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5 Best Photo Collage Maker App for Android

Photo collages are a fun way how you can share some of the most important moments of your life with others and create beautiful pieces of art to hand on a wall. With an Android smartphone and the right app, you can make stunning collages in a matter of minutes. We have selected top 5 best photo collage maker apps for Android and sorted them by their popularity.

5. Lipix – Photo Collage & Editor

Previously known as InstaFrame, Lipix is a popular collage-making app for Android with easy-to-use presets for just about any occasion, such as holidays, birthdays, Christmas, and others. Included in the app are 90 adjustable templates with 5 supported ratios: 1:1, 3:2, 2:3, 4:3, 2:1. Each template can be further customized by changing its border or by applying any of the 12 magical effects, which change the overall look of the collage.

The app’s workflow is very simple. You simply select a layout, fill it with your pictures and photos, adjust their sizes, position, and style, and then proceed to add words, emojis, and stickers to make the collage truly yours. Lipix allows you to put text to your photos, change its color, sizes, and font. Once you are happy with your creation, you can share it with your friends and family members via Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, or virtually any other Android app that supports the contextual sharing functionality.

Lipix is available in Arabic, Turkish, Russian, Hindi, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Japanese, and Korean; and the developers work tirelessly to enhance the app with new features and bugfixes. Even though Lipix is the least popular app on this list, it deserves as much attention as the rest.

4. MOLDIV by JellyBus

MOLDIV by JellyBus is a feature-packed suite of photo apps designed to take you from the start to the final photo collage. Depending on what kind of photo you want to take, you can choose either the Beauty Camera or the Pro Camera. The former helps you take perfect selfies every time by smoothening your skin, and the latter opens doors to endless creative expressions with fun filters.

The next step is to collage your photos with the help of 100 magazine-style layouts, 180 frames, and the ability to combine up to 9 pictures in a single frame. You can adjust the aspect ratio of the collage however you want and take it to the next level with an assortment of design tools. The built-in text function packs more than 100 creative fonts. And like that wasn’t enough, there are 560 stickers and 80 background patterns to choose from.

Needless to say that MOLDIV supports both local saving and social sharing to Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and all other popular social media networks. Unlike Lipix, which can run on any Android 2.3 or higher device, MOLDIV requires Android 4.0 and up to function.

3. Photo Collage Maker

Build to accomplish only one thing and accomplish it exceptionally well, Photo Collage Maker from Scoompa, nails down the customization aspect of photo collages without overwhelming users with unnecessary features or complicated user interface.

The app contains more than 100 predefined photo collage layouts, and it even allows users to create their own. All photo collages created within the app can be decorated with a variety of stickers, background patterns, filters, and text. You are free to select from over 55 different fonts, change the text size, color, style, and more. Best of all, the app is controlled by easy-to-remember touch gestures that make the editing process highly enjoyable.

With Photo Collage Maker, you can save your finished collage as high-resolution pictures, which makes it possible to later print them and display in your home. The app is available for free for all Android 3.0 and higher devices. Photo Collage Maker is currently in version 12.1, which goes to show how active the developers are.

2. Pic Collage

Pic Collage from Cardinal Blue Software is a true powerhouse when it comes to creating stunning photo collages. One of the things that have made the app so popular is the always increasing library of fonts, stickers, seasonal backgrounds, borders, and effects.

Users can import photos and pictures from social media sites, the web, or the local storage. Using the modern user interface, it takes just a few taps and intuitive gestures to place the pictures on a variety of available collage grids, add text, throw in some effects, and share the result with others on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites.

One special feature that makes the Pic Collage stand out from the rest is the ability to edit photos using Aviary, a popular photo editor, by just double-tapping on them. Another great feature is the ability to search for collages created by other users of the app and use them as a basis for your own creations. Others can then vote on which collage looks the best and the most popular entries can win great prizes from Pic Collage’s sponsors.

1. Photo Grid:Photo Collage Maker

Photo Grid, the most popular collage app for Android, radiates creativity and user-friendliness. It empowers users to turn their ordinary pictures into stunning photo collages in a matter of minutes, all while having a lot of fun while doing it. Think of the app as a more creative version of Instagram. Just like on Instagram, you can take great-looking selfies, edit how they look using filters, and more.

But only with Photo Grid you can also decorate the pictures with stickers, text, borders, or drawings. Most importantly, you can turn the edited or natural images into scrapbooks filled with memorable moments of your life. A special feature not found in any other photo collage app on this list is the ability to turn ordinary photos into stunning video stories. It’s called Video Slides and it works on any Android devices running Android version 3.0 and up.

When you are satisfied with the results, you can export your collage as a high-resolution image or video file, depending on the nature of the collage. If you don’t have time to try any other apps on this list, this is the one to get. After all, there’s a good reason why Photo Grid has received 5 stars from well over 4 million users.

5 Best Buying and Selling Apps for Getting Bargains and Getting Rid of Stuff

Even if you haven’t read the Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo from cover to cover, you’ll probably agree that being surrounded by clutter and old, useless stuff can be suffocating. Why not get rid of your old junk with the help of top 5 best buying and selling apps for Android? They’re free, easy-to-use, and are a fantastic way how to earn a few extra bucks on the side while making your home feel more hospitable at the same time.

letgo

With $100 million in Series A funding from the South African media company and tech investor Naspers Limited, letgo has been able to enter the mobile market with an aggressive marketing campaign that promotes its mobile-first approach and sleek, user-friendly interface.

letgo founder, Alec Oxenford, explained, “letgo is perfectly tailored for the typical American consumer. It’s a fun, easy to use, and highly visual mobile marketplace that allows users to post, buy, sell and communicate with each other instantly and for free.”

“There has been a lack of innovation in the U.S. classifieds space, particularly when it comes to mobile. We think letgo’s mobile first design, which is streamlined to make buying and selling locally easier and faster than ever, is a key advantage for our platform,” he concluded when interviewed by TechCrunch.

So far, it’s not clear how the app plans to generate revenue. Users don’t have to pay fees, nor does the app take a percentage of the sales, a common practice in the industry. One explanation is that the app will try to live entirely on money generated from advertising; the other could involve a gradual introduction of premium features.

As it is, letgo seems like the perfect platform for selling anything from books and music to fashion, electronics, vehicles, vintage items, and much more. Users who are versed in modern social networks will instantly feel right at home, with letgo’s built-in chat feature and easy registration. The experience is visually-oriented, making it instantly appealing to new users and digital window shoppers.

Wallapop

Wallapop and letgo are now actually a single company. The two merged earlier this year to increase their odds at beating the incumbent players, mainly Craigslist, and newly emerging startups wanting to compete in the same space.

Before the merger, Wallapop was actually the larger company, valued at over $570 million (over €500 million), according to TechCrunch. Its investors include Insight Venture Partners, an American private equity and venture capital firm based in New York, and Accel, another American venture capital firm.

It was decided that Wallapop will continue operating as a separate platform, possibly to allow the management to selectively test new features. While you can use the app everywhere, the focus is on large metropolitan hubs, including New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Miami, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Austin, St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco.

Wallapop works in a very similar manner to letgo, making it simple to snap a picture of the item you want to sell, display it online, and communicate with the buyer. The nearly instantaneous nature of selling through Wallapop gives it an advantage over Craigslist, which feels like it’s still stuck in the last decade.

OfferUp

With the copious amount of advertising time that letgo and Wallapop occupy, it may seem there isn’t any other competition. Wrong. OfferUp is a highly rated mobile marketplace for local buyers and sellers, currently enjoying a very high rating of 4.6 stars given to it by almost 300,000 happy users.

The premise is the same: using your smartphone camera, you quickly snap a picture of the thing you want to sell, display it online, and then wait until somebody who wants to buy it from you contacts you. OfferUp has a built-in real-time chat functionality through which you can instantly negotiate the final price and agree on the time of exchange.

Thousands new items are being displayed by sellers from all across the country every single day, and the community is steadily growing as more happy customers leave raving online reviews and tell their friends and co-workers how they used OfferUp to declutter their garages.

eBay

Since it was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995, eBay has become the largest online marketplace, with sellers from all around the world offering both used and new products in countless different categories. Items can be posted either as auction-style sales or as “Buy It Now” products. The latter option turns the auction model on its head, letting anyone instantly purchase the product like they would from an online store.

eBay makes it possible to sell truly anything from cars and automotive gear, fashion and outfits, home and garden products, to collectibles, video games, vintage items, and even some truly bizarre things, including a single cornflake, partially eaten sandwich, ghosts, and others.

The Android application place most of eBay’s functionality in the palm of your hand, but its user experience can’t rival that of letgo or OfferUp. Why? Because eBay is a multi-purpose behemoth that is as far from being lightweight and streamlined as you can get. Placing a small item on the site can take a while, not to mention that it may get buried under the sheer volume of goods that are sold on the site every single day.

Craigslist

Craigslist is much more than an online marketplace. It’s the most popular classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, personals, services, gigs, and many other things. The service was founded by a single guy, Craig Newmark, and despite its immense success, it still employs just 30 some people.

Craigslist probably would have already dominated the mobile space, if it wasn’t for their lack of innovation. They still don’t even have their own mobile app, relying solely on third-party developers to fill in the black spot.

The most popular such app is cPro+. Its modern user interface is somewhat reminiscent of letgo’s design, and the quite complete set of features helps to leave the web version behind. Among the features is an integrated map browser, multi-city search, favorite listings, rapid alerts, PIN code lock protection, and others.

If, for some reason, cPro+ doesn’t tickle your fancy, Postings and Mokriya are good alternatives. Both are free, easy-to-use, and come with modern user interface, that makes shopping and selling as easy as breathing. Well, maybe not quite as easy, but you get the idea.

5 Best Travel Guide Apps for Your Android Phone

The day your long-awaited vacation starts is finally here, but you still haven’t had time to properly plan your trip? Our list of top 5 best travel guide apps for your Android phone is here to help. Apps on this list use real reviews to separate places that are worth your visit from those that you should avoid. Using your smartphone’s GPS you can receive suggestions relevant to your current location, so if you want to be spontaneous and make plans as your go, you can.

Foursquare

Foursquare is a mature search-and-discovery service launched in 2009. The app now has well over 50 million users, who enjoy its hyper-personalized recommendations and huge database of insider tips from millions of real people around the world.

Unlike many other discovery services, Foursquare firmly rejects paid reviews and unhelpful negative rants, focusing on the joy of travel instead. The app is designed to be a hub for your adventures, one that helps you find interesting places to visit, organize them into an itinerary, and associate each adventure with pictures, so you never forget what made that French toast you had so tasty or how your hotel room looked like.

The developers of the app have spent years tweaking its locational algorithms to perfection and making the app as battery-efficient as they could. According to our experience, Foursquare is much more power-efficient than most other apps that rely on GPS.

TripAdvisor

With over 350 million reviews by travelers like you, TripAdvisor never fails to recommend an excellent place to visit, find you a nice hotel room, or help you book the cheapest flight available. Everything is sorted out into appropriate categories, which you can explore using search filters and various sorting options.

The Near Me Now feature uses your smartphone’s GPS to precisely locate where you are and suggest you relevant restaurants, historical monuments, and events. If you ever happen to need help while abroad, you can quickly get answers from other travelers in the forums.

In case you don’t have roaming included in your phone plan, TripAdvisor gives you the option to download maps of over 300 cities worldwide onto your smartphone.

Trip.com (Formerly Gogobot)

Formerly known as Gogobot, Trip.com is an award-winning trip-planning app for Android and iOS that packs features from multiple apps into a single digital suitcase. Just like with Foursquare or TripAdvisor, you can find attractive places to visit, book the best hotel for you, or read reviews from other users.

To differentiate itself from its competitors, Trip.com also includes a simple photo editing app with playful filters, database of local events, and detailed statistics that tell you exactly why a certain place is so popular. The app is still fairly young so don’t expect it to have nearly as much content as the previous two. We recommend you to use it alongside either Foursquare or TripAdvisor.

Triposo

Triposo is one of only a few travel guide apps that work completely offline. Instead of building their own database of places, they take content from millions of websites and automatically sort it out, giving you personalized recommendations for over 50,000 destinations worldwide.

Search for any city that you would like to visit and download the full guide on your phone. Each guide comes with a map and information about the major sights, places to eat and sleep, and nightlife options. Also included in the app is a handy currency converter and phrasebooks with text-to-speech ability

Yelp

Yelp is the leading business review application, and it’s our go-to app for restaurant recommendations. Businesses are rated based on the overall experience, and reviews are encouraged to upload their own photos.

Even if you don’t care about the opinions of others, Yelp is still great to have on your smartphone just because it contains accurate contact information with business hours, phone numbers, and address. Although, it is not known as a travel guide, it does offer reviews of all the major tourist destinations. Great for researching places to visit and things to do at your destination.

5 Best Launchers for Your Android Smartphone

If you are still using your Android device with the stock launcher, you are in for a treat. The world of third-party Android launchers overflows with creativity, convenience, features, customization. Best of all, almost all launchers are available for free or, at least, offer free versions with limited functionality. And, please, don’t worry. There’s absolutely nothing that you could break by installing a new launcher. If you don’t like the new environment, you can simply uninstall it like any other app.

Why Should You Change Your Launcher?

The answer to this question will depend on your circumstances and preferences. Do you own an older device that is beginning to show its age? If so, a lightweight launcher optimized for speed and efficiency might be just what you need.

But maybe you are a customization freak who wishes to have complete control the appearance and functionality of your home screen. There are launchers that allow you to change icons, select animations, configure the icon size, and much more. With some tweaking, your smartphone can not only be unique, but it can also help you be more productive.

There are Android launchers that introduce an entirely new paradigm, when it comes to the way you interact with your smartphone. Forget home screen and app drawers, what if all your apps were automatically categorized into different categories according to their type and purpose? Or what if your home screen displayed a steady stream of news stories and calendar appointments?

Last but not least, a new launcher can be a breath of fresh air for your smartphone. If you’re like us, and you enjoy tinkering with your smartphone, trying out new apps and games, then you probably know how it feels to suddenly don’t feel that excitement upon unlocking your smartphone. You simply know all the ins and outs, and there’s nothing else left to explore. Well, why don’t you just keep reading this article and select a new Android launcher – one that will make you fall in love with your device for the second time and give you plenty new features to play with.

One Launcher

Those of you who are looking for an Android replacement don’t need to look any further. One Launcher from one BJ has been inspired by the latest version of the iOS operating system from Apple, bringing its aesthetic sensibilities and general usability principles to Android users.

Just like on Apple devices, all your icons are placed directly on the home screen, instead of being hidden inside an app drawer. You can still organize icons into folders, but you can also keep everything as it is. The latter option is great for people who use only a limited number of apps to accomplish everything they need.

The creators of the launcher have spent a lot of effort trying to optimize it for maximum performance and low memory consumption. Their effort is apparent every time you switch from one home screen to another, or when you look at how many megabytes of memory you have left for other apps. Best of all, the launcher is available for free and runs on all Android devices version 2.3.3 and up.

Nova Launcher

With almost 50,000,000 downloads and 4.6 stars, Nova Launcher is likely the most recommended Android launcher in existence. The concept is simple: take what’s already good about the stock launcher, improve it, and throw in tons of new features. The result is a product with almost universal appeal. Power users will appreciate the endless customizability offered by Nova Launcher, and casuals will be happy with the fact that the launcher is not forcing anything down their throats, allowing them to explore new features at their own pace.

What features are we talking about? For starters, there’s the ability to download third-party icon themes for Nova Launcher on the Play Store, giving your smartphone a fresh, new look. Some are paid, but most are available for free. To make your new icons with well with the rest of the launcher, Nova gives you control over the appearance of labels, folders, drawer tabs, scrolling effects, and icon and widget positioning. The dock is made more useful, thanks to its ability to host a 4×1 widget, such as your music player or camera app.

When you are finally done and have everything exactly the way you want, you can backup your layout and launcher settings. This can save you a lot of time when you need to restore them in the future – perhaps after a switch to a different ROM or complete data wipe.

Hola Launcher

The developers of Hola Launcher started by asking themselves a simple question, “what features do people really need in a launcher?” When they got the answer, they sat down and created Hola Launcher, a lightweight alternative for people who want to accomplish as much work as possible with the least amount of resources.

After you spend a few minutes exploring everything that the launcher has to offer, it becomes almost hard to believe that it is only 4MB large. Best of all, its memory footprint is equally minuscule, making the launcher fast and responsive. The focus here is simplicity. The interface is clean, easy-to-navigate, and access to all commonly used features is available with a few taps.

Beyond the usual assortment of features, such as customizable themes, wallpapers, folders, and others, are Hola features – small applications with a lot of power. Hola Shina is a smart menu that opens when you swipe from a bottom corner. It gives you a quick and simple access to frequently used apps and settings. Hola Boost is represented as a small floating bubble that instantly frees up your smartphone’s RAM after you tap on it. There’s also Hola Box, a quick way how you can hide certain apps that you don’t want to be seen by others from your home screen.

GO Launcher

GO Launcher is a great choice for people who would want to take a step away from the traditional Android launcher design. There’s a good reason why GO Launcher is the most downloaded launcher for Android. It combines functionality with great user experience design to create a cohesive package filled with smart features designed to make your day just a bit easier.

The launcher is built on an innovative 3D engine, which was designed from the ground up to be fast, responsive, and extendable. On top of this engine is the ability to choose between more than 25 screen animation effects and well over 10,000 unique themes. Such a staggering amount of customization could be overwhelming, if it wasn’t for GO Launcher’s DIY Themer, an app that allows you to easily decorate the launcher just the way you want it.

But you don’t become the most downloaded launcher in the Play Store just because you give users a handful of pretty wallpapers and widget. GO Launcher also comes with fantastic app management features, allowing you to hide or lock individual apps to increase your security and privacy. Built-in smartphone optimization widgets increase the performance of your device, making heavy multitasking more enjoyable and free from any lag.

Smart Launcher 3

One of the most innovative launchers available on Android is Smart Launcher 3, the third version of a launcher that places ease of use in the front row. So many launchers just build on top of the stock launcher by adding new features and customization options. Or they go the other route and they strip or hide certain functionality to appeal to more casual users.

Smart Launcher 3 is not based on the stock launcher, and it really shows. The home screen is represented by a circle of six icons that let you quickly open your favorite apps. From there, you can either go to the widgets area or open the unique app drawer. What makes it so special? Its intelligent auto-sorting capability. When you install a new app, the launcher will automatically place it in the appropriate category, allowing you to quickly find it when you need it.

A convenient search bar is always within reach, so you can quick search apps, contacts, or the web. A part of the launcher is a lock screen with notifications and extensive theme support. You can download themes for Smart Launcher 3 in the Play Store and use them to completely change the look of the launcher. Worth mentioning is also the ability to hide selected apps from the apps grid and protect them with a password.

Best Free Coloring Book for Adults Android App

If you were to ask someone back just a couple years ago that coloring books would occupy two of the top 50 best selling books on Amazon, you would probably get laughed at. It’s really astonishing how quickly this new trend took off and became an absolute sensation. Some people love them because they provide them with a canvas upon which they can express their creativity and artistic talent without thinking about the subject itself, and others use adult coloring books as a way how to relax or even get past mental and physical hurdles.

The only real downside is their price. And if you get into the habit of coloring every day, you quickly find yourself in need of a steady supply of books. There has to be a better way, right? You are correct. With nothing more than you favorite Android device, you have at your fingertips an endless supply of high-quality adult coloring books with all the patterns you can think off. We have selected top 5 most popular adult coloring book apps for Android, so there’s nothing standing between you and hours of great fun and relaxation.

1. Colorfy: Coloring Book for Adults

Colorfy is the most downloaded adult coloring book application on Android. With its high rating of 4.6 stars, you know that you are in for a wonderful experience. Indeed, this constantly updated application is polished to a near perfection. You can choose any theme you want, including mandalas, florals, animals and patterns. Colorfy’s developers are adding new images every week, so you never have to worry about running out of great-looking artwork to fill in with any colors you like.

The app works completely offline, so you can have endless fun no matter where you are – as long as you bring your charger with you, of course. When you do get online, you can share your creations on social media sites like Instagram, Snapchat, Messenger, Facebook, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Google Plus, Line, Kiko, Twitter, or send them via email and SMS.

The stylish user-interface is simple to navigate, yet it provides you with plenty of ways how to make the artwork truly yours using special filters and effects. We encourage you to take a look at Colorfy’s Instagram page to see what others have been able to accomplish with the application. We really like that the team behind the app wants to make it accessible to as many people as possible. You would really have to look very hard to find an Android device that couldn’t run it.

Colorfy is available for free in its basic version. Those of you who would like to get extra content can purchase it via in-app purchases.

2. Adult Coloring Book Premium

With several million installs as of the time of writing this article, Adult Coloring Book Premium is the second most popular adult coloring book on Google Play. While the name might suggest that the app costs money, the opposite is actually true, at least for the basic version. As it’s the case with most coloring apps, if you want more content, you have to pay for it.

The most noticeable limitation in case of Adult Coloring Book Premium is the lack of color option in the free version. It’s a shame that developers decided that this is the best way how to approach the in-app revenue model. We feel that more people would grow to love the application if they could really get into it right off the bat without any constraints placed on their creativity.

Apart from this criticism, the application as a whole is fantastic. The user experience of picking up a design from the seemingly endless variety of patterns, mandalas, animals, and natural sceneries is fantastic and so is the coloring itself. The app makes it very easy for you to create your own customized pallets, so you can replicate the general look of an image as many times as you want. Even the tiniest details are not a problem to color, because you can always just pinch to zoom in or out to enlarge the image. When you are finished with a piece, there’s an option to save it to your device or share it with your friends on social media sites.

3. Coloring Expert Coloring Book

The Coloring Expert Coloring Book takes a slightly different approach from the previous two applications on our list. Colorfy and Adult Coloring Book Premium more closely follow the aesthetic approach of the adult coloring book trend, this application exchanges mandalas and patterns for a greater variety of more realistic images, including famous scientists and musicians, exotic animals, faraway cities and even adventure sports. On one hand, this makes it great for parents and their kids as it provides them with a fantastic opportunity how to introduce the subject presented on the picture. On the other hand, it also helps to break the monotony of coloring the same kind of picture over and over again.

The biggest issues with this application – and probably the reason why it’s not more popular – is its clunky user-interface. There’s a row of large boxy icons on the top, and they all look like they were designed by someone who’s not that skilled with Photoshop and graphical design in general. This may seem like a trivial complaint, but you would be surprised how important it is to have an inspiring graphical user interface when you want to unleash your creativity.

The app itself offers over 670 pages of content and has all the tools you might need to color them. Intuitive gestures are used for navigation and a color pallet with a dedicated color dropper allow you to easily choose the right color. Overall, Coloring Expert Coloring Book probably won’t become your main coloring application, but we have no doubts that it will find its place on your homescreen.

4. Family Coloring Book

What makes digital coloring books different from their paper counterparts? Mainly the coloring experience itself. It’s really hard to compare the paint bucket approach of most applications with the soothing feeling of pencil rubbing against paper. The developers over at Colorfit are well aware of this issue, and the Family Coloring book is their solution.

Unlike most coloring books on Android, the Family Coloring Book mixes in brushes with the standard paint bucket approach to make for a more pleasant coloring experience. Using the variety of coloring tools at your disposal, you can gradually fill in the artboard with vivid colors, stunning gradients, and subtle accents.

When you make a mistake or you decide that the particular part of the art would look better in a different color, just select the eraser and start again. If you want to duplicate a certain part for the sake of symmetry, you just have to press the color you want on the artboard and the app will automatically pick it up.

Everything is neatly sorted into deferent categories, and some pieces are truly mesmerizing in their scale and complexity. Just take a look at the app’s Instagram page and see for yourself.

5. Coloring

The last application on our list doesn’t overwhelm with tons of features that you might never use, nor does it include thousands and thousands of pictures. The basic version comes with just a little over 50 pieces to color and an intuitive control scheme. This makes Coloring great for beginners or anyone who prefers to take things slowly.

Just like the Family Coloring Book, Coloring also supports a brush mode for freehand drawing. But it also is friendly toward people who write with their left hand. It doesn’t matter whether you prefer to color on your smartphone or tablet – the app is optimized for both.

You can use the free version of unlimited time and purchase the extra image packs only when you run out of things to color. The total number of images is 170, which should be plenty until you feel confident enough to dive into the vast see of patterns and mandalas that can be found in other coloring adult books for Android.

Conclusion

Adult coloring books are a great way how to discover your creative potential or just kill some time. Even though the apps described in this article are the most popular you can find on Android, there are many others to choose from. We encourage you to search the Google Play store on your own – maybe you’ll stumble upon some hidden treasures.

How to Turn Your Android Smartphone into a Full-Blown PC with the Andromium OS App

Launched on July 21, 2016, Andromium is an Android app capable of turning your smartphone into a fully functional computer. Its developers have managed to reach 300% of their funding goal on Kickstarter within the first hour, suggesting that what they came up with could, finally, bring the era of convergence, which Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, said is the future of computing.

How It Works

Modern smartphones have ample processing power and the latest version of the Android operating system powers more than 2.4 million apps that cover everything from entertainment to productivity. The problem is that these apps are designed with touch input in mind. That’s great for when you are on-the-go, but it sucks when you need to sit down behind a desk and do some actual work with mouse and keyboard.

Andromium transforms the user interface of your existing Android smartphone, adding a mouse cursor and keyboard support—essentially turning your Android smartphone into a full-blown PC. Any Windows user will instantly recognize the familiar interface, with an application menu in the left bottom corner, the current time in the right bottom corner, and a desktop with application icons.

Andromium is currently in limited time free public beta. It can be used either with a compatible dock, such as the Desktop Dock from Samsung, or with Chromecast or Miracast dongle. If you are feeling adventurous and would like to try Andromium right now, you have to meet the minimum device requirements.

Minimum Device Requirements:

Lollipop 5.0 or above with the Superbook or Chromecast/Miracast or Adapter/Dock that allow external TV/Monitor attachment
Mouse/Keyboard (USB or Bluetooth)
Phone must be charging when trying to launch Andromium OS.

Recommended Device Specification:

Here are a few options that would meet the specs.

Snapdragon 800 or better processor
2GB RAM
1080p external monitor

Future of Andromium

But the San Francisco-based company behind the Andromium OS app doesn’t expect their future customers to read lengthy tutorials and go through complicated setup procedures.

Instead, they would like them to purchase the Superbook. “At its core, the Superbook is a smart laptop shell that provides a large screen, keyboard and multi-touch trackpad, 8+ hours of battery, and phone charging capabilities,” explains the company on their Kickstarter page.

With Superbook, all that a user would have to do is plug his or her Android smartphone and wait for Andromium to automatically launch and deliver the full laptop experience. The basic $99 pledge on Kickstarter includes the Superbook (Gold) with 1 custom USB-OTG cord and 1 charging adapter.

Suddenly, paying hundreds of dollars for a high-end smartphone makes a lot more sense, when the same smartphone can turn into an ultra-book, allowing you to create and edit documents, presentations, spreadsheets, play games, build software on-the-go, watch movies, browse the web, and more.

The Superbook has an 11.6″ HD display, 8+ hours of battery life, physical keyboard and multi-touch trackpad, and all the connectivity of your smartphone, including Wi-Fi, LTE, and Bluetooth. “As long as your phone supports USB-OTG (which it most likely does), the Superbook will work for you,” states the company.

Our Take

It’s still too early to tell whether the Superbook will enter into the annals of history as the device that brought upon us the era of mobile to PC (or laptop, in this case) convergence, but it’s evident how appealing the concept is to everyone who occasionally needs to be productive while on-the-go but is not keen on the ideal of paying hundreds of dollars for a capable laptop.

5 Best GPS Car Tracking Apps for Android

GPS tracking apps can be useful when it comes to monitoring (or spying on) your kid that just started to drive, check in on your elderly parents, or commercial application to track your fleet.

It used to be that GPS car tracking was possible only after purchasing an often expensive hardware tracker. Such tracker would either come with a monthly fee, or it would require someone to manually pull the tracking data from the unit and import them into a computer.

Luckily for all business and car owners, those days are over. With modern Android smartphones, we can track our vehicles without spending even a single penny. Not only that, but GPS car tracking apps for Android offer much more functionality and convenience than their hardware counterparts.

The only requirement is for the driver to have his or her Android smartphone in the car, and the GPS tracking app will take care of the rest. Probably the most common example of when the ability to track the exact location of your car comes in handy is when you want to keep an eye on how much money you spend on gas.

While some GPS car tracking apps are designed specifically to accomplish this goal, other have far greater ambitions. Apps like MapME can help you take your business to the next level, by providing you with your employees’ location. Some GPS car tracking apps even come with the ability to add multiple devices at the same time from a convenient web interface. So, without further ado, here are out top 5 picks.

MapME.net GPS Tracker

MapME is a sophisticated GPS car tracking app for Android aimed at businesses that manage larger fleets of employees. As such, it comes with a built-in multi-install ability, saving you a lot of time and energy you would otherwise have to spend.

The first step is to download and install the app from the Play Store on a single device. You will be prompted to create a new account. With the account created, you can log in at mapme.net and start using the app. If you want to add other devices, simply click on the “Add Device” button located on the website. This will send a free SMS message containing a download link for the app.

The web interface takes into consideration scenarios where a company or individual would like to manage dozens of individual cars. It lays down all the essential information in an organized fashion, making it easy to just glance at the screen and instantly know what’s happening.

Fleet owners and managers can define speeds alerts to prevent the drivers from going too fast, and they can also set up warnings to notify the drivers that they are about to leave the route they should be following. If speed and efficiency are of any concern for your business, then you will like the Points of Interest feature.

A point of interest is simply a place that has some sort of importance for you. When a car reaches this place, the app will automatically start monitoring how long it’s been there. This way, you can find out, for example, how long it takes your employees to make a delivery or how long they spend with clients.

The locational information can be shared with others via private links. Sending a link like this to a customer will reassure him that the driver is on his way, resulting in a greater customer satisfaction with your services.

Mileage Log GPS Tracker

Mileage Log GPS Tracker is an infinitely scalable GPS tracking tool that can be used by individuals and businesses alike. It abolishes manual tracking by automatically recording all trips based on set parameters. Once recorded, the data are stored in the cloud on the company’s website. The website makes it possible to download printable log books or IRS compliant reports in PDF and Excel.

A single car can be shared among several drivers, who have the option to classify their trips into various categories. This makes it possible to see how many miles were made for business purposes and how many for personal.

What’s really great about Mileage Log GPS Tracker is the ability to assign jobs to the drivers in real time. By using this method of communication over standard phone calls, you can greatly streamline your communication pipeline and also save on cellular plans.

Built into the app is a complex suite of analytics tools designed to give you a convenient overview of how much time your drivers are spending with customers, how long it takes them to get to their destinations, or who are the best-performing drivers in your fleet.

All this information can be exported as a CSV file and imported into your payroll system or CRM. The free plan includes up to 3 vehicles and maximum of 5 reports per month. Those who want more can purchase one of four available premium packages.

Hurdlr for Drivers

Hurdlr has been made specifically to meet the needs of on-demand service partners working for disruptive companies such as Uber, Lyft, Postmates, TaskRabbit, Instacart, Hnady, and others. The idea is to help people manage their expenses, track miles, and use this information to take tax deductions.

To make all of this as painless as possible, Hurdlr is able to automatically start loging miles as soon as you start driving, making manual tracking management a thing of the past. All expenses tracked by the app are categorized to help you figure out what you are really spending your money on. The app also calculates how much money you owe the IRS, which great if you want to avoid nasty surprises when you least expect them. Hurdlr can do all of this because it looks for incoming payments from clients in real-time, sending you a notification for each of them.

Everything is stored securely in the cloud on either Hurdlr’s servers or on the servers of your favorite cloud storage provider, such as Dropbox, Drive, Box, and OneDrive. This means that you have a total control over your data and can export complex reports or your mileage log book whenever you need.

Fleet GPS Tracker – EverTrack

EverTrack was developed by CorvusGPS.com to help businesses manage their company fleet more effectively and efficiently. The app records the route your drivers take and stores it securely in the cloud. You can then manage the stored information from virtually any place with an internet connection.

EverTrack gives users a total control over most aspects of the tracking, allowing them to choose how accurate the location tracking should be and how often the app should contact GPS satellites to update the current location. For some, it will be preferable to increase battery life by decreasing the accuracy, and others will have it the other way around.

An integral part of the app is a mapping software that allows for accurate vehicle fleet tracking and team tracking. Drivers who ran into a problem while on the road can use the dedicated panic button to call for help.

TripLog – Mileage Log Tracker

TripLog is all about effective mileage tracking for everyone who needs to keep an eye on their gas expenses for personal or business purposes. Unlike most other apps on this list, TripLog is geared toward individual users and their personal needs.

The app is able to intelligently recognize when it should start tracking, thanks to TripLog’s proprietary MagicTrip technology that looks for speeds higher than 3 mph. The app can also autostart when plugged into power or connected to a Bluetooth device, such as your car radio or speakerphone.

Those who want to record as much technical information as possible can configure TripLog to read from OBD-II scan tools, record actual driving routes, save information relevant for commercial truck drivers. TripLog can also capture expense receipt photos and upload to the cloud, generate IRS compliant HTML and CSV tax return reports, and calculate fuel economy, among many other useful features.

Conclusion

The one limiting factor that influences all GPS car tracking apps for Android is the quality of the built-in GPS module in the smartphone. Older devices, in particular, are known for taking a very long time to lock on satellites, as well as being prone to losing GPS signal whenever there are obstacles in the way, such as buildings or trees. Fortunately, the situation has improved dramatically over the last few years, and some of the newest Android smartphones get a GPS signal almost instantaneously. Still, if you are buying an Android smartphone or tablet specifically to use it as a GPS car tracking device, it makes sense to spend some time reading online reviews to make sure that it comes with a good GPS module.

5 Best Email Apps for Android Smartphones

Hate them or love them, emails are one of the most used forms of communication, with over 205 billion emails sent every single day. Of course, most of them end up in the spam folder, but someone has to read those that don’t. That someone is you. And if you’re like us, you do most of your email reading and writing on your Android smartphone. The good news is that your device most likely already comes with an excellent email app pre-installed—Gmail from Google—and that alternatives are plentiful. In this article, we are going to cover top 5 best email apps for Android smartphones, including Gmail, to see what are their pros and cons.

Boxer

As a Webby Award Nominee for Best Mobile Productivity App 2015, Boxer is a worthy alternative to more established Android email clients. It supports Gmail, Exchange, Outlook, Yahoo, Hotmail, iCloud, Office 365, IMAP & POP3 mail accounts, integrates well with services like Dropbox and Box and Evernote, and it even comes with a built-in to-do list feature.

Using a wide variety of handy shortcuts, you can swipe to archive, trash, or block emails. And if that isn’t enough, there’s a total of 12 options for additional customization. There’s no need to type out every response—just select one from a long list of pre-configured messages and keep focused on your work.

Boxer is available in three versions: Boxer for Exchange, which adds exchange support via ActiveSync, Boxer Pro and Boxer Pro + Exchange. The Pro version comes with multiple account support, custom quick replies, and custom signature. The Pro + Exchange version than just throws in the extra Exchange support, because having four versions is apparently better than just two.

Gmail

Gmail the app started as a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google. The service launched in 2004 as an invitation-only beta release and opened its gates to the public on February 7, 2007. For its time, Gmail offered impressive storage capacity of 1 GB per user. In comparison, Hotmail, now Outlook, offered just around 5 MB of storage space. Now, Gmail gives all of its users 15GB of free storage.

Given that Gmail has more than 1 billion users, it’s no surprise that it was the first app on the Google Play Store to hit one billion installations on Android devices. Today, it enjoys a great rating of 4.3-stars from almost 2 million users, and the popularity of the app is only growing as its features are increasing.

The thing is, the current iteration of the Gmail app for Android can do much more than just grant you the access to your Gmail account. It supports non-Gmail addresses, such as Outlook.com, Yahoo Mail, or any other IMAP/POP email services. Adding additional email accounts to the Gmail app is painless, and new emails are displayed in a single unified inbox. You can mark emails as spam, archive them, sort them into separate folders, set your own vacation responder, mute threads that you don’t want to follow, and do a lot more useful things.

While it’s possible to use an Android device without a Google account, only a very small fraction of Android users do so. Chances are that you aren’t among them, and if that’s really the case, you already have a Gmail address and are ready to use the Gmail app. Unfortunately, your Gmail address likely doesn’t even remotely resemble your real name. After all, with more than 1 billion active users, most names and their various versions have been registered. That could be a bad news from the professional point-of-view, since the Gmail app works best when paired with a Gmail account. Other than that, Gmail is the go-to email client for Android smartphone and tablets, and it will probably remain so for a long time.

K-9 Mail

Many die-hard Android fans who are using the mobile operating system since its infancy are fond of the K-9 Mail app, as it’s one of the original alternative email clients on Android. The app is also popular among the open-source crowd, not least because it’s a completely community developed project. Everyone can chime in and contribute in a variety of ways. This communal effort has given us a great open-source e-mail client with search, IMAP email support, Exchange 2003/2007 (with WebDAV) support, multi-folder sync, flagging, filing, signatures, bcc-self, PGP, mail on SD, and other useful features.

The PGP support is probably the most interesting feature, considering the current climate surrounding personal privacy and security in the digital era. As described by security-in-a-box, a project of Tactical Technology Collective and Front Line Defenders, K-9 Mail integrates seamlessly with Android Privacy Guard, which is a free and open source application that lets you encrypt, decrypt and sign files, messages or emails using Public Key Encryption (like OpenPGP) or encrypt/decrypt files or messages with symmetric encryption, securing them with a password.

With your OpenPGP keys imported into APG, all you have to do to enable the email encryption is to tick the “encrypt” checkbox located under the recipient field. This is a must-have feature for journalists, people living in countries ruled by oppressive governments, and all those who are not fond of the idea of the government snooping on emails.

The downside is that K-9 Mail, like so many other open-source apps, lacks the fine degree of polish and cohesiveness that the modern user is now used to. But get over the initial hump and you’ll be rewarded with a full-featured Android email client that knows how to keep your personal communication private.

Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook traces its origin to an email service by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, who named it HoTMaiL. It was acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million and promptly renamed to Windows Live Hotmail, only to be replaced by Outlook.com in 2013. Outlook represents Microsoft’s answer to Gmail and the entire paradigm of sleek, web-based applications accompanied by equally capable mobile apps.

The Outlook app for Android supports Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and even old Hotmail accounts. Its key selling point is called Focused inbox. The purpose of this feature is to keep the important messages near the top of the screen to ensure that you won’t miss them.

Microsoft has made it very easy to access calendars and files right from the inbox, making on-the-go productivity more enjoyable. What’s more, Microsoft’s suite of apps is a very compelling alternative to products from Google, especially for people who are using Microsoft Windows and playing on Microsoft Xbox.

WeMail

The odd thing about most email clients is that these clients don’t correspond to the way we communicate with one another. When we communicate with our friends or online stores or business associates, we organize our conversations around topics and people. However, most email clients display emails as individual thoughts.

WeMail organizes email into a chat-like experience, promising to reduce your inbox size by more than 50 percent. This means that you no longer have to scroll down several pages just to find a response from yesterday only because you’ve also exchanged several dozen emails with two other people.

On top of that, WeMail features one of the fastest and most advanced email search functionalities, allowing you to instantly find what you are looking for. All your documents and photos can be accessed with a single tap and you don’t even have to type to compose an email—you can just dictate it to the app and WeMail will automatically convert it for you.

How to Save and Watch YouTube Videos Offline Where Reception Is Bad or to Save Data

With over 1,000,000,000 video views per day, YouTube is the king of online video sharing. Mobile YouTube users watch on average 40 minutes of video every day, and the number is only growing larger. But as smartphone and tablet manufacturers embrace high-resolution displays and content makers switch to 4k, not everyone has a mobile data plan that can support our modern viewing habits. And even with a fantastic, unlimited data plan, there are still many situations—subway rides to work, camping trips, remote parts of the country—where reception is bad.

As Android users, we face technical issues head on and always come up with clever solutions to pesky problems. The issue of the day is how to save videos for offline use and watch YouTube in places with a bad reception. This time, however, the most attractive solution doesn’t come from a clever third-party developer—it comes directly from Google.

YouTube Red

On its official website, YouTube Red is described as “a paid membership that gives you an enhanced, uninterrupted experience across YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube Gaming.” The service was launched on October 28, 2015, and is currently available to users in the United States, Australia, Mexico, and New Zealand. YouTube Red is actually a rebrand of Music Key, an ad-free music streaming service that launched in November 2014.

Google makes most of their mind-bogglingly large profit from advertisement, and ads on YouTube are a very big deal. They generate revenue not only for YouTube but, most importantly, for YouTube’s content creators, who are, after all, the backbone of the site. Unfortunately for Google, people really don’t like to be interrupted when they are about to watch their favorite show, and they don’t hesitate to use ad-blockers to improve their experience.

With YouTube Red, Google is giving viewers a way how they can give back to their favorite YouTube creators with a paid membership that helps the creators create next-level content and gives the subscribers a whole range of enticing features.

First and foremost, there’s the access to YouTube Red Originals, new exclusive shows from some of the most popular YouTube stars, including PewDiePie, Lilly Singh, and Rooster Teeth. In Scare PewDiePie, the famous game streamer is placed in live scenarios inspired by various horror games, and, for example, in Fight of the Living Dead, popular YouTube personalities are put in a realistic zombie apocalypse scenario.

If your subscription box is already overflowing with content and new shows are the last thing you want to hear about, you will be pleased to know that, with YouTube Red, you can enjoy all existing videos on YouTube or any YouTube app without ads. That includes pre-roll or mid-roll video ads, banner ads, search ads, homepage banner ads, and in-video text-overlay-ads.

What’s more, a subscription to YouTube Red enables you to save videos on your mobile device for your next trip out of town, and allows you to play videos in the background even with the screen off. The downloaded videos will remain available for up to 30 days.

With a YouTube Red subscription, you get an access to Google Play Music at no extra cost, allowing you to listen to ad-free music. The YouTube Music app has been enhanced with Audio Mode, a clever feature that turns off the video stream, allowing you to greatly decrease your data usage.

YouTube Red is currently priced at $10 per month. Given that Netflix costs $8 per month, Spotify $10, and Amazon Prime $8.25, the $10 price tag may seem to be quite high. The good news is that you can sign up for a free one-month trial, by going to YouTube’s Red landing page. Once you sign up for the service, you can cancel your subscription at any time.

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5 Best Social Apps to Make Friends and Meet People with Similar Interests

Nobody bats an eye at a newlywed couple who has met on the internet. After all, our real-world social circles are limited, and it takes a lot to find someone with whom one can imagine spending the entire life. But the relatively small number of people we meet on a daily basis also makes it difficult to make new friends and meet people with similar interests.

With our list of top 5 best social apps for your Android smartphone or tablet, you can easily find like-minded folks either in your local area or across the world. The next time your favorite band is in town and your spouse would rather stay home and watch Netflix, just fire up your social app of choice and find someone who would be thrilled to go there with you. You never know, perhaps that one evening will turn into a lifelong friendship.

Meetup

Meetup’s tagline, Do more, perfectly captures the spirit of this leading social app for Android. The app empowers its users to do more of what they love the most. Whether it’s geeking over the latest tech gadgets, trying out small diners and family-owned fast-food places hidden in back alleys, exploring the outdoors, working up the sweat in the gym or on a local bike trail, and countless other activities.

Meetup events are open to anyone, often bringing together a sizable group of strangers who all share a common goal—to have fun and make friends. Larger meetups are perfect for people who don’t feel comfortable in a more intimate setting. One can visit a meetup to check it out, casually chat to a few strangers, and decide whether to stay or leave and try again some other time.

Facebook Groups

Facebook has created a versatile place where groups of people can organize events and collaborate on projects. Even though many, often reluctantly, join Facebook Groups for school or work purposes, Groups can be used for just about anything, including meeting new people with similar interests and making friends.

Because Facebook Groups are closely connected with your Facebook account, you can easily promote your groups and invite other people you are acquainted with to join. You may be surprised by how many of your Facebook friends make for fantastic real friends.

MeetMe

Compared to Meetup and Facebook Groups, MeetMe is a much more hands-on social app. Instead of finding a group of people organized around a common activity or event, MeetMe allows you to instantly chat with those who share your interests and would like to do the same things as you.

The app lets you create a personalized profile page, where you can tell others about your likes and preferences, personality type, location, age, and gender. Using a variety of search filters, you can trim the huge database of more than 100 million users to a handful of best matches located near you.

From there, just say a few hellos and see with whom you click the most. The app lets you share pictures, send emojis, and discuss common interests—all you need to find new friends and people to go out with.

Nextdoor

We live in a strange world. On the one hand, it’s common to know exactly what a random person from the other side of the world thinks about the new trailer for the latest Star Wars movie, but, on the other hand, we often don’t even know our next-door neighbors on a first name basis.

Nextdoor gives you everything you need to change that. This private social media network connects people living in the same community and provides them with a convenient means of communication. Multiple households can together collaborate and discuss important topics, organize a neighborhood crime watch, give one another tips and recommendations, ask for help, pool money together to purchase seldom used expensive tools and machinery, and, above all, finally learn more other members of the community.

Amino Apps

There are two types of geeks in this world: the first type knows how to build a PC from scratch and uses a mechanical keyboard; the second type knows by heart the names of obscure K-Pop groups and their members, owns an anime-themed pillow, and has an account on Amino, a large network of smaller communities that can be downloaded as individual apps from the Play Store.

Have you, for example, felt in love with the highly-acclaimed role-playing game Undertale and are dying to chat with other people who considered it to be an RPG masterpiece? Then just download the Undertale Amino app from the Play Store and join almost half a million fans, who share what they love about the game and together discover everything Undertale has to offer.

5 Best Android Translation App for Your Next Foreign Business or Vacation Travel

When traveling to foreign countries that don’t speak English, the language barrier is often the most troublesome problem that travelers have to face. But not everyone can hire a professional translator, and even fewer people need to. A modern Android smartphone loaded with a selection of translation apps is often more than enough to help you get around and communicate your ideas.

This list of top 5 best Android translation apps for your next business travel or vacation contains a wide selection of apps, each offering a slightly different way how you can make sense of a foreign language.

Google Translate

Google Translate is the most popular translation app on Android. Many Android smartphone and tablets come with the app already pre-installed, and very few users decide to uninstall it. Why? Because it can accurately translate between 103 languages by typing, 37 by taking a picture of text, 52 without internet connection, and 32 using two-way instant speech translation.

Being the master of big data that Google is, the translation engine that powers Google Translate relies on a wealth of information from real users of the app to constantly improve the accuracy, delivering very natural translations that sound as if they came from a mouth of a native speaker.

With every translation, you have the options to save it to your personal phrasebook or use the app’s built-in text-to-speech feature to say it out loud, so you don’t have to embarrass yourself with your Japanese pronunciation. Speaking of Japanese, Google Translate supports handwriting for 93 languages, allowing you to make, at least, some sense of that puzzling restaurant menu.

With the latest update, Google is “putting Neural Machine Translation into action with a total of eight languages to and from English and French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish,” explains Barak Turovsky, product manager and user experience leader for Google Translate, in his blog post. “With this update, Google Translate is improving more in a single leap than we’ve seen in the last ten years combined.” The company eventually wants to roll Neural Machine Translation out to all 103 languages, which will be a huge event for all travelers and high-school students.

iTranslate

Alongside Microsoft’s translation app, iTranslate is the best alternative to Google Translate there is. Where Google Translate employs sophisticated Neural Machine Translation to deliver accurate results, iTranslate takes a more straightforward approach: The app lets you select from a list of options for each word, giving you a dictionary definition for every option. This works great if you already have some knowledge of the language you are trying to translate but need some help to fill in a few gaps here and there.

The list of supported languages has over 90 entries with natural voice output and voice input for each of them. Depending on your pronunciation, the voice input feature can save you a lot of time and spare you the need to type everything out word-by-word. With the voice output, you can choose a male or female voice and even control the speech rate.

iTranslate is available for free on the Play Store. Keep in mind that the free version of the app is supported by ads and has an annoying translation limitation. To get rid of both, you can purchase iTranslate Premium as an in-app purchase.

Takeasy Translator/Interpreter

Even the most sophisticated machine translation apps, such as Google Translate or iTranslate, have their limitations. Those are mostly easy to glance over, but there are situations in life when accuracy is paramount. You may lose your wallet in a foreign country and need to communicate with the local police, rent an apartment for a few months, or handle an urgent business problem with a foreign customer. Situations like these demand a professional translator. But how do you find a good one on time and without breaking the bank? The answer is Takeasy, the world’s first remote, real-time live human translation service provider.

To use the app, you must first choose the language you want to translate from and the language you want to translate to. Then, the app will match you with a suitable translator, allowing you to solve your language problems anytime and anywhere. If you are really happy with the translator, you can favorite him or her for easy access.

The app supports audio, picture, and text translation for Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. More languages will be added later. The app originally supported 27 languages, but the developer has decided to reduce the quantity in favor of more features, such as the outbound life assistant and private teacher.

Reverso Translation Dictionary

Collocations, sequences of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance, are a real pain for non-native speakers. Is it “heavy rain” or “strong rain” or “big rain?” We as native speakers know intuitively, but those who have learned the language later in life are left guessing. Reverso Translation Dictionary contains a huge database of real-life examples and a powerful linguistic search engine, allowing you to look up how words and phrases are used in official documents, movie dialogs, newspaper articles, product descriptions, or on websites.

As such, Reverso is perfect for professionals who often use highly technical terms and professional jargon. The app contains specialized terminology for business, finance, medicine, and a variety of technical fields. The included phrasebook allows you to save frequently used words for later use, and the flashcard feature helps you memorize them more efficiently.

As of now, Reverso supports instant translation in 11 languages (Spanish, French, Italian, English, Portuguese, German, Polish, Dutch, Arabic, Russian and Hebrew), but more are expected to come in a near future.

Forvo Pronunciation Guide

Knowing what to say is just one half of the equation; you have to also know how to say it. The previous apps on this list can help you with the former part of the equation, while Forvo is here to help you with the latter. With its huge database of more than 3.5 million pronunciations from native speakers of over 325 languages, Forvo is the only pronunciation app you will ever need.

It allows you to instantly compare different accents for the same word in the same language, listen to male or female voices, keep track of your recently listened to pronunciations, and, most important, record pronunciations in your native language and help other learners.

5 Best Google Play Store Alternatives for Downloading Android Apps

Android might be synonymous with Google’s large ecosystem of apps and multimedia content that’s available through Google Play Store, but that doesn’t mean that alternative ways how to download Android app don’t exist. In fact, there’s a whole bunch of them, each offering a slightly different reason why you should give it a go.

Amazon App Store (Amazon Underground)

Before we go any further with our description of Amazon App Store, we want to correct one common misconception: Amazon Underground is NOT limited to Amazon Kindle tablets. It’s just how Amazon distinguishes between the Amazon app you can download from the Play Store and the one you can sideload from their website. Apart from the difference in the installation method, both apps are the same.

Amazon launched their App Store in 2011 with about 3,800 apps and games. It didn’t take a long time for the popularity of the digital marketplace to skyrocket, and it now features nearly 340,000 apps. The main attraction of this alternative to Google Play Store is Amazon’s “Free App of the Day” feature. Those who diligently check back every day can download many popular titles without paying a single dollar. The current roster of free titles (including all downloadable content) includes Goat Simulator, Office Suite Pro 8, Monument Valley, DuckTales: Remastered, Looney Tunes Dash!, Frozen Free Fall, Angry Birds Slingshot Stella, and many, many others.

GetJar

GetJar is an independent mobile phone app store based in Lithuania. The service started in 2004 as an app beta testing platform for developers. After a short while, they started making their apps publicly available, which attracted the attention of Android enthusiasts. A major shift happened in 2014, after a Chinese company Sungy Mobile acquired GetJar.

Sungy took the GetJar business model to the next level, and the service now provides almost 1 million mobile apps across all major mobile platforms, of course, including Android. On a good day, the download number of downloads through the app exceeds 3 million.

GetJar proudly presents itself as the biggest open-source app store for Android, and their wide selection of apps, which are sorted into appropriate categories is mind-blowing. Some of these categories include games, social & messaging, productivity, entertainment, education, finance, food, health, news, personalization, shopping, and many others.

Uptodown

Uptodown is a great Play Store alternative for people for enjoy using Android smartphones but not so much Google’s app store, Google Play Store. Uptodown for Android operating systems gives you a complete access to all Android apps, including their latest updates, from one convenient place that doesn’t require you to have a Google account.

The app highlights which payment model a particular app or game is using, allowing you to avoid those that give you just a small glimpse of what they are capable of and then demand money for just about any extra feature. Another fantastic feature of Uptodown is the ability to roll back to an older version of any app or game. If an update causes more harm than good, you can go back a version or two and wait until the developers sort everything out. Last but not least, Uptodown uses what they call “neutral screenshots” to give their users an accurate representation of what they are about to download and install on their devices, instead of often highly-alternated screenshots which barely resemble how the real app or game looks in action.

F-Droid

As describe on its official website, “an F-Droid is an installable catalog of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. The client makes it easy to browse, install, and keep track of updates on your device.”

Just like any third-party app, you can download and install F-Droid on your Android device by downloading the official .apk file and manually installing it. Just make sure you have third-party app sources enabled in the settings menu. Once you are inside the app, you can browse through its content using category and popularity filters.

The kind of Android app that you find on F-Droid are usually, but not always, smaller, independent projects and low-level utilities created to make your Android smartphone as useful as possible. Their user interfaces are not thalways as polished as you might be used to from the venture-backed apps found on the Play Store, but they are, nonetheless, worth a try.

Samsung GALAXY Apps

It could be argued that Samsung has always been striving to create their own branch of Android. Their smartphones sport a customized user interfaces, they produce their own range of smart accessories, and they have their own app store, which aggregates all “apps designed for your Galaxy or Gear in one place.”

The kind of app you find on Samsung Galaxy Apps have been specially picked out for your Galaxy or Gear devices and sorted out into different categories. The Best Picks category contains a collection of some of the best Samsung-ready apps out there, the For Galaxy category aggregates all apps optimized for Galaxy devices, and the Gear category features apps tailored specifically for your Gear accessories.

Samsung GALAXY Apps app store regularly hosts special promotions, offering popular games for free or for a substantially discounted price.

5 Best Cloud Storage Android App for Photo and Video Backup

The cloud is no longer the somewhat empty buzzword it used to be during its infancy. Cloud is now used as the backbone of large corporations, state governments, and digital lives of individual users, who use it to store data, manage their finance, and do countless other useful things.

Get Unlimited Photo Storage With Amazon Prime

Among them is also the option to use cloud storage as a reliable and simple way how to backup photos and videos from your Android device. All you need is a cloud storage Android app and a user account with the particular cloud storage provider. While there are many cloud storage apps out there, these 5 stand out as the best cloud storage apps for Android for photo and video backup.

Why You Should Store Your Photos and Video in the Cloud

If you are still backing up your photos and videos the old fashion way – by connecting your device via USB to your computer and manually transferring the files – you are placing yourself at risk of data loss. You never know when your memory card or built-in storage space might become corrupted, and when it happens, it’s often too late to do anything about it.

Not only that, but having to sit in front of a computer and manually transfer the pictures and videos you want to backup takes a lot of time. Modern cloud storage Android apps for photo and video backup can do a much better job much quicker. Here are just some of their main advantages:

Simplicity: using cloud storage apps for photo and video backup usually requires just two steps: first you need to create an account with the provider, and then you need to activate the cloud backup feature. From there, the app will automatically monitor your device and look for any new pictures and videos. It will then upload them to the cloud, which can happen either only when you are on Wi-Fi or whenever you have any internet connection at all, depending on your configuration.
Reliability: storing your photos and videos in the cloud is much safer than just keeping them on your hard disk or, even worse, not backing them up at all. Cloud storage providers, such as Amazon, Flickr, and Dropbox, have huge data centers with extremely reliable data loss protection measures in place. Chances that you lose your data from the cloud are very close to zero.
Security: thousands of new types of malware are released every single day. You as an end user can only hope that your antivirus will be updated quickly enough to keep you secure. Cloud storage providers, on the other hand, have entire teams of security professionals dedicated to keeping your files secure.
Sharing: with your files stored in the cloud, you can share them with your friends and family members with a single mouse click or tap on the screen. Compare this to the standard way of opening your email, searching for the photo on your hard disk, selecting it, and, finally, sending the email with the photo included as an attachment.
Convenience: by having your photos and videos in the cloud, you can access them from any place with an internet connection. You will never say, “I wish I had taken it with me,” ever again.

1) Amazon Cloud Drive

The Amazon Cloud Drive app is a gateway into Amazon Drive, an unlimited secure storage from Amazon that costs just $11.99 per year and additionally includes 5 GB for videos and files. If that doesn’t sound like a good enough deal, you can choose the “Unlimited Everything” plan for $59.99 per year. The best part about Amazon Cloud Drive is that Amazon Prime members get unlimited storage for photos!

The app itself is very intuitive, allowing you to preview photos, documents, spreadsheets and presentations; play videos and music stored on Amazon Drive; upload photos, videos and files from your smartphone, create and edit text files; or share your files as links and attachments through email, text message and other apps, according to the official description on the Play Store.

Get Unlimited Photo Storage With Amazon Prime

It has so far earned a rating of 4.4 stars from more than 10,000 users who have left their feedback. Users praise how effortless it is to use the app and how it doesn’t get in their way when they use their devices for other purposes.

2) Flickr

Flickr is loved by photographers from all around the world, and their Android app and 1000 GB cloud storage solution make a very compelling argument as to why anyone with a smartphone camera should consider giving their services a try.

To use it, you will need to have a Yahoo account, which you can create for free by clicking on this link. With your newly created account, you can download the app and activate the automatic cloud backup feature. What’s great about the Flickr app is that it goes beyond a simple photo and video storage. The app lets you organize your pictures based on various criteria, tweak how they look by adding creative filters, and it also gives you access to Flickr’s huge community of enthusiastic users, who are always happy to answer any questions.

3) Dropbox

Dropbox is often considered to be the pioneer of personal cloud backup services. Their mature solution is available on all major platforms and supported by countless third-party applications and web services. Its biggest limitation is that it comes with just 2 GB of free storage space. You can get more space by inviting others to use the service or by taking advantage of various promotional deals, but it’s safe to say that you will inevitably run out of storage space, which may never happen with Amazon or Flickr.

But aside from the space, the app itself is a pleasure to use. The user interface is polished, photos and videos are automatically backed up as soon as they are saved on your device, and you can even edit Microsoft Office files from your phone or tablet.

4) Google Drive

Google and their vast range of cloud services probably don’t require any introduction. Google Drive is their online storage service, which gives users 15 GB of free space and allows them to purchase extra 100 GB for $1.99 per month or 1 TB for $9.99 a month.

Just like other cloud storage apps on this list, Google Drive safely stores your photos and videos in the cloud, allowing you to access them from anywhere. The app is tightly integrated with Google Docs, Google’s suite of office apps, and has a very handy feature for turning paper documents into digital scans using your device camera.

5) Microsoft OneDrive

To compete with Google and other big players in the cloud hosting game, Microsoft has come up with an excellent online storage solution, called OneDrive, with 5 GB of free space and 1 TB of storage for customers who purchase their OneDrive + Office 365 plans, which start at $6.99/month.

The OneDrive app helps users be more productive by giving them an easy access to Office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Employees can sign in to OneDrive for Business and continue working even while on the go. Important files can be accessed even when offline, and, unless the feature is turned off, all pictures are automatically tagged with appropriate information for effortless organization.

Conclusion

If you are unsure which app is right for you, consider whether you are already using any other products from the company behind it. Gmail users can easily try out Google Drive, people shopping on Amazon and reading on the Kindle have already one foot in Amazon’s ecosystem, and just about everyone nowadays has an account with Microsoft.

Get Unlimited Photo Storage With Amazon Prime

But don’t think that you need to limit yourself to a single app, either. Unlike with antivirus software, two or more cloud backup apps can happily live next to one another without causing any issues. So don’t be afraid to experiment to see which app suits you the most. After all, you can always uninstall it.

Best Astronomy Stargazing App for Android to Explore the Sky

Our smartphones, in combination with augmented reality, offer a fantastic way how to explore the sky and discover many wonders of the universe. Most astronomy and stargazing applications work on a similar principle: they determine your location using the GPS sensor and electronic compass in your device, allowing you to simply point the Android smartphone or tablet in any direction and see things that would otherwise become visible only with highly expensive, professional equipment.

Sky Map

Some of you may know Sky Map as Google Sky Map, which was the original name of this Android implementation of Google Sky, an online sky and outer space viewer. The first version of the application was released on January 20, 2012, and released under the Apache 2.0 open source license.

The team behind the application wanted to make it easy for users to learn about the night sky. Sky Map is available for free in the Google Play store and doesn’t come with any in-app purchases. It was already downloaded by well over 10,000,000 people, who gave it the average rating of 4.5 stars.

The first thing you need to do after you install the app is calibrate the compass in your phone. Just follow the 3-step instructions displayed on the screen and you will be good-to-go in just a few seconds. After that, you can simply point your device anywhere you want to see what’s in the sky. Using the icons on the left, you can filter various types of celestial bodies to easily discover what you are looking for. You can also search for a particular planet or star, which will result in a large arrow popping up on the screen, navigating you toward the object.

A good news for owners of older smartphones and tablets that don’t come with a built-in compass is the fact that you can switch into manual mode and navigate by swiping your fingers across the screen. It may not be as convenient as the augmented reality mode, but it works, and that’s all that matters.

NASA App

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is well-known for their ongoing effort to help the public learn about the universe. Their Android application is jam-packed with the latest images, videos, mission information, news, feature stories, tweets, and even a convenient access to NASA TV.

The application uses a simple layout that consists of 9 tiles placed in a grid on the main screen of the application. Each tile represents a certain category of content, making it very easy to navigate to what interest’s you the most. When you find something that particularly catches your attention, you can share it with friends on social media with just a tap of a button or save it using the favorites feature. NASA knows that images of deep space make for wonderful backgrounds, so they allowed users to save them on their mobile devices.

If you keep an eye on all the latest space-related discoveries, you will be pleased to know that the app provides the latest launch information and countdown clocks. There is also a constantly updated list of upcoming ISS sighting opportunities, which is particularly handy if you pair NASA App with an augmented reality stargazing app, such as Sky Map or Star Chart, which is the next application on our list.

Star Chart

Star Chart is an augmented reality stargazing app for Android that provides a window into the universe. Just like Sky Map, it uses the device’s compass and GPS to pinpoint where the user is, and then shows the night sky as if the user was looking at it through a telescope. The application is now used by over 20 million people across the world – and for a good reason.

Compared to Sky Map, Star Chart offers basically the same experience but improves it in several key aspects. For starters, the compass calibration process is now completely seamless, sparing you the tedious process of repeatedly tilting your smartphone or tablet in different directions until you get it right. The augmentation itself is much smoother, and you really feel like the app fluidly responds to your every move as you look at the sky. Last but not least, the map of the night sky has been given a pretty noticeable visual overhaul. Constellations have beautiful pictures laid over them, so you really understand why early astronomers named them the way they did.

One very cool new feature is the ability to use voice control to explore the solar system just by saying commands like “Fly me to the Moon” or “Look at Andromeda”. These major celestial objects are then rendered in 3D, allowing you to explore them up close. Finally, you can shift up to 10,000 years forward or backward in time using the Time Shift feature.

The only thing you need to keep in mind is that the app comes with in-app purchases. They include the ability to track comets, meteor showers, satellites, and also the option to explore the extended solar system.

Stellarium Mobile Sky Map

Stellarium Mobile Sky Map is unique among all other applications on this list, because its history dates back all the way to 2001, when Fabien Chéreau, a French programmer, launched the PC version. The application has since then been ported to Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and, recently, also to mobile devices running Symbian, Maemo, Android, and iOS.

The application is described as a fully-featured planetarium for smartphones, and it’s easy to see why, when you consider that to boasts an astonishing catalog of over 600,000 stars displayed as a real time zoomable sky map. Some nebulae and galaxies even come with high-definition pictures. Major solar system planets and moons are rendered in 3D.

While Stellarium Mobile Sky Map doesn’t come with any in-app purchases, it’s not available for free. The application costs $2.49, which could deter some people from trying it out. We, however, believe that it’s worth the cost, and you can always just wait until it will be put on sale to get it for a fraction of the price.

Conclusion

With the four applications presented in this article, astronomy has never been so accessible. You can use them to introduce this fascinating natural science to children or as a way how to relax and learn something interesting at the same time. There may be other astronomy and stargazing apps for Android, but our selection covers just about anything you might possibly want from them.