Power Manager

The power manager app is a nifty app that lets your conserve battery power. It shows battery life in percent, battery status and automatically lets you conserve power if you are running low. Nice...

Steels a steal!!

We took a look at Chomp SMS that changes the SMS interface of the G1. If there is an SMS program, can a browser be far behind?

Actually there are more than a few browsers available on the G1. Other than the default browser (with which I was neither impressed nor unhappy), we tried out the Steel. The Steel practically makes the slide-out keyboard redundant. On touching the address bar, the virtual keyboard pops up and you can enter the address of any site.

Once you click a link, rather, touch a link, the superbly intuitive thumb level controls take over. (See pic.) You can chose to either copy, share, open, enlarge or magnify depending on where you have "touched".

The copy, paste option particularly impressed me, because otherwise the copy, paste function takes a little while getting used to. So, right now, Steel is what we are using. Got to try out the Opera too sometime...

Software is king!

The most popular

First up, we decided to try some of the more popular apps. Those which exploit the full features of the phone or which bring out the whole point of the Android phone. Two of them qualified right away. Chomp SMS and Labyrinth.

If you ever end up buying the phone, Chomp SMS will probably be the first on your list. It converts whatever format the G1 had for SMS into a iPhone similar format. Cute, fast and works very well. It even recreates a virtual keyboard for you that vibrates for every alphabet you touch.In one word - unmissable! This is one app that has got a lot of publicity and we were keen to see how it worked and we were very happy with it. (Of course, it does not let you forward and therein lies a secret.)

Perhaps it was done this way. The original SMS format for the phone is, well, just about ok. Chomp SMS gives it a dash of panache. Perhaps it was done to prove a point. That software is king in this phone. Do whatever you like. (or as that popular Honda ditty used to go - Hate Something, Change Something.)

Whoever has heard of accelerometer has probably heard of Labyrinth as well. Now, having realized that a statement like that is an overstatement, let me retract that. The best way to tryout the accelerometer functionality is to try out Labyrinth. It involves moving a steel coloured ball through a maze of holes into a specific hole using your hands to tilt and shift the phone and hence the ball. When the ball falls into any hole, you get a tactile response (neatly done) that is almost spooky the first few times.

And while it is not easy, it is real fun. Steady, slow hands do the trick. And the first 8 levels are free, post which you can download the entire 800 levels. Freemium model? Absolutely.

More later...