These days, our digital life has shifted from the traditional desktop PC to mobile devices like laptops, smartphones and tablets. Many people just do not need the classic PC because all they do is some web browsing, gaming and social networks. While Windows dominates in the desktop OS market, Android is the leader in mobile devices. I would like to share with you the best Android apps I use which I consider essential.
Category: Android
Cortana for Android update brings performance improvements and usability tweaks
As you know, Microsoft's digital assistant Cortana is available on several platforms, such as Android, iOS and company's own Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile. Its functionality was on par on every platform for some time, but that doesn't mean there's no way to improve it. Yesterday Microsoft released another update for the Android version, bringing some performance improvements, tweaks to the app's UI and some more minor but welcomed changes.
Foobar2000 is out for Android
Foobar2000 is a very popular desktop music player for Windows with a wide range of options, customizable user interface, support for many music formats and tons of plugins. A few days ago, a foobar2000 app became available for Android.
You will be able to run Windows apps natively in Android soon
Due to its long history, Windows has got thousands of desktop apps. Its software ecosystem is the biggest in the world. What if you wanted to run them natively on Android devices like large tablets? This will become a reality very soon.
New Adblock Browser – what is good and bad about it
Developers of the very popular Adblock Plus extension for mainstream web browsers (Firefox, Chrome etc) today annouced their own browser for Android called "Adblock Browser". It is in the Beta stage at the moment of this writing. The main feature of the browser is that it blocks ads out-of-the-box. Once you install it, you need to install absolutely nothing else to get rid of ads on sites you visit.
How to watch movies from your DLNA server on Android
Today, many users own a media player which shares movies, images and music via the DLNA protocol. This is quite useful, as it allows you to browse your media collection stored in one place with various devices like TVs, PCs, laptops and so on. You might be interested in accessing it from your Android smartphone or tablet as well. Today we will see how it can be done.
10 reasons to replace your Android file manager with Total Commander
Everyone I know has Android devices so today I am going to tell you how you can make file management on Android a whole lot better. There are many different file managers available for Android. Stock Android (Google's version) comes with a simple file manager. Many OEMs (LG, Samsung, HTC etc) ship some customized implementation of that file manager or their own replacement app. The Play Store is full of free and paid apps. However, I prefer the one called Total Commander over all of them. Here are my 10 reasons why you should use Total Commander.
VLC stable is finally available for Android
VLC, one of the best cross platform open source media players which supports all popular formats without codecs, is finally available as a stable release for Android. So, now VLC supports Windows, Windows Phone, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS and Android. VLC is the only media player app I use on my PCs. Let's take a closer look at its Android version.
No more updates for Android Browser, switch to Firefox – here’s why
No matter which software OS you use, it is important that you keep yourself protected from security vulnerabilities otherwise you can get hacked. Developers of the Metasploit framework, which is a penetration testing software, noticed that updates to the WebView component (the one used by Android's HTML renderer) have been discontinued for all Android versions prior to 4.4 (KitKat) and 5.0 (Lollipop). Google has thus decided to abandon lots of users with older Android devices (all 4.x versions except 4.4), even though the version of WebView in them has security vulnerabilities. Here is what you should do to harden your security.
Quickly search installed apps, contacts, bookmarks and music by name in Android with Quickdroid
If you use your Android phone or tablet for long periods of time, it must be having tons of apps installed. Both, the home screen and the app drawer, which contains the full list of apps, become cluttered and it becomes difficult to locate the app you want by scrolling through the many pages of the home screen or the app drawer. Here is a nice little free app which can solve this issue. It offers a very fast search for apps, music, contacts, bookmarks and other phone data by typing. It is called Quickdroid and besides being free, its source code is also open.
