Ask NerdGirl: Radio, All The Apps Updated At Once, and Hero’s Real 2.1!

by n3rdg1rl May 31, 2010 7:46 AM – Leave your thoughts

Today, I’m going to start by asking for your help. Please don’t get me wrong. I love my Eris. She’s my favorite piece of tech I own. However, I am thinking of getting the HTC Incredible, as I love the HTC Sense on my Eris. I have someone that wants to upgrade their phone so I was going to give them my Eris and grab the Incredible for myself. I would love to hear from you Incredible owners out there and really hear what you think after having it for a few weeks. Nothing beats the opinion of the everyday user out in the world actually using the device. Now on to your questions!

Trying to find a radio app for my friend’s MyTouch 3G, something like Radio Companion for the BB. Any ideas?

@0mie

As far as I have heard, the only Android phone that comes with a radio built in is the HTC Droid Incredible. However, just a few days ago Sirius XM Radio became available for download. It should run on any Android phone that is running 1.5 or higher which at this point is pretty much any Android phone. The app itself is free but you do need to pay for a subscription. This doesn’t play all the Sirius XM Radio channels. It just covers the mobile licensed ones, so if you have a favorite station you should check if it’s available first. There is a 7-day free trial, which is the direction I would try first.

Now I understand that Nobex Radio Companion plays something around 5,200 channels from around the world. There are a combination of apps that you can have that will allow a bunch of stations you are looking for, but unfortunately not all of the ones that you can get on the Blackberry.

If it’s just music you’re looking for, I would try Pandora Radio or Slacker Radio. Both allow you to create a station based on the type of music you want to listen too. The best part, both apps are free! Premium service have a monthly subscription.

For a more varied listening experience, I personally like iheartradio. It only streams Clear Channel stations, but I am one of the lucky ones who listens to mainly Clear Channel stations. Some people don’t like it because there is sometimes a long wait to buffer the station, but very rarely is it too extreme for me.

Also check out a few Internet streaming radio app reviews we’ve done!

Hi NerdGirl, loving your column! Thanks so much!

Quick question about app updates. So often I find myself being told that a bunch of my apps all have updates available. The trouble is that I then have to manually tap each update *and* each update’s subsequent “are you sure?” prompts. This gets really tedious if I have a handful of apps to update. Do you know of a way (app or otherwise) to “batch” update, or at least skip the “are you sure” prompts?

Granted, in some cases (like Dolphin Browser) I may not want to update, but most of the time I just want to grab all of them and be done.

Thanks in advance,

Chris

(PS I’m using a Moto Droid with Android 2.1)

I understand your pain on this one, Chris. As an Android app reviewer, I have to check for updates daily to keep on top of it. I wish there was an easier way, but this is how I look at it. Those prompts that come up do give you some good information.

The first screen all about the app usually lists what the update will add or remove so you can find out if you really want to update it. There have been a few instances for me when I was running 1.5 that if I had updated an app I would not have been able to use it because the new features only worked with 2.0 or higher.

The next screen with the what-it-controls information is good to look at too. You can see if an app is going to be accessing information you wouldn’t want it to.

I recently have been using AppBrain Market Sync. Since I did the review for it I fell in love! It somewhat helps with the updates where you can tell it to stop reminding you to update something, like Dolphin Browser, and also kicks all your updates into one queue so you don’t have to keep going back and forth to the main Market screen to grab them all.

In theory, it would be great to do a batch update, but in practice, I like knowing exactly what is going into my phone.

Lastly, you’ll be happy to know that Android 2.2 (Froyo) indeed has this feature; you can update all at once or choose to have apps automatically update. You initially confirm once and forget and those apps will update in the background automatically.

G’day NerdGirl,

I am just about to help a friend out with rooting and installing a new ROM on his Hero and I saw this post on the Andriod Tapp RSS “HTC Hero Android 2.1 update 1 Leaked“. I followed the link and downloaded the file but the file (well it’s extension anyway) is a .exe
It is quite possible that I am mistaken here, as this is the first time I have loaded a new ROM onto a phone, but everything I’ve read says the ROM should have a .zip extension? It would be really nice to install an almost “official” ROM for him as he likes the way his phone behaves at the moment but just needs to update as it currently has a strange language pack on it as it was bought in China.

Confused,
DaveK

First, we apologize as we should have titled it “Sprint Hero Android 2.1 update 1 Leaked“. I’m a little late with this question as in the U.S., the Hero has been officially updated by Sprint. The update is only for CDMA Hero phones. The GSM update has not been released yet. For the official update and how-to for the CDMA phones you can go here. I have done these updates through Sprint several times and they do seem to go rather smoothly.

Thanks for all the new followers I have on Twitter because of yesterdays post! But remember to keep sending those questions to nerdgirl@androidtapp.com!

~n3rdg1rl