Charging your smartphone every day is pretty much expect whether you have an iPhone or an Android phone, but how do you make sure your phone stays put for the whole day, particularly if it’s a long busy day away from home/the office?
Disable Wi-Fi: unless you know you want to use Wi-Fi, disable it. In Android, go to Settings –> Wireless & networks –> Wi-Fi checkbox.
Airplane Mode: if you are travelling on a familiar journey and know you are going through zones of bad reception, or if you are in the basement of a building with no reception, or travelling on the underground for example, switch to airplane mode. For Android, press your power button for a few buttons until a menu pops up and choose Airplane Mode option.
Use Airplane Mode instead of Silent Mode: if you are in a meeting and don’t want to be disturbed but would still like your smartphone on to check the time or simply because the noise it makes when you switch it on and off is too awkward in front of the boss, switch to Airplane mode instead of silent mode.
Got any other easy power saving tips? Share in the comments 
Think it’s fun to develop an app using the phone/tablet built in accelerometer? Me too! I’ll share here an example app, using the same technique for the accelerometer as used in my Android game Ants.
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So last night (UK time), I published a casual game testing your strategy and spatial skills called Ants. This morning, I checked the download stats on Google Android Developers Console and it was almost 700, in about 12 hours, making it roughly one download a minute! No review so far but got one vote – a five star! I wonder if we can get to 2 downloads a minute?
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I’ve just published Ants, a casual game for Android using the accelerometer – Giant Ants have invaded your space, will you manage to survive? The game is free so why not check it out? Currently, there are 20 levels and it will take you a while to get through them – trust me, I’ve been playing (I mean, testing…) the game a lot this past week and it ain’t easy (don’t let Level 1 fool you 
) so you’ll get quite a lot of fun out of this.
All Twitter apps I know of out there show tweets as a list… so I asked myself “is there another way to present tweets so users can see what’s what quickly?” The answer is “tag cloud”. So I’ve released a Twitter app for Android with this in mind. It does the usual stuff you would expect – yes, it does show tweets as a list if you want to – and it also shows a tag cloud so users can instantly see what their friends are tweeting about, or indeed what any specific user is tweeting about.
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A special Winter Sale on Sudoku Way – the Tetris meet Sudoku game for Android, reduced to £0.99 (normal price £1.29) until 17th February! There is a free Lite version so you can try before you buy
First, there was Android Market. Then independent smaller app stores, such as AppBrain, Handster and quite a few others. Now, Amazon is launching its own Android app store. Is this a good thing or does it mean more fragmentation of the market and more work for devs when publishing a new app? Are you excited about what could be a new major Android store or are you happy just getting your apps from Google Market?
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Up until a few months ago, I never created an Application class in Android because I didn’t see the need, after all Android manages all that, right? Then I realised I had a lot of duplicated code in my onCreate() methods for my Activities.
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From time to time, Google adjusts the download statistics in the Android Market Console down, apparently due to over-estimates. This normally happens randomly a few times a year so isn’t it ironic that it happened last night? Is Google trying to tell us devs something?
Developers have asked for it and it seems that Google has finally delivered it – even though they haven’t actually emailed us about it yet! Yes, you can now write descriptions for your apps with 4000 characters, instead of the previous pesky 325 words limit!
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