Hardware devices that make Android experience better

Well I know this is a very unusual topic but this will surely help you to make your Android experience better. I searched a lot about this topic but didn't find any compromising article that explains this thing. So I decided to write this topic for our readers. Let's start with the first device in our list.

1. An External Battery Bank (Portable Charger):

We all know that the battery life of Android is very less. We can hardly use our android device for more than 8 or 9 hours. That's why external charger is on top of our list. An external charger helps you to charge your device when you are out or at the times of power cuts.

How much does it cost?
The cost of an external charger depends on its power. You can buy an external charger anywhere between 300Rs. to 2000 Rs.

Things to check before buying External Charger:

• First thing you have to make sure that you really need an external charger. If you only stay at home or office a lot of time than you probably don't need it but if you have a job that have a lot of outdoor work that you should definitely buy it.
• Know the capacity of your android's battery before buying an external charger. And buy a charger that have double or triple the power of your battery so that you can easily charge your phone multiple times.
• If you are buying online then first read the reviews of the product. Make sure that the product of from a good brand and doesn't have any problems.

Author's Choice: 

DigiFlip Power Bank 6600mAh Power Bank - 2 USB Output Ports, LED Indicator

2. An OTG Cable:

An OTG or On-The-Go cable helps you connect your pendrives to your android device. You can use this cable to connect any pendrive and view, cut or copy its contents. If your phone supports OTG then you should buy this product.

If you have a rooted android device that don't have an external memory card support than you can use OTG cable to connect a pendrive and make a backup of your ROM using recovery. This is really helpful sometimes.

How much does an OTG Cable costs?

The price of an OTG cable lies between Rs.50 to Rs.500.

Things to check before buying OTG Cable:

• The only thing to check before you buy an OTG cable is for what purpose you are going to use it. If you want to buy an OTG cable for copying or viewing small sized data(less than 1GB) then you can buy any cheap OTG cable but if you want to copy/view large sized data (usually more that 1 or 2 GB) than buy a little costly cable.

Author's Choice: 

APS AS070 Micro USB OTG - USB 2.0, Speed Upto 480 Mbps

Can be used to connect pen drive, flash drive, Keyboard, Mouse, Ext HDD and other USB devices (If your phone supports). Buy From Flipkart

3. USB Jig (Samsung Devices Only):

A USB Jig is a small devices that helps you to force your phone to go to download mode. If you have a rooted android phone and you flash a lot of things using custom recovery then there are chances that your phone will brick and will not boot. If that happens then you can use a USB Jig to force your phone to download mode and flash stock firmware so that your phone starts working again.

How much does it cost?

USB Jig's are available for around Rs. 200 online.

4. Gamepad for Android Devices:

If you like to play games in your android devices a lot then you can buy a Gamepad for your android device to enhance your gaming experience. You can connect a gamepad to your mobile phone using bluetooth pairing or NFC. Gamepads work with almost every android phone. 

How much does it cost?

You can buy a gamepad anywhere between Rs. 2500 to Rs. 6000.

Things to check before buying a Gamepad:

• Make sure your phone have awesome performance for gaming. If your phone lags while playing heavy games then you will not have a good experience with a gamepad. 
• Check if your android phone will support Gamepad or not. You can search online, ask on forums or just comment below.

Well this is not the end of this list. We will add more devices soon. If you need any help buying any device listed above or need some other help than you can comment below.
*Image Source: images.google.com

Must Have Apps for Rooted Android Phones

Recently I shared a list of 10 Must have Apps for Android, In this post I am going to share 5 Must have apps for Rooted android devices. [If you don't know what rooting is then you should read this post and if you want to root your android then click here] These apps helps you managing your rooted device, increasing battery life, modding your ROM or just enhance your Android experience.
Below is the the list of 5 Must have Apps that require rooted android phones.

1. Root Explorer 

Root Explorer is a file manager that lets you explore the root of your Android device (which you can't do with your inbuilt File explorer) There are a lot of file explorer in Google Play Store but we chose this one because it have a very friendly interface and easy to use. Its Features include multiple tabs, Text Editor, create and extract rar, zip or tar/gzip files, multi-select, search, remount, permissions, bookmarks, send files (via email, Bluetooth etc), image thumbnails, change file owner/group, "Open With" facility etc.

Android Required: Varies with device 

Size: ~2MB

Price: 223.35Rs. 

Note: If you want a free Root file explorer then you can try ES File Explorer.

2. Gravity Box

Gravity Box is an Xposed Framework Module(Download Xposed Installer from here) that can help you modify any ROM with root access. You can do a lot of things using this app. This app have a lot of features like Notification Bar tweaks, Status Bar Tweaks, Pie controls, Transparency Management, Power Tweaks, Display Tweaks and many more. This is a free app but supports donations to unlock some premium features. I have also written an article on XDA-Forums on How to Install and use Gravity Box, if you want you can read that article here.

Android Required: 4.1 and above

Size: 3.34MB

Price: Free (Supports Donation) 

If you are using Android KitKat (4.4.x) then you can download Gravity Box from here.

3. Viper4Android FX

Viper4Android is a audio enhancing tool that works really good. This app gives you Beats Audio like sound in any rooted android device. After installing this app you will surely see a massive difference in your phone's audio quality. This app is completely free but it is not available on Google Play Store officially. You can download this app from their official site by clicking on download button below. If you are having problem using this app then you can report to its developers on their official XDA Forum Thread. 

Android Required: 2.3 | 4.0 and above

Size: ~5MB

Price: Free 

4. Greenify

We all know that there are various apps that keep working in background and eats a lot of battery and ram. Which causes your phone to work slow and decreases battery backup. With greenify, your phone runs smooth by hibernating apps that are working in background. You can select which apps you want to hibernate while you are not using it. The app is simple to use and free on Google Play store. You can also buy a donation package to help in development and get some experimental features. 

With Root Access you can also hibernate System apps.

Android Requirement: 4.1 and up | Android 2.0 (Non-Root Mode) is in Development Stage  

Size: ~3MB

Price: Free and Donation Package - 100Rs. (Includes Experimental Features) 

5. No-Frills CPU Control

No-Frills CPU Control lets you control your cpu. You can Overclock your CPU by setting the highest frequency (your phone can support) using this app and if you want some more battery backup then you can go down to lowest frequency. You can also set various Governer and I/O schedulers. Some features of this app are:

- Easy GUI to set frequencies, governor and i/o scheduler
- "safety valve" to avoid boot-loops in case of unsafe settings (more info in the homepage)
- Stats screen to see the effective usage of frequencies 

(Source: Google Play Store)

Android Required: 2.1 and above

Size: ~1.1MB

Price: Free 

Is your favorite rooted app in our list? If not then you can share it with us in comments.

Note: App icons are hosted on Google Play Store and not on our servers. 

10 Must have Apps for Android Phone [6-10]

This is the second and the last part of our list. This article contains the list of 6-10 Must have apps for Android phone. So to continue our list lets have a look at the 6th App.

You can see the list of apps from 1-5 by Clicking Here.

6. Private Tunnel VPN

Private Tunnel VPN is an app which can easily hide your identity over the internet. This app allows you to change your original IP Address easily so that you can surf anonymously. Google Play Description:

Private Tunnel uses the official 4.0+ VPN API, so it does not require a rooted device.
SECURITY: Secure your data to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks 
PRIVACY: Protect your privacy from criminals accessing your information
PROTECTION: Protect against malware and malicious attacks 
ACCESSIBILITY: Access any web content no matter where you live

Android Requirement: 4.0 and up

Size: ~1.3 MB

Price: Free/In-app-purchase
(Alternately you can use OpenVPN App.)

7. Clean Master

Clean Master is a very popular Android App. This is one of the best Android optimization app. This app have a lot of features like RAM Cleaner, Junk Cleaner, Game Booster and many more. You can clean a lot of RAM using its simple widget. This app really enhance your Android experience. If your device is running slow after installing a lot of apps then you should definitely try this app.

Size: Varies with device (~10 MB)

Price: Free 

8.  Avast! Mobile Security & Antivirus

There are a lot of AntiVirus Apps available on Google Play but we choose Avast! I have been using avast from a long time. It is trustful and always free. Avast! have a lot of features like AntiVirus Engine, App Manager, Web Shield, Firewall (rooted only), Anti-Theft Engine, Backup Creator etc. It also offers some advance features if you buy the premium version of this app. But if you want just basic security then you can use the free version of this app.
NOTE: You can also use any other antivirus app that you trust. :)

Android Requirement: 2.1 and up

Size: Varies with device

Price: Free

          (Premium Pricing $1.99 Monthly or $14.99 Yearly.)

9. Cloud Storage App (Dropbox, Onedrive, Google Drive etc)

Cloud Storage app is also a must have app for any Android phone or tablet. Apps like Dropbox, Onedrive, Google drive gives their users a limited free storage to save their important data online. These apps also have an important feature and only because of that feature I added these app in this list. The feature is 'Camera Backup'. This feature automatically saves your pictures in a private folder over the cloud so that you can access them from anywhere even if the pictures gets deleted from your phone. Dropbox and Onedrive have these features built-in but for Google Drive you have to download Google+ app.
Personally, We suggest you to use OneDrive because it gives you free 15GB storage (dropbox gives 2GB Free) and you don't have to install any other app with it. SignUp for OneDrive (Click Here) or DropBox (Click Here) using our link will give you and us extra 500MB permanent Space for free.

Details for Onedrive App:

Android Requirement: Varies with device 

Size: Varies with device (~5 MB)

Price: Free (10GB Storage) 

You can download Dropbox by Clicking Here and Google Drive by Clicking Here. (Details are almost same)

10. MyAppSharer

The last app in our list is MyAppSharer. This is a handy tool using which you can create a backup of your Installed app and share that file with your friends. You can use this app to share apps with your friends or just to create a backup of the app. You can share apk files using Bluetooth, NFC or Android Beam etc. 

Android Requirement: Varies with device

Size: Varies with device (~2 MB)

Price: Free 

Is there any app that you think that should be in this list or any app that doesn't deserve to be in this list? Well you can tell us your views in comments section.
Note: App icons are hosted on Google Play Store and not on our servers.

10 Must have Apps for Android Phone [1-5]

An Android phone is nothing without apps. Google's Play store is filled with millions of apps right now. It isn't hard to choose right apps as per one's usage. You can search for any kind of app that you want and download the one you think is good for you and does your work. But here we have created a list of Top 10 apps that you should install in your Android phone. These apps helps you with your daily work or just improve your Android experience.

Lets start with the first app in our list.

1. Night Mode

This app lets you decrease the brightness of your Android phone lower than your phone can achieve with the default settings. You can use this app on dark places like theatres, cinema etc. If your phone have AMOLED display then this app will also help you saving your phone's battery. Details of this Applications are:

Android Requirement: 2.1 and up
Size: 538 KB
Price: FREE

2. MXPlayer

MXPlayer is one of the best video player for Android phone. It is in the list of Top 10 most downloaded apps of Google play store. MX Player supports almost all formats of videos. This is just like the VLC Media Player of Windows OS. MX Player also supports subtitles and offers some more features to improve your movie watching experience. Some of these features are Pinch to zoom, Subtitle Gestures, Multi core decoding and Hardware acceleration.

Android Requirement: 2.1 and up
Size: Varies with device (~10MB)
Price: Free (In App Ads) & Paid Version (No Ads) - 370Rs.

                                                                

3. Tubemate

TubeMate is one of my favorite app for Android phone. This app helps you download videos from various sites like YouTube, MetaCafe etc. You can download any video in any resolution (from 144p to 1080p) in MP4 format. TubeMate also gives you ability to download Subtitle files along with the video. You can download tubemate from its Official site. 

Android Requirement: 2.1 & Up

Size: ~2.5MB

Price: Free

Note: There are so many infected fake TubeMates on 'Google Play' and internet.

Please get TubeMate from the verified sites for your safety. 

4. Greenify

We all know that there are various apps that keep working in background and eats a lot of battery and ram. Which causes your phone to work slow and decreases battery backup. With greenify, your phone runs smooth by hibernating apps that are working in background. You can select which apps you want to hibernate while you are not using it. The app is simple to use and free on Google Play store. You can also buy a donation package to help in development and get some experimental features. 

Android Requirement: 4.1 and up | Android 2.0 (Non-Root Mode) is in Development Stage  

Size: ~3MB

Price: Free and Donation Package - 100Rs. (Includes Experimental Features) 

5. SuperBeam | WiFi Direct Share

SuperBeam helps you share large files between your PC or other android devices using WiFi Direct. Devices can be paired using QR Code with the built-in QR Code reader or by using NFC. The app have a lot of other features. You can read all the feature and download the app from Google Play Store for free. The app also have a Pro version which offers some extra features and removes limitations. 

Android Requirement: 2.3.3 and up

Size: ~2.9 MB

Price: Free & Paid (122.88 Rs.) 

View Next 5 Apps by Clicking Here: (10 Must have Apps for Android Phone 6-10)

Is your favorite app in this list?