Last week, I took the plunge and bought a Samsung Galaxy Nexus (and I must say I’m very pleased with it) and I’ve been playing around with all the games that ran like a pig on my HTC Desire.

Yesterday, Google launched a 10 days of 10p apps promotion, one of which was Gameloft’s Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD. “Brilliant”, I thought. I’d always wanted a decent looking car game to play on my Android. So I went to install it via market.android.com:

All signs seemed good, so I bought the app.

After 20 minutes of downloading 500MB of extra data for the game (fair enough I thought, it is a high end game) imagine my dismay when I’m treated to this message:

At first, I assumed it was something relatively straightforward like the game’s licensing servers were down due to the influx of people downloading all these apps/games for 10p/10¢ (another reason I thought against using proprietary DRM in your software).

20 minutes went past and still no joy, so I sent Gameloft a pretty small email just asking if they’d had any problems with this. After about 4 hours, I got back an email telling me I hadn’t read the description properly and it was entirely my fault that the game didn’t work with my (flagship) phone. This is the blurb they gave me:

When you buy a game from Android Market Place you can check if the game is available for your phone model by clicking MORE on the game description page before you pay for it.

Gameloft assumes no liability for purchaser error, trial versions, software purchased for the wrong telephone, device or platform for any reason (“Purchaser Errors”).

We accept NO RETURNS on software downloads. Please read the system requirements very carefully before making any purchases.

Fair enough usually, I personally can’t stand it when someone doesn’t read the requirements prior to buying something. However, the game’s description made absolutely NO mention of it being compatible with a select amount of phones. I won’t bother posting all their promotional blurb here, but I’ve taken a screenshot here.

I still don’t want a refund, I want to play the game on my phone, but personally feel very vilified from the way they’ve made me out to be some kind of idiot.

Sort it out Gameloft.

Overview

Application Name:
Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD

Price:
10p at time of writing

Official Site:
http://www.gameloft.co.uk/smartphone/asphalt_6_adrenaline_hd/

App information link:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.gameloft.android.ANMP.GloftA6HP

Rating

(and it only got that 1 because it was 10p)

So I’ve blogged it instead!

If you have Greasemonkey for Firefox or Google Chrome simply click this link to apply my changes!

James.

Update: It looks like they’ve taken the Digital Spy Forums offline, will it be to make changes to the layout or just to circumvent the userscripts? We’ll see!

As a previous Spotify Premium user, having sent precisely £100.89 Spotify’s way, you’d expect me to applaud these changes. Well I don’t. And I’m gonna tell you for why…

First off, let me get one thing off my chest…

The ridiculous 5 play limit

Seriously? If this was a limit per week or even per month I could understand that, but after hitting this limit 2 days after finding a new song that I absolutely love and now never allowed to listen to it on Spotify without coughing up for Unlimited or buying the track it left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. The part of this that really gets my back up is that Spotify’s blog post seems to suggest that people that hit this limit aren’t using the service correctly:

“the average user won’t reach the limit on plays for 7 out of 10 tracks, after a year of using Spotify.”

Interestingly, Spotify quite conveniently links with Last.fm, and as I don’t have regular MP3s scrobbled, let’s have a look at my top 20 most played tracks in the past year…

You actually have to keep going to my 168th most played song before you can find one that has been played less than 5 times, so if this had been applied last year, my top 167 songs would simply be unavailable on Spotify.

While I will concur that some of my listening habits are not quite “regular” (I’m not sure how I managed to listen to The Island Pt. II 43 times!) I know of plenty of people who will listen to the same songs quite often, sometimes twice or three times in a row if it’s a new song they love, and with Spotify’s playlist function, it becomes very easy to listen to the same song multiple times.

10 hour listening limit

It’s not enough. Seriously, 10 hours can be gobbled up pretty damn quick, I used to use Spotify at work, so in one day I could have potentially used up 80% of my montly listening quote. While I’m not asking for 200 hours a month to get me through work, I think they could have offered more than they are.

Pricing

Please don’t instantly shoot me down with “pay up or shut up” comments, as I did, for nearly a year. Why did I cancel? Simple: I didn’t think I got my money’s worth. £10 a month is a lot in this age of cost cutting and recessions, so when I actually analysed my usage of Spotify originally, I found that I just didn’t use the Premium services enough to justify the £10 a month cost. I would however consider Premium if it was at the current Unlimited price point of £5.

So what am I going to do without Spotify?

Use Grooveshark. I paid $30 for a year of Anywhere before the prices went up, but even with the prices at $9 a month it’s still nearly half the price of Spotify. Sure, the interface isn’t as slick, some tracks have a lower bitrate and the mobile app still needs a bit of work but it’s got a much more realistic price.

In closing

The door is always open Spotify, so if you decide to make your Premium service more competitive, I’ll be willing to re-join, but at the moment, as one of the early adopters, I feel a bit betrayed.

“Everyone Loves Music”. So long as you only want to listen to it 5 times.

Today, I’m reviewing aCar, an application that allows you to monitor and record all of your car’s servicing, fuel and general costs.

Well, where do I start? This application is quite possibly the most fully-featured car-based app I’ve ever used on Android. And the best part is that 90% of the functionality is completely free!

Let’s get the basics out of the way first – fill ups. aCar records all your fill ups, along with what brand of fuel you used, the octane rating, total cost, cost per litre etc etc!

Once you’ve got a few fill ups under your belt it will then be able to give you detailed statistics on how much your car is costing you on fuel, and how much you’ve spent in a month, last month and over the past 3 months.

It’s quite amazing just how detailed this app is, and this review only scratches the surface of the functionaility available.

Another neat feature is the ability to keep a service record for your car too. Want to change the oil? Record the date and cost and aCar will keep track of that too, AND will give you a reminder at an interval you define to let you know it’s due again!

My only gripe is that because the app has so many features, it can be quite easy to get lost in there (it took me a good half an hour of playing about before I was 100% on what I was doing) but this is the only problem I can really find with it, and once you have got to grips with it, it really is an invaluable tool!

Screenshots

Overview

Application Name:
aCar

Price:
FREE (Donation required for Pro functions)

Official Site:
http://www.zonewalker.com/acar

App information link:
http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.zonewalker.acar

Permissions:
ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION, INTERNET, READ_PHONE_STATE, RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED, WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE

Rating

By far the best one of the three and I’ll admit (as have others), I cried at the end.

The app I’m reviewing today is: Balance Alert for T-Mobile, also known as TMobNotify.

As its name suggests, it won’t be much use to you if you don’t use T-Mobile! However if you’re lucky enough to have a contract with them, then this app is definitely worth a look.

Let’s get to the thorny issue of the price first. It’s 79p. There, that wasn’t so bad was it?

What you get for this paltry sum is an app that will periodically log you into your T-Mobile account and monitor your usage (or Flext balance if you’re so inclined), unbilled costs, and alert if you if you hit the limits you have set in the configuration:

Configuration itself is a doddle, simply enter your “My T-Mobile” login details, choose whether you have a Combi or Flext plan, and set the relevant allowance alerts:

Once enabled, the service checks your account balance at intervals you specify (the default is every 3 hours).

The overview screen now provides all the information at-a-glance:

For those who love their information however, there’s a handy “Get Non-Allowance Breakdown” button which shows you any calls/texts that have been billed outside your normal allowance (for example text short codes like Radio 1′s 81199 etc), and also gives you the total data you’ve used this month, useful if you’re on a cap, or want to avoid hitting a fair-usage policy!

All-in-all, this is a super handy app for anyone on T-Mobile that wants to get a quick look at their account on their phone, without having to go through the rigmarole of logging into T-Mobiles site on your phone, or texting BA or AL to 150 and getting a very concise and rather useless text back!

The only two things I think that would make this app perfect right now would be:

• Some sort of homescreen widget that displayed your balance and minutes/texts remaining.
• Balance of boosters, for example a text or data booster.

Overview

Application Name:
Balance Alert for T-Mobile

Price:
£0.79

Official Site:
http://sites.google.com/site/tmobnotify/

App information link:
http://www.cyrket.com/p/android/cx.ath.tom3030.TMN/

Permissions:
INTERNET, READ_CONTACTS, RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED, WAKE_LOCK

Rating

I thought I’d add these here. I get 2 a month for being on Premium, these are for Spotify Free, simply paste in the invite code on that page!

NB: These will only work in countries where Spotify is available, currently: Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain or The Netherlands.

If it doesn’t work, try the next one in the list. I’ll add more as I get them each month and cross out the used ones!

• dGnbudxmugu3yYVX
• b4W95Dd3W4FYHBGt
• aNsRyhfVgJghkchw
• ceGx8DSDSNYWTPz6
• e4bdXPyMqCChcs57
• fAkn4BdqB9HPgEL8

All gone (01/06/2010).

Enjoy!

James.

Seeing as there doesn’t seem to be much relating to this error on Google. Well, there does, but never a resolution (or people are unwilling to share the solution they received from CoPilot).

I had the notorious “Google Checkout number invalid” error, and after re-installing the app, then received this error when trying to log in to my CoPilot account (on the phone): Sorry! Your CoPilot Trial Has Expired – Error 703

So, for the benefit of those of you out there who encounter this problem, here’s the email I received from CoPilot regarding this problem.

Thank you for contacting CoPilot Technical Support. It may be your maps are corrupted. What I would suggest is to

1) Uninstall CoPilot in SETTINGS | APPLICATIONS | COPILOT.
2) Connect your device to your PC over USB
3) Delete the CoPilot folder
4) Now unplug your device from the PC
5) Download CoPilot from the Market Place again (you will not be charged for this)
6) Then follow the Central instructions below to download maps again

Download Central 2.0
1) Please download Central from

http://www.copilotlive.com/central

Getting the device Connected
1) Launch Central 2.0
2) Log in with your CoPilot Live ID (this is required in order to download maps or purchase upgrades)
3) Connect your android device to your PC through a USB cable
4) On the device, drag the top bar down to the bottom of the screen and tap on USB connected
5) Select “Mount”
6) You will see in Central at the top left of the screen your Device model (for android devices we just show “Android Device”) and CoPilot 8 version number.

Downloading Maps
1) Select Download maps – this is an icon in the center of the welcome screen (currently only for android customers) or go to CoPiltot store and select Maps.
2) Select the region to download. You can only download maps for the region you previously selected on your device. These regions will be shown in blue in Central. For all other regions that you have not purchased, the text will appear in black signifying you need to purchase these.
3) Once you click on download, the data will be transferred to your PC, unpacked and sent to the storage card on the device. Please remember to keep the device connected at all times.

Ready? Okay!

This weekend sees my flatmate Andy and myself visiting the mph show at Earl’s Court in London. They are platinum tickets very kindly bought for me by my mum as an early Christmas present.

The mph show certainly looks like it’s going to be excellent, I hear there are going to be 250 exotic cars, including the world’s most expensive Bugatti Veyron and a mirror effect McLaren Mercedes SLR. The platinum tickets also entitle us to 2 free drinks, a free meal and dessert, access to “the platinum enclosure” and “The bumper book of Top Gear”!

But I think the most exciting bit of the whole day will be the Top Gear Live show, of which we’ve managed to get front row seats to! They seem to have a lot of things planned for it, but don’t listen to me, see what Jezza and the team have to say about it.

I shall be back on here (I promise) next week with photos and hopefully videos!

I finally got round to moving this site onto its brand new server (with an updated version of WordPress) so I can finally resume my ramblings!

Congratulations are due methinks to Barack Obama for becoming the next US President. I will be in Washington, DC for the inauguration in January, very much looking forward to that! 76 days and counting!

I promise I’ll keep my blog up to date this time, but then how many times have you heard that eh?

James