Time to purchase a new smartphone? Is this an upgrade from an existing device? We want to help you out either way.
To save you money, we’ve gathered up all of the promotions we could find from T-Mobile. Regardless of where you’re thinking of going for service, or what phone you are looking to pick up, you owe it to yourself to check below.
What follows is a mix of phone, rate plan, and accessory promotions worth checking out. It might not be an exhaustive list, but it’s a good collection of what’s currently offered through T-Mobile.
Although we’ve listed known expiration dates, we have no idea how long some of these other deals will last.
If you’re looking for a deep, intensive, complex gaming experience… you’ve come to the wrong review. For this is a review for Tap Numbers, a well-done but very, very simple gaming experience on your Android device.
The game comes from the developer MateriUp. It’s a type of match game that is very friendly for all ages. Let’s take a fairly quick tour of this game.
Setup
Like the rest of this game, setup is dead-simple. Just download from the Google Play Store, and click on your shiny new icon. From there you jump right into the game. Done.
There are some simple settings (sound effects, music on/off, etc.), and an achievements screen; but there really won’t be much use for these for most folks.
Gameplay
How to explain this and give the game the credit it deserves? Upon entering play, you are given a random number which immediately begins counting up. Directly above is a static number within a circle. You only job is to tap the screen when the ascending bottom number matches the static one above.
That’s it; that’s your only job.
If or when you do stop the count-up so both numbers match, you are immediately transferred to a new screen with an new static number to match. The goal is to survive, matching the number you’re given and moving on. The risk is either tapping too soon or too late, missing the number-match. You are scored a point for each match you make. If you do miss, your game is immediately over and you must begin from zero.
There is a bit of variation to the game, but it lies specifically with the speed of the counting-up of the numbers. When you begin play, the game moves very steady, and fairly pedestrian in its pace. This allows you to get used to the game and find your groove.
But, after a few rounds of this easy speed, the pace begins to waver. At first it will speed up slightly with each round, and though the increase is incremental and rather expected, it does a good job in ramping up the tension.
Then the game changes a bit; the speed will begin to vary in its increase and decrease. If you would record the speed on a scale of 1 to 10, one round would be a 3, then the next a 5, then a 9, then a 4, 7, 6, 2, 8, and so on.
The real challenge lies in once you get to the upper levels of your game. With this variation in speed also comes a variation in the difference between your goal number and the number you start with.
In the beginning most/all of your numbers are at least separated by 5; this gives you a decent amount of time to gauge the speed in which to anticipate your tap. But as you progress through the levels, this difference in numbers you start with starts to vary. One level you may have a difference of 7, then 4, then 11, then 3, then 6, 2, 8, 3, etc.
Coupled with the speed variation, getting to higher levels drastically increases the difficulty of this game – as simple as it seems. Sometimes the best tweaks to a game lie in its simplicity, and that’s what you have here. The upper levels are just as difficult for adults as it is for kids, and that makes Tap Numbers a great game for family members to challenge each other with.
What We Liked
Simple game, and doesn’t apologize for what it is.
Sneaky-good variations as you progress.
Nice color palette.
Easy pick-up and replay value.
Very responsive to your taps.
What We Didn’t
Very simple gameplay; perhaps seemingly too simple for experienced gamers.
With the holidays fast approaching many of us will soon be visiting with friends and family. This means gift giving, hearty meals and lots of photos. Making memories is one thing–sharing them with loved ones is something else altogether. In 2016 alone, it is estimated that 2.5 trillion photos will be shared online. While many of use just upload straight to Facebook, there might just be a better option for sharing your holiday memories.
The upcoming holidays will be full of great photo opportunities
Google Photos has been around longer than Facebook’s own ‘Moments’ photo sharing service. It’s also more robust and a little smarter when it comes to editing and organizing your photos. By default, Google Photos sharing feature is set to off thankfully, but what if you have a photo or album that you want to share?
Sharing on Google Photos is really simple. It can be done from your smartphone, any standard computer with internet access, or even a tablet with internet access. Google Photos is directly tied to your Google/Gmail account, so photos that are set to sync to the service will automatically be available. Photos that have not been synced will have to be uploaded to Google Photos before they can be included in shared Google Photos albums.
Google Photos allows you to organize by date, location or by people included in the photo
Let’s take a look at how to first make sure you have photos set to be shared within the Google Photos service. From your smartphone or tablet, open your ‘Photos’ app. Once opened you will see the search bar at the top with the three-lined menu icon. From this menu you can see what albums or photos you already have shared [Shared], your folders on your phone or tablet [Device folders], as well as a few other options such as [Trash] (where you can restore photos you may have accidentally deleted).
Click on [Device folders] to see which folders are set to automatically upload to the Google Photos service. Here you can select to turn off automatic uploads of various folders on your device. This can be very helpful to make sure you’re not uploading photos that you don’t need to automatically back-up and to verify that your photos are being stored off of your device for back-up purposes.
Google Photos share, edit, and delete functions are visible at the top right
Once you’ve verified which photo folders are set to be stored online, or in “the cloud”, you can directly choose an album or photo to be shared. The options to share a photo or album are plentiful. You can send a direct link to shared photos right to a contact name from your device. Just tap a photo and you will see the share icon to the far left. It looks like a single dot that splits into two other dots, with lines connecting. You will also see that you can create a direct link, post directly to Facebook, save to your Google Drive, or even post in Google Hangouts.
The process is very similar if you choose to share from a PC or Mac. First, open a web browser and type in photos.google.com into the address bar. If necessary, log into your Google/Gmail account and from here you will see your most recent photos that have been uploaded to the service. On the left side of your browser window you can select [Albums] or the increasingly popular [Assistant].
Sharing holiday photos with family and friends is really fun and easy
If you click on a photo or album within the browser you will see the same familiar share icon towards the top of the window. You will also see icons to edit or delete the photo. If you click on the share icon, again you will see the familiar locations to share your photo or album. You can choose one of your contacts, to get a link (a webpage that can be shared through email or Facebook or Messenger), or directly to Google+ or Twitter, if available.
Once you’ve created a link for sharing, you also have the option to allow others the capability to add more photos to your shared album. This could be really handy for families that want to put all of their holiday photos in one location for everyone to view. Be sure to be careful with this feature though, as anyone that has access to the link can upload any photo they desire to the shared album.
Sharing photos during the holidays is a great way to connect with family and friends that you may not be able to visit. With the busy schedules most people employ over the holidays, it’s a great time saver to use the Google Photos service to share the special moments with those you care about.
HTC, not one to be left out in the cold this holiday, wants your attention this coming shopping season. Indeed, we just received word of its expected sales for phones and accessories. The time is right if you’re looking for a new phone as HTC’s got some big-time discounts coming.
Rather than waiting for Black Friday, HTC will kick off its sales on Monday, November 21 at 12:00 EST and run them through the end of November 30 at 3:00AM EST. That’s ten days of slashed prices.
$200 off HTC 10
HTC One M9 for $300
HTC One A9 for $275
UA Healthbox for $300
UA Band for $79
RE Camera for $75
HTC One M8 and M9 cases for $10
All Other Accessories 40% off
HTC notes
Promotions are US only (other regions may offer different promotions)
Limit 4 discounted units per product per order
Get your mouse ready to order this coming week. Once the time rolls around, head to the HTC Hot Deals page and save. Which one do you plan on snagging?
One of the best part about the new lines of Motorola’s “Z” line of phones is that they can be paired with MotoMods. These add-on accessories provide all sorts of wonderful functionality, including extra battery life, better cameras, or an enhanced sound experience. The problem for some people, however, is that these MotoMods aren’t exactly cheap.
Purchasing a Moto Z phone runs anywhere from about $400 up to $600 or so; adding on the Hasselblad True Zoom camera is another few hundred. Normally, that is. Motorola’s Black Friday deals are online ahead of the big shopping day and they look tremendous.
If you’re looking at Motorola for your next phone, and have thought about a MotoMod, the time is right. You can get both together with a $250 discount. Here’s a list of the phone/mod deals being offered by Motorola for Black Friday.
Verizon Models
Moto Z Droid + Hasselblad True Zoom for $674
Moto Z Droid + Moto Insta-Share Projector for $674
Moto Z Force Droid + Hasselblad True Zoom for $770
Moto Z Force Droid + Moto Insta-Share Projector for $770
Moto Z Play Droid + Hasselblad True Zoom for $458
Moto Z Play Droid + Moto Insta-Share Projector for $458
Unlocked Models
Moto Z + Hasselblad True Zoom for $750
Moto Z + Moto Insta-Share Projector for $750
Moto Z Play + Hasselblad True Zoom for $500
Moto Z Play + Moto Insta-Share Projector for $500
To get the savings all you have to do is add the phone and MotoMod to your cart. The discount will apply itself when you’re ready to checkout.
Time to purchase a new smartphone? Is this an upgrade from an existing device? We want to help you out either way.
To save you money, we’ve gathered up all of the promotions we could find from AT&T. Regardless of where you’re thinking of going for service, or what phone you are looking to pick up, you owe it to yourself to check below.
What follows is a mix of phone, rate plan, and accessory promotions worth checking out. It might not be an exhaustive list, but it’s a good collection of what’s currently offered through AT&T.
Although we’ve listed known expiration dates, we have no idea how long some of these other deals will last.
Being from Ecuador, you might safely assume that I’m very passionate about football. The sport is so deeply tied to our culture; it controls our plans and our mood. Football makes you travel throughout the country to watch your local team and, to me, it is as relevant as other stuff that is supposed to actually be important. That’s why Forza Football is one of the first apps I install on any device I own.
I can’t remember when the first time was that I used it, but it’s definitely more than two years ago. This app is, in my opinion, one of the best apps available on the Play Store. It doesn’t matter if you know all of your team’s chants or if you just follow Real Madrid because you like Cristiano Ronaldo, Forza Football will make your experience so much better.
After the splash screen, Forza will automatically detect the country you’re in and show you the leagues available there. This will add them to your favorite leagues, an essential feature of Forza, since it will let you follow them in the app itself.
I’ve always thought that this part of the setup is actually in disorder, since I have always expected to be able to choose a team from my local league afterwards. Instead, Forza redirects you to popular leagues around the world. This include the Premier League (UK), La Liga (Spain), Bundesliga (Germany), and even the Primera División from Argentina.
Immediately after, you’re allowed to choose international competitions. Important events such as the Champions League, Europa League, World Cup Qualifiers, European Championship, and Copa America are included here. Some of them are pre-selected for you – namely the really important competitions, so you don’t need to go and look for them yourself. The selection here is truly astounding.
After this, you get to choose your home country’s national team, as well as your local team. See what I mean? The order is kind of weird. The national team comes pre-selected for you, and it also can include U21 and women national teams, which is cool. Choosing a team from this list, either local or national, will turn on notifications for the matches of that team (more on this later). You can choose more than one local team, of course, but do you seriously want to do that?
Forza’s setup seems like forever, right? Now it’s the time to choose teams from all around the world. There are some popular options here, such as Juventus, Arsenal, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern München. If your favorite team is a bit more obscure though, you’ll have to go to the settings page later and add it manually.
Finally, the last screen of the setup shows a list of all the teams with a little bell to the side. This lets you configure the kind of notifications you want to receive for each team. If you don’t want to receive notifications for Manchester United (live in San Francisco and the match time is too early for you), but you still want to see their results easily, then you can leave it as a favorite team but turn off notifications here. There’s also a granular control over the kind of notifications you receive.
Overview
Forza’s Football main screen.
Finally! Forza will show you the screen you’ve longed for since we started this setup. A calendar strip is at the top, in which the current week will be displayed starting from Tuesday. This actually makes a lot of sense, since some leagues play some of their matches on Monday.
The rest of the screen is divided in two: your favorite teams and your favorite leagues. If a team you follow plays on the selected date, it will appear first and foremost so you won’t miss it.
If there are matches on the competitions you’ve followed, then they will appear below your favorite teams. These won’t filter by teams or anything: all of the matches played on that day valid for that league will appear here.
Tapping on the calendar icon at the top right will take you to a list view of the matches your favorite teams play in the next weeks. If you want to stop filtering your favorites at the top and just show everything according to their league, you can do that by tapping the switch at the top. If you only want to see live matches, there’s a button for that. There’s something for everyone here.
Match View
Tapping on a match will take you to the match view screen. This area is focused on a specific match, and the amount of information it shows is impressive. Also, it changes according to the phase of the match: fixture, currently playing, or played.
The screen itself is divided in five sectors: statistics, table information, match details, videos, and lineups. As you can figure, statistics, videos, and lineups are not available until the match is actually being played.
Statistics show live information such as possession, shots on target, yellow cards, and such. Table information shows the current standings in the table for the tournament this match is being played for. For example, if Arsenal plays Tottenham for the Premier League, then this tab will show the full Premier League standings.
This is updated live: this means that if Arsenal is winning, the table will already have the three points added to them. Both teams playing are shown in bold so it’s easier to spot them.
The match details tab is the most complex of them. It shows information such as the managers, age average, tendency, and stadium. When the match is being played, information such as yellow cards, red cards, goals, penalties and substitutions will also appear here. When the match is over, you can choose players of the match, and a small poll on confidence on chairman, squad, and manager of the team you support.
The videos tab will show you highlights (such as goals, failed penalties, and other important actions) from Dailymotion. This tab’s quality obviously depends on the match you’re watching. If you are looking at a Barcelona vs Real Madrid, then expect to see a lot of them. If you’re following a match from two obscure teams from Ecuador, then don’t expect any videos (even people in Ecuador don’t care about them anyways).
Finally, the squad tab does exactly what you expect of them, showing the starting 11, then showing substitutions and injured players. Special mention to Jack Wilshere, who always finds his way to this last section.
Options
There’s a wide selections of options you can choose from. You can change your favorite leagues and competitions, manage what content you see on the details of a match, app language, notifications, and even support for themes.
The favorite leagues and competitions aspect is pretty much what you would expect. You can choose between every league and competition the app has to offer, and then mark it as favorite so you can see it on the main screen. The option of adding new teams is there too, in case you need it.
Themes range from really good to really ugly, but the fact that there’s actually an option for changing the colors of the app is nice. This is not a quick attempt of doing things either; when you change your theme, even the smallest of details change. It’s amazingly implemented and consistent throughout the app.
Notifications
This is one of the biggest aspects of this app, without doubt. In a nutshell, they work flawlessly. Remember all of those teams we chose on the setup and options screens? Well, you can get push notifications when these teams play.
There’s also the option of choosing with notifications you get: match reminder, lineups, match start, match end, goals, half time result, final result, yellow cards, red cards, video highligts, and even questions and transfer news about the team. You can do this for every individual theme or just set the default options on settings and use that here too.
You can change your teams at any time.
The robustness and granularity of this system is something admirable. As I said before, I’ve used this app for approximately two years and I’ve had issues with it exactly once. It’s amazing how well it works, how each setting is remembered correctly and reflected immediately, how prompt the notifications are, and how every event is in fact picked up and reported.
Clicking on the notification itself takes you to the match details screen. Don’t want to receive notifications right now? Is your homework more important than that North London derby? You can turn off notifications for the match right from the notification, so you can do that Ruby on Rails homework while Arsenal and Tottenham draw yet again.
Conclusion
Forza Football provides a wide array of options, features, customizability, and robustness that is rarely seen on an app, let alone a free one. It sounds cliche, but, considering the amount of stuff you can do, I can safely say that this is an app from football fans for football fans. Seriously, just go and download it right now if you’re a fan of football. I’m sure you wont regret it and your experience will be better.
News that Google has suspended nearly 200 accounts suspected of violating the company’s terms of service, surfaced today. Around 200 people bought Pixel and Pixel XL phones via Project Fi with the express intent of making profit.
The devices were shipped directly to a re-seller based in New Hampshire – a sales tax free state, according to deal monitoring website Dan’s Deals. The scheme goes like this – after the phones were resold the (small) profits were split with the original Pixel buyers.
Buying a handset on Project Fi for yourself or a loved one is perfect legal, but Project Fi’s terms of service specifically state the phones are not to be commercially resold. So Google took action by suspending a number of accounts suspected of wrong doing. Affected users found they were unable to access Google services including apps for email, photos, documents and social media. Aouch, don’t mess with Google, people!
More than that, in some cases it appears Google locked the secondary accounts that were listed as a backup account on the users’ Google profiles.
A Google spokesperson sent Dan’s Deal an official statement saying the company has “identified a scheme in which consumers were asked to purchase Pixel devices on behalf of a re-seller, who then marked-up the cost of those devices.”
The statement also notes that “after investigating the situation, we are restoring access to genuine accounts for customers who are locked out of many Google services they rely on.”
Well it seems like Google already reversed the decision of locking users out of their accounts, after receiving a deluge of complains, reports The Guardian.
It turns out Google send an email to affected parties it has reviewed their appeals and it’s granting them access once again. However Google does note that “repeated violations of our terms may lead to account termination.”
Voices online have been questioning whether the punishment actually fitted the crime, calling Google’s initial decision to ban users a “digital death penalty”. But in the end Google proved to be merciful once again and everything went back to normal.
Need to get a nice protective case for your smartphone or gadget? Black Friday is just around the corner and that means sales, discounts, and all sorts of promos. Speck has some pretty great savings on the horizon, one of which works site-wide and drops prices to nearly half their normal costs.
These are just a few of the many options that are available to you.
And don’t be afraid to break those niches down even further.
The more specific the niche, the less competition you’ll have to deal with and the easier it will be to position yourself as an authority on the subject matter.
Without it, it’s going to be extremely difficult to post content on a consistent basis.
And if you aren’t publishing content on a consistent basis, your readers are going to become disinterested quickly.
And if your readers become disinterested quickly…well, you get the picture.
Step #3 – Develop a Marketing Plan
This is something that a lot of bloggers swing and miss on.
The bottom line is that there are millions of blogs out there.
Even if you decide on a super specific niche like ‘health apps for Androids’, there are undoubtedly going to be others that are blogging on the same topic.
And while you certainly have to create great content, that’s not going to matter if no one is reading it.
Find out where Android enthusiasts are spending their time and develop a plan for reaching them there.
Utilizing social media platforms is currently one of the best ways to do this.
Many modern day bloggers actually recommend that you commit to spending only about 10% of your time producing content and 90% of your time marketing.
While you can decide for yourself what works best for you, developing a blog marketing plan is absolutely necessary.
Step #4 – Commit to the Long Term
The reality of starting and developing a blog is that it is going to be very difficult to monetize it until you have a strong base of loyal readers.
Most bloggers will tell you that it takes at least a year worth of producing content and marketing their blog until they can monetize it to the point of a full-time income.
For this reason, it’s important that you’re willing to commit to the long term effort that it will take to create an Android blog that makes money.
Conclusion
While this is a simplified version of what it will take to create an Android blog that makes money, following these steps will help put you on the path to becoming a full-time blogger.
It won’t be easy. But it will certainly be worth it.
wrong review. For this is a review for Tap Numbers, a well-done but very, very simple gaming experience on your Android device.
Like the rest of this game, setup is dead-simple. Just 
What We Liked
There’s a wide selections of options you can choose from. You can change your favorite leagues and competitions, manage what content you see on the details of a match, app language, notifications, and even support for themes.
More than that, in some cases it appears Google locked the secondary accounts that were listed as a backup account on the users’ Google profiles.
It turns out Google send an email to affected parties it has reviewed their appeals and it’s granting them access once again. However Google does note that “repeated violations of our terms may lead to account termination.”