Improve your device speed with Super Speed for Android

Leave a reply RonF

If you are an Android user, sometimes you may be frustrated with the low performance of the device. Especially when you are loaded with lots of apps and media files in your Android mobile, the chance for reduced efficiency goes high. Super Speed is an Android app that helps you right on this situation!

As many other apps in the store, Super Speed may not have the best of screens and features visually visible outside. The app shines where your device is in trouble with loaded cache memory and slow performance. It almost works on the background and keeps your device as a real “smart”phone.

SuperSpeed android app

The first tap on the app takes you to the one and only screen where two buttons are shown to activate the app working and deactivate it. If you activate Super Speed, you will be notified with a simple pop-up message followed by the confirmation. As said, you may not see any further graphics or performance charts from the app, but it should be working behind making your Android device faster!

Once you activate the app, you can simply tap on your home screen to add the Super Speed widget. I am sure there will not be any differences on your devices for the initial few hours, but the app started showing some good results after few hours. The only let down is there are no measuring arrangements on how the device improvements are working!

SuperSpeed app options

There should be some screens that show the memory usage, processor speed and active applications, etc. Some of the competitors of Super Speed clearly showing these features, only the improvements in the speed or memory won’t work in big time! This is a downside for the app, but the effectiveness in the output is highly appreciable!

Super Speed is a paid app available on the Google Play Store for $0.99. It runs on Android mobiles and Tablets with OS version 2.1 and up.

A Possible Breakthrough in Energy Storage?

5 Replies Jonny Hankins

The Institute of Mechanic Engineers says that turning air into liquid may provide a solution for energy storage. At present most energy is stored in batteries, but battery production and disposal is an extremely messy and polluting affair, and so experiments are underway to look into this alternative.

One of the problems particularly with renewable energy sources is that energy is produced at times when it is not needed. The system cannot just be turned on or off, so this excess energy must be stored. Scientists believe that with improvements the liquid energy solution could be 70% efficient, less than batteries but at a much lighter cost to the environment.

To give you an idea of how the process works, it follows a number of stages:

“Wrong-time electricity” is used to take in air, remove the CO2 and water vapour, which would otherwise freeze solid.

The remaining air, mostly nitrogen, is chilled to -190C (-310F) and turns to liquid – this provides a compact storage medium that can later draw energy in the form of heat from the environment.

The liquid air is held in a giant vacuum flask until it is needed.

When demand for power rises, the liquid is warmed to ambient temperature. As it vaporizes, the expanding gas drives a turbine to produce electricity – no combustion is involved.

One particularly interesting thing about this development is that it comes out of a garage in England.

Peter Dearman in his garage

Inventor Peter Dearman in his garage lab

Peter Dearman made the discovery while looking for a way to power his car using air. I have written about these types of experiments before in my Health of the Planet series. Take a look at this video on Youtube to see Dearman at work. Real Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stuff.

The BBC also has an article in its Science and Environment section that you can read here.

One conclusion to draw is that world changing technological innovation has to start somewhere, and it is not always in a sterile lab. Sometimes it is in a garage behind a house in Hertfordshire.

‘WorldCard HD’ – Manage your Contacts the Smart Way

2 Replies RonF

Are you a business-oriented person? Then you would probably be meeting many people every day. It really gets difficult for you to manage all the business cards that pile up on your table and in your wallet. Here comes an app that helps you manage your cards. Yes, ‘WorldCard HD’ is an iPad app which is an intelligent business card manager.

This iPad application is the handiest tool for your business. With ‘WorldCard HD’, you can save contact information of multilingual business cards. This is an app that transfers your business card details to your iPad without manual typing, but by scanning them using the iPad’s camera. One of the notable features of ‘WorldCard HD’ is that it uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to recognize the details. Once you capture the image, you just have to click on the recognize button.

Once you open the app, you see 3 icons, namely Contacts, Favorites and Maps. The home screen displays names in alphabetical order. Under the contacts option, you have several choices. Using them you can add a new contact by capturing the business card details through your iPad’s camera. The app automatically recognizes the name, company information, address, phone number etc. You can also add contacts from your album by enabling the ‘WorldCard HD’ local services in the system settings and can also import contacts from the iPad. You can check the contact details and edit them if required with the edit icon. You can export your contacts to cloud, email etc., with the contact management icon. The Favorites icon allows you to select contacts and add them to your favorites. With the Maps option you can select a contact and find out where he is located. It also gives you the GPS information of the contact.

WorldCard HD appThe Settings option helps you customize your preferences. It has 3 main options namely, Display, General and Cloud and About. With the display option, ‘WorldCard HD’ allows you to set the display sequence of the first name and last name and the indexing criteria can be set as contact name or company name. With the general option, you can set the index to follow any of the orders like English alphabet, Chinese Stroke, Japanese Phonetics etc. The cloud allows you to share or backup your contacts via cloud services (iCloud/Dropbox) option. The help option of the app gives a clear overview of the various functionalities of the app.

‘WorldCard HD’ is available in languages like English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. It is a business app costing $14.99 that requires iOS 4.2 or later versions. The best part of the app is that you can scan multiple cards at the same time. You can also contact your friends through email, Facebook, Twitter etc. Except for the price, the app seems to be the ultimate choice for any business person. With ‘WorldCard HD‘ in your iPad, dealing with business contacts will definitely become easier.