HTC Thunderbolt 4G ICS Sense 3.6 Leak Released!

Going to keep this short and simple there has finally been a leak for the HTC Thunderbolt ICS Sense 3.6 Update you can find it at the link below! Thanks Team Bamf! More to be posted later!!

[ROM][ICS] LEAK for HTC MECHA 7.00.605.2 [4.0.3] 08/21/2012

PAGE DOWN MIRRORS COMING ASAP!

Update:

Mirrors Curtesy of Randy Hoover:
BAMF_MECHA_ICS_08212012.zip
MD5: 68c7c69553c6097ffd5cf36bd016938b

#1 http://tinyw.in/87CV 

#2 http://tinyw.in/i0Jk 

#3 http://tinyw.in/ckNs

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich with data released for HTC Thunderbolt 4G!

That's right you heard it here first we finally have ICS with working data on the HTC Thunderbolt 4G! Although it's not quite 4G LTE the reported "1x" is getting speeds over 1mb/s which is enough for most casual activities. Most likely 3G is getting reported as 1x based on speed tests by multiple users. While we are waiting on an Official Ice Cream Sandwich update with Sense 3.6 from HTC we have a new build of ICS built from source from the hard working members of the development community Liquid0624 and SP-Jester. It's been a long time to see this released and we all look forward to new bug fixes and feature updates on this rom. The links to the download and forum post are below.

XDA Forum Post and Download

Update: One of the users discovered if you switch it to EvDo only it will display 3G some people are reporting speeds as fast as 2.7mb/s download and over 3.5mb/s upload. We should have 4G LTE very soon with this new break through.

Update 2: It's been pretty well confirmed you can get 4G speeds on this although it will never say 4G or 3G it will always say 1x. It is in the process of getting fix and we should have a new build from source soon.

Google Music

     I've been using Google Music ever since it was released last may. It has completely changed how I obtain and listen to music. I've always been against iTunes and other DRM infested music stores. It was always easier to go buy a CD. Google Music is a DRM free, super easy to use service. You no longer have to worry about syncing your music from your computer using cables. You can either buy music on your computer or Android device in the Google Play Store. It will automatically put the music in cloud storage, download it to your computer, and sync it to your phone.

     I am on an unlimited 4G data plan so except for my one regular playlist I listen to that's set to offline I stream all my music. After I got my new computer all my music remained on my external hard drive and none of it was transferred to my new laptop. I had previously uploaded it all to Google Music. I no longer use Windows Media Player or any other media program on my computer. Any time I want to listen to music I open chrome and click the icon that looks like the picture above and start listening. I save hard drive space, time, and money using Google Music. It's so much easier to just buy a song and have it added to my list right away no more ripping or messing with DRM. I get a DRM free mp3 file that I can use with any device I own and it isn't linked to any one computer or account. If my computer breaks it doesn't matter all my music is safely stored in my cloud storage.

      There are a few disadvantages of Google Music which hopefully will be resolved some day. The first is not every artist or song is on the service. As they continue to make deals to get more music on the store the selection of songs and artists will grow. The other disadvantage is you can only manage your music on the website not on the music program you install on your computer to upload your music. I hope they update the program to better manage your music. It definitely needs a sync music now button instead of having to wait for it to detect changes in your library. The last obvious problem with Google Music is that you can only use it when you have access to the Internet this will never be fixed because it defeats the purpose of the service. I love Google Music and it is clearly a better alternative to iTunes and other music services for many reasons. I encourage you all to give it a try! It's free to sign up and if you already have a Google account you  have access to the service right now. When you sign up for the service you will receive a bunch of free songs as well. Have fun listening to your music!

Source: Google Music

Pure Ice Cream Goodness.

 

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich has been out for a while now. It hasn't really penetrated the market quite yet but devices are continually being updated all the time as well as unofficial ports and AOSP roms for various devices. Mostly everyone seems to love the new Holo theme that is on stock Android unfortunately OEMs still felt the need to skin it. Now the new versions of the various OEM customizations aren't nearly as bad as previous versions. I feel like Google and the various companies that manufacture Android devices can make things easier on them selves and on the consumer if they do a few things. First of all they need to get together and develop a better system for themeing, skinning, and implementing customizations that is open and will allow the consumer to have the kind of interface that they want on their device. With this system when Android is updated to a new version the company should be able to easily load their customizations from the side without having to do a lot of heavy modifications nothing in the Android system should be replaced or changed by the OEM except to add additional hardware functionality. Next OEMs should be required to release the source for hardware specific drivers to allow for open source software development. There is no reason why the source for the hardware drivers shouldn't be released this would let developers experiment and get their own versions of software to work on the hardware easier and faster without having to write custom drivers or hack up a less working setup. This would cause sells of the various hardware to go up and allow Android as a whole to progress further as an open source project! Now with this new system of themeing any one should be able to compile and run Android on any hardware they choose and then in a separate folder load all their customizations from the side not only will there be more ideas implemented from doing this but updates to devices would go much faster and smoother then ever before! This will also allow in-menu options for the users that want to choose between a OEM customized experience or a stock Android experience without any problems at all. I hope in the future that these ideas come true and Android can be a much more open and less fragmented as a system that will be used and loved even more by developers and end users.

Source: Android 4.0 Platform Highlights

Integration and Consolidation!

           Lately there has been a lot of news about rebranding and consolidation of products on Google. The first move of course was the creation of Google+. So far the goal has been to create a new Google that will merge all the features and services into one product Google+. This has already been taking place over the past few months as all the different pages across Google have been unified in layout and design and integrated into Google+. The next step was "Google Play" which completely rebranded the Android market as well as Google Music, Book, Movies, and other Google Products. Recently Punit Soni a product manager at Google said “By next year, we will not be here talking about Google+ Games, Chrome Web Store games, Games for Native Client and Android games,” he said. “We will be talking about Google games.” This leads me to believe that we will soon see those other services integrated into Google Play. We will then have two major parts of Google the Plus and the Play. The integration and consolidation can get even deeper though. I recently participated in a hangout with Hugo Bara, Director of Product Management at Google. I told him that I really thought that there wasn't a need to have Google+ Messenger, Google Talk, and Google Voice as separate services and that they should be integrated together into one service. His response made me happy. He said they are working on a solution to that problem and that it's something that I would really like. He didn't out right say they were doing what I suggested but to me that meant more then likely we will see a "Chat for Google" all in one smartphone and website app and possible chrome extension or a better solution. I always get excited to see where things are going and I hope eventually I'll be able to be one of the people to move it along.

Source: venturebeat

Google Play

Mint.com Finances the easy way.

     In a world where spending money is as easy as sliding a card or taping your phone against a scanner it's no wonder people have a hard time keeping track of their finances. I my self struggle with keeping my money in order, not spending too much, and knowing how much money I actually have in my accounts. Mint.com is made by the same people that brought you Turbo Tax, Intuit Inc. It's very easy to setup and use. Once you go to the website and input your login information for each of your different accounts you'll be able to easily manage your finances. It let's you put Credit Cards, Bank accounts, and loans as well as other financial stuff I haven't even tried to figure out yet. Once you have it connected to all your accounts it will import all your purchases and account info. It lists and categorizes every purchase and deposit that you have on your accounts. One of the best features that Mint.com offers is easy budgeting. By default it gives you a basic budget that it allows you to tweak and categorize to fit your needs. It also tells you how much money you can spend  in each of the categories and if you don't have a smartphone you can have it text it to you when you reach the limit on your budget that you have setup. If you have a smartphone then your in luck because the Mint.com app is amazing. I have it on my Android device and I use the widget it comes with to tell me how much cash is in my bank account and how much money I have used on my credit cards. Now keep in mind because Mint.com imports data from outside sources it might not update right away however I find it's usually pretty up to date. This website and app have helped me out a ton and I hope you guys find it useful as well. I posted links below to the website and the smartphone app.

www.Mint.com

Mint.com for Android

PadFone + Ubuntu?

     

    Many others have proposed the idea I'm sure, but I thought I would post it once again. This week we just had the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Both Asus and Canonical had some pretty awesome announcements at the event. Asus announced their device the PadFone which if you watch the video above is a  Phone that can use a shell and a dock to turn into a Tablet and a Laptop. Canonical announced that they will be implementing their Linux distribution Ubuntu into Android devices. Ubuntu will use the same kernel as Android and run at the same time instead of a dual booting solution. You will be able to access your Android apps and other data inside of Ubuntu as well as running regular Ubuntu applications. Imagine if we combined these two awesome innovations! You no longer need three different devices but a simple all in one device that has both a full computer operating system as well as the Android mobile operating system. This is amazing! Ubuntu also has working virtual machine software which may include the possibility of running other operating systems like Windows and OS X inside of a virtual machine. It has also been demoed that you can run cloud applications running on other types of servers. I hope that both companies see these possibilities and make this all in one device a reality!

Ubuntu for Android

Asus PadFone

Humble Bundle now for Android!

I was introduced to Humble Bundle the end of last year by my friend. I've loved it ever since. What is Humble Bundle you ask? Well it's a pay what you want game pack that is put together every so often. Part of the proceeds go to one of many charities. For everything you get in the pack if you bought it separate it would be significantly more. The games are cross-platform Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. They are DRM free and you also receive steam codes for the Windows and Mac versions of the games as well. You also receive the sound tracks for each of the games. So basically you get super cheap games and you get to give to charity what more could you ask for in life! Humble Bundle is probably one of the best values you can ever get so go pick yourself up a copy right now and get your friend a copy too!

Source: www.humblebundle.com

Google Chrome the future of the internet.

     

     For a long time I've used Firefox and I enjoy it because it is so customizable gui wise. But a few months ago I started using Google Chrome and the extensions, stability, and innovation that is has are far surpassing what Firefox had to offer. Now let's look at a few things. Chrome is the closest to have complete compliance with the HTML5 standard on HTML5Test.com the latest nightly version of Chrome gets 387 and it should actually get another 20 points for having web cam input support now. Chrome is doing multiple things to help the user out. Number one it's allowing us to get rid of the "required" browser plugins like flash and the ones you need to use your web cam, microphone, or game controller on websites. Next with NaCl it is allowing us to run full applications and games without the need to download and install them on your computer you can just run them inside of Chrome. By allowing us to do these things it let's us put all of our stuff in one place and have it on the go any where we have Chrome. Eventually we will have full Chrome support on Android allowing us to do all these amazing things on all our other devices. Now taking it a level up Google+ which is integrating all of Google's Web services will become more integrated with Chrome allowing us one place for all of our computing needs. Anyways I'm excited for whatever the future brings and it looks great! Go Google!

GetJar Gold!

Many of you like me are Android users and you love to download apps but you don't like paying for them. GetJar Gold similar to Amazon's Free App of the Day is a program to get paid apps legally for free! They update GetJar Gold on a weekly basis adding new paid apps to the list. I've gotten so many paid apps for free between GetJar and Amazon that I almost never have to pay for any of my apps. If your like me you should check it out!

GetJar Gold

ColorEye App Review

I haven't really done any reviews of any kind for a while so I thought I would do one for an app my friends at Valkoria Software are making. It's a unique idea I don't think I've seen anyone else try and do. The app uses the camera on your Android device to determine what color objects are. It displays the name of the color as well as the RGB and other information. This app is not only useful for Artists but also by people that are color blind in fact many of these people have actually gave this app good ratings and commented that it has helped them quite a bit. Valkoria software is a newly founded software development company in the near future they plan on releasing more apps including one called codename smoke bomb. I look forward to seeing their new apps anyways give ColorEye a try it's pretty awesome!


 Market Download

New Go Launcher Ex Themes

Lately I have been making more Go Launcher Ex Themes and uploading them to the Android Market. A new ThemeFactory has been released and I encourage Artistically talented people to make a theme or two. If you like my themes please consider buying one of my paid themes as a donation!

GreenDroid Donation

Market Link

SpaceOdyssey

 

Market Link

Rainbow Circles

Market Link

retroPlus 

Market Link 
This is a CM7 Theme I ported to Go Launcher the Original can be found HERE,


Screenshot Gallery of all my Themes
My Go Launcher Theme Thread on XDA

Note: My Zelda Theme and Facebook Theme are no longer on the Market because of Copyright issues so if you want them they can be found in Theem Thread.

Why I don't like Apple.

Most of you know I don't like Apple (I make it pretty obvious) I have multiple reasons why that is. I've had many bad experiences with Apple's products. In high school I used Macs for two years in my media production class because of data corruption (which happened for no apparent reason) my 3 week project was lost this happened to me twice.

A lot of people don't know this but for 3 months I owned an iPhone (it didn't have service though) but honestly that didn't matter the fact that it was so uncustomizable and was locked to one computer and forced you to use iTunes made it horrible.

Now let's evaluate this more. Yes in many ways mac is better in that it has (until recently) better security than Windows. Next up it has a lot of good software that comes with it iMovie, garage band, ect. It is based off of Unix (but if I want to go that route I would choose the better free OS Ubuntu which I dual boot already). They are made to be so insanely simple anyone can use them (or so I'm told I have yet to find that to be true but I haven't learned all the new shortcuts on it).

Now here is why it isn't good. All Apple hardware is "proprietary" but after IBM ditched Apple and Intel started making the hardware that became mostly a lie. Yes the adapters and such are all custom but the actual hardware is exactly the same hardware that is used in a PC. Now that brings me to my next reason why I dislike Apple all their products are horribly over priced your paying for hardware that you can get on a PC for $300-$600 on a Mac it cost $900 to $2500. If I wanted to use Mac OS X I could download it and install it on a computer I paid $300 for because it's the exact same hardware just in a different package. The software for Macs is very limited and uncustomizable I have thousands if not more of applications for a PC or a Linux computer than a Mac.

My conclusion is that if people did their research and tried other products they would find much better products for less money with more options and openness. Now for phones, tablets and media players (not a lot yet but very soon there will be quite a few) there is Android which is an open source operating system based on Linux created and maintained by Google. You can do anything you want on Android devices from installing non-market applications out of box to completely replacing the OS with another unofficial customized or newer version of the software. I plug my phone into my computer and it comes up as an external drive I can drag and drop files to it or use any program to sync to it. Or I can throw files on it over a network. My homescreen is completely customizable with apps, widgets, live wallpaper, and themes on IOS you have an endless row of unorganized apps and you can have a different wallpaper no custom anything without jail breaking your device and even then the unofficial stuff is limited by what the OS allows.

For computers there are many options if you don't like Windows I understand Windows does not have a good track record for being secure and 75% of viruses are for Windows XP (so get a Win7 PC that resolves this problem!). The main security issue is the user, if you use good Anti-virus software which you should on any OS and you exercise caution you won't get viruses. I haven't had a virus effect my computer for like 5 years (excluding the time I was away for two years I couldn't protect what my sibilings did to my pc) so it is possible not to have viruses attack our PC every second of the day if you train your self the right security precautions.  If you want to use something other then Windows use Ubuntu Linux it's probably more secure then Mac OS X and best of all it's FREE and 99% of the software that runs on it is FREE. It will do everything your Mac does and most things a PC will do. I choose to use Windows because I am more proficient with it but if the new version goes in a direction I don't like I'll just switch to Ubuntu Linux. Now the reasons I will never use macs are that they are overpriced and completely closed off, they force you to use their software, their unupgradable/unfixable hardware, they sell you a product that does less for more of your money when other products that cost less money are in reality better. This is all from my experiences with technology in all three major OSes of Computers and other electronics of course everyone has the right to their own opinion on the matter but I hope that you re-evaluate yours based on the information I have presented to you in this blog post.

Google+

Google+ for Android

I just thought I would take a little time to talk about Google+ or G+ as a lot of people are referring to it now. G+ is Google's new social network to rival Facebook. When it first came out I wasn't sure if I liked it and how simple it was but as I dove in more and more I was able to find that G+ has many useful features that Facebook lacks.

First of all it's different in the fact that if you have someone in your circle (instead of friends you have circles) you are following those people and you may or may not be in the other person's circle. Similar to following people on Twitter, circles are independent of everyone else's profile so if you or the other person chooses they can be removed with out anyone ever knowing. It's also a simple way to conveniently separate people into their proper social groups aka Family, Friends, Acquaintances, and people who you're just following.

Next up in G+'s line of features is drag and drop sharing of pictures and videos and soon files as well. I find it way more time consuming to upload pictures to Facebook, on G+ I just type my comment drag and drop my pictures or videos and click share, choosing who I want to share it with (everyone, extended circles, specific circles, or only certain people.). Personal messages can be done privately via the main page by simply choosing only that person to share a comment with, thus resolving the dreaded personal message wall posts Facebook is plagued with.

Now my all time favorite feature offered by G+ is the Hangout. When you "Hangout" on G+ you enter into a multi-person video chat which you can have up to ten people in, simultaneously, all with their own webcams and microphones! In addition to that you are able to have text and watch YouTube videos together even videos that have a live feed! To hangout you simply click the green "Start a Hangout" button on the right side of the screen and choose who you want to invite (just like sharing things, you can choose everyone, extended circles, specific circles, or only certain people.). Once you do this it will post an invitation that shows who is in the hangout and it will show up on everyone's feed who was invited. You can also add people by sharing the url that the hangout has which is unique to that specific hangout.

In Addition to the actual website that G+ has, there is also an Android application which has an auto-upload feature for pictures and videos you take with your Android device. It has many other features which I won't be covering in my review of G+. The app can be found at the link at the beginning of this review.

I hope you enjoyed my small overview of Google+ and what it is. I hope to see you on Google+ soon!

Get started with your Google+ here!

Here are some useful links to help you get started with your Google+ experience:

Google Plus Nick
Google+ Tutorials

Start Google Plus Website

The Unofficial Google+ Wiki

New Team Bamf Website!

As I posted before I have an HTC Thunderbolt I use a custom rom known as Das Bamf by a group called Team Bamf and they have an awesome new website and forum for anyone who wants to check it out it's the best rom out there for the TB! Anyways check it out!

http://teambamf.net/

Go Launcher Ex Themes!

I have not posted on my blog in forever! Please forgive me anyone that is actually still following me! Lately since I've been home from my mission I've been getting into the Android Dev community and such. I'm also going to start school soon and I will be taking an Android Development class as part of my degree, since it counts and will also help me learn Java. Anyways I've been messing around a bit and I made a couple of Go Launcher Ex themes I thought I would share with you guys. Of course the first one is The Legend of Zelda. The second one is totally random it's a Facebook Theme. Anyways here they are! If you don't know what Go Launcher Ex is, it's a replacement launcher for Android that has a lot of customizable features including extra home screens, press to hold delete, and themes of course. I use all of GO Dev's products you can find their site located HERE!

My Themes

Legend of Zelda Theme:

Download

Facebook Theme:

Download

More Screenshots

My original post on XDA can be found HERE. It also includes a small guide I wrote to help you get started so you can make your own GO Launcher Ex Themes!