The sugar rush of candy canes and chocolates is beginning to wear off and you're finally starting to go through all the gifts and gadgets that you received this holiday season. You probably got something shiny and new, but with smartphones and tablets being capable of doing practically everything, you're probably asking yourself: what next? Before you go installing every version of Angry Birds in the Play Store there are a few more "practical" tasks you might want to address to keep your phone safe, charged, and ready to take you wherever you want to go. Setting up During the setup ...

Updated: Alternate method to flash from a custom Recovery Image, and video showing the final result. Android Jelly Bean brought with it a whole new way to search and get up-to-date and location relevant information: Google Now. Search results are fast, beautiful, and usually pretty accurate. When compared against Apple's Siri, Google Now wins in many regards. The bad news? Officially Google Now is only available on tablets and smartphones running Google's latest operating systems (4.1 and 4.2). Sure, there are ways to hack the feature in, we even reported on one such method back in July. ...

If you've been following Pocketnow for any length of time, you know that one of our favorite custom ROMs for Android-powered phones and tablets is CyanogenMod ROM. It's fast, it's lightweight, and for the most part it's pure Android. CyanogenMod has some advantages over other ROMs, specifically the way its built allows one set of developers to maintain and improve the core ROM, and another set to maintain the many, many devices they support. The reasons to flash a custom ROM are many and varied. Top reasons include performance improvements, increased features, and being able to run the ...

If you've got an Android tablet, chances are you've let someone else use your tablet. Tablets seem to lend themselves to being used by more than one person -- at least when compared to smartphones. In my house our kids constantly want to borrow the tablets. That wouldn't be a problem but some of us are fairly proud of our save-games, and others don't want children sending emails to people in our address books. To remedy those situations Google introduced multi-user support for tablets starting with Android 4.2 (smartphones were left out). If you've wondered about multi-users and didn't ...

Google started selling their Nexus 4 and tablets with Android 4.2 earlier today -- though the ordering process hasn't been ideal. Another special treat was the beginning of Google's roll-out of Android 4.2 to Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 owners. As with all updates, the Android 4.2 roll-out will come to your device when it's your turn in line. We're not that patient, so of course we found out how to get the official OTA update and flash it on our devices without having to wait in that dreaded line! First off, like any other "flashing" procedure, you assume the risk of potentially bricking your ...

After you've used your smartphone or tablet for a good, long time, eventually you're going to want to get a new one. What are you going to to with your old one? Will you put it in a drawer and let it collect dust? Or will you give it to a friend or family member, or maybe even sell it? Whatever you end up doing, it would be wise to run it through a "factory reset" before letting it leave your hands! In this video we'll go through the steps necessary to wipe four different devices, the T-Mobile G2, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Droid RAZR HD, and Nexus 7. We'll show you how it's all done on devices ...

Google Music is great! I can purchase albums and songs directly from the cloud and play them back on any of my Android devices, or even any computer that has an internet connection and a web browser. I can also upload my entire music collection to "the could" so I can listen to all those songs where ever I am! Sounds like nirvana to me... as long as you have an internet connection. What happens when you don't have an internet connection, or your connection speed is too slow? Unless you've saved some of our music for offline listening or have some cassettes in the glove-box, you're out of ...

Sprint seems to be having a hard time with 4G. First they deployed Wi-Max while everyone else was jumping on the LTE band-wagon, now users are complaining that they're not getting LTE on their LTE-enabled Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphones -- even when they're allegedly under an LTE umbrella. What gives? It turns out there's some magic going on -- well, maybe some well-intentioned technical stuff anyway. The problem, it seems, happens when you've got a stronger 3G signal that your 4G signal. When that's the case the phone figures you'd rather have a reliable signal than a fast one. ...