Apps in my Android Phone

    It has been almost an year I started "using" android on my Samsung Galaxy R  - i9103. Pretty decent phone with 4.3 inch SLCD, 1 GHz Dual core Tegra 2 processor and 1 Gig RAM

    I was on Stock Indian 2.3.5 Ginger Bread (GB)  and switched to Cyanogenmod 10 (CM10) with 4.1.2 Jelly Bean (JB) recently. I have been trying out many apps for different puposes and this post to list the ones I use regularly.

    Of course, a part of them are rooted apps I use to enjoy tweaking my phone for performance. Almost all are free and copy of paid apks can be found online easily.

Classified as

• Messaging
• Contacts
• Media
• Internet
• Location services
• Local information
• Communication
• Interface (Look and feel)
• Documents and Notes
• File management
• Tamil
• Travel
• Hacks
• App for Couples
• Finance
• Tools : control
• Tools: Automation
• Tools: Backup
• Tools:Misc

Messaging

 GO SMS Pro  for texting.Has many features like theme support, sms backup local or cloud ,  scheduling , private SMS etc. 

Does Whatsapp need a mention? 

Contacts   

I have more than 1300 contacts   Google contacts, my one stop contact management tool. 
We all have so much of junk contacts. Cleaning up and syncing contacts to a single place from all  sources like phone, gmail etc is a time consuming  process but worth. Never loose contacts after in lifetime. I shall make a separate post on this soon.

 Media 

MX player for video playback.It uses hardware acceleration based on the device. The User interface and touch gestures are pleasing. 
 

Winamp  for music. It was far better than default one on GB. Auto and manual Playlists, Lock screen widget and headset controlled Play/Pause/Next/Previous with a decent user interface.
    CM 10 has DSP manager equalizer with Apollo Music player which gives great music experience with a high bass I love. 

Instagram - Must have for smartphone photography buffs. So many filters and effects.

Ringdroid – Provides a easy and accurate  interface cut songs and set/save as ringtones 
   

Internet 

My data manager helps tracking data usage on mobile network according to the internet plan I dictate.It shows the data used/left on use with days remaining on the plan. Gives statistics on data trafic through various apps and activities.Pretty useful. 

 Seesmic - The most used app on my phone and my favorite twitter client. Its light weight and comfy. Gives maximum screen space and does not baffle with bright colours.It lacks push notifications and draft or scheduling of tweets. I use the official twitter app occasionally.

Google chrome and Dolphin browser interchangeably for browsing .Opera mini if I am stuck on a slow network.

utorrent to download torrents directly on mobile.

Tubemate to download youtube videos directly on mobile in various resolutions or even as MP3.It is not on Play store. 

    Mobile banking apps. Almost all the banks give mobile app access but with restricted transaction limits. I prefer logging into their websites in desktop mode from both browsers mentioned above.

Location  Services

Google Earth Not as good as PC. Root needed to enable US market in India.

FasterFix - Gets faster GPS fix by downloading prior auxillary data based on my location.

Google SkyMap - It you watch stars and constellations, then this the app for you

 GPS logger to have a memorable GPS coordinate log of places I visit or to trace a new path I travelled to a place. The log can be later imposed on Google Maps for better visualisation.

Indian caller info displays the caller information on screen live on an incoming/outgoing call.The information includes which network operator and state in case of mobile numbers and city name for land line numbers. ISD numbers too. 

 Google maps doesn't need a mention, I use the most on travelling. Directions, distance, offline caching etc. It rocks.

 Local Informationn

Bus routes – BMTC in Bangalore or MTC in Chennai have many apps in market for knowing bus routes between stops or Path of route numbers.

Justdial provides all local yellow pages information like its website.

Google Now is my favorite feature available from Android version 4.1. It gives awsome features of voice search and assistance, local information, personalised information cards etc. 

Communication 

Skype Not many phones have front camera for video chat. Mine has a 1.3MP. Skype calls in phone are more comfortable than on a Desktop/Laptop.
 

 Interface (Look and feel)

 Go launcher EX   I loved this simple and clean launcher over hefty Touchwiz by Samsung on GB. Now the default trebuchet launcher on CM10 seems sufficient. 

   Battery Solo widget - Displays numerical value of battery remaining as a widget on Home screen

Documents and Notes   

 Kindle by Amazon is my PDF reader.UI and the feel is good. 

 Scan to PDF - Take a snap and convert anything to PDF.

 Springpad is a nice app allows feature rich note taking with a synced web access   

 Google docs (Drive ) with 5GB online storage, offline storage and local edits helps accessing Google docs synced everywhere.

 Kingsoft Office is so for the top free office viewer and editor in the play store

File management

Undelete to recover deleted files in your android.Its a root app.

 Airdroid is interesting. Lets access the phone features for Messaging, Files etc in a  PC browser when the phone is connected over same wifi network.   

 Androzip to work with zip files

Dropbox and Google Drive for syncing files and documents on cloud and access anywhere.

ES File explorer and Root browser are my favs.

 AndFTP   Host a FTP server on your mobile for easy file access from phone on network.

Tamil 

Tamil unicode font - Needs Root. Needed to display Tamil font in phones which do not have default support.
  

 Tamilvisai  - I post a lot in Tamil on social networks.This app makes it easy with Phonetic english keyboard. Also supports direct tamil typing which I hardly use.

Travel

PNR status and train  info gives almost all train information including live status of a current running train. 

mBus allows mobile booking for RedBus, KSRTC and TNSTC.

Hacks

Market Enabler  is a root app which allows access of blocked apps in India by simulating required country's identity.

AdFree - Root app. Blocks all Ads in your mobile by changing the hosts file.

App for Couples

Of course I did not have a chance  to use this app. But as per the review, this app seems good.

Pair has private wall feature only between couples and other usual sharing features. Give a try

Finance

Splitwise   sharing costs with friends? This is the app with web sync. Billmonk does not have a mobile app.

Tools

Control

Team viewer  View and control your PC/Laptop from anywhere.

DroidVNC server allows viewing/controlling phone as such in a network connected PC browser on the same network.Root App. 
  

Automation

llama  is an amazing automation app which is location aware. It first learns your locations based on cell towers like home, office or anything you instruct. Then we dictate few tasks to perform when entering/leaving an area. It does automatically from there on. I use it to Toggle wifi on/off, change ringtone volumes based on my preference etc.

Tasker  is a true paid automation app.It automates almost everything based on rules we set. Few simple scenarios are when I plug in my earphones, the volume is reduced if its high and winamp is opened. Toggle Auto-sync feature automatically when I am on Mobile data to conserve battery.It can send automatic SMS to partner when you leave office and what not.Its a beast app. Learning curve is there. 

Backup 

App backup and restore helps in backup of applications as .apk files in case if some mishap happens to phone and you don't loose any application.

Titanium backup (TB) pro is the best. But rooted. It has multiple functionalities of which app backup with data like game achievements and saved states etc.One more notable fuctionality is it helps moving apps to external SD card if ou are running out of space on phone.Pro version support batch restore. Restoring a TB app on a different android version or ROM may throw up issues.

Call log Backup - Backup all call logs  on SD card

SMS Backup - Backup all SMS on SD card 
 

Misc.
   

Flashlight will lets using the flash only without getting into any camera app. Direct and Useful.CM10 has a "Torch" feature on the Notification drawer for easy access. 
 

Android lost helps tracking lost phone.It works and I have heard real stories. 

I shall try to update the list in a regular basis. Comment with other apps you enjoy.

  

NEET PG 2012 registration and the related Chaos

               


For any one who is not aware what this NEET PG means is its a nation wide PG entrance exam in India for Medicos introduced in 2012 and there had been some chaos related to its registration, on which on share my views here.


Being a life deciding factor for medicos I could see a lot of frustration in this front. I too have  registered NEET for my medico friends. It is a concern and I lack knowledge to comment on the time of notice for the exam or quota or syllabi as I am a non - medico by profession.

But I wish to share what could be the other side of the story or a broader picture of this NEET scenario, a couple of things on technical aspects related to computers as a 3rd person. No offense meant nor I support to any one.Sorry for making it lengthy.


Why is it a Computer Based Test and not on papers as usual?

Being one of the important exam and a high population of more than lakh people writing every year which increases every time, the old paper-ledger methods don’t work. There needs more human effort and cost in transport of exam papers, where comes the SECURITY of exam data and the most important evaluation. Its highly error prone and time consuming at a large scale. 

Thus at any point of time moving to a computer based test (CBT) becomes default. A machine dedicated to evaluate your results would not  commit any error unless there is intended human manipulation. And if in case there is a question on security in a CBT, if designed properly, the exam question would be distributed to you only at the moment you sit for the exam from a digitally secure single centralised server where we have more control on handling questions .

Why is the exam conducted across multiple days and not just on a single day?

Setting up a CBT for a lakh people  is a huge cost and task again. It is not just booking a school or college in a city to make the candidates sit with paper in any class room. It needs secure computers networked to connect with the centralized exam question server.

You could see all the venues are engineering colleges this time. The reason is only engineering colleges have 200-300 computers in a single place  and possibly  good network infrastructure to handle the scenario. 

And it is not possible to book all colleges to make a lakh people sit on same day , monitor them. It needs a very great computer server facility like a IRCTC server or a Google server kind of setup to allow lakhs of people to a single computing machine. Its very high cost consuming process to set up for a single day exam in a year.

Thus a single day test is technically not possible at the moment and so the exam is spread across multiple days.



Reliabilty?

You might be aware that the NEET exam seems to be out sourced to a private organization called Prometric who is a world leader in online exam delivery. Prometric has a clear success story conducting almost all certification exams world wide and some more like USMLE, GRE etc. So possibly this exam should not have any question leakages or any mishap.




The Registration chaos 

The web server could only handle a specified number of users at a time, or else it would load itself and fail to work for none. If this kind of loading is done intentionally it is called as ‘denial of service attack’ in computer hacking terms. 


Though it has been declared as a first come first serve service , there seems to be incremental addition of seats based on registrations which was not announced. It is a mistake. And it is also a fact that they have given dates for online registration till November 12th so which they would not have  expected so much load on the registration server on the very first day itself.


The major cause for such happening is the candidates rush to register themselves to reserve a seat in a centre nearby. There had been 57000 registration requests to the server on a single time which ultimately would cause the system to fail and also its a fact that they have restored the server in an hour which is really a commendable job .


In case if they allow such a thing to happen as CBT in a single day, no doubt you will be writing exam the scenario of NEET registration, waiting for questions to appear to you where the pages will load for ever.


There had been more than 120 intended hacking attempts to bring down the registering server for NEET  itself it seems as per the twitter status of NBE. https://twitter.com/neetpg2012  and all are avoided and protected. 


Its such a secure system, if not, all the registration data would have been circulating in public web collected by hackers.

If  CBT happens on a same day , it would be the same case and  imagine all the question papers circulating public web. It would be awkward than anything. Such things wont happen as it seemed to be planned ahead for a good going. Hope for the best

More or less, major exams across the Globe are CBT and successfully go by this way. 

 Point of contacts :

After all machines are just human creations and they too have only limited  capacity to handle.
It seems due to over loading , the candidate help line IVRS number has also failed and had been restored back .
 
They have given a contact page to resolve issues  and I get to know that they are responding on calls from yesterday.  
Try them.
 http://www.nbe.gov.in/neetpg/contact_us.php 
and also a web mail link in the above page.

Seems they respond well on twitter too, giving live updates of their status and they have mentioned about uploading a practice test soon.
No Panic.
Keep cool and Wish you all the Best!