Smartphone and sleep. There's an app for that.

A lot of us use our smartphones at night before bed. This disrupts a natural sleep cycle. One of the reasons it does this is that artificial blue light simulates daylight to our brain. One way to combat this is using an app to change your display. Twilight changes the blue light to red. Your can change the intensity and the app will modify your screen based on the sunrise and sunset and time of day for your location. You can also manually input this.  In my usage, it has helped with my sleep. Now medically, the best thing to do is turn the phone off. However, most of us are not going to do that. So this is a good medically valid way of curbing the issue. One interesting thing is how quickly you adapt to the screen. In less than two minutes the screen will appear to be white to you. If you turn the app on pause via notification shade, you will see it become far brighter. I highly recommend this to all Android users. Sadly there is no way to do this on iOS.

Check out Twilight here. 

Call Planner - App review

We communicate with people every day through various methods. Some of us are rather bad at remembering or picking up the phone and need that gentle push. Call Planner is a wonderfully simple application to help us. I love this app for two main reasons. First, it is beyond simple to setup a planned call you really can't mess it up if you wanted to. Second reason is that the app notifies you at the programmed time or location as a notification when you look at it in the notification tray. It has the title of the planned call and a call button can't get much simpler than that.

Call Planner has the ability to pull your contacts or manually input a number as well as notes for the call.

Call Planner is free and is holo designed. Get it here.

Glympse

There has always been a problem with location sharing services, they are closed. You either have to have this app or that account or this platform. They may be excellent at what they do but they are horrible to get everyone in agreement. Glympse aims to solve this problem by not only being on all four major mobile OS but it doesn't have to be installed on the persons phone. You send them a web link anyway you want to. They open it to see a mobile site which is live updating. You first set what to share and how to share your location, broadcast your speed, use metric units, low power, and expire on arrival. Now for every Glympse you share how long 5 minutes to 4 hours, where are you going, and who are you sending it to. During a Glympse you have the ability to extend the time remaining by 15 minutes or expire it instantly. From my experience the web view is accurate to 5 seconds of real time that is how long it takes to see the time of the sharing change.

Get Glympse here.

Share location with Google Maps quickly

When you are going to a place with a group of people or meeting somewhere it is often hard to give the location. Google Maps can provide a small bit of help. When you have maps open, tap the locate button and as usual it will show you your current location. If you long tap (tap and hold) you will get a maps pin for your location. Swipe the card up and you will see the location or address where you are. This card has the built in Android share dialog and you can send your location out via any app.

long press standard share.

Superbeam

We transfer files at lot both between our devices and with other people. Email works to do this but has limits. It would be so much easier to just beam it to the person wouldn't it? Superbeam facilitates this on the spot and has capability of doing huge file transfers. Superbeam works by way of Wi-Fi networks or NFC paring. In the event that you are in the middle of a store or house with no network, it will create a Wi-Fi direct network between the devices. Superbeam's technical features are only overshadowed by how easy it is to use. Just grab the file or files you want and use Android's built in share dialog and select Superbeam. This opens the app and shows the number of files and size of the transfer along with a huge QR code. The other person opens the Superbeam app on their phone and scans the QR code and viola you are done and only have to keep the phones in relative proximity of probably 30 feet during the transfer. I personally have not tested the range but have done transfer in my house and walked to another room without error.

Get Superbeam here.
Please note this app is free and the developer is in a country that does not allow them to sell apps for profit. So if you like the app there is a paypal donate button in settings if you want to give a thank you to the developer.

Motorola Skip thoughts after a day of use

I decided to break this review much like my review of the Moto X into two posts. One for initial impressions and one later after extended use. So here are my initial thoughts of the Motorola Skip.

The Skip is essentially four NFC tags that unlock your phone. They come in a pack of three dots and the main skip, which is a magnetic clip for clothing or any interesting place you can think of. The packaging and setup are elegant and stylish. To start you literally just tap your skip on the back of your phone and enter a backup unlock method. For me I had to remember to use my skip for the first few hours. Kind of like a novelty but after that I was already using it in place of my pattern lock. So far I find that it makes my phone less of a hassle to use sense I am one of those people that pulls it out every couple of minutes for whatever reason.

I will leave this for now and post again in a week or so on how my habits may have changed and my final thoughts on the Skip.

Review of the Moto X

I got my first Android phone several months ago, a Galaxy Note 2. Unfortunately, it was plagued with the same problem I would say about 70 percent of Android phones have . . . so much junk ware. Be it carrier or OEM. The reason I switched to Android in the first place was customization. So at first this was no problem, however, the more things I had to do to make the experience usable for me the less usable the phone became. I got tired of this and decided to use my upgrade and get a Moto X. The only expectations I had were a close to stock Google experience. The hardware/software unique features like camera gesture and touchless control. So after roughly a week of usage here is what I have found.

The Moto X is easily the fastest phone I have used to date. The smaller screen was easy to get use to. The audio is fantastic. A pure Google phone is amazing, my Moto X is a Verizon model and has some carrier apps but they don't negatively affect it. Motorola really hit a home run with their software hardware optimization. I have read some other reviews saying the Moto X is akin to a Nexus 4S using Apple's naming conventions making this the predecessor. I can't directly speak to this as I never had a Nexus 4. However, from what I have heard I would say this statement is not misplaced. This phone is one of few that Motorola/Google has as a standard for Android handsets. It is about as pure as you can get without being a Nexus and I have to say their optimizations largely should be put into pure Android. I expect this to happen as Android evolves to not do so would be crazy. Personally I think things like wrist gestures or more technically using the accelerometer to perform gestures should be put into Google Play Services for developers to utilize. There is no reason why you couldn't program multiple gestures. Speaking of the camera lets dive into that.

The wrist gesture to open the camera makes photos a joy to take. This combined with auto uploading to Google+ which organizes and auto enhances if you tell it to makes for a wonderful experience. I am still not honestly sure how I fell about the UI of the Moto X camera. Part of me likes the clearly defined swipe left for options swipe right for gallery. Another part of me likes the overlay controls the stock camera has more. I can't honestly say there is a winner in either case it is simple a matter of two great camera apps. I would like to see them combined, however, we must be careful what we wish for. Motorola got the tap to focus pretty good on this though in low light you might get bad results but that is true for a large amount of smartphones. Having the ability to swipe between the gallery and the live camera gets getting use to. I still have to make a conscious decision of wether to open gallery or the camera to get to my photos. I don't have the gallery on the home screen currently as I am trying to train myself to go through the camera only. One thing that is easy to overlook yet very cool is how they made the video control. To take a video you press the camcorder icon in the bottom left corner, you still however, have the ability to tap to take a picture essentially you have instant access to both if you set it that way. The last thing I will go over on the camera is the rapid shot, tap and hold to take a picture and it starts taking them about one a second and has a visual counter. Very nice if you want to take vacation pics and would prefer to not have to guess or look at the gallery to see if the shot is bad or not. Google+ also helps here for two reasons you can make an auto awesome GIF really easy and the best photos are automatically surfaced for you.

Touchless control is like combining Siri and Google Now in one service. Results may vary depending on how loud or soft your recordings are when you teach it as well as noisy environments. It works 97% of the time for me and is great for fast searches and weather information. Looking up map info is very nice this way as well. Interesting commands you can try is something like NCIS IMDB to get to it quicker when watching TV. As I said having lock screen enabled makes this feature all but useless.

Hardware customization is a good idea and someone needed to do it. It will sell Moto X's to consumers and it sets the phone apart in looks. Honestly I got mine plane black for two reasons. One I got it on Verizon which currently does not have Moto Maker nor does anyone else besides AT&T. Two I put a case (holster) on all my phones and the only reason I would do custom colors is if it were at no additional cost. I think the fact that these phones are designed and assembled in the US is a far more important thing. Kudos to Motorola and Google by extension for proving it can be done and done well.

All in all the Moto X is the best phone I have had to date. I believe it to be among three of the best possible Android phones all great for different reasons. If you are on Verizon's network and want a pure experience this is it without question. If you are on any network and want a pure experience with some finer touches this is the phone for you no question.