If you’re an IT guy who already has a pretty well-rounded toolkit, then I would encourage you to add one more weapon to your arsenal. Network Discovery is a free app which can (very) quickly identify computers on your wifi network and what ports those nodes have open. It is the kind of app every IT guy should have on their Android smartphone.
You can download it from Android Market, along with some other useful apps from the same developer.
App 2 SD does more than you might think it does! True, the primary function of this small, free download for Android is to make it easy for you to find applications that are taking up space on your phone’s internal memory and relocate them to the SD Card. When you load the app you can see what programs you might have missed anad need to move over yourself. It also has a handy notification feature which will let you know if an app that you just installed can be moved to the SD Card.
But here’s the bonus feature that blows me away, and I wonder if it could’ve saved me the hassle of wiping my phone a few weeks ago. When I load the application up, it will tell me that I can free up cache on my phone by deleting the collective temporary cache files of several applications. So far I haven’t had it remove any vital data – I haven’t lost any Browser favorites, I haven’t had to log back in to the Facebook app, nothing like that. It works very well and keeps my phone from running low on memory, since the internal storage on the Evo Shift 4G isn’t quite what I had hoped. But this app helps!
It’s App Wednesday! But this week I don’t have an App, I have a great story of taking back what’s mine! I set my phone back to “factory default” last week. I have an HTC Evo Shift 4G – it’s a Sprint exclusive device which only has one major down side: storage capacity. It includes only 512 MB of onboard space.
The problem with the Shift seems to be a strange setting on it. When I get below 45 MB of free storage space on the phone, it locks into a panic mode and a lot of features like background sync don’t run properly. It’s trying to prevent you from running out of storage space – but 45 MB on a device like this is still more than 10 average sized apps! I don’t get why it chokes me at such a high level of free space. So most people say, still, it’s no big deal. Just install some apps, move things to the SD card and you’ll be all set! Wrong.
It turns out, at least in my case, after performing some Over the air Updates, some of the files were left over and hogging up space in some hidden way that I couldn’t find them. Even using apps like Disk Usage, I couldn’t remove stuff from the System partition. So when it was all said and done, I decided to make sure I had contacts synchronized to my Google account, made sure pictures, etc… were all moved off to the SD card and my computer in some cases. Then? Settings screen, SD & Phone Storage menu, then Factory Data Reset.
It kept the firmware and software updates that had been pushed to the phone, and got rid of the installer files that had clearly been left behind from OTA updates. I now have nearly all of my apps reinstalled, and nearly 3 times the free space I had! Also, this thing is running like lightning. Slow down must have happened gradually, but I forgot this phone was ever this fast when I got it. But, much like Windows, the occasional reformat may prove to be a good idea! Glad I did it, and just wanted to share!
Mute. from MNO Company is one of my absolute favorite apps on the Android. It’s the simplest, most elegant, most useful app I own. Have you ever had to go in to a meeting, turned the “ringer volume” on the side of the phone down, only to have something like MEDIA volume or NOTIFICATION volume still up? Android made that quite confusing. Mute. makes it easy again.
With one tap, I can literally Mute everything on the phone, EXCEPT for alarm clocks. Just install the app, and place a shortcut on your home screen. When you tap it, you will see a little pop up at the bottom of the screen alerting you that you have been muted, press it again to unmute. Here’s another selling point, it’s totally free, so head over to the Android Market (sorry, Google Play?) and download Mute. for Free.
