I’m now a android lover after switching from a iPhone 3gs to a Samsung galaxy S 6 months ago.

My current apps look something like this.
75 total, 68 free (90%), 7 paid (9%) | Total Size: 138MB
Total spent: $14.99

You can view the list of my installed apps here.

Here i will note some must have apps for your droid and a few other cool apps as well. Im not going to write an essay about each of them, just list them and hopefully you can download them and see how good they are for yourself.

Top 10 Apps

1. Handcent SMS. – The best sms application ever.
2. SMS2PC – Probably the most used app. If your in front of your computer alot, this makes your phone like a chat client, however you can reply to people via sms from a chat screen on your computer. Well worth the $4
3. Launcher Pro – This is the fastest and best launcher available.
4. Switch pro Widget – The widget is best for your homescreen. Currently mine displays battery %, wireless toggle, blutooth toggle, vibrate/silent/loud toggle, a flashlight, 3g toggle, and a shutdown and restart button.
5. Bible – Best bible app with heaps of offline version such as ESV for viewing straight from your phone.
6. Isyncr – This app enables you to sync itunes to your android phone just like a iphone. You can also sync over wifi without a cord!
7. Poweramp – An awesome music player, has a 30day demo but costs a big $5 for this one.
8. Gtasks – If you use google tasks, this is a great widget that keeps your tasks in sync
9. Pure Calendar Widget – If you use your calendar alot this is a must. So customisable and can be a widget you wont know what to do with yourself.
10. Skype – Voip over your mobile. brilliant!

Top Games

1. Paper Toss
2. Angry Birds
3. Unblock me
4. Robodefense
5. The Moron Test

Other Cool Apps

1. Go Sydney – Train & bus times
2. Shazam – Listens to a piece of music and will tell you the artist and song.
3. Sydney Traffic Cameras
4. Zedge ringtones and wallpapers – Heaps and heaps of ringtones and wallpapers for your phone
5. Ringdroid – Crops songs on your phone and sets them as your ringtone
6. Vlingo – Tell your phone what to do. Only works if you have a internet connection
7. Schedule Sms Wishes – Ever wanted to remind yourself via a sms or remind someone else? This can schedule sms messages to your contacts.
8. SMS Backup – Backup your sms and save it in a excel spread sheet for safe keeping.
9. Google Chrome to phone – Ever wanted to get a webpage you were looking at on your computer to your phone? With this app you just click a button and it launches on your phone

What is your favourite apps? Please share in the comments.

Post From Ardorpes | Rhys Evans Blog

DropBox - Dropbox allows you to sync your files online and across your computers automatically. Dropbox automatically syncs when new files or changes are detected.
Imagine finishing a pricelist excel document, saving it to your computer, then your out at the shops and a customer rings you. You can look up the spreadsheet on your phone and retrieve it. Alternatively you could be at the airport, open up your laptop (providing its connected to the internet), the spreadsheet appears in your documents as its synced and away you go!
Dropbox has 2GB of online storage for free, with up to 100GB available to paying customers. For more info on dropbox check out these 8 top tips here!

Sign up to drop box!

Here is some tips on increasing that free 2gb storage.

Referrals – EDU email addresses get double referral credit!

Whenever someone signs up with Dropbox through a link you sent them, Dropbox will credit both you and the new user 250 MB of free storage. Fair enough. But that would mean 4 referrals for every 1 GB. Quite a task.

In hopes of annihilating its competition, Dropbox recently announced that anybody with a .EDU email address, namely college students, can earn double the referral credit, or 500 MB. Life’s pretty sweet sometimes when you’re a college student. Now, you would need only 2 referrals for every 1 GB of free storage.

Share dropbox on social media sites

Click here and share the links on fb and twitter and get another 768mb for a few clicks!

Post From Ardorpes | Rhys Evans Blog

FREE MEAL FOR PEDDLING

Crowne Plaza Copenhagen Towers has installed two electricity-producing bicycles which are connected to the hotel’s main electricity supply. Guests who pedal hard enough not only get a dose of environmental feel-goodness, but can also score a complimentary meal. h/t Giz mag

FOLDABLE KEYBOARD

Japanese gadget giant Thanko. Its full-size USB keyboard is broken into four connected quarter segments, allowing it to be folded over into a pocket-size rectangular shape. h/t gizmag

ROBOT FLOOR CLEANERS

Robot floor cleaners designed to free us from the drudgery of keeping the house clean are nothing new. Robotic vacuum cleaners, such as the Roomba, Electrolux Trilobite and Neato XV-11, have already found a place patrolling the carpet in many homes, and now the Mint Automatic Floor Cleaner that was first announced at CES in January is nearly ready to report for duty on hard surface floors. h/t gizmag

FPS Jacket

A surgeon, who was trying to develop a system for remotely diagnosing prisoners, designed the FPS Vest. It has four pockets in the front, four in the back, and connects to a small USB-powered air compressor. Different pockets will activate to varying degrees, depending on what’s happening to you in the game. The FPS can apparently simulate hits from a pistol or an Uzi, along with the sensations of explosions, stabbings, rocket hits, and falling (one would assume they actually mean “landing”.) h/t gizmag

Post From Ardorpes | Rhys Evans Blog

Nour.ish a popular rss to newsletter tool on the web has been down for a while making me switch many of my sites i have made to feedburner to distribute newsletters. Great news came out today, you can read the letter below:

Dear Nourish user,

You may have been aware that the founders of Nouri.sh fell into some financial difficulties over the last few months and the service was neglected. Knowing how much you will have missed it, we are pleased to announce that Nouri.sh has recently been acquired by Web-Translations and will be back online from Friday 3 July 2009.

When you log in, you will see that your campaigns and distribution lists are as you left them but as a result of the acquisition, no billing information transferred so all accounts have been set to a free account, which uses the default template and is limited to 1000 emails a month.

Over the coming weeks, we will be working through and fixing some of the bugs that have been a cause of frustration on the forums.

We will also be adding some new features to help make Nourish even better. We would therefore appreciate you taking a short survey, which should take no more than 5 minutes of your day, to really help us improve the service and add the features you want:

http://www.nouri.sh/survey/part1.php?uid=229

Thanks for your patience as we try to make the transition of Nouri.sh as smooth as possible and don’t forget to:-

1) re-register from Friday 3 July;

2) help shape the service through the survey;

3) select a new payment plan. http://www.nouri.sh/register.php

As an incentive to act now, the first 50 customers to complete the survey and sign up for an annual subscription will receive an additional 25% discount!

Kind regards,

Laura Palmieri
Operations Executive

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So you’ve heard of google right? Yea i thought so. But have you heard of Bing? Nope, i thought so to.

Bing is a new search engine, a new engine from the big guns, Microsoft.

Bing is an attempt to win back some market share from google and on first appearance looks very much similar to google’s design.

So whats difference? How are they going to try and win back some people?

• Well for starters, they give you a random big picture that looks rather nice. Cool. All i can say is more bandwidth, right?
• Short name. Instead of typing 5 characters, you get to type 4. That will totally save my fingers and hands from getting RSI!
• Searches are fasted they have ever been for microsoft, i did a quick test however, and google still won :)

My 2 minute quick conclusion? Stay with google…

For more info visit these sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_(search_engine)

http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2009/05/29/our-first-look-at-bing-5-things-that-stand-out.aspx

http://www.customerthink.com/article/cbm_news_may_29_2009

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=18952

Post From Ardorpes | Rhys Evans Blog

Dual monitors are awesome but can be a little restrictive in the default windows environment.

Normally you can only have one taskbar so when you have windows on the 2nd monitor they clutter up your one and only taskbar.

Now you can have 2 taskbars and more on your monitors, it feels like you are running multiple computers!

Multi Monitor Taskbar – Freeware & Even works with the latest Windows 7 unlike Ultramon(another monitor solution but $40)

or Direct download HERE

Screenshot of my monitors next to each other:

UPDATE: ULTRAMON now supports Windows 7. Goto here for latest download. http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/download.asp

Post From Ardorpes | Rhys Evans Blog

The VideoLAN team is very pleased to announce the release of VLC media player 0.9.9.
This is a bugfix release on the 0.9 branch of VLC. Notables bugfixes are:

• fullscreen behaviour on Windows with multiple screens,
• workaround bug with libxml2 >=2.7.3,
• video performance on Intel-based Macs,
• various decoders updates on Windows.

An experimental native decoder for Real Video 3.0 & 4.0 using FFmpeg has been added and many fixes happened in our Real Media demuxer.
This should improve Real Media Files support on all platforms.

Post From Ardorpes | Rhys Evans Blog

Remember how I told you about the new iPhone killer back in 08? Well its not far away with the Nokia N97 being released in late march.

This amazing phone has these features which flogs the iPhone out of the water.

• 3.5” Touchscreen
• Full Qwerty Keyboard
• 32GB Internal Memory
• 16gb Expandable SD slot.
• 5MP Camera
• GPS Software
• A long 430 hours standby, 6.5 Hours Talk time & 37 Hours Music Playback!

With these features a hefty price tags come though, around $1250AU ($800US)

Click HERE for Nokias Tech Specs and check out the amazing hands on video below:

Post From Ardorpes | Rhys Evans Blog

Now that you know what RSS is, time to learn how to start engaging with it and using software to subscribe to RSS feeds.

There are three types of software that you can use to subscribe to RSS Feeds

1. Browser Integration (My Favourite)
2. Online Software
3. Offline Software

What solution is right for me?

1. Browser Integration is best for people surfing the net all the time, who want to keep right up to date with their RSS and like it all in one neat bundle.

2. Offline software is best for people who aren’t the biggest fans of RSS and only want to check for updates now and then, or who are busy and don’t want to be distracted by updates when they have free time. (Probably best for work lunch breaks)

3. Online Software is best for people who want to view their feeds right around the globe from any computer there on, great for people traveling.

NOTE: Options 1 & 2 with certain programs can sync with online solutions which may be another option for keen RSS’ers

Ok, now which software and how do I use it?

1. Flock is the best Browser with RSS Feed integration (Windows). Click here for flock reviewed. How to add a RSS feed with flock:

When a feed has been detected in flock, the rss icon will glow orange next to the address bar.

When you your feeds have a new content, the rss icon on the flock toolbar will glow orange, click it and your feeds are displayed.

There are many other cool social web features that flock offers as well, for tutorials and information, type “about:flock” into your address bar.

You can change in flocks options how often to check for new feeds as well.

Other Software:

• Opera – Click here for tutorial.(Recommended for all other operating systems)

2. Google Reader has been rated the best online feed software. Some advantages include mobile compatibility and many plugins that work with operating systems and software, designed by google themselves.

Sign in or sign up if you don’t have a google account and start adding feeds, or watch this easy tutorial video from youtube.

Other Software:

• Bloglines

3. Feed Reader 3 is a great offline RSS Reader. Similar to google reader in features but in a separate offline software package.

Other Software:

• Newzie
• FeedDeamon

What do you use? Have i missed any software solutions? Is there anything else about RSS you would like to know? Please let me know…

<—– Part 1: What Is RSS

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If you have been alive in the last 10 years & you actually have a life, you would of noticed this thing on websites called RSS. What the heck is it? Well I’ll explain in my two part series.

Definition:

Stands for Really Simple Syndication & is used to publish frequently updated works including blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video. For History of RSS see here.

Why Use RSS?

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. RSS Readers list all your favourite sites and highlight new posts and events so you can look into them further.

How to recognise RSS?

Many sites now implement RSS, to keep readers informed and updated. When browsing, look for RSS icons like this one. When you click it, you are redirected to a .xml file which can be copied and added to your feed reader. Some browsers even have indicators when a site has a RSS feed available, read more about this in part 2.

Examples Of Using RSS:

• You read a blog, but don’t want to goto the site all the time to see if a new post has been added. RSS informs you when a new post is available.
• You like buying vintage surfboards on ebay. Set up a filter on ebay so that you only can see boards with vintage in the title and are located within 25km of where you live. Subscribe via RSS and have all the new boards listed right in front of your eyes and never miss a bargain.
• Your friends upload photos & videos to social sites such as Flickr & Youtube, subscribe via RSS and get notified when a new item is uploaded.

—–> Part 2: Engaging With RSS Feeds

Post From Ardorpes | Rhys Evans Blog