HTC - are you coming or going?

So much news about HTC in this week, both positive and negative, shows the company is going through a very turbulent time. It's an absolute shame in my eyes because I could see them turning their fortunes around with the HTC One and at least attempting to compete with Samsung, not that it seems any other Android manufacturer is able to at the moment.

HTC First
Reports are coming in that the HTC First is not being launched here in the UK on the back of unfavourable reviews it has received in the US. Not surprising really, since there appeared to be a lot of excitement for a Facebook phone for a continued period of time but nothing ever came to fruition until a few months ago, at a time when people are leaving Facebook, rather than joining. It's a hit for HTC since they were the manufacturers and will miss out on the revenue of a phone which was widely publicised, but it seems everything about this phone was a mistake, including its price tag. The phone costs more than the Nexus 4 sim-free and that pretty much says it all. I don't know how much Facebook had a say in the various aspects of the phone, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are mostly to blame.

Mass exec exodus?
Maybe not quite an exodus, but several high profile executives of HTC have left over the past few weeks and it's a worrying sign for the company and its staff when something like this happens. Why would they leave unless they knew something we didn't is what I imaging some workers must be thinking, and who would blame them? Especially after one of their ex-employees went on Twitter encouraging his friends at HTC to leave and they would be much happier after doing so.

HTC One sells 5 million
An unnamed executive at HTC has gone on record to say that they have sold 5 million HTC Ones, a pretty impressive feat when in direct competition with the S4. Although Samsung may have sold 10 million S4's in under a month, it is still an achievement when you think about the relatively weak brand naming the One range has in comparison to the Galaxy range. Reviews for the One have been very favourable in comparison to the S4 and having both of the phones in my household, I for one (get it?) am much happier with the One than the S4.

Turbulent times indeed for HTC, let's hope their next quarter performance gives them some hope for the future otherwise who can stand in the way of the goliath that is Samsung at the moment? From a more selfish viewpoint, I want them to be around so they update the HTC One!

Mo

[App Review]Greenify - How Android should be

Since apps are a major part of Android, I thought I'd start doing reviews of apps that I use regularly. This is hopefully the first of many and I've based it on an app which does something I think Android itself should do, put apps to sleep until you need them. First things first, you'll need a rooted device to install Greenify.

What it does
In very simple terms, it does what iOS does to its apps. People regularly mention that iOS doesn't have proper multi-tasking and in a sense that's true. Once you leave an app on iOS, it takes that apps and put them in a suspended state until you open it up again. This app does something very similar, it takes any app you want and freezes it, until you need it. But instead of freezing it completely, it only disables the app from doing anything when you're not using it, as soon as you open it up it operates normally. It's only when it's sent to the background that the app is frozen.

Is it for me?
The developer describes what Greenify does as putting apps into hibernation, but claims to do it in quite a unique way so that you don't lose any functionality when you're using the app. Lets take the Facebook app as an example. I find no use for any of its background notifications and I only need it when I'm actually on it so for me, it's a perfect candidate to be hibernated. Once you put an app on the hibernate list, it won't be allowed to run any background processes at all and can't wake up your phone (gets rid of a lot of pesky wakelocks!) when its supposed to be asleep.

When the app first loads up, it scans to see which of your apps has woken up your device and how many times which makes it very easy to make a decision on which apps to hibernate. Personally, I picked all the games which woke my device up and some apps which I had no idea were waking my phone up!

Since installing, I have so fewer unexplained wakelocks and much happier knowing that if an app is running processes in the background, I won't necessarily have to uninstall the app, just Greenify it!

Conclusion
I've been waiting for an app such as this for years, finally it's here! I would make sure you bear in mind that if you hibernate an app, you will not get any notifications from that app so for something like the eBay app, you'll not get any activity updates. Apart from this, Greenify is an app worth having in your fight against background processes and I know I go on about battery life an awful lot (I promise I'll stop soon) but it will aide your battery life too.

Mo

Battery life - when did we settle for a day?

For the majority of us that own a smartphone, we have to charge it once a day. Why? When did we settle and think 'well we can live with this'? Gone are the days where we would plug in our phones once a week and not have to worry about them running out of juice at awkward moments. Some people might argue that the days where we only used our phones for calls and texting are over too, so it was a tradeoff in the end. I disagree.

Why?

The reason we have phones that last just one day with moderate use is because we want it all from our phones. We want them to look stylish, give us push notifications, have a glorious touchscreen and allow us to play games/update statuses and anything else you can think of. Now if we were prepared to let one of these slide, like the stylish factor, then maybe phone manufacturers could fit a larger capacity battery and our phones wouldn't have such a close relationship with the wall socket. Before the iPhone came about, we didn't care much for how phones looked, we cared a little but nowhere near as much as we do now. After their release, manufacturers had a wake up call that as good as their phones are, they need to look good too. Phones became as much a fashion accessory as they did a device for communication. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not a good thing either. It's just how our tastes as consumers have changed.

How to fix it?

Android phone manufacturers have started to implement battery saving software to help the longevity of a single charge. Samsung started a while back with its power saving function, Sony and HTC both have it implemented in their phones now too. The three flagship Android phones on the market now, the S4, the Xperia Z and the HTC One, all have some form of this on their phones as standard. It means that manufacturers know consumers want longer battery life, but they cannot put a bulky battery on as it won't sell, regardless of how long it lasts for. This is their answer for the time being.

Unfortunately for us, there's no real fix either. You could get an extra battery, but you'd have to keep it topped up all the time and phone manufacturers are increasingly moving towards non-removable batteries. You could buy a battery pack to charge your phone on the go when the battery is low but they're bulky and realistically you can't use your phone while it's charging on the go. Apps like Juice Defender have been around for a while now, but they only increase your battery life at the cost of less connectivity. Most of these apps are very limited in how much battery they save, since the biggest drain of our battery is the screen, which is something you can't really disable. Either way you look at it, we're stuck.

Our only hope?

While advances in processing power and storage are extremely quick and exponential, advances in batteries in general are much much slower. It has been the case for years now. Moore's law observes that the number of transistors on integrated systems doubles abut every two years, which means that processing power doubles too. This has been the case for some time now and looking at the mobile phone market, it seems to follow this phenomenon too. While the advances of memory hasn't been as quick as this, it has still been much faster than battery capacity improvements. In a way this is also stifling advances in the mobile phone market since manufacturers can't put their fastest chips in their phones as batteries can't sustain them for long enough. This forces them to spend more money trying to make them energy efficient, essentially making the whole research and development process longer. We'll have to sit tight and hope that there is a breakthrough in this sector, otherwise we will be forever doomed to need to charge out phones once a day...

Mo