. Rooted, running Liberty 2.2 ROM, and overclocked. The playback occasionally stutters even with an excellent WiFi signal.

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

I tried HBO Go on my HTC Aria. Rooted, running Liberty 2.2 ROM, and overclocked. The playback occasionally stutters even with an excellent WiFi signal. :(

I've found the whole HBO Go thing to be buggy all around. My wife has been using it to watch Sex and the City using our laptop hooked up to the TV via HDMI. I'll usually be upstairs playing TF2 for about 10 minutes before I hear her shout that something's broken, or the play button won't disappear, or it's frozen.

The service is really cool, but they need to fix up their software.

Also: Why does HBO not care about streaming on every android device, but Netflix is getting super anal about DRM?

Radical Ans wrote:
Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

I tried HBO Go on my HTC Aria. Rooted, running Liberty 2.2 ROM, and overclocked. The playback occasionally stutters even with an excellent WiFi signal. :(

I've found the whole HBO Go thing to be buggy all around. My wife has been using it to watch Sex and the City using our laptop hooked up to the TV via HDMI. I'll usually be upstairs playing TF2 for about 10 minutes before I hear her shout that something's broken, or the play button won't disappear, or it's frozen.

The service is really cool, but they need to fix up their software.

Also: Why does HBO not care about streaming on every android device, but Netflix is getting super anal about DRM?

I'm thinking Netflix is the new iTunes of 5 years ago. Studios are being very strict on Netflix because they don't want them to have too much control over the streaming market.

Perhaps already suggested, but I'm messing with an "adventurous" software keyboard replacement called 8pen.

http://www.the8pen.com

Only have an hour or so, but really liking it. Makes texting a lot less painful, especially with the gesture library.

I got that when the released it. Was pretty cool...for a while, then it got kinda tedious. I still go back to it from time to time, but mostly I use SwiftKey.

Amazon's free ap yesterday was FlexT9 Speak Trace Write Tap. Which apparently has a tracing like swype, and some dragon naturally speaking voice recognition stuff... kinda combo of all the best keyboard/voice entry. Haven't messed around with it yet, but some of the reviews say they replaced swype with it, others say they replaced swiftkey with it. So sounds interesting. Sorry I meant to post yesterday while it was still free.

Surely everyone is remembering to click the Amazon app once a day for free stuff?

Stele wrote:

Amazon's free ap yesterday was FlexT9 Speak Trace Write Tap. Which apparently has a tracing like swype, and some dragon naturally speaking voice recognition stuff... kinda combo of all the best keyboard/voice entry. Haven't messed around with it yet, but some of the reviews say they replaced swype with it, others say they replaced swiftkey with it. So sounds interesting. Sorry I meant to post yesterday while it was still free.

Surely everyone is remembering to click the Amazon app once a day for free stuff? ;)

Yeah, been trying to remember to do that. Picked up a lot of stuff that I can't use with my phone, FlexT9 being one of those, thinking about September when my current contract is up and I can get a new one.

Stele wrote:

Amazon's free ap yesterday was FlexT9 Speak Trace Write Tap. Which apparently has a tracing like swype, and some dragon naturally speaking voice recognition stuff... kinda combo of all the best keyboard/voice entry. Haven't messed around with it yet, but some of the reviews say they replaced swype with it, others say they replaced swiftkey with it. So sounds interesting. Sorry I meant to post yesterday while it was still free.

Surely everyone is remembering to click the Amazon app once a day for free stuff? ;)

I'm playing with FlexT9. "Swyping" seems OK so far. Haven't tried voice.

I did get in an infuriating situation where I couldn't scroll in a text box on a reply here on GWJ, no matter what I did.

RoughneckGeek wrote:

Even though it's not a supported, the Netflix app works flawlessly on my DroidX with the phone model check stripped from the APK.

Tried the same one on my Atrix. Unfortunatly It doesn't work as smoothly. It streams video, but it's got a weird green strip across the bottom and ghost images. I'm guessing the app was optimize for a Snapdragon, and the Tegra in the Atrix just doesn't mesh quite right. I guess they weren't just BSing when they said they needed to optimize for different phones.

RoughneckGeek wrote:

Even though it's not a supported, the Netflix app works flawlessly on my DroidX with the phone model check stripped from the APK.

So far so good here on my Droid X (and my wife's too). This is truly awesome! Thanks for finding that RoughneckGeek!

MannishBoy wrote:

Netflix. Limited phone support.

* The Netflix app runs on these phones:
1. HTC Incredible with Android 2.2
2. HTC Nexus One with Android 2.2, 2.3
3. HTC Evo 4G with Android 2.2
4. HTC G2 with Android 2.2
5. Samsung Nexus S with Android 2.3.

I have netflix working on my rooted G2 running CM7 and my wife's N1 (not rooted) both are great. Super syked. With PvZ on the way the two things I was frustrated that the IOS team had and I didn't, will be solved.

EDIT:

I haven't tried it yet but it looks this works to get it on most other devices if you have root...

Hyetal wrote:

Any rooted phones out there that like switching it up, ROM-wise, I suggest giving MIUI a look:

http://lifehacker.com/#!5795542/miui-is-a-gorgeous-super-fast-rom-for-android

http://en.miui.com/

It's really quite neat and *might* have persuaded me away from CM7.

Interesting. Anybody else tried this?

As I posted in the other thread, my Droid screen flaked out, and I'm getting a new one in a couple days. Think I'm going to root it and see what it can do. Trying to decide what mod to use, thinking I wanted something with gingerbread, but I'm open to suggestions.

I would feel extremely wary of installing a Chinese ROM on my phone. Who knows what Trojans and backdoors does it have?

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

I would feel extremely wary of installing a Chinese ROM on my phone. Who knows what Trojans and backdoors does it have?

Open source code with various devs supporting the versions for the specific phones makes me less worried. A lot of people are looking through this code.

I looked at this for my EVO, but if memory serves it didn't have WiMax support. Maybe they have or will incorporate the Cynogenmod's code for WiMax.

I finally put Cynogenmod on my EVO recently. Other than a GPS issue that required me to reload a Sense ROM and reset GPS, then come back to the nandroid backup for CM, it's been pretty good.

Stele wrote:
Hyetal wrote:

Any rooted phones out there that like switching it up, ROM-wise, I suggest giving MIUI a look:

http://lifehacker.com/#!5795542/miui-is-a-gorgeous-super-fast-rom-for-android

http://en.miui.com/

It's really quite neat and *might* have persuaded me away from CM7.

Interesting. Anybody else tried this?

As I posted in the other thread, my Droid screen flaked out, and I'm getting a new one in a couple days. Think I'm going to root it and see what it can do. Trying to decide what mod to use, thinking I wanted something with gingerbread, but I'm open to suggestions.

I tried miui on my G2 but it feels a lot like the ios devices and well that felt kinda wrong... and I am a big fan of the stock android look and feel...

I recently started doing the CM nightlys to see how it feels to be on the cutting edge... it has been fine so far and I am enjoying it.

I think I'm going to use SuperOneClick to root.

And then just get RomManger and give CM a try.

Seems the simplest thing to try to get some gingerbread action.

Is there a free equivalent to SetCPU or should I just cough up the two bucks?

Stele wrote:

I think I'm going to use SuperOneClick to root.

And then just get RomManger and give CM a try.

Seems the simplest thing to try to get some gingerbread action.

Is there a free equivalent to SetCPU or should I just cough up the two bucks? :D

It's built into Cyanogen now.

You guys using ROM Manager to install ROMs?

I started using Amon_RA recovery when I got my EVO due to it being early to backing up the WiMAX data when Clockwork Recovery didn't.

I've always installed ROMs by running the .zip from within recovery. Not sure that ROM Manager would save me much time.

I will say that some Sense ROMs give me an "error on line 81" problem when installing, even though the ROMs seem to work. Never found anybody that gets that same error on XDA, so I have no idea what it is.

So my phone showed up a day early.

Well... with Win7x64 I could never get SuperOneClick to work. It always hung on "waiting for phone..." even though I think I had the phone drivers installed and know I had USB Debugging on, which are the only two prerequisites listed.

I found another guide to using it that said you needed the android SDK installed first. While I'm sure that might be nice for some other things too, it seemed pretty weird. And after downloading it, it was installing all these optional components that seemed like it was going to take forever.

So I remembered I still have my old laptop that has WinXP. Put SuperOneClick on there. Plugged in the phone, installed the phone driver from the SOC directory... ran SOC, click root, success!

Disappointing that Win7 wouldn't cooperate. But I have ROM Manager downloading the last stable CyanogenMod 7.0.3 as I type this. We'll see how that works out. Updates later.