Gadgetory

routing your Android powered device used to be one of the only ways that you could make it do some relatively common stuff like take a screenshot or control the LED on your camera luckily today those are all built into the stock Android experience but root still has its place I'm Joe Levi for PocketNow and here are a few of my favorite root applications I'd like to share with you first up is super su or super super user I guess it doesn't make much sense but that's what it's called this is my favorite super user manager it lets you go in and make changes and updates the the super user binaries and all that fun stuff a lot of people would overlook that there are some other apps that you can use super su seems to be the best these days if you've got a different opinion of course let us know down in the comments make sure you include your reasons why next up is an app called soft key Z or soft key Zed for our friends down under essentially what that does is it lets you change your soft keys to pretty much whatever you want mine you can see I'll have a nice subtle drop shadow underneath them it adds just an extra level of well refinement I think it might not be your thing you might like yellow you might like blue words you might like circles you might like blue circles you might like big words you might like on PlayStation you know whatever you like pretty much you can set those as your buttons you can back them up just right there with the save it's really easy to make changes you just come through select whatever you want of course I'm just selecting these at random to show you what you can do not necessarily that you would do just like that and then you can apply them it does require a reboot for those changes to take effect but once you've done that you're good to go next up is sequel Lite editor now we talked about this in a recent article that told you how to re-enable tethering on certain T mobile devices in certain t-mobile plans specifically that are running Android KitKat which for some reason turned it off this essentially just a sequel editor you can go in here and add keys add values see what they are change the values what we did is we went in and we just added a simple tethering key and value saved it rebooted and we were good to go I've only used this half a dozen or so times to change settings but these are settings that generally can't be changed anywhere else there is no settings control panel to get to them and you just might want to go in and make some changes some of these values you can set through through various control panels and settings screens a lot of them however you can't so to do that you're going to need a sequel editor and sequel Lite editor works great gotta mention busybox free now a lot of your routing setups whatnot the the tools that you use to route are going to include this mine did essentially this is all of the libraries and all the programs that you need to be able to run all of your rooted and super user stuff you're not going to do a lot with this on the surface but all of your route applications they're going to be happy that you have it most cell phones get their time and date settings from the network that you're connected to so in my case t-mobile you'll notice I've got that turned off and there's a very good reason for that there is an app I want to show you next it's called clock sync this will work both with and without root but it'll do a lot better with roots so as you can notice the atomic time it says we're 17 minutes past the hour and my system time says that we're 16 minutes past the hour so we're off by a minute in several seconds here now this isn't really a big problem to be several seconds off or even a minute or two off not a big deal however if I've got lots of these so I've got two or three cellphones in my family I've got two or three tablets in my family now I've got two or three computers in my family all of them have a different time and of course if you've got teenage kids you know that saying one time and being one minute off means for some reason that your opinion isn't valid anymore so what we do is we go through and we synchronize all of these our Android powered devices we use this app called clock sync our desktop computers and laptops and whatnot we have another app but essentially what it does it goes out to the atomic clock grabs the current time looks at your system time and then you can synchronize the two few settings in here if you take a look you can change your NTP server that's your network time protocol I believe is what that stands for you can enable automatic synchronization I've got that set for every three hours but it's not strict so it's not like every three hours on the hour it's not a high precision mode because I'm not really that worried about down to the second if I had that on we'd go out and look at the atomic clock five times and kind of take the take the average of those and that just helps resolve some Network latency issues and you might get if one takes longer than another you can set it to only do it over Wi-Fi so doesn't use up any of your data and I've got mine so that it only does this when the device is awake so that it doesn't chew up any more of my battery other than a ping back and forth to a server so this does work both in routed mode which is what we're seeing right here it also works in a more restricted limited way in unrooted so even if you don't have a rooted device this app will still will still be beneficial to you next app on my list of favorite route apps is root explorer now this is my file explorer it's the only one that I've got on my device and that to tell you the truth I really like it there are others that look a little bit nicer this one does have some stuff that you can change and whatnot I kind of like it the way it is but what you can see here is it's just like a normal file explorer just very simple very basic but unlike those this does let you get into some of your other folders that you can't normally get into because this lets you use your root access and you can go in and make changes inside your system and data folders as well very useful very handy especially if you're applying any patches or updates that well you didn't get through official methods or if you're making customizations to apps last but not least I am running a stock of Android it's rooted however and I am running a custom kernel in this case it's the Fokker kn'l so I've got an app called folk lock on here now this lets me come through and set any of these settings at boot or not I can turn them off or turn them back on lets me set my minimum and maximum clock so you can see here I am under clocking my device got my governor set to a new one called Intel Atom and which is kind of a cross between intelligent and on-demand I've turned off my imprecision and I'm using the Intel plug hot plug driver which is supposed to be recommended so hey great I've got some other stuff turned on as well all of these are features of the kernel can do voltage adjustment which I have not done if you think I should be go ahead and head over to pocket now leave a comment down in the comment section of the article let me know what what voltages you would recommend for me to adjust and why that would be helpful for me and for everybody else is what CPU governor and come in here and turn on this is specific to the Intel Atom and CPU governor turn that on and off we can look at the updates down in the bottom that takes a minute to populate very cool stuff we can look at statistics for for a CPU idle and other stats thermal management I'm using the Intel a thermal which is supposed to be better than the thermal D which is stock I can set my frequency throttles and whatnot and of course look at down here on the bottom when I have been throttled because of high temperature in this case I haven't been at all probably because I am under clocking I can also come in and mess around with the GPU change the governor change the frequency all that fun stuff io scheduler as well sleep to wake or sweep to wake rather I don't have this enabled for the sweep to wake we've showed you that in a previous video however notice I just turned it off I do have tap to wake so that feature is right there and it mimics what you can do on the the Moto X and whatnot so really kind of cool does supposedly take up a little bit more battery power because it's it's still got that digitizer on even when it's in your pocket so you know whatever vibration adjustment you can change the intensity of that vibration I've got mine set at 70 percent memory management it just lots and lots of stuff I'm not going to go through everything here because I mean honestly there's a lot you can even come in and download the the newest kernel straight from here you do have to reboot into recovery to apply those so make sure you know what there are this one that I'm using is the zero zero eight ultimate so just in case you were wondering about that you're going to need to have a custom recovery image which is going to wrap up our favorite root apps this one not really an app but we may as well include it it's twr pea recovery it's finger friendly it's nice it does an awful lot of stuff and I would highly recommend it for everything other than setting up a custom ROM on your device the first time for that I still recommend clockworkmod recovery just because that's kind of weird the way that TW RP does it so from here you can make backups so you can make restores mounts wipes it pretty much all you want including reboot and you know like I said it is finger friendly so we will go ahead and reboot into system just like that so there was a quick look at some of the route apps that I'm running on my device right now and seem to stay on my devices regardless of which device I'm running or how many times I've wiped it and reloaded a stock or a custom ROM but now it's your turn I want to know what apps you use and I want to hear about that over in the comments at pocketnow.com hey thanks for watching and if you haven't subscribed to our channel already make sure you do that we're literally releasing new videos every day that's the best way to keep up to date on everything that's happening in the mobile industry now including wearables also why not share this video with your friends on any one of your favorite social networks my favorite of course is Twitter where we're at pocket now and I'm at Jo Levi thanks for watching we'll get you next time you