Essential Android Apps

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Network signal info. just received a nice update:

- new UI and it has got rid of the 3 dot menu button for the one series phones :D Follows the ICS UI now
- some new features, shows what cell tower you're connected to, I am currently connected to one 645m away from me :p
- and a few others tweaks


I have been playing with all the popular browsers (again :p) and here is what I think:

Dolphin:

Superb performance, I think the best I have tried yet, pages just load instantly and there are some addons, no adblock addon though :( UI is quite nice, however, too much white and doesn't have the stock android feel. A lot of options/features

Boat:

Nothing really special about this browser IMO, performance is decent but not any better than the likes of quick ics browser. Has similar amount of options to dolphin and the UI is too similar to safari! Although some parts of the UI are quite nice.

Firefox:

Great to have addons like adblock plus (if you're not rooted that is!) and best of all, the stylish addon, which means we can use the awesome black theme for this forum :D However, lack of options and a poor UI let it down as well as font issues, some font is huge and other font is tiny (one of my main dislikes of chrome as well). Performance is decent, again no better than quick ics browser and boat. Maybe a bit smoother.

Xscope:

Have always really liked this browser but it has had issues with too much RAM usage and FC when I tried it (although this was months ago). So far I haven't had any problems. The performance is very good as well, although dolphin is still the king :p The UI is superb, has a lovely stock ICS style (blue and black with the proper arrangement like stock ICS) It has a lot of features/options and one stand out feature is adblocking! However, an awful lot of ads still remain :(

One problem with all of these browsers, no quick thumb controls! :p Although I think the browsers advantages over that one main advantage of browsers based on stock isn't worth it any more.


So for now, I shall be deciding on either dolphin or xscope, but once/if firefox sorts out those issues then I shall be moving to it straight away for the stylish and proper adblock addon!
 
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I absolutely love quick ics browser and kind of want to go back to it still :p, but pretty much everything is better on xscope and dolphin IMO and the performance difference is noticeable, although I think GIFs aren't as smooth as they are on stock/quick ICS browser when there is loads on one page.

Will be using xscope as dolphin has the 3 dot menu button on the bottom, however, once us S owners get the new update :mad: I'll probably switch over to it.

Xscope would be so much win if it actually blocked all the ads completely :(
 
The only thing I don't like about xscope is the fact that you have to keep the phone awake while downloading a file, otherwise it kills the download... I'm in three opera mobile camp these days :)
 
Nexus18 said:
For me BS player is the best player for quality and plays all of my films, TV shows really smoothly across LAN.

And as mrk pointed loads of nice features now (for free as well)

MX player is also very good, but BS for me personally.
Click to expand...

So, does BS Player let you use hardware decoding for HD files played via wi-fi streaming?

I've been using MX Player on my Iconia A210, which has been working well for SD playback with gmote and ES File Explorer browsing to LAN locations. However, today I noticed that HD playback was really juddery.

I then noticed that it wasn't using hardware decoding and wouldn't let me switch to it. Apparently it doesn't let you do this over LAN. Neither does Mobo, I believe. I've now downloaded DICEplayer to try that, but would be good to know if BS allows hardware decoding for a wide variety of file-types when streamed over wi-fi.
 
bsplayerhwcodec.jpg


HW decoding over wireless^
 
^^ Excellent, thanks!

Will give DICEplayer a spin since I've already installed it, but it does look like BS is going to be the better option (since I've not heard that much about DICE apart from it's streaming with h/w decoding ability...).
 
The bedroom TV that my wife will be watching X Factor on? You mean that TV?

(Or I could have gone for: you mean the TV (with no headphones) that will wake my wife, who is as often as not asleep before 10pm...)

Yeah, we got one. Why?

:)
 
Im looking for an app where I can write some text and then display it on a white background, so all you can see is the text, anyone have an idea for something that does that?
 
I'm running Apex v1.3.0beta6 with no problems on my 'gutless' Xperia Arc (not S)... if the official/Stable don't work, try the beta!! :)

Apex Settings -> About Apex Launcher -> Automatically check for updates -> Beta version
 
Hmm, seems an awful lot of people are having that same problem twist3d0n3. I am sure that he will get an update out quickly though......

Holding of until he does.

Nova also recently had an update (stable), don't know if I should bother trying it as I will most likely be back on apex again after one day :p
 
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