After the iPhone and BlackBerry, YouMail is updating its Android application, yet again making visual voicemail cooler and easier to use. One thing you will instantly notice is the slightly revamped user interface, which is said to be the "most responsive yet." In addition, there are two major pieces to this update that will "completely transform" the YouMail experience for Android users:

• In-App Community Greetings using which you can browse, search and add to YouMail growing set of tens of thousands of user-provided greetings all from the app itself.
• Number Search that allows you to find out exactly who is leaving you messages, and whether or not they should be blocked forever. Simply select the new magnifying glass on the voicemail playing page to search for more info on the caller phone number, or select the city/state of the caller to see a map of that location.

In related news, YouMail has also updated its iPhone app with a number of bug fixes and new features that allow users to create folders for voicemail and reply to voicemail with an e-mail. Moreover, version 1.9.42 also brings "dramatic speed and reliability improvements."

 

 

Have you ever wondered what is happening inside your phone? Which apps are using up your RAM or CPU? How to Boost up my Phone Performance without Rooting it or Overlock it ?, The Answer Android Assistant, which gives me all this information and much more, even including some functions for RAM release, batch uninstallation, and battery usage stats.

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Download: Android Assistance (FREE!)

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The App has three tabs: Monitor, Process, Tools.

Monitor

When you open the Monitor tab you will see three different graphs that refreshes constantly. On top you will see your CPU Info where it constantly displays on a pie chart how much of your CPU capacities are you using. This CPU info is divided into three aspects: your system, which means how much CPU capacity is the system using at the moment; you as a user, which means how much of the CPU are the apps you have installed using and finally the idle percentage, which means how much of the CPU capacity is free.

Below that you will see the Memory Info which refers to the RAM status. Again you will see a pie chart, this time with two constantly moving pieces of the pie growing and contracting. This is quite simple: in red you will see how much of your memory are you using and in green you will see how much is free; this is constantly moving because there are apps that constantly use and release memory. And, underneath that you will see how much memory your phone has. This does not change, because, as you know, you cannot increase your RAM as you would do on a laptop or PC.

And finally, at the bottom of the screen you will see your Battery Info on a battery chart divided into four subjects:

• Level, which shows the percentage of your battery capacity that you still have left,
• Temp, where you find an approximation of your battery temperature.
• Voltage, in mV, which is to show whether your battery is giving the phone enough energy.
• Health, which is an overall conclusion of the battery status; when you have a battery that gets very hot and loses mV its health is shown as poor and you will have to plan a replacement.

As a bonus, you have at the bottom of the screen a button with the text "Quick Boost" when you press this it makes a fast app killing for memory and CPU realease, quite practical if you don’t like the common task killer apps.

Process

The middle tab is Process; here you will see a list of the apps that are currently running on your phone, identified by four colored categories: in gray you have the main apps that are vital for the system for the phone to work properly in white you have "launcher" which lists the launcher you use. in blue you have the widgets that are running on your desktop; in purple you have the apps that are running as services and in green you have all other apps.

As you see the apps list you may see how much CPU and memory these apps are consuming, you will see the CPU consumption as a percentage of the CPU capacity and the memory usage in KB.

Additionally you have the possibility to select some apps and kill them right away with a tap at the bottom on the screen. Also, next to the "kill selected" button you have a "refresh" button to get the latest info.

Tools

Finally, the third tab presents some tools for the user:

• Volume Control, where you can define with percentage the ringer volume (and the same for notification alerts, media, alarm, voice calls, and system sounds).
• Ringer, where on a small screen you can set your phone to silent (no sound or vibration), vibration only, sound only, or sound and vibration.
• Cache Cleaner, where you can see how much cache is being taken up by apps and be redirected to the screen where you can clean the cache.
• System Clean, where you can clean the history of your last use on the phone (this will erase what you have searched on the phone and not your user data).
• Batch Uninstall, where you can see all the apps you have installed and be redirected to the screen where you can uninstall them.
• File Manager, for managing the files on the SD card.
• Save Battery Settings, where you can spare some battery by turning off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, reducing the brightness of the screen, and so on.
• Startup Manager, where you can see the apps that start with your system and tell some to not do so, thereby giving a faster startup.
• Battery use, where you see how much battery the apps are consuming (besides those needed for the system to work) and be redirected to a screen where the system analyses this same info with all the apps.
• System Info, which is very useful for seeing the characteristics of your system such as platform info, basic hardware info, and your sensor info.

CyanogenMod 7 (CM7), a Gingerbread-based stock Android ROM, had been on my radar for a while. It’s currently available for 28 devices, old and new, tablets and phones, including the Nexus One, HTC Incredible, HTC Hero, LG Optimus 2x, Motorola Droid, Samsung Nexus S, Samsung Galaxy S, Nook Color, T-Mobile myTouch Slide, HTC Hero GSM, HTC Hero CDMA, HTC Magic, T-mobile G2, HTC myTouch4G, HTC myTouch3G and HTC Desire . Since my Desire Z was rooted, I decided to give it a shot. Lo and behold, a breath of fresh air swooped through my phone and it felt brand new without the clunky, RAM-hungry, processor-intensive Sense layer.

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Download CyanogenMod 7

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 10 Reasons To Try CyanogenMod 7

 

1. Themes

If you are big on personalization, then you must look at the color of the Android status bar icons, selection boxes, highlight texts, and wonder why cannot you change any of them. After all, a new wallpaper can only go so far in refreshing the look of your handset. With Theme Chooser baked into CM7, you can pick by default one of three available themes, or download any of the CM7 themes available in the Android Market. I like the work of UpwardSpiral, who provides several colored free themes. I can switch through them every week, and it’s almost like I have a brand new phone every time.

2. Lockscreen Gestures

CM7 comes with several tweaks for the lockscreen including music controls, several lock styles, unlocking with the trackball if your phone has one but the winning feature is the gesture support. Simply wake your phone and draw a gesture on your lockscreen, and a plethora of actions are accessible: opening an application, toggling the flashlight or sound, dialing or messaging a contact, getting maps directions… Its brilliantly simple and its a huge time saver.

For example, if I draw a C on my lockscreen, it opens the Camera. No longer do I need to unlock my phone, look for the Camera icon, and then tap to launch it. A G opens the Gallery, an S opens SoundHound, a circle toggles the flashlight… Basically, the sky is the limit, and I have set it to the actions that I do not necessarily use frequently, but that I usually need super quickly.

3. Eye Candy

Other than themes, there are some cool animation effects in CM7. For example, you can set the screen to play the CRT animation available on the Nexus S when it’s switching off and on. You can also set the overscroll effect to glow or bounce, so when you scroll a bit too quickly and reach the end of a list, it signals that to you. Another neat trick is allowing you to rotate the screen 180 degrees, so you can even use your phone upside down.

4. Phone Goggles

Nothing to do with Google Goggles this is for those who know they get drunk at times, or would really like to avoid dialing someone’s number or messaging them by mistake. Goggles is for that. It’s like a second check on your outgoing calls and messages to prevent you from doing something you might regret later on.

5. Speed

I wouldn’t be a fan of CM7 if not for its speed. For all its tweaks and options, its amazing how fast it runs. Even with over 115 applications installed right now, and several of them running, I have 192MB free RAM, and my phone does not slow down, reboot or restart the home process when I open a new application. It sounds simple, but the Desire Z only has a 800MHz processor, and it crawled under Sense. For example, opening the Applications list under Settings used to take over a minute when I was running Sense; now it takes less than 5 seconds.

6. Input Tweaks

Other than haptic feedback personalization, you can set the behavior behind long-pressing the home button to either open an application, or show 8, 12 or 15 of your recent applications. You can also change the search key behavior to launch an application on a short press or a long press. I have personally left the search button intact on a short press as I use it way too often, but a long press launches Twitter, which is one of my most used applications that I’d often like to switch to quickly.

7. Browse Incognito

CM7 brings several improvements to the Android browser, including instantly reflowing the text if you pinch to zoom; inverting the colors for less power usage on AMOLED screens; and selecting a user agent to open pages as if you are on a Mac, an iPhone, or even IE6. However, the stellar feature is the Incognito mode, which is like the feature of the same name on Chrome, or Private Browsing mode on Firefox. Simply said, it will not keep track of your browsing or downloading history or your cookies.

8. Notification Bar Power Widget

If you are as much of a control freak as me, you will want to keep tabs on how your phone acts at any given time. WiFi, bluetooth, data, brightness, and other toggles need to be readily accessible, and CM7 brings that to your notification bar. You can set how many toggles appear there, their color, order, and whether or not the notification screen closes after you toggle something. Its a power user dream come true.

9. Performance Improvements

Other than the obvious speed improvements that CM7 brings you out of the box, it also allows you to set the CPU usage and profiles on your phone, for either high performance or a more conservative usage, for example. You can also lock the home screen and the messaging application in the memory so they do not close if you ever run low on RAM.

10. Features For The Geeks

If the above does not sound geeky enough for you, try looking at what CM7 offers in terms of OpenVPN and DSP Equalizer. Unfortunately, I am not knowledgeable on either of these, but if you are interested in audio performance or tunneling and VPN tweaking, then this might be right up your alley.

 

Another popular iOS app has found its way on the Android Market. Crackle Movies TV is an app that lets you watch Hollywood movies and TV shows for free on your mobile phone over a 3G or Wi-Fi connection. The app itself is free as well. All you need is an Android 2.2+ phone with Flash Player support and a solid Internet connection and preferably unlimited data plan and you are good to go.

 

Here are some of the main features of the app:

• Watch full-length Hollywood movies and TV series
• FREE to download app, FREE to watch!
• Unlimited, on demand viewing
• 20 new movies and TV episodes added monthly
• Genres including: action, comedy, crime, horror, thriller and sci-fi
• Browse Movies, TV, Originals, Collections and Genres or search by keyword
• Build and manage your queue for viewing on the app or online at Crackle.com.
• Stream HQ video via 3G or Wi-Fi

 

 

Unfortunately, the service is only available for those in the US, Canada, UK and Australia. Also, if you want to access some of the latest content then there is a subscription fee of $4.99 per month to be paid. However, that seems like a reasonable amount since you can then stream the content as many times as you want.

 

 

Say what you will about Flash on mobile devices but do not say that Adobe does not know the importance of mobile apps. The company has just released an update to Flash Builder and Flex 4.5 which will help developers target mobile apps on the iPhone, BlackBerry OS and the PlayBook.

 

This follows a previous update which enabledAndroid apps, the latest update to Flash Builder and Flex 4.5 gives you one tool to create apps for separate markets. There are thousands of developers who are familiar with Adobe tools, so this is definitely a positive for app fans out there.

 

"The reaction from developers to the new mobile capabilities in Flash Builder 4.5 and the Flex 4.5 framework has been absolutely fantastic" said Ed Rowe, vice president of developer tooling, Adobe, in a prepared statement. "They are amazed by how easy it is to create great mobile apps for Android devices, BlackBerry PlayBook, iPhone and iPad. Companies can now effectively reach their customers no matter what type of device they have."