Up until recently there have basically been two reasons to use the Amazon Appstore as an alternative to the official Google Play Store. First, the Play Store isn’t available for all phones and tablets. And second, even if you can use Google’s marketplace Amazon offers one free app each day and sometimes runs promotions which offer discounts on other apps. That was a big deal when… Read more »

Apollo is the new default music player for CyanogenMod 9. If you download and install the latest nightly release of the custom firmware for Android phones and tablets it should include Apollo. But you can also download and install the app manually on virtually any device running Android 4.0 or later. The music player features a very clean user interface that actually seems to match… Read more »

Android smartphone users looking for more control over their devices have been rooting their phones and using software like SetCPU to manually adjust the processor speed for years. But now that dual, and even quad-core phones are becoming the norm, there’s another way to speed up your phone or adjust performance to improve battery life: decide how many processor cores should run at a given… Read more »

The CyanogenMod team has released a second release candidate of CyanogenMod 7.2 for a few dozen smartphones and tablets. CyanogenMod 7.2 RC2 is a custom version of Google Android 2.3 Gingerbread with a number of tweaks and special features including customizable lock screen and notification areas and a theme manager. While much of the development team’s work is now on developing a custom version of Android 4.0… Read more »

Samsung has started to push out an Android 4.0 software update for the Samsung Galaxy Note. Right now the update only seems to be rolling out officially in Germany — but xda-developers forum member Faryaab has repackaged the update so that you can flash it manually on any Galaxy Note. Keep in mind, you’ll probably void your warranty if you use Faryaab’s method — and… Read more »

CyanogenMod is a popular Android-based operating system designed to run on dozens of phones and tablets. There aren’t any devices that ship with CyanogenMod. Instead you can unlock the bootloader on many Android devices and replace the default operating system with CyanogenMod. There are currently two main branches of the operating system. CyanogenMod 7 is based on Android 2.3 while CyanogenMod 9 is based on… Read more »

The HTC One X is one of the hottest smartphones around. It has a large 4.7 inch, 1280 x 720 pixel display, a fast processor, and a high capacity battery. It also uses the latest version of HTC’s Sense software, which blends in with Google Android 4.0′s default look and feel much better than earlier versions of Sense. Unfortunately while HTC offers official tools that… Read more »

The CyanogenMod team introduced a theme manager in CM7, allowing users to change the look and feel of Android 2.3 by installing custom themes. Now the theme manager has been updated for Android 4.0. It’s available in the latest nightly builds of CyanogenMod 9, which is still in pre-release testing. You can try out the theme manager by downloading a nightly build of CyangoenMod for… Read more »

HTC offers tools that let users unlock the bootloaders on many of its phones. This makes it possible to install custom recovery tools or custom ROMs or make other changes. Unlocking the bootloader will void your warranty, but if you’re cool with that, HTC is cool with letting you do it on about 45 handsets. Unfortunately the AT&T version of the HTC One X smartphone… Read more »

Just a few days after launching an official voice and video chat for Windows Phone, Skype has released new apps for Android and iOS. Skype 2.8 for Android is now available from the Google Play Store, while you can grab Skype 4.0 for iPhone or iPad from the App Store. The new Android app features support for video rotation on additional phones and tablets, instant… Read more »