Benchmarking tools

If you always like to tweak your device and trying to find out the best rom that can run on it, I am going to introduce you 2 tools to play all around with.

1) Linpack for Android: The tool to benchmark your cpu processing power in units of Mflops. Your device results can be posted off to a website for show off or comparison purposes.

2) Neocore: The tool to benchmark the graphics processing power of your device and results are in fps (frames per second). No, there isn't an official website for you to compare results to though.

There you go, useful tools for your device better. Its free and doesn't requires root to use at all.

Free interactive lwp

There are 2 free interactive lwp which I think is worth trying out.

1) Waves wallpaper - a lwp that shows the waves at sea and a yatch floating on top of it. It uses your device accelerometer and moves the yatch around the wallpaper itself. Careful when you use while driving, damn eye candy but dangerous as well

2) Snow falling wallpaper - a nice looking winter wallpaper that uses your accelerometer to display the direction of the snow fall within.

Both lwp were freely downloadable from market, please use it on your Eclair (2.1) device and above only.

SetCPU 2.01

SetCPUis an application in which allows you to customize your android device cpu cycles. In other words, overclocking or underclocking.

You may have a device that can run at 1Ghz but there are options for you to tweak it to run faster (but risking of stability or even damaging the cpu itself) or running slower as to conserve battery usage.

This paid application can also use to customize based on usage (i.e. When device enters sleep mode or when battery lower than certain percentage). With this feature in mind, you can now have the capability to underclock your cpu when sleep and go maximum speed when awake.

Overclocking is not supported on all device by default. You may need to run custom roms to use that feature. Speaking of custom, did I mention that you need root access to use this application ?

Spirit bomb live wallpaper

Yesterday I went and change to this lwp (live wall paper). At the beginning I thought it was cool and fun to run an interactive wallpaper but it turned out that its better than many other lwp in terms of performance and memory usage ! I'll stick to this for a while then and see how it goes for a longer run.

My device

From now on I'll also post findings that is related to my device itself. If you share the same device as I do, you can also apply the same tips I am about to post here under the tag "My device".

How NOT to look like an iPhone for the SGS

Okay, besides defacing or refacing the device hardware parts, I can only give you advise on how to tweak in terms of software.

Your Samsung Galaxy comes with a standard launcher called "TouchWiz". It basically means it's the main screen you see when you first bought and booted your device. The bad news about this launcher is that it's quite basic and always starts off from screen

0 (the leftmost screen) - so if you had put some applications on screen 7, then you'll get the benefit of cleaning your Galaxy's screen with your oily finger for at least 7 times.

The good news is that you can actually change this interface into other more sexy looking and function filled ones. Here are some launchers which you can install into your device and change the default ones.

1) Home Plus Plus (http://hpp.intuitit.mobi/) - no longer on development, today changed to LauncherPro

2) Launcher Pro (http://www.launcherpro.com/)

3) ADWLauncher (http://jbthemes.com/anderweb/)

4) Others which I may not find sexy or useful... all personal preference though

Upon installation of the launcher, just press your home button and select which one you want to use. Play a while with it before you make it your default new launcher (if desired).

Official launchers by manufacturer does exist (like SenseUI by HTC, TouchWiz by Samsung, MotoBlur by Motorola) but because it's so tightly integrated with the OS itself, you wont find these launchers running in the wild easily for you to install and play with.

Looks better huh ?

Oh, I forgot to say - you don't need root access to change your launcher ! Good luck !

How to buy legit applications ?

You may wonder if all android my applications comes from some warez site but I'm assuring you, NOT ALL. You can actually buy legit applications from the Android market even though you're in a country that does not support the the actual market transaction itself.

To start off, you need:-

1) Credit card that can be validated off from the internet (i.e. Paypal)

2) Google account

3) Your ROOTED android device

Here are the steps:-

1) Log on to http://checkout.google.com using your google account

2) Register one of your credit card as a transaction credit card upon purchase of android applications

3) Log off

4) Search, download and install MarketAccess from the market (it's free !)

5) Run MarketAccess and click on "BACKUP VALUE" to backup your current mobile provider's details

6) Click on the provider tab and click on the top most entry (T-Mobile [US])

7) Close MarketAccess and run your market now

You'll notice that you now can see the list of applications appearing on the first screen after launching market. You'll also notice that paid applications had appeared - and yes, you can transact and buy these paid applications using the credit card you had keyed in at checkout.google.com

Some points to ponder:-

1) Your credit card will only be charged after 48 hours upon download, you get a full refund if you cancel it within that time period

2) Your credit card will be charged immediately if you had did a refund before (as in step 1)

3) All applications purchased will be tagged to your google account. If you log on using your google account again on a new phone, your purchased applications will be there waiting for you to be downloaded

Happy shopping !

Why does my android lags ?

Ever feel why does your device suddenly lag or beginning to lag after you had install various different applications ?

Android is a multitasking operating systems in which various different applications can run concurrently at the foreground or background. By now you would have notice about your device that there is not a button that explicitly closes the application. This in turn would make us think, "So where is the application after we click upon the back button ?"

Most applications would actually go behind the scene and became a background task. (I'm saying MOST, but not all) Then when the android operating system needs more memory, it will actually kills off these background process which have a lower priority thus releasing the memory (deallocate) for other applications to use. So now you understand how your device memory works right ?

Next you need to be aware that a lot of stuff in the android device takes up memory which the memory does not gets deallocated. Some examples:-

1) Live wallpapers

2) Widgets

3) Launcher

4) Background running process (ebuddy, email, twitter and facebook polling and such)

It may not be that all the process mentioned above lags your device altogether. From my prior experience, it may due to one single application that went "rogue" which causes "memory leaks" hence slowing down the system. You may wish to switch off each of these background process one by one to test out which process is the culprit.

One other remedy is to tweak the "MinFree" parameters of your Android. Like telling your Android device to grab memory even if it's not "hungry". This in turn will make your device function smoother as you have surplus amount of memory to use but the downfall is that more and frequent background applications would be killed. If you wish to try to tweak that part of your device, download an application called "Autokiller" (Screenshot at the beginning of this post). You need root access to use it though.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my own Android blog. I am planning to post all my findings about the Android platform here from today on.

I hope you will find my contents useful as I would share stuff based on my personal findings and experiences.

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