Articles by Patrick Nelson

If you've been accumulating redundant, carrier-locked communications hardware like phones and data cards and have been stuffing them all into a drawer likely never to be used again, you can repurpose some of it and realize some cost savings Modem data cards, sometimes called "dongles" or "data sticks," are well suited to this repurposing because ma...

Plex for Android, an app from Plex, is available for US$4.99 at Google Play.Plex is a good looking media platform for running media files on Google TV, tablets,phones and so on. Online channels include Hulu, Vimeo and more....

With the apparent clamp-down on formerly liberal U.S. data quotas by mobile operators,public WiFi hotspots -- like cafes -- for daily Web consumption may become an evermore likely Internet environment for many of us Europeans have been used to limited mobile data quotas under various euphemismslike "fair use policies" and "data plans" for some time...

HD Widgets, an app from Cloud TV, is available for US$1.99 at Google Play If you've ever used HTC's Sense graphical user interface, you've been spoiled. I hadit factory-loaded on my first Android phone back in 2010, the Sprint HTC EVO 4G....

Bombarded by ads for cable and satellite TV packages, or seductive programmingbundles offered by Internet service providers and phone companies, it may be easy toforget that it's possible to pick up much of that programming via a sub-hundred dollarindoor antenna reminiscent of the rabbit-ear days If you live in a town, conurbation, or a rural area ...

MetroFax Mobile, an app from MetroFax, is available for free at Google Play, with fax plans starting at $7.95 a month.Reports of the demise of the fax machine may be premature if research in Chico Harlan'sarticle in The Washington Post last week is to be believed.

Wireless carriers sell you "postpaid" contract phones at a considerable discount. The carrier expects to recoup its outlay -- the full price of the equipment -- over the life of the contract that you sign Often, it will lock the equipment to its network through a technique that stops the phone from working if the SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) ca...

Visual Voicemail Plus, an app from PhoneFusion, is available for free at Google Play, with voice-to-text service starting at US$1.99 a month.Visual voicemail functionality is the visual element in a voicemail application that allowstext to be transcribed and displayed on the phone -- or more simply, message headers, orenvelopes, are displayed text...

If you've been waiting with the patience of biblical figure Job for your handset makerto release a hardware-specific version of Android's latest incarnation, the 4.0 operatingsystem called "Ice Cream Sandwich," or ICS, and it hasn't yet, you can try cloning it You can achieve this without rooting, by taking advantage of a launcher replacement app t...

RingCentral, an app from RingCentral, is available for free at Google Play, with various monthly rate structures for the accompanying service.I've been looking for an alternative to Google's Google Voice product that provides onenumber for all my phones -- mobiles and landline -- and includes online voicemail anddiscounted calling....

With Verizon's recent announcement that it intends to drop its grandfathered unlimited wireless data plan for existing customers who were around before tiered its pricing came into being, crackdowns are in the air Both T-Mobile and Sprint continue to offer unlimited data plans, although T-Mobile slows data transmission after a point....

SwiftKey X Keyboard, an app from TouchType, is available for US$2.99 at Google Play. I've got fond memories of physical keyboards embedded in smartphones. My PalmTreos -- I had three -- were superb at composing email and SMS text responses. I evenmade notes for a book I was writing on one Treo....

If your device is having difficulty completing tasks like file downloading, it's a dead giveaway that it needs some maintenance. We're used to the idea of spending abit of time running hard disk defragmentation, spyware scans and other tools on our PCs,but we may not be so au fait with what's needed on the limited-memory phones and PC-substituting...

Scalado Album, an app from Scalado, is available for 99 US cents at Google Play. Have you ever found yourself scrolling endlessly around your phone's chronologically arranged photograph album -- called "Gallery" in Android -- looking for a photograph you've captured? If you can remember the specific place but not the date, then Scalado Album may b...

There are a lot of photographs out there. Photo sharing and album network Flickr alone reckons it hit the 6 billion image upload mark last year. If you consider Picasa, Facebook, and the current darling known as Instagram, we're talking gazillions of images floating around -- all freely downloadable Couple this relatively new phenomenon with an ent...

Google Drive for Android, an app from Google, is available for free at Google Play. Keep Everything. Share Anything....

If you've been involved in a project that has been documented on Wikipedia and has earned its own Wikipedia page, it can be disconcerting to visit one day and see the page vandalized, as happened to an associate of mine recently This incident led to a frantic email exchange. One consideration was how to deal with the problem without getting tagged ...

Shazam Encore, an app from Shazam Entertainment Limited, is available for US$4.99 at Google Play. I have to confess to being a little unfair on the Shazam Encore app for its first LinuxInsider test. It is supposed to identify songs you're listening to, and tell you the artists' names and lyrics and more.

Have you ever wondered what the differences are among the scores of digital image formats out there? Some of the more common ones we see are GIF (CompuServe Graphics Interchange Format) and JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group JFIF Format) but what does it all mean, and why are there so many? Plus, how do you know which one to use for the Web, a...

If you've been anywhere near a consumer electronics retailer lately or have leafed through the consumer electronics circulars and ads that supplement Sunday newspapers, you've no doubt noticed the words "Smart TV" shouting out at you. And if you've been wondering what a Smart TV is, or whether whatever it is may be smarter than you are, read on....