Get OpenSignal for Android - a multi-function monitor

Have you ever been in a situation where you have a really poor mobile phone signal? Just one bar one second and nothing the next?  Have you tried to use a Wi-Fi hot spot, but you are too far away and have a poor connection? The solution is to walk in the direction of the mobile phone transmitter or Wi-Fi access point. But which direction should you walk? OpenSignal can tell you this and a whole lot more. It's a free Android app from the Google Play Store. (Search for 'opensignal').

The home screen is the Dashboard tab and there are simple and advanced views. The advanced view shows things like the IP address, MAC address, and other network details. The simple view (see the screen shot) shows a compass, voice and data quality, and the Wi-Fi network name.

The compass in the middle top part of the screen shows the direction of the nearest mobile phone tower, so if the signal is poor just head in that direction. Tap the Map button and you can see mobile phone towers and Wi-Fi hotspots on a Google map. This enables you to get closer and improve the signal.

 

Select the Test tab and you can measure the bandwidth available. I was at McDonalds when the screen shot below was taken and you can see the upload and download speed and ping (response time). Ratings are given for web, video and VOiP use. The map below shows the 3G coverage for the area around me. You can also see how good your mobile phone operator is compared to others.

 

There are too many screens to show here and there is a lot of useful information displayed by this app. For example, it monitors the mobile phone signal and records any periods where you lost the signal. This is displayed on various charts and there is a history that shows hourly and daily signal strengths.

It monitors the amount of data used and you can tell it your monthly bandwidth allowance. It can then tell you how much is left and how much you can use each day without going over. It records the minutes spent in voice calls and the number of SMS texts sent too. This is great if you need to keep an eye on your phone usage and avoid excessive charges because you have gone over the limit.

OpenSignal is an excellent utility that deserves a place on your Android phone. It's easy to use and displays useful information about phone usage and signal quality.

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Turn your Android phone into a weather machine

There are countless weather apps for Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy S4 and others, and it can be difficult deciding which one to install. WeatherSignal is a completely different type of weather app that does not compete with the others and instead it offers a unique view of the current conditions. Even if you already have a weather app, this one is different, so it is worth adding to your phone.

  

It is not really a forecasting service and it won't tell whether you will need an umbrella tomorrow when you leave home. What WeatherSignal does is to use the device's sensors to display information about the current conditions. Top end Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy S4 and others have a lot of built in sensors to measure temperature, pressure, humidity and even light and magnetic flux.You can see all the readings in the left-hand screen shot.

Tap any of the readings to switch to a live display, shown on the right for temperature. It shows the minimum, maximum and average, plus a chart for whatever time period you choose - 10 minutes, an hour, 12 hours, a day, week or month. There is a live display that shows live figures and a live sideways scrolling chart too.

Your phone is just like a tricorder from Star Trek! You can move it around and see how the magnetic flux density or light levels vary.

Swiping sideways reveals a map and other users with the app are displayed with pins. You can tap a pin to see what their readings were and when they were recorded. It's anonymous, so you don't know the user and you just see the readings like those shown above.

It is interesting to see charts showing how readings change over a week or month, or to quickly check what the current temperature is. Falling pressure is an indication of rain and other bad weather, whereas rising pressure means fine, clear weather, so you can make your own weather predictions of sorts.

WeatherSignal is interesting and it is free. Search for it in the Google Play Store.

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Microsoft slashes price of Surface RT

We all suspected that Microsoft's Surface was selling badly and now we have had confirmation. The company has slashed the price and not by a bit, but by a huge margin. Here in the UK the 32GB Surface RT was £399, but now it is just £279 (including VAT, the tax we pay on goods). Why is it not selling when tablets are so popular?

There are many reasons of course, and the price is just one factor. Selling it at the same price as the iPad when it offers less is a bad idea. The iPad is now a mature product with hundreds of thousands of fantastic apps and support from all the top software developers. The Surface has much less support and far fewer apps.

Windows 8 is a problem too. Microsoft has a vision of one operating system to rule them all, one operating system that runs on everything and everywhere - Windows. Astonishingly, the dream began as far back as 2001 when Windows XP was launched. It had tablet components built in, but tablets back then were little more than laptops with the screen folded flat. They weighed several pounds, were heavy to carry, and the touch screen was nothing like what we have today. Windows tablets were awful and never caught on.

More than a decade later Microsoft is still trying to create a Windows operating system that runs everywhere and on everything. Windows 8 achieves this and it runs both on the Surface RT tablet and desktop PCs. The problem is that it is a jack of all trades and master of none.

Windows 8 is strange on desktop PCs because it has a tablet interface which is at odds with the usual Windows desktop experience and some people don't like it. The Surface RT has problems too and it is possible to get to the traditional Windows desktop, in a limited sort of way. This is equally confusing and it is like running a desktop OS on a tablet.

What are people to expect from a tablet that runs Windows 8? It is confusing and what's more, it contains a lot of code that is unnecessary, leading to bloat that sucks the life out of the hardware. The Surface has to have 32GB of memory because the OS consumes so much whereas the iPad and Android tablets work happily with 16GB. I even have an early Nexus 7 with just 8GB of memory and it's fine.

I think Microsoft's vision of one OS is wrong. At the new lower price point I think the Surface RT will definitely generate more interest, but I doubt if it will generate sufficient to survive in the long term. It needs to sell millions to survive and I can see it quietly being scrapped after a year or two.

The Surface Pro is a different kettle of fish and it is more like an ultra light laptop with a detachable screen. It definitely has a future for people that want a tablet/laptop hybrid. Here Windows 8 makes sense and you can run desktop applications when the keyboard is attached and use it as a tablet when you pull the screen off. It is a neat idea that deserves to do well.

The Surface RT even at its new price point will continue to struggle because of cheap Android tablets and the better iPad. It is surely the beginning of the end for this device.

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How to save lots of money on software

There are many great programs for your Windows PC or Apple Mac, but unless you are a lottery winner you might find it difficult coming up with the money to buy them all. You end up you buying the essentials and the rest is put on a wish list. You wish they were cheaper and you wish you could afford them. There is a way to bring down the price to a much more affordable level and it is very easy to do.

Instead of buying software, always download and install the free trial. Most software is provided as a free download these days and you usually get 30 days use before it stops working or you have to pay for it, although some software companies are a bit mean and offer you less time.

Always register the software or the website. It is sometimes a condition of the free trial anyway, so don't worry about it. It is all part of the plan. In fact, it is an essential part of the plan. The software company needs to know your email address and that you are using the free trial.

Don't buy the software. As the end of the trial approaches you will get an email from the company with a discounted offer that saves you money. This is tempting, but if you hold out a little longer you might even get a last-chance offer at a bargain price.

Here is an example. The regular price for Ad-Aware Personal Security is $24, but instead of buying it, I downloaded the free trial.

A week or two later I got this email with an offer saving me $14 over the regular price of the software. It is now just $9.95 and all without doing anything special. Just running the free trial and registering with my email address.

This practice of emailing users of the free trial with discount offers is very common and I frequently see mail in my inbox offering fantastic deals. It means you can save a lot of money and software that seemed out of reach could well be affordable.

Go and download the free trials on your software wish list and wait for the offers to come in!

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Clean up your Gmail inbox

We get so many emails it is hard to keep track of them all. There are messages from work colleagues, customers or clients, personal emails, newsletters we have subscribed to and so on.

Some email services allow you to create folders and to move messages from the inbox and put them into the appropriate folder. This enables you to keep the inbox clear of clutter and only the important messages remain, or perhaps the odd one or two that don't fit into the categories assigned to folders.

Google Mail is different and it uses labels rather than folders to organise email messages. If you open an email though, you will find two buttons at the top, one of which says Label as and the other says Move to. If you click each one you will see that they are almost identical. Both list the labels you have created for your messages.

Should you label emails or move emails? What is the difference?

The difference is that when you assign a label, it is added to whatever labels are already attached. A message can have more than one label associated with it and you are not limited to just one. An email in the Inbox has the Inbox label assigned to it. If you added a News label then it would have both Inbox and News labels. Select either the Inbox or News in the left panel and you will see the email.

If you use the Move to menu, the new label is attached to the message and the Inbox label is removed. So if you move to News, the email will appear when News is selected on the left, but not when Inbox is selected. By using Move to rather than Label as you can clean up the inbox and remove the clutter.

Suppose you want to put an email back in the inbox. This is easy and if a label has been attached, select the label on the left and the Move to button becomes Move to Inbox.

If there are no labels assigned to a messages, where is it? In this case, select All Mail on the left. This option may be hidden and you might need to click the More link to show all the items in the left panel.

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Free birthday presents from the iOS App Store

The iOS App Store is now five years old and to celebrate Apple is giving away some great apps free of charge. If you have an iPhone or an iPad you should head on over to the App Store straight away on your device and grab these superb goodies because they probably won't be available for very long. Well not for free anyway.

There is a link on the home page to the birthday gifts and there are two categories, Apps and Games.

There is just one thing to watch out for and that is the size. Some of them are huge and Infinity Blade II for example, is 1.1GB. You generally need enough space to download an app and install it, so you will need around 2.2GB of free space on your iPhone or iPad to grab this freebie.

Barefoot World Atlas is another 1.1GB so after installing Infinity Blade II you'll need at least another 2.2GB of free space to download and install this atlas too.

If you are short of space I would recommend avoiding those two heavyweight apps and go for Tiny Wings and Where's My Water on the games side, and Over and Traktor DJ for iPhone on the serious side.

Even if you don't want to use these apps right now, you should download and install them while they are free.

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Master notifications on the Samsung Galaxy S4

One of the great features of modern smartphones is the way that information can be pushed out to them. You can be notified when there is a new email, when someone posts something on Twitter or Facebook, when someone bids on your auction and so on. Notifications are an essential tool and you need to take control of them. Notifications can be a source of irritation when left to the defaults, so here I'll show the techniques to use to filter out the ones you don't want and leave just the important ones.

I'll be using the Samsung Galaxy S4 for this, but everything here applies equally to other Android phones and tablets. The menus may be slightly different depending on the device and version of Android, but that's all.

Notifications produce a sound so that you don't miss them when the phone is in your pocket or the tablet is in a bag. Press the volume up or down key and when the volume control appears on the screen, tap the gear icon. There are several volume controls and one is labelled Notifications. Drag the slider to the desired volume.

Pull down from the top of the screen (the right side) and press the gear icon to go to Settings. In the My Device section, go to Sound. Press Default notification sound. You can choose the sound to produce when there is a notification.

Also in the Sound section is Vibration intensity. Tap it and there are sliders for Incoming call, Haptic feedback, and Notification. Drag the slider to choose whether to have the phone vibrate when there is a notification and by how much.

Go to LED indicator in the My device section of Settings. There is a Notifications section and this enables you to choose whether to flash the LED on the phone whenever you have a new notification. You don't even need to hear the phone, just look at it and if the LED is flashing you have a notification waiting.

Now go to the More section in Settings and Application manager (it may be called Apps on some devices). Tap any application you like and there is an option near the top called Show notifications. When this is ticked the app can display notifications, but not when it is clear. Note that this does not mean that an app will definitely display notifications, just that the system will allow it to if it wants to. It may be an app that doesn't produce notifications. A photo editor for example, might not need any notifications, but a social networking app would produce lots.

You should go to every app listed in Application manager and set the notifications to either on or off as you prefer. I know it is tedious when you have a lot of apps, but it is really useful to turn off notifications except for your favourite apps. Then you won't be overloaded with messages about things you don't care about or things that aren't important.

This isn't quite the end and some apps have notification settings within them. Take Facebook for example. Run it, tap the menu button on the device, and select Settings. There are lots of notification settings for messages, wall posts, comments, and so on. Tick or clear the boxes to allow or prevent them. There are also Vibrate, Phone LED and Notification ringtone settings.

Facebook is unusual in that there are extra notification settings in addition to the notification box in Settings. It is worth looking at the settings in each app to see if there are extra notification settings.

After all this configuration you'll be exhausted, but at least you can sit back and relax. You won't be disturbed by a notification unless it is an important one that you have expressly allowed.

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The advantage of plain vanilla Android devices

There are two types of Android device and I don't mean tablets and smartphones. Android devices can be organised by how much they have been customised.

There are  plain vanilla and customised versions. A typical plain vanilla or pure Android version is the Google Nexus 4 smartphone and the Nexus 7 tablet. Typical phones with a highly customised version of Android are the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One.

There are other pure Android phones, like the HTC One Google Play Edition, but there really aren't that  many. This is because there are lots of phones and tablets all with very similar specifications.

One of the easiest ways that phone and tablet manufacturers can make their devices stand out from the crowd is by heavily customising the interface and operating system. Google lets you do that whereas Apple doesn't.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is loaded up with extras and the disadvantage is that they use up a lot of memory. There have been complaints about the limited amount of memory on the phone and you only get around 9GB free out of 16GB installed. That's around 7GB for the operating system and bundled software. Compare this to a Google Nexus 7, which uses around half this for the OS. However, Samsung does give you a nice bundle of extras and the HTC One comes with nice customisations too.

Assuming you don't mind losing a bit of memory, why wouldn't you want the extra apps and functions on these devices? One reason is that new versions of Android are pushed out to plain vanilla pure Android devices before others. I'm on the next version of Android with my Google Nexus a month or more before Samsung users get it.

There have already been reports of Android 4.3 in use, although I suspect that they are simply test versions. My Nexus 7 reports that Android 4.2.2 is the latest version. It is usually among the first devices to get new versions though, so it shouldn't be long before it gets an upgrade.

If you want to be at the cutting edge of Android operating systems, get a pure Android device.

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