Posts by Joe Levi
Joe graduated from Weber State University with two degrees in Information Systems and Technologies. He has carried mobile devices with him for more than a decade, including Apple's Newton, Microsoft's Handheld and Palm Sized PCs, and is the Pocketnow.com "Android Guy". By day you'll find Joe coding web pages, tweaking for SEO, and leveraging social media to spread the word. By night you'll probably find him writing technology and "prepping" articles, as well as shooting video. End of line.
-
by Joe Levi | February 27, 2013 11:46 AMCall it the Battle of the Power Houses, HTC and Sony are lined up toe-to-toe with their latest top-tier smartphones. In the Sony corner we have the Xperia Z. In the HTC corner is the HTC One. We showed you the Sony Zperia Z from CES 2013 and were quite impressed with it. As Brandon said, "it's a darn nice phone". And it should be. Sporting an S4 Pro quad-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz and backed up by 2GB RAM, it's very snappy. The skin Sony has opted for is fairly light-weight but distinctively different from the stock Android experience that you'll get from a Nexus device. This ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 26, 2013 10:30 AMIt's been more than a few years since Bill Gates turned over the reigns of Microsoft half-a-decade ago, but he still has quite a bit of control in the company as Chairman of the Board. During his early years with the company, he had a very lofty goal: a computer on every desk and in every home. I don't think you'll find anyone who will argue that we have seen that objective achieved. Computers, whether they are servers, desktops, workstations, or even traditional laptops, are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Gates saw that coming as well and started rolling out "Handheld PCs" and ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 25, 2013 10:51 AMAny company, regardless of industry, is only as successful as its marketing reach. If someone doesn't know about a product, they can't buy it. Some companies do this by word of mouth, others turn to social networks to spread the news of their products, others spend gazillions of dollars on TV and more traditional ads. Each marketing strategy has its strengths and weaknesses, and each appeals to a different demographic segment. Samsung decided to go all-in with the Oscars this year, placing six ads -- one including a cameo by film director Tim Burton. The agency behind the ad campaign, ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 22, 2013 11:01 AMWe recently talked about smartphones, brand names, and saturation of the major players in the mobile arena, and the fact that handsets powered by Android make up over 50% of the market share. It may come as somewhat of a surprise to learn that when it comes to corporations, Android comes in around 26% -- second to iOS at 37%. Samsung doesn't like that is has a plan to do something about it. They're calling it SAFE -- "Samsung Approved For Enterprise" or "Samsung For Enterprise" for short. SAFE is built on "four pillars": enabling workers to access their corporate email, calendar, and ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 21, 2013 1:18 PMOne of the reasons we all love Android is because it can do so many things, especially when rooted. Unfortunately with that comes the ability for bad guys to do many things, especially when rooted. Luckily there is something that we can do to help protect from some of the more popular "attack vectors". SecDroid is an app available from either its XDA thread or the Google Play Store which hardens the Android kernel by disabling certain binaries that have internet access or can be used to hack your device. Some of these include: SSH SSHD Telnet NC (net cat) Ping PM (Package Manager - ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 20, 2013 12:06 PMThose of you who are regular readers probably remember that my "old" Nexus 4 met with what I like to call "premature end-of-life" caused by a "gravity-event". Many of you probably have an old smartphone laying around like I did. Switching back to it while I waited for my replacement was fairly simple: pop the SIM out of the broken phone and into the old one, boot up, and done! For my temporary phone I opted for my (very) old T-Mobile G2 running Gingerbread. It wasn't terribly fast and it wasn't very pretty. It was a bulky brick, but it did virtually everything that I needed it to. That ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 19, 2013 3:05 PMMost agree that the Nexus family is the soapbox from which Google illustrates to manufactures, customers, and sites like Pocketnow what a "real" Android-powered device should be like, and roughly what an unsubsidized smartphone or tablet should cost. Google's Nexus 4 was released in November 2012 and is the latest in their flagship line of smartphones running the Android Operating System. It was the first joint venture between Google and LG. We've just passed the 3-month mark on when the Nexus 4 came to market. If history is to serve as an example of the future, the next Nexus ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 12, 2013 3:30 PMThe latest update to Android 4.2 Another Flavor of Jelly Bean has started to roll out to select Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10 devices. Suspiciously absent are reports of an update for Google's latest flagship device, the Nexus 4. This version, 4.2.2, is a 0.0.1 update to the operating system and weighs in around 46MB (depending on which device you're installing it on), so to say it's a "minor update" is a bit of an understatement. The code hasn't yet hit the AOSP, so custom-ROMs based on it aren't being developed just yet. In the meantime, if you own the GSM variety of the Galaxy ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 11, 2013 11:58 AM"Hey, is that the new Galaxy?" No, it's a Android-powered Galaxy Nexus. "Yeah? I love Droids!" Those are from Verizon, and they're primarily made my Motorola, this one's on T-Mobile and made by Samsung. "Oh! So it is a Galaxy!" - #FACEPALM - ARGH! Face it, you're either on the frustrated side of that conversation, or you're the one doing the frustrating. But it's not your fault: Android-powered smartphones and tablets are suffering from an identity crisis. I love that Android is as successful as it is! We have 53.4% of the market share. I've got co-workers that have a Note II, a ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 8, 2013 12:31 PMI love my Nexus 7. It's one of the best tablets on the market for the money. Recently, Google updated it to Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean and brought with it irritating lag! That lag presents itself at the worst times. Another issue I wanted to address was battery life. Although the battery on the Nexus 7 isn't small, in my use I needed another hour or two of use. Investigating solutions that would address both lag and battery life, some of our readers recommended Franco Kernel, a replacement kernel, kernel updater, and settings control panel all-in-one. It won't work with every device, but if ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 7, 2013 3:25 PMGravity is all around, pulling us down. Without it we'd fly off the earth into space -- cell reception isn't very good in space. In the meantime, we've got to guard against gravity and the dramatic influence it can have over our smartphones. I felt that influence first-hand last night when I dropped my Nexus 4 onto the floor. After getting home from work I parked in the garage. Loaded up my hands with all the papers and miscellanea from my day at the office, and tucked my smartphone under all of that. Bad idea. Some papers slipped and my Nexus 4 flopped onto the hard cement, face first. I ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 6, 2013 4:56 PMWay back in the Windows Mobile days, the sweetheart devices were made by HTC. Power users could do so much with devices made by HTC. Even today, the most-hackable, least brickable device is arguably the HTC HD2. Over time, HTC started to lose that crown and, for a while, Samsung picked it up and ran with it. Why is the crown so important? Sure, we'd all like a phone that we can hack, but some will downplay the ability to do so and say "hack friendlyness" shouldn't be a measure of a device's appeal. Maybe they're right in that regard. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 5, 2013 3:41 PMThey say you can't have your pie and eat it, too... or was that cake? No matter, LMT Launcher is an app that augments your built-in launcher -- it doesn't replace it -- by letting you pull a pie-shaped quick-launch panel from the edges of your screen. In that pie you'll see the current time, date, some animating status indicators, and one or two rows of icons, depending on how you've set it up. Though I don't show it in the video, you can change the colors and even the spacing and radii how ever you'd like. Each wedge can be set to launch an app or toggle a setting, and can have a ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 4, 2013 10:47 AMManufacturers have been teasing us with flexible displays for years. You'll be hard pressed to find a trade show anywhere in the world that doesn't have some booth with a thin sheet of plastic being twisted and flattened over and over. The Future, they say, will be made up of these displays, built-in to everything from bracelets to automotive displays. What they're not telling you is that although the display may be flexible, and the futuristic mock-ups are intended to be twisted and rolled, that's not the real intent -- nor is it their real advantage. Yes, it looks cool, high-tech, and ...
-
by Joe Levi | February 1, 2013 11:15 AMI'm Joe "The Android Guy", and as you might expect with a name like that, I'm pretty into Android. I've been described as everything from an "expert" to a "fan boy", but I hope I fall somewhere in between those two extremes. The one thing I hope all my readers take away from every article I write and video that I shoot is that I'm fair -- I never give any device (or even the Android operating itself) a "free ride". There are things I like that others don't, and vice versa, but at the end of the day, Android isn't perfect. Neither are iOS, Windows Phone, or even the new BlackBerry. That's ...