• How To Spot Scams and Malware Apps on Android
  Be smart about checking your Android apps to prevent malware or scams from appearing on your phone. [Tested]
• Spotify and Sonos bring music home
  For those that have it, your Spotify account is now accessible from Sonos players. [Spotify Blog]
• Samsung Galaxy Tab
  Samsung announced the release of their Galaxy Tablet with 7-inch screen, running Froyo 2.2, front and rear facing cameras for release in Europe this month and in the US in “coming months”. [Uncrate]
• Steve Jobs on Why Facebook Is Not Part of Apple’s New Ping Music Social Network: “Onerous Terms”
  A few people may have seen Facebook Connect pop up in Ping for iTunes, however, Apple is saying Facebook will not be integrated due to “onerous” terms. [All Things D]
• Laptops Look Like Racecars – and Not in a Good Way
  Sick of the stickers that come with your PCs and Laptops? A.M.D. is planning to use stickers that peel off easy and may opt out all together. [Pogue]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb54aSHq13E

Windows: If you’re sporting an HTC phone with the HTC user interface you may have grown fond of the combination clock and weather forecasting widget. HTC Home ports the HTC interface from your phone to your Windows desktop, complete with animations.

HTC Home is a port of the popular weather/clock widget from the HTC Sense UI interface found on Android phones—and related to similar HTC UIs found on other smart phones. You can resize the widget, tuck it in the taskbar, toggle the animations on and off, and easily switch which locale the forecast is reporting.

HTC Home is Windows Vista/7 only and requires Microsoft .NET 4.0. Have a favorite weather app or widget? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Link: HTC

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Update: Something to point out, only Celsius, don’t know about you but would be a  kinda nice  feature,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgz8-qmFWHU

If you’re a keyboard shortcut lover using Gmail’s new Priority Inbox feature or the awesome new Gmail calling feature, you’ve got three new shortcuts you’ll want to add to your Gmail repertoire.

Note: In order to use keyboard shortcuts in Gmail at all, remember that you’ll need to enable them by heading to your Gmail Settings and turning keyboard shortcuts on in the General settings tab.

Change Message Priority with ‘+’ (plus) or ‘-’ (minus)

Google’s new Priority Inbox learns what messages are important to you and tries to bring the most important to the top. If it gets it wrong, you can mark any message as important or unimportant by selecting it and clicking the new plus or minus buttons in the toolbar.

If you want to do the same from the keyboard, though, you just navigate to the message you want to change using the ‘j’ and ‘k’ shortcuts, hit ‘x’ to select the message or messages you want to re-prioritize, and then hit either the ‘+’ (plus) or ‘-’ (minus) sign. As you might expect, the plus sign marks a message as important, while the minus sign marks a message as unimportant.

Note: You can actually press either ‘+’ (i.e., hold Shift and press ‘=’) or just ‘=’ to mark a message as important. To demote a message, only ‘-’ works.

Make a Phonecall from Your Keyboard with ‘g’ then ‘p’

If you’re using Gmail’s new calling feature, they’ve introduced one more quick and convenient shortcut. You may already know that Gmail uses the ‘g’ key in conjunction with other keys to navigate to different folders or labels. For example, pressing ‘g’ then ‘i’ takes you to your inbox.

The ‘g’ shortcut also works for phone calls now, too. Type ‘g’, then ‘p’ to bring up Gmail’s new phone dialer. Type the name of the contact you want to call and let the autocomplete take care of the rest.

And the Rest?

We’ve highlighted Gmail’s best keyboard shortcuts before, but just remember: If you can’t remember every shortcut, just memorize one: ‘?’ (question mark). It opens Gmail’s shortcut help so you can find any elusive shortcut you can’t remember.

We did it again, same as we were the first ones of obtaining the official pictures of the Samsung Vibrant, now we give you the first official pictures of the T-Mobile G2. As you know the T-Mobile G2 is going to be the first HSPA+ phone running speeds up to 11mbps. We believe the G2 will only come in one color.. silver, a completely different way when T-MO launched the Slide 3G or G1.

Android only: Missing your USB cord, or just too lazy to grab it? WiFi File Explorer turns your Android SD card into a small web server, so you can transfer files, stream media, and otherwise control your content across a Wi-Fi network.

The app’s setup couldn’t be more simple. Connect your Android to your home Wi-Fi network, then start the app. You’ll get a popup box with the exact address you should point another browser on the same Wi-Fi network toward. The app can run in the background when you press the Home key, or shut down when you hit Back or exit the app manually. The web file manager is spare but functional, and in the free version, you can only download, not upload. Both apps could use a link for bulk downloading of multiple files, but for grabbing a few files here and there, it’s fine and functional.

WiFi File Explorer has a free app, but the Pro version, with file upload and other functions, is 69 British pence, or about $1 in U.S. currency. You can grab it in the Market using the scan-able QR code below.

To swap out Windows 7′s small, square logon box for the more rectangular and glass-framed look it had back in the early days of Microsoft’s Longhorn drafts for Vista. CyberNet News explains how to make the swap, using a DLL file picked up from a crafty deviantArt tweaker:

The file you will be replacing is the authui.dll that is located in the C:\Windows\System32 folder. However, before you’ll be able to replace the DLL you’ll need to take ownership of the authui.dll file. To do so I highly recommend using the registry script here, which will add a “Take Ownership” option to the context menu. The download includes a second script that you can run to remove the option from the context menu after everything is done, or I’d say it is useful enough to keep around.

Neat stuff, explained in full at both the source page and at CyberNet. Found another handy logon switcher? Tell us about it in the comments.

Even if you don’t love Bing’s search, you probably appreciate its home page backgrounds. Now you can set those Bing images as your desktop wallpaper through an official theme, and keep it updated automatically through an RSS feed.

Windows 7 users need only to download the theme package from Microsoft’s offering page and double-click it to set up a “Bing Dynamic” theme. By default, the wallpapers rotate every minute or so, so you’ll want to head into the settings to slow things down a bit (click the “Desktop Background” link at bottom). You’ll get three months of Bing wallpapers through the feed, automatically updated each week. Each image has a Bing watermark, but it’s not too ostentatious.

• Step 1: Install TOR (Note: The “Installation Bundle” packages for Windows and Mac are the preferred downloads).

• Step 2: Install Proxy Switchy! in your Chrome browser.

• Step 3: Change the profile name with “Tor” (or which name you want but remember it). Make the http proxy “127.0.0.1″ and the port “8118″. then check the box “Use the same proxy server for all protocols”. Hit “Save” at the bottom. The full set-up is pictured here:

• Step 4: Go to the “general” tab in the options of Proxy Switchy!. Check the box “Quick switch,” then select “binary switch.” Make Profile 1 “[direct connection]” and Profile 2″ “Tor” (or which name you gave your profile before). Click Save.

• Step 5: Switch between normal connection and TOR connection with your button!

Ed. note: You’ll need to make sure the TOR software is actively running when you hit your Proxy Switchy! button in Chrome. To check if Chrome is actively using TOR for its browsing, right-click the TOR button in your system tray (or, on a Mac, click the onion icon in your status bar) and open the bandwidth monitor tool. Browse to a site with some decently large images, and if TOR’s bandwidth transfer moves up, you’re browsing the web anonymously through TOR and Chrome

Android application Tasker gives you total rules-based automation for your Android phone. It’s not free, but it offers a free 14-day trial download. In the Android Market, it’s £3.99 in UK money—a little over $6 U.S. If you grab the trial, or shell out the cost of a Double-Double meal at In-N-Out Burger to buy it in the Market (scan the QR code at left), you’ll discover it’s worth the cost, even if you only have one super-specific use for it.

Tasker can do nearly anything on your phone. It’s mostly limited by your imagination. Here are some up-front ideas about neat automations that come to mind:

• Set preferences for each application: Give the Kindle app a longer screen time-out. Make Maps or Foursquare automatically turn on GPS, and have a file browser launch when you trade out SD cards. Have your music and other audio apps lower the volume to 50 percent when you plug in headphones, so you never get a way-too-loud moment.

• Time of day automation: Make your phone go into airplane mode overnight, but re-connect for a few minutes every 30 minutes to grab messages. Set up your phone to play specific or random songs from your collection as an alarm, back up files from your SD card every day, load up an application at a certain time.

• Set up contact rules: If you’ve got a friend who talks too loud, make your call volume go down when they ring. Create a home screen widget that sends an automatic SMS (“In the car,” maybe) to the last person who called. Set your phone to pop up a more iPhone-style message box, rather than background notifications, when you miss calls or get SMS from certain people. Have your phone always record messages from a certain caller.

Here’s a video demonstration of one of the Tasker apps I created, a “Face-Down Quiet Mode” that kills the volume on your phone, and shuts down Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS, when you turn the phone face-down:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov6LxlZmAfI

Those use cases barely scratch the surface, really. Take the developer’s tour, and you’ll see there are variables, hundreds of events and triggers, and nearly infinite setups. Want to have Reddit.com launch on your browser if your alarm clock goes off on a Tuesday while Wi-Fi is on? You got it.

We’d need to write a research-paper-length treatise to cover everything Tasker can do for you, so we’ll instead offer up a few examples of app models we’ve found handy.

Task 1: Turn on GPS/Bluetooth/Wi-Fi for Certain Apps Automatically

I don’t keep GPS positioning on all the time, both for battery efficiency and a niggling sense of privacy. At the same time, I dislike when Maps, My Tracks, Navigation, or Foursquare ask me to turn on GPS, and I’m required to click “OK,” then make the toggle in Settings, then head back. For just those apps, I want my GPS to automatically click on. When I’m done with those applications, the GPS should shut off, too. You can easily pull the same trick for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or most any system function, but we’ll just show how GPS works.

From Tasker’s main screen, hit “New.” You’ll be presented with six options, or “Contexts”: Application, Time, Day, Location, State, and Event. Think of “Context” as an “If”—”If X is happening …”

In this case, we’re going to choose Application, then pick out the app we want to apply a rule to. You can pick out apps one at a time and apply your “Tasks” to them, but you can also apply Tasks to all applications, or pick out apps you don’t want your Tasks to apply to with the “Not” button at bottom. We’ll just pick out one app, Maps, which I almost always want GPS to be turned on for.

After you pick your Context, now it’s time to add one or more Tasks. Thinking ahead though, we’re going to apply this kind of action—turn GPS on when the app launches, then turn it off when it’s moved away from—to a few different apps after this. So hit the “New” button in the upper-right corner, then type in a name for your Task that you’ll easily grasp later, like “Auto-Launch GPS.”

Now it’s time to tell Tasker what Task we want to fire when this Context is happening. As you can see at left, you basically get your whole system to play with. The thing we want, GPS, is under “Misc.”

In the bar under the GPS “Set” option, you’ve got three options: On, Off, and Toggle, the last of which just flips the setting the other way, whichever way it is. There’s also a checkbox for an “If,” which, if clicked, drops down a box where you can enter in a variable and make it a condition. You could, for example, only have GPS turn on if airplane mode is set to off (“%AIR -- Isn’t Set”). Our needs, for now, are simple—just have GPS set “On,” no matter what.

Well, that was pretty easy. Now you’ll see that “GPS Auto-Launch” has just one task: “GPS -- Set On.” Let’s say you were a little more protective of your GPS chip, though, and you wanted Tasker to ask you about GPS, Wi-Fi, or whatnot. The gear-and-screwdriver logo in the lower-right corner gives you that option. Set your “Task Type” to “Menu,” and you’ll get options to set how long the menu stays up, if there’s a default option selected, and even set a background image, if you’re feeling extra-custom. But we’re just having Tasker take care of the GPS switch for us, so get back to the Tasks screen.

You could hit “Test” in the lower-right corner to see how Tasker handles launching Maps and turning on GPS automatically, but we’re going to specify one more detail of our auto-launcher. Hit “Done” to get back to the main Tasker menu, then tap on the right-hand side of the process you created, the side with “GPS Auto-Launch” and a green arrow. From the menu that pops up, choose “Add Exit Task.” When we told Tasker to do something when Maps launched, we created an “Enter” task. By adding an “Exit” task, we can have something else happen when Maps is closed down or put away. You can add these Exits to all kinds of conditions—when you’re no longer near a certain location, when it’s no longer a certain time, etc.

Update: Not all Tasker tasks need an Exit task—in general, whatever settings you’ve changed while a task is running will set themselves back when you’re done. In this case, though, we’re getting a little more extra-cautious control over turning the GPS off.

After hitting “Add Exit Task,” you’ll run through the same process you used to create the GPS turn-on: create a new name template, add the task GPS from the Misc menu, then set it to Off and hit “Done.” Now, back at the main screen, you can see that there’s a Context (Maps launches), an Enter task (GPS Auto-Launch), and an Exit task (GPS Shutdown). Hit the “Apple” button at the very bottom, and now Tasker will be watching for Maps to launch, then do its auto-GPS thing.

This trick worked fairly well on my Nexus One, despite Tasker providing a pop-up note that application exit watching wasn’t as stable on Android 2.0 and later. Worst case scenario, it doesn’t launch GPS, and I do it myself.

Task 2: Create an Ultimate Morning Alarm

The next step, adding multiple tasks to a time condition, isn’t all that different, but it does show off how far Tasker can go in automating your phone. So let’s create Kevin’s Ultimate Alarm.

Hit “New” and choose Time as the Context. I’ll have this alarm go off at 6 a.m. and, if I don’t respond, play for 3 minutes. You could just set 6-6 as your time to run until you take action, but I’ll be nice to my morning self. We’re going to add another context, the days of the week, later, but for now, you’ll be moved into the Tasks section.

Here’s a video showing what it looks like when my Ultimate Alarm fires off:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=87g-B4XYH9Y

For my own Ultimate Alarm, I’m having a song play from my collection, make my Remember the Milk tasks load up on the screen, and have my phone say, in text-to-speech, “Good morning, Kevin. It’s going to be a great day.” Why? Because, why not? For these pieces, I added three Tasks:

• Media—Music Play—Music Play Dir. After long-clicking on the “Dir” field and choosing my Music folder, I also checked “Audio Only” and “Random.” If you wanted a particular song, you could swap “Music Play” for “Music Play Dir.”
• App—Load App—Remember the Milk. Fairly simple, and I could set a different starting page in Remember the Milk’s own settings, if I liked.
• Misc—Say. Then just fille in the text you want, choose a language, and mess with any other fields you’d like. “Stream” sets the output you’d like the audio to go through, which helps if you’ve got other things, like songs, going too. You can, of course, mess with the pitch and speed of the voice, too.

When you’re all done and hit “Done,” tap on the left-hand side of your Ultimate Alarm entry, where the clock is. From the menu, roll down Context and hit “Add,” then choose “Date.” From the pop-up chooser, you can get very specific about the months, days of the month, days of the week, and other selectors for when your alarm goes off. Mine’s a basic Monday-through-Friday deal.

That’s all there is to that one, but it’s a pretty nice package.

Task 3: Make Your Phone Quiet Down When Face-Down

Now I’m going to create a kind of “Quiet Down” mode for my phone (the video demo of which was posted higher up, or can be found on YouTube). When I put it face down on a flat surface, like arriving at my desk for work, it should turn off GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth (and, heck, you can turn off EDGE/3G data, if you’d like), and then turn the system, ringer, and media volumes all the way down but keep vibrate on. By default, whatever you had on when you flipped over will come back up when you flip it back up, but that’s fine by me; you can change that in each setting, if you’d like.

For this Context, you would choose State, then pick Orientation. You’ll get the options you see at left. I like to stay away from “Face up,” “Standing Up,” and “Upside Down,” because they’re pretty common occurrences. For this example, “Face Down” is a pretty deliberate action you take with your phone.

For the tasks, I added “Bluetooth” and “WiFi” from the Net menu, set to Off, “GPS” from Misc set to Off, and set the volumes for “Media Volume” and “System Volume” to 0 from the Audio menu. “Silent Mode” with Vibrate could simplify your setup, but I like to be sure. If you’d like, you can re-order the tasks in priority by pressing and dragging them up the chain. In this case, I moved the volume-to-0 tasks up higher, since silencing the phone was the most important thing to do. Hit Done, and you’re all set.