A few days back, I blogged about my new Samsung Galaxy W and what I like and do not like about it. This time, I'll be sharing the first batch of Andoid apps I installed and recommend.

Useful Apps:

• GO Launcher EX – It's a launcher to change themes and such, I'm very particular about themes.
• GO SMS Pro – It's an app my friends suggested and use. It makes sending SMS more interesting. You can change themes too, and it also has a chat (requires internet access) but it slows down your phone, doesn't connect right most of the time, and sometimes hangs up your phone.
• App 2 SD – It helps you to move your apps to SD cards easier so your mobile doesn't run out of space.
• QR Droid – It lets you scan QR codes. I have a habit of scanning random QR codes when I see them. Sometimes, I find interesting stuff when I do.
• TweetDeck – Though there are tons of Twitter apps out there, I opt to go with the official one, with more functions that the default app.
• Facebook for Android – Also the official one.
• Tiny Flashlight + LED – It'll come in handy, promise.
• Viber – This is one of my favorites. This app is for exchanging stupid text messages with friends the VOIP way! This is way better than the always fucking up Skype app. I can chat with my friends from other countries using this, as long as I know their mobile numbers. The only thing I do not like about it is that you can't log off it for whatever reason. If you choose not to receive message from it, the only option you got is to 'Deactivate' your account.
• Dropbox – Yes, it has an app and you better check it out. Although, when you install this app and logged in to your account, it will sync everything.
• Green Power – It manages my WiFi to only connect at certain periods to sync emails and stuff and disconnect after. It also checks if the WiFi it's trying to connect to has good signal. If it's lower that the threshold you set, it disconnects. This way, you can save more battery.
• Camera 360 Ultimate – By far, the coolest free camera app I've encountered. It has lots of features like Retro, LOMO, Light Color B&W, etc. My favorite was the sketch. You can turn your image into a sketch!
• Camera ZOOM FX – It's the "best camera app for Android" according to a lot of sites. It has more features and options than Camera 360 Ultimate, though you need to download the other packs. It's great, but you have to pay for it. Although, it's really a money well spent kind of app.
• SoundHound – It's a really cool app that scans a song that you hear, say, along the way to work, and tells you the title and the artist with the lyrics of the song.

• Google Sky Map – It's a useless app, but I like it anyway.
• Galaxy Tarot – The thing I like about this app is that you can pick your cards yourself and that the card is the classic set. It reads and translate your spread using tarotpedia. Though, I suggest you to just get this one instead of the other Galaxy Tarot Pro which is a paid one. The only difference it has with the paid one is that you can freely change the background image to whatever image you like including live wallpapers, which doesn't really have anything to do with the reading itself.
• PocketDex Free – For some reason, this disappeared from the Market. But it's a complete PokeDex listing all the Pokemons, their complete stats including info like STR, DEF etc. and all the possible skills it can acquire.
• Androidify – It's an app made by Google to make your own Android avatar.

• TamaDroid - It's a tamagochi app. And not just any tamagochi app, the classic, pixelated one too!
• Field Runners HD – It's a game where you have to make different strategies to prevent soldiers, tanks, helicopters from going in your base.
• Monopoly – It's the classic game of Monopoly. This is my favorite childhood board game. You have to know this game, you have to! If you don't know this game, you're missing half your life. Like seriously.
• Uno – The same as above, it's the classic Uno game that you can bring wherever you go. Also one of my favorite games as a kid.
• Pacman – Of course, the classic game of Pacman. Maneuvering this apps controls is hard as shit, so I do not really play it. Except, perhaps those few days that I actually tried it and spend half a day figuring out how to best use it. Nonetheless, I need it in my apps drawer just for the vanity of having it.
• Pooyan – And my old time favorite FamiCom game, Pooyan. I actually play this every so often. There's also the Charlie Circus, but it's hard to catch the timing of Charlie's jumps. So I gave up on it after a while.

I was suppose to write this entry a day after I bought and played with it, but I got lazy and all. Anyway, last December 18th 2011, I bought myself a Samsung Galaxy W I8150 model smartphone. And I named him Amadeo, after my favorite fictional character, Armand from Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. Amadeo is Armand's name, given by Marius after he took him in and turned him into a vampire.

Amadeo is my New Year's gift for myself for doing my best for the past year. To be perfectly honest, it's been hard. I'm really trying my best to cope up with a lot of things. Thank you for supportive friends even though I go bipolar on them most of the time with random extreme depression and exteme anger streaks.

Of course, pictures!

The entire package is really small. It contains a the phone itself, a manual, a USB PC connector, and the headset.

Upon full charge, I started playing around with it. I've notice a few things here and there and I'll probably notice more as time goes, but here's what I think about my new phone:

On a positive note:

• One thing I love about this phone is the sync feature. I think this comes in with the OS, however. Whenever I add new contacts, it auto syncs itself to my Google contacts. Another thing is that I do not need to download apps directly from my phone. I can just click "Install" from the Market and it downloads itself to the phone.
• Second is the threaded SMS. It's so much easier to read back on conversation.
• Third is the email. I wanted something with the same feature as the email application I had in my old Nokia N95, and I'm so glad smartphones have them, and it syncs with my Google mail too!
• The same goes with the calendar.
• Another thing I love is the screen lock pattern where I can choose any patterns I want.
• One of my most loved feature is that it rotates horizontally when you tilt it. My old Nokia N95 doesn't do this.
• I also like the QWERTY keypad, but it's hard to use. Luckily, you can change the keypad to the usual number-keypad like that of the older phones.
• The default alarm clock is also interesting! I can set different times for each different day of the week!
• The Google Maps helps me a lot, especially the me who has no sense of direction. But not as bad as Hibiki Ryoga.
• Oh and the option to block people/contacts! Thank Android for this! OMG! I have a few cases of persistent unwanted calls from random people I do not know, so I've always wanted this feature in my phone. Back when I was using my Nokia N95, I was even tempted to purchase the tool you install in Symbian just for that purpose.
• The best part of it is that you get to play around with tons of apps in the Market, and these apps are handy most of the time.

Negative stuff:

• As every smartphone is, the battery drains easily. I'm always running low on battery.
• I'm not sure if it's just me, but it hangs up every now and then.
• The  earpiece is VERY low. I can hear calls clearly when I'm indoors but when, for example I'm on a mall or a bus station, it's very hard to hear the person I'm talking to.
• I'm always use up 80%-90 of my phone memory, even when I've closed all running apps and cleared the memory.
• I can't uninstall unwanted/useless pre-installed apps! D:

I'll try to play around more with it and probably root it after a few more month, just for seeing the difference between a rooted phone and not. I heard it's faster when you root it.

Since a lot of people are asking me on how I did this, I thought of writing this easy to follow tutorial on how I managed to change my Pidgin theme in Windows.

I tried this both at Windows XP (work PC) and Windows 7 (personal laptop) OS and it works just fine.

Read the rest of this entry »

For quite some time now, I've been looking for a WordPress to Blogger importer. But just yesterday, I finally stumbled into one while I was looking for Blogger themes.

I've actually tested this first before I'm sharing it to everyone and seems to be working just fine (at least, on my end). The only thing there, is that it doesn't seem to convert the pages. It only converts the entries and the comments in each entry, but the pages are nowhere to be found.

If you still feel like trying it, and pages doesn't really matter that much to you because you can re-create them anyway, go and try the awesome script!

(Click the image above to go there)

There's a step by step instruction on the page itself so you wouldn't get lost on what to do.

My friend Enob-x told me to try the new Google Chrome web browser earlier this afternoon. Here's a screenie:

It's a pretty cool browser. I like that fact that it captures screenshots of the sites you visited and you get to see them when you first opened the broswer. That aside, it looks simple and neat too. And Javascript and Flash files runs okay there too. I just hope this one wont turn out to be like IE who messes up CSS and you need to use hacks and stuffs. If taht would be the case, it would be another pain and for those people with my type of job.

I still like Firefox the best though, because it has tons plugins that makes my life easier.

PS: I tested all my sites there too, and it looks fine.