Web Review » android

SugarSync synchronizes your documents for free, brings them to your smartphone

riccardo — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:34:45 +0000

I was looking for a complete solution to keep the office PC with my laptop in sync: SugarSync does more: it offers a free 2.5Gb storage space to synchronize an unlimited number of folders between two computers; in addiction, they gives you a mobile application – available for Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Blackberry – to access your file also in mobility.

You’ve only to select the directories you want to keep in sync (tipically the “documents” folder, and maybe your music or pictures archive), the SugarSync client will run in background, automatically monitoring every change. If the other computer is switched off, it will be synchronized the next time you will power it up.

It is a direct competitor of the famous (and good) Dropbox (2Gb for free), but it offers several addictional features: Dropbox syncronizes a single folder and it gives a mobile app only for iPhone, even if the free accounts are elegible to be linked to an unlimited number of computers, while SugarSync free supports only two (plus a phone). SugarSync is available for Windows and Mac OS X (Dropbox has also a Linux client).

You can expand the space limitations of your free account referring your friends: SugarSync offers you 250Mb of addictional space for every new user you refer (and your friend will get the same, starting with 2.75 Gb of free storage space!); if someone you referred will upgrade to a paid plan – starting from $4.99 per month for 30Gb – you’ll get an addictional 5Gb for free.

Go to SugarSync website

Waze, the free social GPS

riccardo — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:38:54 +0000

Waze is born from a simple and smart idea: connecting cars together, to automatically create a new “social network” that detects and gives alerts about traffic conditions, police traps and accidents.

You’ve only to install the Waze client, free and available for Android, iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile, starting it everytime you’re driving your car. It will anonymously record your track to inform other drivers about traffic (Waze collects speed informations from all the phones and it creates statistical alerts). You can also send “human” messages to the community, reporting speed cams or dangerous events on the road.

In addiction of this, Waze is a “normal” car navigation system, with a “not-so-normal” feature: also the maps are drawed and updated by the community! When you drive with Waze running on your phone, it records every your move and it sends it to Waze servers, where the centralized system merges this data with the existing maps. When several phones record a difference (because, for example, of a change of a road) this part of the map is updated.

People from United States are luckier than Europeans, because USA government gives maps of the territory for free, so there’s a complete base to start with. Anyway it’s also possible to start from scratch: we just started to draw maps here in Italy, and major cities like Rome or Milan are already half-mapped. Let’s call Waze the Wikipedia of streets

www.waze.com

Google being evil with developers

riccardo — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:21:02 +0000

Don’t be evil is the famous Google slogan. Since some time, it seems that something is changing: last week they contacted Cyanogen, the author of the most famous “unofficial” firmware for Android phones, telling him to stop the distribution of these releases; the problem comes from the fact that Android code is open source, but Google applications that are shipped with it (Google Talk, YouTube, Android Market…) are not.

This contradiction bring the impossibility to build a fully working ROM (if the developer can’t release a firmware with Android Market, final users can’t even download the other Google Apps!). Cyanogen has confirmed his intention to respect Google copyright, so he will continue to develop new firmware without any proprietary component, but the final solution is still incomplete. Let’s wait to see if this story will have a happy ending.

see also:

CyanogenMod home page: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

“A Note on Google Apps for Android“, from the Google official Android developers blog.

How to import and export SMS on Android

riccardo — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 01:09:30 +0000

Here’s another useful information for lucky people with an Android phone (only a single model is available on the market, at the time of this post: the HTC Dream, also known as “G1″): one of the most annoying problems for Android users is that they can’t export their sent and received SMS, to stock them on the PC and – maybe – to import them back on another Android phone.

I want to thanks a user from the forum on modMyGphone.com, so I discovered that our SMS and MMS are stored in this file, in the phone’s memory:
/data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db

So, root users can copy them all on the SD card with a simple and single command from the terminal:
cp /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db /sdcard

This file must be copied on the PC and it can be copied back on the phone (for example, after a format) to recover messages. You can also browse it from your computer with a – more or less – comfortable way, using a SQLite client (for example: SQLite Database Browser).

ScummVM for Android

riccardo — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:47:26 +0000

The list of applications and games for Android phones is big, but not so huge as the ones for iPhone or Symbian devices: the operating system by Google is new and the road is long. Anyway, ports of the most famous multi-platform softwares are coming day by day.

Today we can enjoy the launch of the very good emulator of old LucasArts games: ScummVM-Android is the unofficial port, now available on the Market – directly from your Android phones. Now we can play Maniac Manson, Monkey Island, Sam & Max on our G1 (aka HTC Dream)!

http://sites.google.com/site/scummvmandroid/