Non-game Android Apps Recommendations Catch-All

It pre-caches the pages so scrolling ends up being way smoother. Zooming seems smoother as well. Plus it does bookmarks, so if your pdf has them it makes skipping around a book way easier.

I got ezPDF when it was the free Amazon app, I agree it is good, I like it over the Adobe viewer.

Amazon has an in-browser emulator. Use that for a doIlikeit? test and then the post-purchase period for hardware test. Yes, 15 min is short, just throwing another option out there.

Radical Ans wrote:
LiquidMantis wrote:

Just got home with an Acer A500 tablet. It's so spiffy.

[Edit] Hmmm, Gingerbreak just seems to be chillin'. Wish there was some kind of status indicator.

[Edit2] So I got it rooted eventually. I'm reeeeeally digging the tablet though. Very fun.

You lucky somFemale Doggo! I want a 10" tablet soooo bad, but I won't be able to afford one for a long while. I have so many RPG PDFs that I want to read and after viewing a few on my mother-in-law's iPad I've come to the conclusion that a tablet is the single best way to read them. I'm not an Apple fan so I've been drooling over the various Android tablets and dreaming of the day I can make them my own.

I do not know how well they work, but have a look at www.dealextreme.com They have no-name pads and they are cheap.
The company is in Honk Kong, but shipping is for free. This site is pure awesomeness for lots of things they have.

10" screen $160
IMAGE(http://www.dealextreme.com/productimages/sku_57277_1.jpg)

My dad got one of the cheap ($75-100) hong kong tablets to see if he could use it as a cheap interface for the stuff he designs. He had me play with it for a bit and it had a horridly slow processor, it was also a resistive touch screen... He thinks he can us it as a cheap touch interface just fine, and I agee, but as something for entertainment, etc. It would just make me frustrated.

Edit, double post removed.

Sparhawk wrote:

I do not know how well they work, but have a look at www.dealextreme.com They have no-name pads and they are cheap.
The company is in Honk Kong, but shipping is for free. This site is pure awesomeness for lots of things they have.

I use dealextreme a lot, but mostly for cheap stuff like cables and mini-torches. The build quality of stuff on that site is iffy at best, and even to Singapore, delivery can take 10 days. Even though it's cheap, I wouldn't recommend picking up stuff like tablets from dealextreme.

The wallpaper on that tablet amuses me, I think they lifted it from dA.

For Miren users -- anyone feeling like that browser just eats the battery life? It's regularly sending the watchdog app into warning mode, and my phone has had pretty miserable longevity since I installed it.

Seth wrote:

For Miren users -- anyone feeling like that browser just eats the battery life? It's regularly sending the watchdog app into warning mode, and my phone has had pretty miserable longevity since I installed it.

Had similar problems when I gave it a try. Ended up back with Dolphin HD Mini.

Anybody use Enhanced Email? On sale at Amazon for $5 today. With the stock email app not really doing HTML emails, I'm thinking about getting this for my non-Gmail accounts. $5 is much more my buy price than $20 for Touchdown.

Is K-9 Mail (free) not an option for you? Because I've been using it since late 2009.

K9 is awesome. And I believe it does Exchange too, although probably not all aspects of functionality.

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

K9 is awesome. And I believe it does Exchange too, although probably not all aspects of functionality.

it does exchange email, but I haven't been able to sync Calendar or Contacts.
And I want to keep my Google Contacts and Exchange contacts separate.

Right, it doesn't fully do activesync/exchange. It does some kind of workaround to the licensed exchange access I assume.

I used K9 at one point, but it had some annoyances that I can't remember of the top of my head. But that was a long time ago. Might be different now.

MannishBoy wrote:

Right, it doesn't fully do activesync/exchange. It does some kind of workaround to the licensed exchange access I assume.

I used K9 at one point, but it had some annoyances that I can't remember of the top of my head. But that was a long time ago. Might be different now.

I had heard about K9 for some time, but never tried it. I would use the 30day trial Touchdown App. It keeps my contacts separate and it's an overall great email app. Before finally giving in to the $20.00 key, I tried K9. I googled for contact and calendar sync and was unable to find anything. I finally decided to pay for the Key.

Hobbes2099 wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:

Right, it doesn't fully do activesync/exchange. It does some kind of workaround to the licensed exchange access I assume.

I used K9 at one point, but it had some annoyances that I can't remember of the top of my head. But that was a long time ago. Might be different now.

I had heard about K9 for some time, but never tried it. I would use the 30day trial Touchdown App. It keeps my contacts separate and it's an overall great email app. Before finally giving in to the $20.00 key, I tried K9. I googled for contact and calendar sync and was unable to find anything. I finally decided to pay for the Key.

From what I'm reading in the positive reviews, Enhanced Email does pretty much what TD does, and with this sale, at 1/4 the price. $20 is more than I want to pay, but $5 is probably something I will do.

MannishBoy wrote:
Hobbes2099 wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:

Right, it doesn't fully do activesync/exchange. It does some kind of workaround to the licensed exchange access I assume.

I used K9 at one point, but it had some annoyances that I can't remember of the top of my head. But that was a long time ago. Might be different now.

I had heard about K9 for some time, but never tried it. I would use the 30day trial Touchdown App. It keeps my contacts separate and it's an overall great email app. Before finally giving in to the $20.00 key, I tried K9. I googled for contact and calendar sync and was unable to find anything. I finally decided to pay for the Key.

From what I'm reading in the positive reviews, Enhanced Email does pretty much what TD does, and with this sale, at 1/4 the price. $20 is more than I want to pay, but $5 is probably something I will do.

Post how you like it, I could be interested in it for Exchange and an old Yahoo account I have to keep an eye on every now and then.

mwdowns wrote:
Seth wrote:

For Miren users -- anyone feeling like that browser just eats the battery life? It's regularly sending the watchdog app into warning mode, and my phone has had pretty miserable longevity since I installed it.

Had similar problems when I gave it a try. Ended up back with Dolphin HD Mini.

I also have been having battery drain problems with it, but do really like how it works... It did not work properly on my Transformer in Honeycomb either (scaling issues)... Dolphin it is, I guess.

MonoCheli wrote:

Post how you like it, I could be interested in it for Exchange and an old Yahoo account I have to keep an eye on every now and then.

Well, if you use Swype, hold off or try the test version I wish I'd found earlier.

When entering text in the app, while typing in Swype, the text box on the keyboard doesn't update with your typing. As soon as you close your keyboard, the original text box shows the text.

Pretty nasty bug that makes it unusable.

MannishBoy wrote:
MonoCheli wrote:

Post how you like it, I could be interested in it for Exchange and an old Yahoo account I have to keep an eye on every now and then.

Well, if you use Swype, hold off or try the test version I wish I'd found earlier.

When entering text in the app, while typing in Swype, the text box on the keyboard doesn't update with your typing. As soon as you close your keyboard, the original text box shows the text.

Pretty nasty bug that makes it unusable.

I was having a similar problem. I'm using the Beta app on my Moto Atrix and the damn thing wohnt allow me to simply type. if i dont want to swype the word, like an oddly spelled name, i cant do it. it wants to do word guessing for each letter i type! ARGH!

groan wrote:

I was having a similar problem. I'm using the Beta app on my Moto Atrix and the damn thing wohnt allow me to simply type. if i dont want to swype the word, like an oddly spelled name, i cant do it. it wants to do word guessing for each letter i type! ARGH!

You talking about with Swype or this mail app?

Swype since the last beta is working fine for me. On the previous version it would sometimes stop taking Swyped words and I had to manually typed until I went and reselected keyboard type again.

This topic feels like it belongs more here than the Android catch all. I could be wrong.

So last week I rooted my phone, and that was fun for about a day. Since I still had a stock kernel, really the only things it let me do was underclock my phone and activate wireless tethering. Both cool options, but not exactly front page material.

So last night, after hours of reading and re reading and worrying, I took the plunge. I upgraded to CWM 3.1.0.1, installed the SyndicateROM Frozen 1.2 ROM, and updated my kernel to Genocide 1.1, which allows the Epic 4G to go up to 1.4 Ghz.

First: stability. If anything, it's more stable than the stock OTA froyo that came with the phone. Zero lockups, zero freezes.

Second: speed: It's noticably smoother than stock froyo. The built in voltage meter and CPU adjuster are much more refined than setCPU, the phone is snappier than it's ever been (even after going through Titanium Backup and reinstalling all the apps I use on a daily basis), and everything that isn't bandwidth limited just loads faster. I currently have the CPU range between 200mhz and 1.2Ghz.

Thid: battery life: It's too early to tell. People rave about the way this ROM sips battery power, but it doesn't seem to be drastically different than stock froyo (once I removed Miren, of course). This may be a situation where I'm just expecting a lot of my phone (I have a lot of push notifications for twitter, FB, weather, shazam, gmail, etc) turned on, so this may be something a new OS just can't overcome.

That said -- despite the fear of bricking, the whole process was surprisingly smooth. I feel like a real grownup now.

Well, consider, you've raised the performance of your phone a great deal without impairing battery life. Speed isn't normally free, so it appears that the raving about this ROM's power management is justified.

The mobile tradeoff is always speed versus heat and battery life. If you're getting that much more speed for free, that's a big win.

MannishBoy wrote:
MonoCheli wrote:

Post how you like it, I could be interested in it for Exchange and an old Yahoo account I have to keep an eye on every now and then.

Well, if you use Swype, hold off or try the test version I wish I'd found earlier.

When entering text in the app, while typing in Swype, the text box on the keyboard doesn't update with your typing. As soon as you close your keyboard, the original text box shows the text.

Pretty nasty bug that makes it unusable.

Seems to be fixed as of the update I got yesterday. Which I think was an update available other place, just not at Amazon.

So I seem good with this now. Finally HTML non-google email.

MannishBoy wrote:

Seems to be fixed as of the update I got yesterday. Which I think was an update available other place, just not at Amazon.

So I seem good with this now. Finally HTML non-google email.

I picked it up when it was on sale anyway, I have wanted a way to check my yahoo mail that I use for all my website etc mail but rarely send mail from and it has been working well to just check it. Last time I tried the Yahoo Mail app it drained my battery soooo fast I uninstalled it a couple days later.

So for those of us who have a Droid X - and presumably some other handsets too - the Netflix app has been updated and now works perfectly for me. Before the update, I couldn't even see it in the marketplace. Woo-hoo!

I wonder if it's working on my tablet now then. I keep getting an error that it can't connect to the Netflix service when I try to actually start streaming.

LiquidMantis wrote:

I wonder if it's working on my tablet now then. I keep getting an error that it can't connect to the Netflix service when I try to actually start streaming.

I have been waiting for the Honeycomb version of the Netflix app... they need to make tegra 2 version, but I kinda doubt it will happen.