Sirius/XM App: strong content weak app.

Home Screen

Are you currently a Sirius/XM subscriber?
Did you know that for $3 more a month you can add access to their Browser version?

This allows you to listen to most of their stations via ANY web browser.
Did you also know that this ALSO allows you to access this same content on you Adnroid phone.

Keep in mind, you need to have at least ONE full subscription at $12.99 in order to get the $3 price for this. If you don't have a physical satellite radio or car account subscription,  the web-only fee jumps to $12.99.

Channels

On to the app: I hate to say this, but if it wasn't for my desperate need for OnA, ESPN  and some news channels: I probably wouldn't use this app since it has some lacking features and (so far) uncorrected bugs.

What I like:  
well, it simply allows me to listen to XM content on my phone.
The "favorites" screen lets me see what's on at the same time.
Pausing.
*Multi-tasking (listen to XM, do other stuff ... as long is it's not GPS)

Favorites

What I don't like: 
Audio quality is not as good as others apps (they should hire the Pandora people).
It allows you to add favorites, but not re-sort them.
The space taken up by the station logo is too big, and the font for the song/artist is too small.
All but useless "home" screen which only shows current station/artist/song.
NO LANDSCAPE MODE.
"swipe left/right" doesn't switch screens.
No bookmarking artists or recording playback (does have  "pause")
Not ALL channels are there and  the existing ones are slightly different depending if you have XM or Sirius.

Notifier

Needs a STRONG data signal for streaming.
Loss of data signal causes one of three things to happen:
- it will throw up a pop-up informing you of the loss.
- it will simply stop streaming music and will require a quit/restart to fix.
- it will lock up and will require a force close or task-killer to fix.

GPS or Navigation use causes XM to stop streaming.


In a nutshell:
Get it, If you ALREADY have XM/Sirius in one of your cars. This is cheaper way to add additional access.



The app itself is free and has trial subscription period so you can see if you like it!

Get Sirius/XM app from the android market »

Simi Widgets: lightweight apps that pack a punch!

Simi-Folders and Simi - Clock:  These are some nice minimalistic widgets for your home screen. Because I have one of the original droids, I am always faced with the issue of slowdown and performance.  One of the practices I use to remedy this is to not use too many widgets on the home screens. If I do, they tend to be very simple ones that do not require a whole lot of the phone's resources.  I have found that these 2 widgets by Simi are very  friendly to my phone.

The widgets in the natural habitat.

Selecting a folder to edit

 Simi-Folder: is a widget that allows you to create nice custom folders on your home screens. What's the difference between this and just creating normal folders? The folders (once set up) are saved in the application, which means if you delete a simi-folder from the home screen, you don't need to rebuild it like you would a normal folder.  You just re-add it the widget.  There are also a lot of style settings that allow you to customize the look-n-feel of each folder.  Once you get one folder to look the way you like, you can apply that style to additional folders.  I've made several "template" folders that I don't place on my home-screens for just that purpose so I can quickly change the styles to match the home screen wallpaper.

Editing a folder

Pressing "Faves" shows this.

Simi-Clock:  Just like Simi-Folders, this widget has a ton of visual customizations and also acts as an additional way of launching any application you like.  For example, I love the default weather and news app that android has so I use the "on-tap" function of simi-clock to launch it. Simi-Clock has 3 tappable regions that you can assign any shortcut to.



Both of these widgets are free and are available on the android market right now.

• Get Simi-Folder »
• Get Simi-Clock »

Note: there are "donate" versions of each one of these for $2.14 if you are feeling generous.

TOYS: Green Lantern Stuff ...

This is sort of droid related, since I took the videos and pictures WITH my droid ...


I am stoked for the new Green Lantern movie ... the latest trailer (if you haven't seen it) was really cool and I like Ryan Reynolds, who is Green Lantern in his 4th "superhero/comicbook" role:


His others:

• Deadpool (Xmen Origins)
• Captain Excellent (Paper Man)
• Hannibal King (Blade 3)

Anyway, ever since Star Wars, just about EVERY movie now gets child toy tie-ins (notable missteps in this practice: Alien, Rambo and  Battlefield: Earth)


Well, I recently was sent 2 toys for me  my kids to play with and see how they are.

A Hal Jordan Action Figure complete with "giant energy fist" and wearable power-ring


A Gauntlet/Gatling Gun (Colossal Cannon) thing that really shoots.

Lets start with the action figure. It's your standard "star wars figure" 3.5 inch size action figure that surprisingly really looks like Mr. Reynolds.  The molding is really nice and though it lacks elbows and knees, the articulation is pretty good.  

 It also came with what I can best describe as a giant snot-fist that can be stuck to the end of his arm.  But due to it being around 3 times the size of the figure, it woefully unbalances the tiny figure and he cannot stand on his own with it attached.  But it does stay on once it's on so  my son was able to run around with it pretending to punch stuff.

The ring is nice  and well sculpted and is the right size for any 5-8 year old but unfortunately doesn't light up or even glow ... bit of a disappointment there. 

On to the the Power Gun.  It's sort of a "gauntlet" that you load up to 10 discs into. Inside the toy, there is a trigger that when gripped, causes the outer part of the gauntlet to rotate (like a gattling gun), emit a rat-at-at gun sound, light up and best of all ... shoot off a disc.  


It's semi-automatic, firing off a disc for every squeeze of the trigger.  

To be honest, this thing was a lot of fun. The discs don't really fire all that fast, in fact, they kind of spin off like little frisbees.  So you're not going to hurt anyone or any thing (pets included).

It's easy to load and so far took the abuse of both my 4 year old and my 7 year old.  Even with no discs loaded, it's fun since it will still spin, light up and make a machine-gun-noise.  It even has a switch underneath for single gun shot noise, never-ending, parent-maddening, non-stop machine gun noises, and (best of all) ..."off".




The only drawbacks I can think of:

•  like any "shooting toy", the discs are easy to lose. 
•  It's also a tad big.  

Scratch that last one: being big is actually a benefit ... since it's big enough for me to play with use.


Here is the gun in action:



Here are some hi-res images of the toys:

I wrote this review while participating in a blog tour by Dad Central Consulting on behalf of Mattel and received Green Lantern toys to facilitate my review and a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.

PowerAmp: the best music player there is ...

player screen

Google provides a nice music player with android that will more than suffice if you want a basic music player for casual use. However, those of you looking for something with more functionality and snazzier interface should try PowerAmp.

equalizer

Over the past year, I have tried MANY different players. Each one had some nice feature that I liked but not one had the one feature that this one has.  An Equalizer.  Of all the music apps on the market that I tried, this was the only one with an adjustable equalizer.  For someone that likes to use his phone in his car or with a blue-tooth headsets or wired headphones: this is a must have feature.

track list

Another great feature, that I have only seen in ONE other player (winAmp) is the gesture-navigation on the album art.  Swipe left goes back one track. Swipe right: goes foward.  Swipe up or down will change albums or artists.  I love this feature since in the car, it's REALLY hard to find and press the small  "<<" ">>" buttons while driving.

It also lets you control the app from the lock-screen by placing some buttons there as well.  No need to wake up the phone, swipe to unlock to access the controls.





Other major features:

home screen widget

- plays mp3, mp4/m4a (including alac), ogg, wma*, flac, wav, ape, wv, tta
- 10 band graphical equalizer for all supported formats, presets, custom presets, per-song/per-output preset assignment
- separate Bass and Treble adjucement
- plays songs from folders and from system media library
- downloads missing album art
- 4 widgets, with album art and without it
- lock screen (2 widget types) with optional Direct Unlock (to home)
- headset support, automatic Resume on headset connection (can be disabled in settings)
- tag editor


Almost every app I have has been free.  This was one of the first I ever paid for and it's truly worth the $5.

There's a 30day trial if you'd  like to demo it first.

Get it now from the android market »

TIP: adding navigational short cuts

I often use google maps on my phone on the way to and from work to view the traffic conditions and possibly find alternate routes home ... to do this I would have to open the app, type in location or find in my "recents" just adds more steps in this process since once you select the address you still have to select "navigate to" to start the GPS/Mapping.

This gets tedious to do over and over again ... especially since 90% of my driving is either to work or to home.

Luckily, google has you covered  ... Direction & Navigation Shortcuts.

How to add these:

1) Just long-press a home screen to
bring up the "add  to home screen" menu.

2) Scroll down and select Directions & Navigation

3) Fill out the form and save

Voila ... a link on your home screen that will automatically open Google Nav and start helping you get home.  You can add as many of these as you want.

Pressing "Home" does all the work!

Bonus tip: you can also add these types of links to your Cardock home (if you use a car dock).

Pandora: not the planet from Avatar ...

Pandora internet radio is a streaming music app that allows you to setup "stations" by  artist or song ... for example ... I like Wolfmother, so I typed in Wolfmother to add in a new station and lo-and-behold!  ... Pandora started playing Wolfmother ...  below the song currently being played are a couple of buttons ... skip / thumbs up / thumbs down.  When the song was over, the app started playing Led Zeppelin ... why? Because the Pandora has decided that Led Zep is pretty similar to Wolfmother so if you like Wolfmother ... you MUST like Led Zeppelin ... which you can either skip/like/dislike depending on if Pandora got that particular assumption correct.

And THAT'S the magic of Pandora. It has created,  for all of its songs, a musical genetic database that combines what it already knows about music (via how others rated the songs) with your personal taste (how YOU rated the songs) to bring you music that you should (hopefully) like.  It's a lot like how Netflix "suggested movies" work.

The app allows you to store as many "stations" as you like, and it is free as long as you can live with an advert now and then and 6 skips per hour limit.  If you subscribe to Pandora, they remove the ads and allow unlimited skipping. By the way, changing channels is not considered skipping and neither is thumbs-downing.  Just be careful,  thumbs-downing a song will remove that song from your channel forever (you can login to the pandora website and undo this though)

When the Pandora app is running it will have a Notification Bar icon that allows you to quickly access the app when you are doing something else. Also, you can pin a Pandora widget to one of your home screens if you want.

Get Pandora now from the android market »

Note: Pandora does have a browser version that allows you to access your channels from anywhere: www.pandora.com

My current phone: what the heck am I using?

It's a 1st generation plain old Motorola Droid.  Nothing fancy and it's currently starting to show its limitations. I don't use a lot of "widgets" because they slow down my home screen.  I constantly install/remove apps because i'm near the 256mb internal storage limit (even though it has a 16gb memory card, some apps can only be installed to internal memory. But more and more apps allow "install to SD card"). It also has a nice 5mp camera which takes both video and stills.


I don't use the stock home screen, I use something called LiveHome which gives me some neat functionality which I've talked about previously.

The droid came with 2 docks.  One for the desk (a Multimedia dock) which turns it into the worlds most functional clock-radio. And another one for the car which allows me to use it as GPS.

The Car dock is great though. Because the droid can multi-task: I can use the GPS, listen to XM or my mp3s ... and when I get a phone call, it acts as a speaker phone.

I can't use a case on my phone for 2 reasons:
1) I would need to take it out of the case to use it in my docks.
2) almost ALL cases have magnetic latches, which trigger one of the "dock" modes and the phone stays on while in it's case, killing the battery ... took me WEEKS to figure that one out.

When I got my phone, there where no other droid phones available on verizon ... so I had no choice. But these days, verizon has 12 android phones listed on their site.  Ranging from 3" to 4" screens, some have physical keyboards and the newest ones have processors that rival computers from just a few years ago.

Seems like yesterday when I got my first cell phone, you know ... to make phone calls.

Ericcsson SH-888 (1997)

Zoodles: the best way to keep a 4 year old happy at the restaurant.

You go out for dinner with the kids ... the restaurant is super busy and your youngest is getting antsy and you left the Nintendo DS at home ... WHAT DO YOU DO?!

Zoodles to the rescue ...

Zoodles is a essentially a kid-zone for Android.  The app contains a ton of games, videos, interactive books and other activities from around the web which have then been optimized for your device.  The app does require an account which is controlled by the parent and it will ask you to enter in your child's information, like: name, age and gender.  Once all set up, zoodle's home screen has an icon for each child you entered and when selected, the app shows the appropriate apps for that child.

The real neat part is that once a week, you get an email from zoodle showing what activity and progress your child has done so far.

As an added bonus, your account and features are accessible in the desktop version as well (which we also use.)

Get zoodles for free:

• for your phone »
• for your PC »