When you get an Android phone, it can be difficult to know how to set it up and take advantage of all the available options. I will let you know how I set up my phone and why, as well as some other options available.

What Launcher To Use: The first thing I do when I get an Android phone is download a different launcher. A launcher is basically a home screen replacement. I’ve noticed that the home screens of most Android phones are not great. HTC’s Sense UI has a nice home screen and some nice widgets, but even that home screen is not that great. I believe the best alternate launcher is LauncherPro. LauncherPro has many attributes that put it above the rest. The first is that it is quick and stable. You want your home screen to be fast but stable and smooth. I’ve tried them all and this is the best one that has these qualities. Another quality that makes it nice is that it has swipe gestures for the apps on the dock. The dock on your phone is the bottom part with the apps that don’t change. Not only can you customize the apps that are on the dock, but you can customize it so that when you touch one of the apps and swipe your finger up, you can do a couple of different things. You can launch an application, a shortcut, or you can see a popup for missed calls, unread messages, bookmarks, or recent apps. This is something simple but nice to have. It’s downfall is that it is not as customizable in the sense of giving it themes. For this I would download GO Launcher EX. It has all of the same functionality of LauncherPro, and it has over 4000 themes. The reason I prefer LauncherPro is that I noticed that GO Launcher EX slowed down my phone a little bit. If your phone is newer then it might not slow it down and GO Launcher EX could be better for you. There are also options to have your phone look like different operating systems. To make your phone look like an iPhone, the best option is Espier Launcher. If you want to make your phone look like a windows phone, try Launcher7.

What Widgets To Get: The first widget, or pack of widgets, I would suggest getting is “Android Pro Widgets.” These widgets add scrollable widgets for your Twitter and Facebook news feed, your calendar, your contacts, your messages, and your bookmarks. It is a fantastic set of widgets and the first widgets I would get. To use these widgets, you must have an alternate launcher, as seen above, and you must enable scrollable in widgets in the preferences of that launcher. The second widget I would get is called Fancy Widget. This widget shows you the weather, time, date, and high/low of the day. It’s a simple but nice looking widget and is very useful. These are the best widgets to get that don’t come with your favorite apps. They are not an application, they are just widgets to put on your home screens. Remember that. To add a widget to a home screen, long press an open space, touch widgets, and choose the widget you want to use.

What Free Apps To Get: For most people, the first apps you get will be Facebook and Twitter. After that, there are so many apps it is hard to know what to get. The following apps are basic ones I would suggest everyone get. The first app is Pandora, which is used for Internet radio. The next app is the Weather Channel app; it is simple but it tells you everything you need to know and is easy to use. If you are a sports fan, ScoreCenter is the most complete sports score and story app and connects you directly to ESPN’s website for anything the app doesn’t have. IMDB is a great app if you like to look up information on actors/actresses as well as movies and TV shows. Dolphin Browser is a great alternative for your phone’s internet browser and adds a lot of extra functionality. Amazon Mobile, Craigslist Mobile, and the Official eBay Android App are great for shopping on through those three mediums.

If you don’t have a ton of space on your SD card, Google Music is a great app. It stores all of your music online and lets you listen to your whole library as long as you have an Internet connection. Evernote is a fantastic app for taking notes in just about any setting. Kik is a messaging app that shows you when the message you write is sent, delivered, and read; the catch is that the people you want to talk to have to have it as well. Another app that is great for communicating is HeyTell; HeyTell is like a leaving someone an instant voice message and is a nice way to talk back and forth. The two best options for reading news article are Pulse and Google Currents. I prefer Pulse because it is more polished at the moment.

Best Free Games: These I will just list and let you figure out which ones are for you. Angry Birds, Words With Friends, Hangin with Friends, Air Penguin, Fruit Ninja, Tetris, Unblock Me Free, Contract Killer, Slice It, and Apparatus Light. There are thousands of apps and games on the market that I have not listed and the best way to find games you like that aren’t here is to discover them yourself!

If I have missed any apps or you have an questions, leave a comment and let me know!

Photo credit to: http://www.voiceable.org/25-best-android-apps-for-social-networking.html

Verizon's Droid Charge by Samsung

The Droid Charge is a spectacular and underrated phone. I would recommend this phone to anyone, unless they are going to sign a two-year contract. I personally am extremely satisfied with this phone. It is very fast. It only has 512 MB of RAM, and a 1GHz Hummingbird processor that came out last year. Despite this, Samsung did a fantastic job of making this phone fly with such limited hardware. It has two features that Android does not come with, and that other phone makers such as Motorola and HTC, do not include.

The first feature is toggles for WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, Mobile Network (your data), and Auto-Rotation. This is extremely useful because I don’t have to dig into the menu settings of my phone to toggle these, and I don’t have to take up home screen space to have the widgets. If you don’t mind widgets, then Samsung’s setup is better because you don’t have to find the home screen that has the toggle widget to adjust the setting. This is just something minor that really makes a difference.

The second feature that Samsung includes is a task manager. This can be accessed by long pressing the home button and clicking on task manager, or actually opening the app. What this does is that it can close apps that are running and actively taking up RAM. It is great because it really helps you save battery life.

For now I believe that this is the best phone on Verizon. Even though it doesn’t have the same specs as newer phones like the Razr and Bionic, you don’t really feel it because they are good enough for Gingerbread and Samsung does a great job of making it feel like a top of the line phone. This phone also has an exceptionally great camera. Colors look beautiful in the pictures taken. Another great quality is the screen. It is an 800×480 screen, which on paper does not look good, but in reality looks fantastic. The two reasons for this is that there are 3 subpixels for every pixel, as well as the fact that it is a Super AMOLED display. The Super AMOLED display makes colors look gorgeous and the blacks are the darkest blacks of any phones. It has the closest screen to the iPhone I have ever seen. It might not be as crystal clear as the Rezound or the Galaxy Nexus, but it is definitely up there. Combine all of the qualities that this phone has, and it is definitely a winner at the moment.

I would not, however, recommend that anybody agree to a two-year contract to buy this phone. The reason is that this phone is not future proof; it may be great right now, but in a year it will not be fine and you will be feeling the pain of outdated hardware.

It is questionable whether it will get Ice Cream Sandwich, but if it does, it will be slow anyway. The reason for this is that the Operating System upgrade is not what makes older phones slow; the main reason that older phones get slow is because Apps are optimized for the newest phones, using the newest hardware. If you like to use apps and play games on your phone, then the Droid Charge will be slow because it will not be able to handle the newest apps like a new phone will. As newer phones come out, they offer more resources for apps and games to use. These resources are mainly the processor and the RAM. Apps begin to use more of these resources so that it runs faster and smoother. If you have an older phone that does not offer the apps as many resources, it will run slower and much less smoothly.

I am waiting for a great phone that is future-proof as well as a phone that has the features that the Droid Charge has. These features include the task manager, the toggles in the notification bar, an amazing camera and screen, great battery life, 4G, a big screen, a loud speaker, a removable battery, and top specs. I also will not be spending $300 dollars on my next phone. That is way too much money and I’m sorry but they are not worth that much when I’m signing a two-year contract. I will definitely be buying a certified pre-owned and if it has any problems I can fix them and make it feel new. What I would suggest if you are interested in a great phone but are not eligible for an upgrade, the Droid Charge is cheap on eBay and I would buy it there. That is exactly what I did,

What phone are you planning on buying and which phone do you think is the best option on Verizon? Leave your comment below!

Picture credit goes to: http://wireless.amazon.com/Samsung-DROID-Android-Verizon-Wireless/dp/B004XD1S4M

It may take you by surprise, but the iPhone 4S only has 512 Mega Bytes (MB) of RAM and an 800MHz dual-core processor; this was verified by iFixit and Anandtech. Peoples’ first thoughts might be something like “How does Apple think they are going to compete with Android if they can’t keep up with their respective phones’ hardware specs?” The simple answer is the iPhone’s software. I’m not saying that hardware isn’t important; it most certainly is. The problem with many peoples’ conception of mobile phone technology is that they don’t fully understand the relationship between software and hardware, and this is a relationship that Apple seems to have mastered. The second you turn on an iPhone and play around with it, you realize that the software you are interacting with is vastly superior to its Android and Windows Phone 7 counterparts. The smoothness of the interface is unmatched and every little detail throughout the operating system is taken into consideration to maximize efficiency and simplicity for the user. No one does this better than Apple.

In a world where all we hear about is the fastest processor and the most RAM, you would believe that the iPhone 4S, with the best performance of any phone available, has superior hardware to that of any other phone. Given the specs that were discovered about the new iPhone 4S, its software is really what should be getting some attention. The way that software interacts with its hardware has the ability make or break a system. The first step is to get everything to work. Once everything works, refining every part of the system is what separates the men from the boys. Throughout any phone’s operating system, there are countless little details in every nook and cranny that can be, and should, be refined to make the user experience the best possible.

Apple’s philosophy is simple: Start with how you want the user to experience the product, and work backwards from that point. It seems like common sense, but, surprisingly, Apple is the only company that really implements that idea in such a way that it sets the standard for the entire industry. That industry-leading attention to detail and efficiency trickles down all the way down to the crucial element that is the software-hardware communication. There are a few reasons that it is so extremely crucial to maximize efficiency.

The first reason is because it cuts costs. If you can do the same for less, it doesn’t make sense not to. 512MB/phone is a lot cheaper than 1GB/phone, and when multiplied by every iPhone manufactured, that’s a lot of money being saved. All of that extra money being saved can be invested in other things such as higher-quality materials to build each device, or it can just be stored into Apple’s 81 billion dollar reserve.

A second reason is because it saves battery life. The more RAM you add to a device, the more battery life is going to be drained at a quicker pace. This is because the bigger the RAM is, the more addresses you have to power and maintain. If you have a 1-bedroom apartment, the electric bill is going to be a lot less than if you have a 2-bedroom house. The same concept applies to RAM. Having a slower processor also saves battery life. For the clock to run faster in a processor, it needs more power delivered to it to provide more cycles/second. Another way of looking at it is, if you want to drive your car 25 miles in 25 minutes, it’s going to take more gas (power) to do it than if you drove it 25 miles in 50 minutes. The iPhone is the Gold Standard when it comes to smartphone battery life. This has a great deal to do with the slower-clocked processor along with the smaller RAM.

A third reason efficiency is key is that, particularly in Apples case, you can keep older phones updated without worrying too much about them not being able to keep up with newer software. If you run iOS 5 on an iPhone 4 or 3GS, you won’t notice much lag throughout the phones operating system. Even though iOS 5 was designed with the iPhone 4S in mind, past iPhones were not forgotten. The ability for Apple to do this is made clear once you take the software written into consideration.

My third point can be highlighted by taking a look at Android’s Motorola Droid 1. I had this phone up until a month ago, and Android’s latest update available for most new phones, is not available for that phone. The only way to obtain it is through root but Verizon does not push it out. This is because the hardware cannot keep up with what Gingerbread, which is the newest update besides Ice Cream Sandwich. This is because Gingerbread is greedy and needs more resources than those offered by the poor, old Droid. While the two-year-old Droid is left out in the cold, the two-year-old 3GS is still invited to enjoy the latest update.

These advantages are passed on to the consumer. If you want a phone with the best battery life, as well as a phone that will always be up-to-date, you need a phone whose software is the most efficient; no one does that better than Apple. This is a big reason that Android phones will always be second best to the iPhone, and until Android catches up, it’s going to stay that way.

Picture Source: http://theopinion.in/android-ios-war-fanboys/

Iris is an app for Android that stands for ‘Intelligent Rival Imitator of Siri.’ As the title says, this is basically an Android application inspired by iOS’s Siri. After using iris for a couple of minutes, you can definitely see that it is in its alpha stage. From the questions I asked it, I noticed that it is mostly meant to learn facts taken from the internet, as well as clever responses when asked questions like “do you want to go drink with me tonight,” and iris politely responded “Yes I do.” It was difficult to find questions it would answer like that, a la Siri, because it mostly just searches the internet for answers. A good example was when I asked iris if it would marry me, it responded “Will You Marry Me? is the 1992 single by Paula Abdul.”

I also noticed it cannot access your location at the moment, so if you want it to find you a good restaurant or coffee place, you’re out of luck for now. It is important to keep in mind that it is in alpha, so if you want to give it a whirl, don’t expect everything you see your fellow iPhone 4S users enjoying. Yet. The developers are constantly working on it to make it better, and the first version came out just 8 hours after they started writing the code for it. It has come a long way since then, but still obviously has its limits. When you download it, you will also need to download Android Text-to-Speech synthesis if you haven’t already. If you haven’t, it will automatically take you to the market so you can install it. If you get a chance to check it out, let me know what you think below!

Picture Source: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.dexetra.iris

Blackberrys were the smartphones to have in 2002. They had push email, internet faxing, and a good mobile web-browser for the time. They were the best smartphones up until the iPhone came out in 2007. They were still popular after the iPhone came out; then came Android. Android became huge after the Motorola Droid came out for Verizon in November, 2009. Both iOS and Android have been growing every year; Blackberry OS has not grown nearly as much. Blackberry phones have not changed very much since Blackberry OS 5. The hardware as well as the OS are pretty much the same and have not been able to keep up with the times.

The iPhone OS has not changed much since it came out in 2007, but it doesn’t need to change; iOS is simple, fast, functional, and modern. It does everything a smartphone should do, does it well, and looks great doing it. The same can be said for Android, though it is the opposite in the sense that it is constantly changing. Both operating systems never feel dated and always compete to give users the best possible user experience and performance. This is where RIM, who owns Blackberry, is considerably behind. Android and iOS can do everything a Blackberry can do, and then a lot more. A very important aspect in which Blackberry OS is considerably  weaker is the app market. The app market is a key element of what makes Android and iOS so much more functional in so many ways. The lack of apps limits the functionality and versatility that it provides the other to OS’s with. The only things that Blackberrys excel in is encrypted corporate email, Blackberry messenger, and their great keyboards. Android and iPhones are even offering safety measures for businesses and there are Android phones that have the same form factor and similar keyboards to those of Blackberrys.

After having these options with the two superior operating systems, why choose Blackberrys? I still have not been able to come up with a good answer. A lot of people are starting to see the same things and leaving the operating system for something better. RIM has also seen this and has tried different things to keep up. One thing they tried was coming out with an all touchscreen phone with four buttons on the bottom. These two phones were the Storm 1 and 2. These phones were plagued with bugs and were not a big hit. Nothing RIM tries to do seems to work. Blackberry OS 5, 6, 6.5, and 7 are pretty much the same thing. There are very little differences between them in functionality and appearance. RIM’s next effort to try to regain some ground in the mobile OS war was the Blackberry Torch; it was a good try, but it was too little too late. RIM always seems to be a few steps behind and has never been able to catch up.

Their latest phones look very nice, but they are not different enough or exceptional enough to draw users in. There is nothing appealing enough to draw people away from other phones to try a Blackberry. RIM’s saving grace is Blackberry Messenger. When I talk to people who love Blackberrys, they say that the main reason they use it is BBM. Without BBM, a lot of people change over to another OS. Now with iMessenger running on iOS, RIM is starting to lose ground there too. Soon RIM will have nothing novel to offer with their Blackberry OS, or even anything it does exceptionally better than the other leading operating systems. Their lack of innovation in the last 4 years is the reason that they can no longer compete and will someday die out.

Picture Source:

http://crackberry.com/blackberry-javelin-8900-smartphone-review

If you swipe to the very first page, you will find a search page that will search your apps and contacts, as well as the internet. If you swipe up on one of the home pages, you will find the app switcher found in iOS; it shows your most recently used apps in order from left to right; it only shows four at a time but if you swipe to the left, it will show you four more. If you open the app switcher and swipe to the right, you will find toggles for rotation lock(which works throughout every app), wifi, bluetooth, network settings, brightness, and sound. I’ve been using it for two days now and it’s definitely my favorite launcher. The developer did a very thorough job of imitating iOS and it’s definitely something to take a look at!

Picture Sources: http://www.androidrevolution.com/