One of the most annoying things about using a computer to read data on your Android phone or tablet’s SD card is that in order to mount the card on your computer you have to unmount it from your mobile device. In other words, you can’t copy music, movies, or photos to your phone using a USB cable without temporarily losing the ability to access those apps on your phone or tablet — or to run any apps that happen to be installed on the SD card.

Now there’s a solution that lets you dual mount your SD card so your computer and mobile device can read it at the same time. The app is cleverly called Dual Mount SD Widget, and it simply allows you to place a widget on your home screen which you can tap to dual mount your memory card. You can also go into the settings and tell the app to automatically mount your SD card whenever a USB cable is plugged in and enable an option to rescan the SD card after you unmount so that your phone or tablet will be able to access any media you’ve added.

There’s only one catch: The app requires root access. If you haven’t rooted your device, you won’t be able to use the widget.

Dual Mount SD Widget is available from the Android Market for 99 cents.

via Android Police

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Need to clean up some storage space on your Android phone? You might want to think about moving some apps from main memory to your storage card. If you’re running Android 2.2 and up, many apps include an option that lets you move them manually to the storage card — but other apps do not. For instance, Adobe Flash Player 10.2 insists on hanging out in your primary storage area — even though it takes up about 12MB of disk space.

There are a number of apps that let you move stubborn programs like Flash Player 10.2 to the SD card, but most of them require root access. But it turns out you don’t need to root your phone to move Flash Player and other apps to your SD card. You just need to download the Andorid SDK on your computer and run a simple command.

Here’s how it works:

1. Download the latest Android Software Developer Kit for your phone. The SDK is available for Windows, OS X, or Linux.
2. Install or unzip the SDK on your computer.
3. Open a command terminal and navigate to the Tools folder in the SDK directory (If you’re using Windows, just click the Start Menu, select “run,” and type “cmd” (without the quotes) and hit enter to open a terminal window).
4. Make sure “USB debugging” is turned on in your phone’s settings.
5. Connect your phone to your computer via a USB cable.
6. In the terminal window on your computer type “adb shell pm setInstallLocation 2″ (without quotes).

That’s it. Now you can go into the application menu on your phone and select apps one by one and manually move them to your SD card. Also, by default most apps that you install from now on will be installed to the SD card automatically.

You can restore the original settings by typing “adb shell pm setInstallLocation 2″ into the same terminal window.

Note that not all apps can be moved. System tools like the Android Market or Google Maps, for instance, are going to stay in your main storage. This trick won’t work with devices running Android 2.1 or earlier versions of the operating system.

There are also some apps that you probably don’t want to move to your SD card. Home Screen widgets for instance, or other apps that load when you boot your phone are probably left in your primary storage.

via reddit and Luis Rei

Update: There’s also a way to move apps to your SD card without root access — but you’ll need to install the Android SDK on your computer first.

Google Android 2.2 and up allows you to move some application data to an SD card to free up room on your phone’s main disk. But this only works if developers specifically enable the feature when coding their apps, and not all of the data will be copied to your SD card. Some remains on your phone’s disk, which means that the more apps you install the less free space you have.There’s a new tool called Link2SD that makes it easy for Android users with root privileges on their phone to move almost any app to the SD card. More on that in a moment.

First, if you don’t want to root your phone but are simply looking for a quick and easy way to find out which apps on your phone can already be moved to the SD card, I highly recommend a free app called Advanced SD Card Manager. All you have to do is run the app and wait for it to scan your apps. You’ll get a list of apps which you can move by checking the boxes next to their names and selecting “Move to SDCard.”

But if you want to go a bit further and move apps that don’t officially support SD card installation, you have to root your device. If you’re cool with that, there are a few tools that will let you move nearly any app at all to your SD card. Read the rest of this entry »

Skyfire has released version 3.0.1 of its popular web browser for Google Android. As you might suspect from a point release, there aren’t a ton of huge differences between Skyfire 3.0 and Skyfire 3.0.1, but there are a few new features that should make the Skyfire experience a bit better — especially for users running Android 2.2 and up.

Scan to download

For one thing, you can now move the app to your SD card, freeing up several megabytes of storage on your phone. This feature isn’t supported on Android 2.1 and earlier. Another Froyo-only feature is support for file uploads from within the browser.

All users should also benefit from the other two updates: Crash reporting capabilities and the ability to continue app downloads in the background and receive system tray notifications when they’re complete.

Skyfire 3.0.1 for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market.

Webkey is a free app that lets you control your Android phone from a web browser. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You an also view detailed information from your call log, export your contact list as a plain text file, or use a file browser to access your SD card.

The only catch? Webkey requires root access, so you’ll want to use a tool like Unrevoked, SuperOneClick, or Universal Androot to root your phone before you can use the app.

Scan to download

Once installed, just open the Webkey app on your phone and click the “Start Service” button to begin. The app will show you a URL to enter into your desktop web browser as well as a username and password (you can edit user accounts using the web interface).

The phone screen shows you a live image of your Android device. If you press a button or perform another action on your phone, the image on the screen will update. You can also drag your mouse across the screen in the web browser to make changes on your Android phone, or hit the Home, Back, or other buttons in the web browser.

This is a great way to take screenshots, or just enter large amounts of text on your phone if you’re too lazy to use the tiny keyboard on your phone.

The sdcard tab is also pretty awesome. It presents you with a file browser that you can use to view all of the files on your storage card. There’s even a details window that shows previews of image files and detailed information about other file types.

You can right-click on any file to download it to your computer from your phone, or copy, move, delete, or rename a file. You can also use the “Open with” command to open files on your desktop without putting your phone into USB mass storage mode first.

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First the good news: Unlike certain smartphone platforms on the market, Windows Phone 7 will allow users to store data on SD cards, not just built-in storage space.

Now the bad news: You won’t easily be able to remove and replace that SD card.

That’s because Microsoft says Windows Phone devices will have special SD cards that offer high performance — and which are recognized by the phone as internal storage. Say your phone comes with 8GB of flash storage and a 8GB SD card. Basically the device will think there’s 16GB of internal storage. If you remove the SD card it might not be readable in other devices — and if you try to insert a new SD card your phone might not recognize it — or work properly, since important files and settings may have already been written to the original SD card.

Not all Windows Phone 7 devices will have SD cards, but if yours does have one it will likely be accessible in a slot beneath your battery. Microsoft just suggests you never actually pop out that card.

via IntoMobile

One of the new features in Google Android 2.2 Froyo is the ability to store applications on an SD card, freeing up space on your phone’s main memory. Developers need to enable this feature in their apps, so not every app available can be stored on an SD card, but I’ve already freed up plenty of storage space on my Nexus One by moving a handful of apps to my 8GB microSD card.

So I was pretty excited to learn that Barnes & Noble had released a new version of the Nook eBook reader for Android. When I first checked out the Nook app a few weeks ago, I was pretty impressed with its features, but underwhelmed by the fact that it took up more than 17MB of storage space — making it by far the largest app on my phone. I quickly uninstalled it.

Today I tried downloading the latest version of the Nook app and then I moved it to my SD card. You can see the results above. It still takes up more storage space than any other app on my device — and that’s main storage. When I uninstalled the Nook app, my phone storage available space jumped from about 28MB to 40MB.

In other words, moving an app to your SD card doesn’t actually move all of the files to your SD card. Some files will be left behind, and in the case of the Nook app, they still take up an awful lot of space. If you have a phone with a huge amount of internal storage space, or if you only plan to install a few apps, this might not be a problem. But with the Amazon Kindle app using less than 4MB and the Borders app taking up less than 1MB, it seems strange that Barnes & Noble’s eBook reader takes up so much space.

On the other hand, the latest version for the Kindel app also adds a few other features such a new search function in the library, four new themes, and new screen settings. You can also copy unencrypted ePUB files from a computer to your device and open them in the Nook app.

Nook for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market.

via Gizmodo

For the last year and a half or so, Issue 1151 has been hanging out in the Android code page. What’s Issue 1151? A request to be able to install apps on a phone’s SD card instead of the built in storage. Since many Android phones have limited storage space, but can accept much larger SD cards, this would make it easy to install more apps, or larger apps. Right now, for instance, it’s tough to develop graphically intensive games for Android since there’s simply not enough room in a phone’s storage to hold all the necessary data.

But Google has finally updated the status of Issue 1151 from “assigned” to “future release.” In other words, the company plans to add the ability to install apps on storage cards in a future release — and plenty of folks are speculating that we’ll see the new feature in Android 2.2 which may be due out in another month or two.

via Android and Me