On-lyneTech

Lonely Planet is world famous for its travel guides – each of them curated by travel writers who have

visited each city and presents it in its true flavour. The guides are bulky and costly too.

Now with this new app – Guides by Lonely Planet – you get the city guides for free – yes you read it right – FREE. Each city guide gives you details of what you can see (with friendly maps and directions and wonderful pics), where and what you can eat, where you can stay, shop, drink and play! You can save each city for offline use and pull it out when you are there.

Currently, they have about 20 cities listed and more are being added continuously.

With real life experiences and essential tips, Guides by Lonely Planet are a boon to first time travellers to any city – a must have when you travel to an unknown place.

https://goo.gl/daI5Eh

We click many pictures on our phones. Some of them good, some not so good. All these sit in our phone and clog valuable memory.

Similarly, we also get loads of pics from WhatsApp, Skype and other apps. Many long videos once seen, remain on our phone.

Gallery Doctor helps us clean all this stuff effortlessly. Once you instal and run it, it groups photos and videos into the following classes :  Bad Photos, Similar Photos, Photos for Review, Long Videos and Whatsapp photos. It gives you the option to review the photos and videos one by one and allows you to either delete them or keep them – left swipe to delete and right swipe to keep – it is just that simple. If you delete a pic by mistake, it also allows you to undo the deletion immediately – very cool!

So boost your phone’s performance and speed by installing and using the power of Gallery Doctor!
https://goo.gl/BKQvO3

The best part of your Android device is that you can customize it to your own preference and liking.

Many phone manufacturers like Samsung and LG superimpose their own mini-launchers onto the devices that they market. However, to get the pure and light Android experience, without any major frills, try out Google Now Launcher.

A Launcher is the main screen which you see when your phone starts.  It may have several apps already but you can change all that. You can put the apps that you want on your Home Screen, by going to the apps, long pressing any app and then dragging it to the Home Screen. You can also add screens by dragging and dropping app icons to the right of the Home Screen.

By swiping left to right, you can access Google Now. Google Now is an intelligent assistant, which apart from helping you Search by Text or Voice, also shows you Google Now Cards. These are picked up from your appointments, mails, sites visited, etc. etc. You can also customize what cards you wish to see on Google Now!

You can also set reminders by touching the microphone icon and say “Remind me to go for the meeting at 3 pm today” and a reminder will be set and activated at the desired time.

Explore and find many other nuggets under the hood. And be sure to share them when you find something interesting, useful and productive!

With the ever growing number of messages in WhatsApp, there are times when it is difficult to find some important message or telephone no. which a friend had sent you, say, a month ago. You know it is very much there, but it could take ages to find it. More so, if the message is hiding in a ton of Group Messages which you receive every day.

WhatsApp now allows you to “Star” a message – marking it as important, so to say. Just long press on a message and on the menu that appears on the top, tap on Star. This will mark the message as starred. This is exactly like marking the message with a Bookmark or as a favorite.

Later, when you wish to find a starred message, all you have to do is go to the Menu, and tap on Starred Messages – you will get all the starred messages listed in chronological order. You can further Search within starred messages and reach your desired message quickly. Further, you can “Unstar” a message later, making it easier to manage the Starred messages.

Organizing your messages in WhatsApp will make you more efficient – try it!

Many a times, we tend to misplace our phone around home or office. The simplest way to locate it is

to dial your phone from another nearby phone and the phone will ring, making it easy to find it. But what if the phone is in silent mode? It may keep vibrating in your bag or in your drawer and you would still not be able to locate it.

Alive OneScan Pro is a new way to Search – Visually. So, now use your phone camera to click / scan any product, logo image or newspaper Ad and let the app discover for you, the same or similar items instantly. You also have the option to buy the selected items online.

Did you like a T-shirt shown in a print Ad? Scan the product on the ad and get see where it is available online, instantly. Do you want a similar shoe or watch your friend is wearing? A book in your colleague’s library? OneScan it, discover and buy it. Alive Pro also scans 3D QR codes and deciphers what lies beneath them. You don’t need a separate app for that now.

Whether you are a fitness freak or simply want to improve and monitor your fitness, Google Fit is for you. Once installed, it will effortlessly track your activity. Your phone or Android Wear Watch will log all your activities during the day and give you an updated report in real time.

Apart from giving you the stats, it also motivates you to achieve more. If you fall behind on one day, it will encourage you to catch up and go for better performance. You can also set your fitness goals and track how you are doing against your goals. You can set goals based on steps, time, distance, calories burned and receive personalized recommendations and coaching for activity goals.

It also links to and aggregates from many other devices to track fitness, nutrition, sleep, and weight, like Android Wear, Nike+, Runkeeper, Strava, MyFitnessPal, Lifesum, Basis, Sleep as Android, Withings, and Xiaomi Mi bands.

Stay Fit with Google Fit and watch your health improve!

Astro File Manager is one of the best file managers for Android. It finds and manages all files on

your Android device, wherever they may be located. You can search files by name, by type or simply browse through your folders to find your file. If you use the Windows File Explorer, the Astro File Manager will be very familiar to use and navigate.

Moving and Copying files within your phone and from and to your Cloud Storage, is a breeze. It can also look for files on your Facebook account and your local Network. Astro has a Task Killer in-built, which kills tasks and processes which are a drain on your battery life. Also, a Backup has been built-in, which help you backup apps in case you lose your phone or change your phone.

A very useful utility which is a must have on all Android Phones!

Contacts Plus is one of the world leaders in maintaining your Contacts Book. Once you install Contacts+ all your contacts from your phone book are automatically imported into the app. When you have more than one telephone no. per contact, it also allows you to set the default telephone no.

With Contacts+ apart from using your phone for calls and SMS, you can open Whatsapp, Viber, Hangouts, Email and more, directly from your contact list. So you can operate all these apps from one single interface without jumping from one to the other.

Birthday Reminders are also built-in. So, every morning, you get a message showing Birthdays of your friends in the Contact List

The free version handles all the above effortlessly. The paid version further gives you extended backup options, has an efficient duplicate finder, a spam blocker and gives you 80+ customizable themes to make it look exactly the way you want it to be!

An excellent tool for daily use.

The EMI Calculator (Android App, available on the Google Play Store at http://play.google.com) is a simple, no frills calculator for EMI. You just enter the Principal Amount, the Rate of Interest and the period in Months / Years and tap on Calculate. Voila – your EMI is calculated and ready!  You can then go and look at the month-wise statistics which shows you the monthly outgo of Principal and Interest. It is that simple. You can instantly share the results with your banker or borrower, by Email, Whatsapp or any other mode.

Further options include creation of Loan Profiles for Loans already taken and monitor progress of repayments. An interesting feature is to compare 2 different loan options, where the principal amount, interest or loan tenure may vary. You can instantly check the EMI under both options to help you take a decision. It also gives you the option of comparing the effect of EMI in advance with EMI in arrears.

There are many other financial calculators available – but I found this the simplest and easiest for the lay person, for calculation of EMI.