Gadgetory

hey everyone its Jeff Farina with pocket now calm and recently you saw our fearless leader Brandon minuman give you a run-through of his five must-have apps for Android now it's my turn I'm actually going to show you the apps that I use most frequently and the most useful must-have apps for myself starting with pulse pulse is an RSS reader that actually brings feeds that you can assign yourself into a graphical interface you can see right here it's very easy to look at very easy to read now basically what you what you can actually do and scroll through these feats here now I want to keep them on one page so it's easier to use if you pull your phone quickly and try and navigate through if you want to add different feeds you can actually press the Settings button up here and that will allow you to add feeds what's great about this is you can actually scroll horizontally from left to right through the various stories for example if we go down here to the pocket now stories we can pick a story it will actually load now on the screen now it might be tough to see but it's text is highlighted here so this is basically a text rich format to start just so that it loads fast now if you want to see the entire article in its glory you can press the web button and it will actually open up a in-depth browser within the same application now as you can see it takes a little longer and that's why it does do the text first by default so that it does pull up your your feed and your article for you very quickly once this does load will be able to see the whole article in its glory look at the pictures read the article even post comments if we decide to so now we can scroll through and as you can see you can do everything that you could typically do with the standard Android browser you can zoom you can zoom in you can zoom out it may not be the fastest experience but it is the most readily available from within this application now if you want to go back you just tap the actual article name itself and you can continue to scroll through the pocket now stories here or you can press the grid button up in the top left corner and that will bring you back to your entire feed and once again the same thing here we can scroll through pick a story and it will load the text first you want to play a video you can actually press the video button it will play that video for you from there so that's pulse if you're a big fan of trying to keep up with the news whether it be tech news weather be politics whether it be business news you name it you can add almost any RSS feed into pulse so I highly recommend that application next up is going to be Dropbox now I'm someone who's always on the go i'm a student I'm a full-time graduate student I also work full time so I'm always on the go i always need certain files with me whether it be homework whether it be templates for different documents that i may use for my day job so by having a dropbox account which is free i can also use this dropbox app so by actually opening up the dropbox application now as you'll see here it will load it will show you the icon very quickly what dropbox basically is if you don't know it's a cloud file service so you can actually get your files into a cloud it's basically a hard drive that's on the internet if you don't know what a cloud is and they're readily available to you now so as you can see here I have all of my different folders and I can scroll through and you'll see these these different folders here as well as various individual documents that aren't in a folder but let's say for example I want to click on strategic management it will actually open up that folder and then you'll be able to see all these documents that i have here whether they be a document a powerpoint you name it we can go ahead and open if we decide to now what we'll do is actually will download it and depending on what software you have installed in your phone it will open up that powerpoint for you within that software so Dropbox is very cool if you need certain files to always be at your fingertips with you when you're on the go whether it be templates you name it Dropbox is a great tool for that the next of my five must-have apps is actually going to be one that I'm using primarily as a widget if we scroll over here that's going to be beyond pod now this is the actual widget here has a play button and has a fast forward button this is the typical standard widget if I was planning a podcast it would actually have a podcast title here this is a podcast player so if we go ahead and actually open up the applications by clicking on it as you'll see here we have the various podcasts now you can add any podcast that as an RSS reader into that feed and then if you want to actually play the podcast you can go ahead and click on it and then you can press play from there what's very cool about beyondpod is you can actually set an update schedule so let's say every night you want your podcast feed to check for new updates to podcasts every morning every night at 1am is what mine does so that why when i wake up at five or six I have all of my new podcasts already updated already ready to listen to and I'm already out the door it's perfect so again if we want to press play we just press the play button here and there you go is actually playing that podcast now so beyond pod is very useful very easy to use and the fact that it does the auto update makes it a win in my opinion the next application on my must-have app list is actually another app that follows the same theme of being on the go and that's logmein now unfortunately app does have a pretty high price tag for a typical app and that's thirty dollars but for someone who is always on the go and needs to possibly log into their computer remotely this is a great option for you it's very easy to use very easy to set up it's essentially dummy proof so if we go ahead and actually go to the application list here we can open up logmein and i've already logged in previously i was actually just using it about five minutes ago it will give you a list of the computers you have set up here what you do is you make an account on logmein com you set up that account with that computer and that information is now saved so as you can see I have my XP computer my windows XP computer at my office and my iMac which is actually right here in front of me now let's say I want to log into that imac I should go ahead and pick this imac right here it's going to establish the connection it's classy for my password i'm actually it's going to pull the phone off screen and enter the password real quick okay i've entered my password and you're greeted with a quick tips screen that life should give you some information on how to use applications you can see you can pinch in you can pinch out if you use two fingers to tap that's your right click one will be your typical move if you tap with one finger that's going to be actual click but let's go ahead and give you the juicy details so the first thing you're going to see is the login screen for my actual imac here if you're a Mac user this screen will look familiar to you this is basically where I'm going to type in my password yet again to lock myself in so as you can see I've actually clicked on the word blank now just press the keyboard button which is down here on the left and that will bring up my keyboard and yet again I'm going to pull the phone off screens to enter my password so I am now fully logged in and what you're seeing is my actual desktop on this window here we can actually pinch us to zoom right in the last thing I was doing was actually doing some media management within iTunes you'll see all my movies here matter within the actual iTunes feed as you can see we have itunes here we can of course zoom in zoom out now if I want to minimize this application I literally just put the actual mouse over the minimize button and just tap anywhere on the screen and that will then minimize it for me now my imac once again is right in front of me here and your this is actually minimizing it on my screen itself as you'll see that sometimes is quite a delay but once again for remote management that's a small sacrifice to have this app is dynamic and that you can turn into landscape and actually use it in landscape mode you'll see right here this is actually a much better experience it's a much better browsing experience especially when you're using the browser which is what I'm doing right now we have google chrome opened up and we can actually go ahead and type in a website up here in the blank so i've clicked on it once again i'm going to press that keyboard button and we'll type in pocket now you can actually scroll over here you'll see that it populated like it usually does going to press the enter button and that's going to load pocket now now it does load first on the imac and then from there has to actually beam this picture to the phone itself what we can do now is press the x button to get rid of our keyboard and as you'll see we have pocket now here ready to go now one thing this will not play it'll play flash videos if you're looking to do that with your device however it won't play the sound now that's how they basically are able to offer you the best experience the bandwidth would be greatly lost if they were playing the flash sound to you so you can watch a youtube video that is flash or a full flash video but it's going to be a little bit choppy the frame rate isn't going to be the best last but not least is going to be better keyboard now this is an actual skin for your keyboard you may have noticed this is actually a dell streak which is a 5-inch screen device now the keyboard that it comes with is very functional it's very easy to use however it doesn't have any kind of shortcut commands with the numbers and that sort of thing now using a keyboard skin like better keyboard will allow you to actually get the keyboard commands much like what the HTC Sense keyboard offers so for example if I click here now you've already seen it in action I can actually now hold down this top row or any of these letters here to actually get the symbols or the number so if I hold down the you for example it will turn into a 7 now you're just saw on that screen now better keyboard will allow you to customize the keyboard like I said so if you're looking for a smaller keyboard or darker keyboard there's even iPhone replicas of the keyboard this will give you that option to fully customize your device as you see fit as Brandon mentioned in his post please leave a comment with your must-have apps let us know what you're using everyday and what you think please give this video a thumbs up and stay tuned for the rest of the editing crew of pocketnow.com to show you their must-have top five apps thanks everyone hmm