The biggest addition is theme support, which can incorporate themes designed for a variety of launchers, including ADW, LauncherPro (rest in peace) and Go Launcher. The grid now extends up to 10×10 icons (handy if you’re rocking a modded Galaxy Note) and gesture support has been improved. The developers know their audience, and have added integration with the CyanogenMod 9 settings menu for custom ROM users.

Some of the more advanced features (like themes) require the $3.99 paid version, and we’re perfectly fine with that. Good on you, Android Does, for offering a free version as well. All the standard bells and whistles are also present, for those who love to modify each and every aspect of their launcher compulsively. Give it a try, why don’t ya?

For the uninitiated, think of Total Commander as an alternative to that old favorite Root Explorer. There’s three crucial differences between that app and this one: Total Commander is more powerful, admittedly uglier, and it’s absolutely free – it has been since it was introduced on Windows and later WindowsCE and Windows Mobile. I must admit that the interface is pretty awful, but then, power users won’t be too concerned by that.

Total Commander supports all the bells and whistles of most advanced file managers, including support for compressed files. It’s also got something that most others don’t: a dual-pane view, perfect for moving lots of files around quickly. To activate it, just tilt your phone into landscape mode. This feature works great on high-end phones with 720p screens. Total Commander can also use root permissions – check the settings menu.

[via Android Police]

The Android Reddit is up in arms, with hundreds of comments containing the predictable bile. Their two-minute Powerpoint-class YouTube spot aimed at free app developers has an astounding three likes to 188 dislikes – a ratio rarely seen even on the vitriolic cesspool of YouTube commenters. The video itself isn’t exactly evil, but it does paint Android users as targets for marketing and not customers. The main selling points are more engagement while a user waits for a call and the fact that ads play even when users aren’t actively using the app, though hopefully they disappear once it’s uninstalled.

SellARing claims that they already have advertising agreements with clients like NBC, FOX and Wal-Mart, and that their SDK is easy to integrate into existing apps. Full marks for creativity guys, but this kind of intrusive advertising is not the way to win users. We’d have a hard time recommending any app that used this particular service, even if it unlocked your bootloader and downloaded more RAM.

This Android Community post is brought to you by the great taste of Charleston Chew®! 

[via Android Police]

Chief among these is the ability to automatically generate a color palette from a photo that you take with your phone. So if you’re out and about in New Orleans and you see a fetching mural for the Saints, you can snap a photo and get the distinctive gold/black/white color without having to hunt down a branding guide. It’s not just a gimmick, either: you can create palettes along the major divisions of color theory, complementary, monochromatic, analogous, shades, triad, tetrad and split complementary.

Other functions include exporting to RGB, HSB and HEX, not to mention swapping palettes with your friends on Facebook. Those just looking for some UI bling can adapt their palettes into Android wallpapers. The full version is a hefty $4.99 USD, but those who need professional tools probably won’t bat an eye. The Lite version is free, but does without the various theoretical variations and wallpaper.

If you haven’t tried AirDroid yet, go get it right now. It’s an app that hosts your Android phone’s storage on a local wireless network and presents it to a PC web browser, complete with a gorgeous interface and a ton of management features. In addition to viewing, downloading and uploading files, AirDroid can access your contacts, call logs, email, and many, many other functions right from your computer.

Other new features include installing apps from your browser, whether they’re on the Google Play Store or stored locally on your computer. You can also send a URL straight from AirDroid to your phone (handy if you don’t have Chrome to Phone installed on a computer you’re borrowing) and remote screenshots. We can’t stress this enough: AirDroid is a fantastic, beautiful app, and it belongs in the toolkit of any power user.

The browser itself seems solid, if a little uninspired. The interface takes a lot of cues from Opera Mini/Opera Mobile and, strangely, the iOS browser. Naturally Yahoo’s search and various web tools like Mail and Maps are integrated, as is a “speed dial” home page. Yahoo hasn’t failed to integrate some of Android’s most useful features: voice search and mobile/desktop views are present as well. ICS-style quick buttons and a read it later feature are included. The lower bar seems a little busy and the whole interface covers more of the web viewing area than is comfortable for yours truly.

Currently the browser is only formatted for smartphones (and notably doesn’t incorporate much of Ice Cream Sandwich’s UI design), but it should at least function with Android tablets. Yahoo hasn’t published the app outside of Japan, and given the fact that their app store hasn’t spread either, they’re unlikely to do so in the future. Japanese readers can download the Yahoo! Browser at this link.

[via 9to5Google]

The message was sent along with an update FAQ stating that EA was closing down the support (i.e. the servers selling additional songs) to focus on other mobile games. This was little comfort to those who had paid for the game and extra songs and would be left with a disabled product in a month. Technically EA wasn’t doing anything illegal – their terms of service for pretty much all games on all platforms says that you’re not buying a product, you’re buying a “license”, and that your license to play the game (which, again, you paid for) can be revoked at any time and for any reason.

This bumble is the latest in a long line of anti-consumer moves from Electronic Arts that’s given them the reputation as one of the worst game publishers in the industry, at least from a business and consumer perspective. Restrictive, overbearing terms of service, expensive DLC packages (which many think are purposefully left out of final console and PC games) and a reliance on heavy-handed DRM and the Origin PC platform aren’t winning the company any fans. Their developers and the triple-A titles in their stable will probably keep them going, but a continually abusive stance towards their customers is creating a larger and larger contingent of dissatisfied gamers.

[via Cnet]

Basically, Alt Mounter creates an alternate connection between your phone and your Mac, sidestepping the MTP protocol for a separate connection. You’ll need a separate application running on your Mac in addition to the FUSE package. Install the apps on your phone and your Mac, tap the widget on your homescreen and you’re good to go with blessedly fast, old-fashioned file transfers.

Currently the program is only available for Mac, but the developer is thinking about creating Windows and Linux versions as well. It’s also in beta, so tread with caution. You can download both the app and the OS X program at this file reservoir. Go now, Mac users, and transfer files with reckless abandon! (And by the way, if you don’t want to mess with any extra desktop software, try AirDroid and a local WiFi network.)

SoundWire works sort of like a remote desktop viewer in reverse. Install the server application on your Windows PC (sorry Mac folks) then connect it to the app on your phone over your home’s WiFi network. After a brief authentication, all your PC’s audio from any application will be broadcast through your phone’s speaker, headphone jack or Bluetooth connection. It’ll even mute the volume when you get a call. That’s just downright convenient.

The free version of the app includes an audio nag every half-hour, but the $4 paid version is distraction-free. Both apps work with all recent versions of Android, and can connect to multiple PCs for different streams of music. Technically you could use it over a wireless broadband connection as well, but you’ll have to know your way around a little port forwarding and keep an eye on your data usage if it’s limited.

[via Reddit]

How has QuickOffice improved? Oh, let me count the ways. There’s more fonts and keyboard shortcuts (for QWERTY phones or Bluetooth keyboards) across all the included apps. The PDF viewer gets in-text comments, shapes and annotations, as well as better selection tools. The word processor gets spell check, line spacing options, tables, and improved chart and table management for DOCX files.

The presentation viewer gets a laser pointer software tool, numbered lists in addition to bullet points, and duplicate slides in the PowerPointX format. Spreadsheets get a relatively small update, allowing users to move or resize charts and update them with live data. Best of all, if you’ve already bought a previous version of QuickOffice, you don’t need to repurchase it – just check the Google Play Store for the update.

This is because Apple bought Chomp lock, stock and barrel back in February, and they’re not too keen on sharing the limelight with the operating system that’s outselling iOS in every major market. The reasoning was that Apple wanted Chomp’s algorithm for searching and organizing apps to improve the same feature in iTunes. When the acquisition was announced, Chomp’s executive had already been working for Apple for some time.

Will this affect you? Unless you’re a dedicated and constant user of Chomp, probably not. It’s also not altogether surprising, given Apple’s downright hostile stance towards Android in the past, refusing to even allow iOS developers to acknowledge Android apps in their iTunes listings. Oh well – you’ll just have to rely on one of Chomp’s competitors or, you know, search the Google Play Store manually from now on.

[via SlashGear]

First of all, Lux uses a time function, so you can schedule which parts of the day your phone will operate at what brightness. This is great if you spend a lot of time out of doors and know when you’ll do it: if you know you’ll be driving in the early morning with the sun at your back, you can automatically boost the brightness to make sure your GPS navigation isn’t washed out. It also has a “sub-zero” brightness setting that sets the screen’s backlight even lower than the “0%” of the standard settings menu.

The basic version of Lux Auto Brightness is free, but the very reasonable $1.55 paid version adds a few extra settings that really take things up a notch. Night mode will adjust the color temperature of the entire phone for more comfortable viewing, and the awesomely specific Astronomer Mode will shift the phone’s screen into the red spectrum to avoid expanding your irises and getting extra light into a telescope lens. Lux Auto Brightness works on Android phones and tablets running 2.1 or later.

[via Reddit]

Upon opening Scalado album you’re greeted with an organization scheme that’s somewhere between folders and tags. The two primary options are the camera roll (whichever folder your phone or tablet puts its pictures in) and All, which scours your phone for every single JPEG it can find. Elsewhere your photos are divided into those taken nearby, photos taken by month, photos taken by area, and last (and from Scalado’s viewpoint, least) the actual directories on your phone or SD card. It’s a unique way at looking at your photos that’s very geo-centric… and makes me wish I had actually geotagged any of my photos.

Navigating through your photos is fast and natural, even with hundreds on your phone. Hi-res photos from the camera and relatively low-res screenshots get the same snappy response. Zooming and navigating uses the same swipes and pinches that you’re used to, and Scalado takes the liberty of removing the notification bar (but not Ice Cream Sandwich’s navigation bar). You can select multiple images to rotate them, delete them, or share them via Android’s built-in share function. There’s no real editing to be had.

The unique aspects of Scalado come when you tap the “Map” icon in the home screen (next to the “Camera” icon that immediately takes you to the camera app – Scalado Album is designed to be a complete replacement for the Gallery). You’re then taken to a Google Maps interface with your current location highlighted, and albums overlayed on the areas where you’ve taken groups of photos. It’s a pretty unique way of organizing your photos, and for certain types of users it will be very useful indeed. Video thumbnails are something we haven’t seen on any other app.

Scalado Album could use a little more in the editing department, but as a pure viewer app it’s well worth the entry price. If you’re tired of the default Android Gallery and need something that’s easy, flexible, and most of all fast, give it a shot.

Taplogger disguises itself as a simple memory game, in a manner not uncommon among Android trojans. In the background it records your phone’s movements in three dimensions constantly, waiting for the subtle changes in pitch and yaw that come when a user is inputting a number. It then records the location of a touch on the touchscreen (without ever interfering with a software keyboard or number pad) and “listens” for important personal information, like lockscreen PINs and Social Security numbers.

According to the student who created the app, its intended effect is to illustrate the fact that the permissions for motion sensors on smartphones are dangerously unregulated. The lead PhD candidate notes that the same functions are unsecured on both iOS and BlackBerry, making this sort of exploit theoretically simple. The research paper, “TapLogger: Inferring User Inputs On Smartphone Touchscreens Using On-board Motion Sensors“, was co-authored by University of Pennsylvania PhD candidate student Sencun Zhu and Kun Bai, a researcher working for IBM.

[via Ars Technica]

Enhanced Email features support for POP and IMAP as well as half a dozen other email standards, but Microsoft’s ubiquitous and often cumbersome Exchange is the focus. The app is licensed for Activesync, so it features practically instantaneous push email – a must-have for mobile professionals. Beyond that you get a lightweight interface that could be mistaken for Android’s default Email app, were it not for the breadth of customization options presented.

To tell the truth, the app is a little on the drab side, but considering its utilitarian focus that’s not really a problem. And those who want to shake things up can alter the theme to their liking. Light and dark presets are pre-loaded, but you can alter the color of the text and background on read and unread mail, not to mention the global and message font sizes. Colors for each attached email account can also be customized.

There’s a ton of other settings as well – perhaps not as many as you’ll get in the full desktop version of Outlook, but far more than are available by default, concerning everything from your mobile email signature to where attachments appear in the interface. There’s not much to look at, but if you want absolute control over how your email comes into your phone, gets displayed and goes back out again, Enhanced Email is the app for you. And for those of you who constantly flash new ROMs: all you settings can be backed up and restored for later.

Oh, and search. The one function that is so glaringly absent from the default email client is present, front and center. Just tap the Search button up top and you’re ready to go. I wish it worked with the Search button your phone (or in the case of my Galaxy Nexus, on my ROM) but the fact that it’s there, fast and effective is an absolute godsend. Even when going through hundreds of old emails it brought back results in less than a second.

There’s just one thing I’m not crazy about in Enhanced Email: the interface. It’s all there and it works, but the app looks like it’s running on Froyo and it could definitely use some Ice Cream Sandwich-themed updates to its icons and menus. But that’s a nit-pick – it’s not as if Outlook is very pretty either. It could also use a tablet interface; right now the app just expands from smartphone mode on Honeycomb or later.

Long story short: if you need a flexible, powerful Exchange email client that still manages to run as fast as if it were native, Enhanced Email is worth the price of entry. It’s a steep price – the app goes for $9.99 – but for a function that some of us use every hour of every workday, the Search function and customization options are indispensable. Download it from the Google Play Store.

What I immediately noticed is that Pocket’s new interface embraces Android 4.0, with icons and menu placement that seamlessly blend in with my Galaxy Nexus’ native Ice Cream Sandwich. This is still a rare sight among major Android apps, and even rarer for those publishers who have a significant iOS presence, like Read It Later-Pocket. Setting up a new account for the demonstration and saving my first few items was seamless on Android. I found myself saving directly from the Android browser.

Synced items are a little slow, sometimes requiring a refresh to see immediately. This isn’t a major issue, since most of the time you’ll be saving them and forgetting about them until later. All of the essential Read It Later functions remain intact: by default, the app saves a mobile-friendly version of a webpage or photo to view at a later date. Quickly going into airplane mode didn’t affect it at all – a welcome fact for someone who often loses 3G signal. The formatting itself is admirably clear with a Web View that can be accessed at any time, and if you prefer to save sites in a full desktop view that’s an option.

Sharing and managing from Pocket is also commendably easy. Long-press an item to bring up an ICS-style menu that lets you tag, favorite or delete an item, as well as mark items read or re-share it. You can filter a long list by content (web, photo or video) tag or parent URL. Once an item is marked as read, it disappears from your primary list, but you can still find it via the search function. I really can’t say how refreshing it is to see the interface so well-done on an Android app – Facebook could learn a thing or two here.

Overall the improvements from Read It Later to Pocket are impressive. The only thing that’s a bit of a let-down is the desktop web integration, now located at getpocket.com. The default tile view dynamically changes size, and on my account at least, the thumbnails wouldn’t appear, making the reading experience somewhat less seamless than the Android app. But overall it’s a refreshing change for a service that millions rely on. If you often find yourself switching between devices and missing content, you’ll want to give Pocket a try.

Content

There’s a lot to see in Next Issue, and depending upon your personal tastes, you may want all of it or just a little. At present there’s 32 magazines on offer with up-to-date issues, and back issues stretching to the beginning of 2012. Highlights include Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune, Entertainment Weekly, Popular Mechanics, and many more. For a full list of titles, check out the Next Issue Google Play Store page. There’s a lot to be had here, though I must say it skews female at the moment – not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Next Issue representatives say they’re continually working to add new magazines.

Odds are pretty good that there’s something in Next Issue that you want to read, but the question is, what and how often? While the service retains the ability to buy single issues and subscriptions (between $2 and $10 a pop) the real draw will be the “all you can eat” unlimited plans. The Basic plan gets you all the monthly magazines, included at $9.99 a month. The Unlimited Premium plan adds weekly magazines (Entertainment Weekly, People, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker and Time) for $14.99, granting you access to about three dozen full magazines with four months of backlog (at the moment). That’s hundreds and hundreds of issues a year for less than $200.

But there’s a bit of a wrench in the works for these unlimited plans. Some magazines only format their content for certain Android tablet screen sizes and resolutions. Better Homes and Gardens, Car and Driver and Elle are only available on 10-inch tablets, while Time and The New Yorker are only available on 7-inch tablets. This seems to be determined by screen resolution rather than actual devices, using 1024×600 as the 7-inch standard and 1280×800 as the 10-inch. So for example, if you use a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, you’ll get access to the 10-inch exclusive magazines but you won’t be able to access the 7-inch ones. It’s an annoying limitation to be sure.

Interface

What sets Next Issue apart from other apps and services is the fact that all of the magazines on offer have been reformatted specifically from the source files. There’s no pinching and zooming here: it’s as if you’re reading a periodical designed exclusively for the tablet format. The magazines themselves are wrapped in an interface that’s heavy on the visual flair but retains a surprising amount of utility. Magazines are separated into “stacks” of dated issues, and you can download and read each issue one at a time, or get them automatically synced with your device. If you use one of the unlimited plans, you add magazines to the front page of your app in a format that’s similar to the Kindle archive method.

Managing space and downloads is important, since each magazine is several hundred megabytes of rich media. If you tap on a magazine that you haven’t read before, it automatically begins downloading from the cover. This is a little slow on my 3G connection, but on 4G or WiFi, you shouldn’t see any problems. You can zoom to any page in the magazine at any time and have it load up automatically – a very nice touch. The Settings menu allows you to set which magazines are automatically delivered, how long a downloaded magazine will stay on your device, and which ones won’t be automatically deleted. The only management option that’s missing is SD card support, but that’s coming in a future update. Navigating individual magazines is done via a combination of article headlines and a CoverFlow-style viewer.

The periodicals themselves are surprisingly easy to read. Each and every bit of text has been specifically formatted for the screen size and resolution, making for an experience that’s much more comfortable even than web browsing on a tablet. In-line linked content like Contents pages flow dynamically, and though they shift from one periodical to another, it’s easy enough to get the hang of things. If you’re someone who seriously reads any of the available magazines “for the articles”, you’ll be a happy camper.

Pictures are another matter. Because most of these magazines are delivered in a portrait-only format, you’re limited on how much and how often you can view photos. Some magazines allow for a “blown up” view of specific images, but they’re still stuck in the portrait format, squeezing down to fit in the viewer pane. (If you’re a fan of men’s interest magazines, get used to seeing only half a centerfold at one time.) Most videos suffer from this tiny viewer problem as well. This rigid adherence to a single resolution and a lack of natural tools, like orientations switching and pinch-to-zoom on large photos, really drags the experience down.

Dynamic content is interesting. You get the expected contextual links, but some magazines also throw in extra content that’s only available on the app. One surprising and pleasing example was a cover of Parents Magazine, which had an animated cover of rain that gradually faded away to sub-headlines linking directly to articles. Ads are present, of course, but the vast majority of them are just static images and a link – there’s been almost no effort to make them fit into the digital format.

Value

If you’re a regular reader of the weekly magazines on offer, the $14.99 Unlimited Premium plan is a steal. Likewise if you pick up more than three or four of the standard magazines every month, $9.99 is a solid price for the content. If you’ve subscribed to any of the magazines on offer, you may or may not be eligable for a discount on the backlog of titles – some even let you access all of the titles for free if you’ve already subscribed. And in a move that’s definetely consumer-friendly, you can cancel Unlimited plans any time.

Of course, these scenarios assume that you’ve already got an Android tablet running Honeycomb or later. And since not all titles are available on all tablets, even on Android, you’ll have to take a serious look at which ones you can access to determine if the service is worth it. If Next Media can add even more titles (and presumably keep the same price) it will continue to become more valuable, a la Hulu Plus or Netflix. Next Issue is not available on smartphones of any size.

Wrap-Up

Next Issue doesn’t replace the experience of a paper magazine, but it comes as close as I’ve seen yet to doing so, and presents some impressive value-ads at the same time. If your coffee table is littered with months of People back-issues, you cold swap them out for your tablet and actually have room for your coffee. Likewise the idea of having hundreds of issues in your bag or purse, in a format that’s actually enjoyable to use, is compelling.

Is it worth it? It depends on what you read, and how often. The reader who picks up Popular Mechanics twice a year probably won’t see a serious benefit with Next Issue, but if you’ve got a box of ten years of Vanity Fair back issues, you’ll definitely want to give it a try. In either case, you can access the entire catalog on your Android tablet free for 30 days before paying. If you’ve got an Android tablet and you’re an avid periodical reader, it’s definitely worth a try.

Check out a video hands-on below:

In addition to the videos, you can sort the clips by date or popularity, or just select a random clip from the archive. There’s also a pretty impressive tagged database that lets you quickly find that one Stephen Colbert Christmas story from 2004. It’s also got the now obligatory sharing functions for sending links to clips out on Facebook and Twitter, as well as email. Presumably for your parents. The app works on Android 2.1 and up, and of course, it’s free. Too bad the menu only works in landscape.

The Google Play Store description goes out of its way to note that full episodes are not available in this app.  You can thank Comedy Central and Viacom for that, since they post timely updates of full episodes on Hulu, where you can watch the last dozen episodes for free… assuming you’re on the desktop. If you’re using Android or any mobile device, you’ll have to pay for Hulu Plus. Or, you know, watch it on YouTube before it’s pulled. If you’re still watching on cable, the app will conveniently remind you when new episodes are airing. Have fun!

Not that Instagram needs any instruction from whiny tech bloggers like me. The company was bought by Facebook just yesterday for an astounding one billion dollars. For a mobile app developer with six employees, that’s basically the equivalent of being sent to Valhalla without having to die first. Odds are that the Android app was just the icing on the cake – Instagram claimed more than 10 million total users on iOS before last week, so now they’re at somewhere between 15 and 20 million.

If you haven’t downloaded Instagram yet (hey, not everyone is a fan), you can check out our official review. Long story short: it’s a solid enough app, but needs some serious polish and there are still too many devices that aren’t supported. It’s a good thing that the developers have been releasing regular updates – the third post-release update was sent out on Friday. One has to wonder what all those whiny iPhone users are thinking, now that their little “artistic” community has been bought by the web’s version of McDonald’s and between a quarter and a third of Instagram users are accessing the service on Android.

[via USA Today]

The BlueStacks beta was downloaded a whopping one million times in just ten days after its release – an incredible showing for software that’s still very much experimental. What does Qualcomm, a company whose interests are overwhelmingly mobile, want with BlueStacks? Who knows – maybe it’s the same thing that AMD wants, or any of BlueStacks other investors, now totaling resources of $15 million. The software has already gotten attention from hardware vendors like ViewSonic, and as Windows 8 tablets start appearing later this year or in 2013, the lure of ready-made touch apps may be hard to resist.

BlueStacks is a free download, and anyone can use it to try out a variety of apps synced from their Android smartphone. Even if you don’t use an Android phone, the latest beta includes several third-party app stores for built-in access to hundreds of thousands of apps. If even that isn’t enough and you’re handy with a registry editor, you can try your hand at installing the Google Play Store or rooting the BlueStacks player – yup, there’s nothing that Android modders won’t try. Planned updates to BlueStacks include a premium version and an OS X port.

[via SlashGear]