Category: Operating Systems

Nov 10 2010

Phone Disk – Use Your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch as a Portable Drive

Phone Disk - Device Root Folder

Ever since the original iPhone came out, people have complained about Apple’s decision to prevent its use as a portable drive. Apple’s original iPods (excluding the iPod Touch) all supported the use of the device as an external drive which would show up in Windows or MacOS as another disk drive. There have been a …

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Nov 09 2010

Turn Your USB Drive into a Bootable Windows Medium

If you have a netbook or a more sizeable notebook that does not come with an optical drive you may find yourself in a quandary when attempting to reinstall Windows from scratch. When I bought my netbook it came with Windows XP which made me feel like crying until I worked out how to put Windows 7 …

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Oct 30 2010

Build Your Own Android Smartphone

I came across a website yesterday that allows you to customise your own Android smartphone in a very similar way to how you can customise a Dell laptop to your personal requirements. This is interesting as traditionally the only thing that you might be able to differentiate in a mobile device is the included amount …

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Oct 28 2010

Save Battery Life on Android – Turn Off Unused Radios

Leading on from yesterday’s article, sometimes you need to be a real power miser if you are nowhere near a power socket or you have forgotten your charger. I’m sure many of us have undergone the humiliating scrounge  around the office begging for a charger. Worse still, there are people that will simply help themselves …

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Oct 27 2010

Save Battery Life on Android – Check Background Services

Android Battery Statistics

Whilst Android had the one up on iOS for a while with its multitasking ability with user applications it did come with a few drawbacks one of which was an impact to battery life. This can occur when you leave applications running without quitting them or when an application has a background service component that …

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Oct 26 2010

Regain the Traditional Start Menu with Classic Shell

Settings Screen (Courtesy of Classic Shell)

Here’s a quick tip for those that may have made the move to Windows 7 before realising the changes to the start menu and the taskbar or otherwise had change thrust upon them without much choice (like your old computer having gone to heaven thus requiring the purchase of a new computer). One of the …

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Oct 24 2010

Free Your Android Device of the USB Cable with SwiFTP

Here’s a quick tip for those who are prone to losing, misplacing or hate using cables. There’s a great app called SwiFTP (a contracted form of “Swift FTP”) which basically install a compact FTP server on your phone.  Then you can connect to it using your favourite FTP client (such as FileZilla) and drag and …

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Oct 23 2010

How to Flash Unofficial Firmware on a Samsung Galaxy S

At least in Australia, Samsung Galaxy S owners have been let down by ongoing delays with regard to the release of the Android 2.2 update (AKA Froyo). This has been of particular frustration for users with Android 3.0 (AKA Gingerbread) due to be released by Google before the end of the year. However, there is …

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Oct 22 2010

WINAMP for Android Released!

From what I have gathered reading numerous forums and blogs, finding a good media player has been somewhat a quest for the holy grail for Android users. DoubleTwist has been popular as it can be paired up with client software on a regular computer for content management however it has not been without its problems …

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Oct 20 2010

Windows Phone 7 – Some (Not All) Devices Have Expandable Storage

There seems to have been a flurry of news in the last about the capability of Windows Phone 7 devices particularly with respect to whether or not additional memory can be added to the base memory already present. It seems that some devices make provision for additional storage through the use of microSD cards however …

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