School's out for summer, which means barbecues, swimming pools, and summer concert tours from many of your favorite bands. There's nothing quite like the experience of live music, so in this post, we've put together a list of five essential Android apps for concertgoers.
Find concerts
Don't miss shows from your favorite bands because you didn't know they were in town. Gigbeat is a nice music listing app that can scan your Last.fm, Rdio, more
Live in an area prone to flash floods, hurricanes, blizzards? Smartphone users will soon get a severe-weather alert from the National Weather Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The new nationwide emergency alert system, called the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), sends 90-character text messages to smartphones of people facing extreme weather conditions. Severe weather defined by the NOAA includes tornadoes, flash floods, hurricanes, extreme wind, blizzards and ice storms, tsunamis, and dust storms. Note that thunderstorms aren't on the list because they occur so frequently.
moreGoogle just wrapped up the second keynote in as many days at Google I/O 2012. Today's event was focused solely on Chrome and Apps and brought some great news to iOS users (how ironic) who are fans of Google's Drive and Chrome products.
Both Google Drive and Google Chrome are now officially available for iOS devices running iOS 4.3 and above.
Google brought its popular Incognito features to the iOS version of Chrome, along with many more features we won't go into here. Incognito mode, as we showed you on the Android version, allows you more
Apple made mention of a standalone podcast app earlier this month, but most figured it would arrive with iOS 6 this fall. Not so. Earlier this week, Apple released Podcasts. It's free and universal, designed for both the iPhone and iPad.
When you first launch the app, you'll see the Library view, which features two columns of large tiles of your podcasts. Any podcasts you have previously subscribed to in iTunes get pulled in. There are two buttons at the bottom, labeled Podcasts and Top Stations. Tap the Top Stations button to browse popular podcasts by subject. At more
Shortly after the Google I/O keynote yesterday, Google rolled out a list of app updates, one of which was an update to Google Maps. In the update, Google enabled the ability to save a section of a map for offline access. This is a great feature when you are traveling in an area with spotty coverage.
To save an area, launch Google Maps and tap on the menu key. Select Make Available Offline from the menu and then narrow down the area you want to save. You'll want to make sure you do this in advance and when more
Jailbreaking isn't for everyone. Cydia is quick to overwhelm even the tech-savvy user, and upgrading iOS software on a jailbroken device can be a headache-inducing process.
Whether you've discovered that jailbreaking isn't for you, or you need to take your iDevice to the Genius Bar for repair, you'll need to unjailbreak your device.
There are plenty of forums, blog posts, and YouTube videos that attempt to guide you through this process. Many are outdated, and, in some cases, incorrect.
So, to find the proper way to unjailbreak an iDevice, I went to the source. Nikias Bassen, more
Google's Vic Gundotra wasn't kidding when promised he'd send 6,000 party invites using the just-launched invitations feature in Google+.
Not long ago the invitation from Google's senior vice president of engineering popped up in my inbox, looking suspiciously like a Google+ comment, but with a map you can hide or reveal, some event details, a drop-down RSVP menu, and a couple of fields for entering your name.
There's also plenty of room to write comments, +1 comments you like, and check your availability in your Google calendar. Click another buttons and you're launching more
To say that Facebook's iPhone app is slow could be considered generous. In truth, it makes the tortoise look like the hare.
It seems almost inconceivable (and yes, I do think that word means what I think it means) that a Web-focused, modern company could produce such a slow rendition of its product on the most popular mobile product on the planet.
But, not to fear, Facebook has heard the crowing (and has seen the one-star reviews) and plans to update its iPhone app, according to The New York Times.
The New York Times managed to get two unnamed engineers to reveal that the Facebook iOS app has been completely retooled and will feature the only thing that really matters in social-networking apps -- speed.
moreGoogle+, the social network Google is integrating into almost all of its other Web services, is rolling out a new feature today: Events. The idea is to make scheduling events and keeping track of the details (attendees, photos, etc.) a breeze.
Creating an event
To create an event, simply head to your Google+ page. Click on Events in the left-hand side menu to open the details window.
There are a lot of stock pictures with small animations -- called "cinegraphs" -- added by default in the theme section at the top of the window, and they look pretty good. You'more
The opening keynote for Google I/O 2012 just wrapped up, complete with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the Nexus 7 tablet, the Nexus Q and an insane Google Glass product demo.
There were some changes brought to the Google Play Store as well. One of the changes wasn't even mentioned during the keynote -- the ability to update or uninstall apps on your Android device, directly from the Google Play Web site. A small feature, but one that is sure to come in handy to many users. Here's how it works.
Visit play.google.com on your more
Internet & Media
1kFacebook Likes
344Tweets
102Google Plus Shares
318Comments
CNET On The Go.
Download the native CNET app for the platform of your choice.
