Category Archives: Android

Episode 11 – Gav & Dave’s Tech Podcast is live – Please RT

Android, Apple, Tech News, Windows

As you know, I co-host a weekly podcast with David from UKMobileTech called Gav & Dave’s Tech Podcast. It is a light hearted tech podcast broadcast bi-weekly. To subscribe click here for iTunes or copy and paste this link into your favourite podcast app.

Episode 11 is now live.

If you get a moment and have enjoyed the podcast, please leave some feedback in iTunes. Thanks.

What’s the link between a hammer and Google Chromecast?

Android, Tech News

This was going to be impressions of the Chromecast which just went on sale officially in the UK.

So far all I want to do is take my heavy duty hammer and crush it into little pieces.

What’s involved. Opening the box, inserting the Chromecast dongle into your HDMI slot on your TV, connecting some power to the dongle via USB or a power socket. Then follow the link to install the app on your android phone, install and follow the simple setup instructions.

Chromecast is advertised to work with Google’s own apps including YouTube, Google Play Movies and Music, and then others like Netflix.

Google Play Music doesn’t work. The other apps work as advertised but the one I was most interested in was being able to cast my music. So I performed a hard reset Friday night on my Note 3. And it made no difference with a clean phone. Same problem. I then tried my wife’s iPhone 5S (I should have done this first) and Play Music wouldn’t cast.

So far Google Support are still investigating. If they can’t resolve the Chromecast will be castoff.

But … with a crew of tech gurus involving @jhoneyball , @Raktkat, @davidmarkrich and @gilroyneil and 2 hours later all is resolved. It turns out that my BT Homehub 4 router wasn’t playing nicely with the Chromecast. Now what’s annoying is Google support didn’t even mention they are aware of an issue with their BT Homehub 4 and 5 routers. Since resolving this issue I found the support knowledge article by Google Google Homehub and Chromecast.

Thanks to Dave, I actually had to temporarily disable the firewall and then re enable again as well as turning smart access off, which is a real pain in the arse if you change devices a lot.

What’s worse – performing a hard reset/restore on android phone or sleeping on a bed of nails?

Android, Tech News

As you may have read on my previous post, I performed a hard reset on my Samsung Note 3 on Friday night. I have had the Note 3 just over 3 months and this is the first time I have undertaken this exercise.

I did this to see if I could get my new Chromecast to work. I also thought after 3 months of installing and trying new apps and just recently updated to android kitkat, that a hard reset wouldn’t be a bad idea to flush out any crap.

The hard reset and formatting of the memory card takes only a few minutes, although the first attempt of erasing/formatting the memory card caused the Note 3 to soft reset by itself. The second attempt was fine. And then hard reset the Note 3, and was left with a baron phone. Mind you can you call a Samsung phone baron!

Anyway, that’s the easy part. Unlike restoring an Apple iPhone which is a totally seamless exercise, the process via Google was painfully slow. In fact, I left the phone downloading the apps and games overnight. I was up at 4.30am and it was still had more to download and install. Then by around 8.30am all 164 apps/games were installed with all logins and passwords and my custom layout back to its state from the night before. All in all, it took 12 hours.

The good news I’m left with 2gb more internal storage. And my custom setup is back.
image

Amazon looking to expand Prime with music streaming

Android, Tech News

The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Amazon is “hoping to offer an on-demand music-streaming service” to Prime customers—but it also cites people familiar with the matter as claiming that it “may limit how much a person can listen to any given song.”

Amazon has told record companies it would pay them out of a fixed pool of money, according to people familiar with the matter, instead of compensating them based on how often users listen to their songs. Music companies are seeking to withhold their newest music from the service, a person familiar with the matter said, though details were unclear as the negotiations are in process. The retailer has told some music companies that it plans to impose time limits on how long a user can listen to a given song or album on the service. The average duration of that limit couldn’t be learned.

I wonder how Amazon will succeed in this area and how it will sell the Prime offering at the higher cost when people won’t want all of their services and cost. The other concern is that whilst Prime may appear good value now there is always the chance they could raise their prices even further.

Samsung’s response to Android Wear

Android, Tech News, Wearables

Techradar reported that Samsung issued a news release which appeared just after the Google Android Wear announcement. Coincidence ?

Samsung have stated that they have a third Gear smartwatch in the pipeline which will actually be able to make phone calls as it has its own sim.

So by revealing this new 3rd version why would anyone buy the Gear 2 so soon? I also wonder how developers will react now to supporting the Tizen operating system when android wear is likely to be far more popular.