Review Horizon

Thanks to developer/hacker Vgeezy, Hulu Plus can now be enjoyed as an application on every Android handset/tablet available, even the ones that were not deemed compatible by Hulu. One such device is the new LTE enablet Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocekt launched several months ago by AT&T and my favorite smartphone at this point. You can download two variants of modded Hulu Plus apk from here (portrait orientation) and from here (landscape modded orientation) for devices that lack a portrait mode. I can confirm it works on my Skyrocket and reports confirm it working on Motorola Xoom, Archos 101 G9, Galaxy Nexus, Asus Transformer TF101, HTC HD2, Viewsonic G Tablet, Motorola Atrix 2, Evo, etc. Just be sure to disable any ad blocking apps you might have installed, or at least configure them to let Hulu Plus through.

At this point, unfortunately the modded Hulu Plus apk doesn’t work with any Google TV variants, the main reason being the x86 architecture and the lack of the needed libraries. Well, one can always hope that the next version will!

via XDA-Developers

Less than a week since Nook Tablet started shipping and the highly popular tablet was already rooted / jailbroken. Why should you do it? Well, for start, the Barnes and Noble App Store is rather thin in content even compared with 20,000 apps available in Amazon App Store. If you enable application sideloading you will be able to install Amazon App Store on the Nook Tablet. If you go further and root it, you can also install the official Google Android Marketplace, Google Apps like Maps, Read More…

If you got a new AT&T Samsung Galaxy S II or Skyrocket, you might know that these smartphones have the capability to create a WiFi mobile hotspot capable of providing an Internet connection to 5 WiFi devices simultaneously via tethering. If you do not have a tethering plan though, when trying to enable the tethering and portable Wi-Fi hotspot, you will get the following error message:

Tethering/Mobile AP is unavailable - A Tethering/Mobile Hotspot plan is required to Read More…

Got a new Kindle Fire and want access to the entire Google Android Marketplace instead of the puny Amazon App Store? You came to the right place. In this tutorial we will cover in detail how to install Google Android Market on Kindle Fire. Before starting this tutorial, you will have to have your Read More…

If you are like me and wondered how exactly you can enable the USB mass storage on a Samsung Galaxy S II or Skyrocket device, the answer is not exactly obvious but it is quite simple. While some Android versions like CM7 will pop-up a dialog to enable the mass storage mode, the new Samsung phones are a bit different. They will acknowledge in the notification area that an USB cable is connected, but nothing more obvious than that. they certainly won’t prompt you for anything. To switch to the mass storage mode and mount the Samsung galaxy S II / Skyrocket as an USB drive, you will have to open the notification window by swiping down the notification bar and select the USB connected message. Upon selection, the familiar window showing that USB is connected will pop-up and you can put the phone in the USB storage mode simply by touching the Connect USB storage button. Simple, eh? Shortly after that, whatever partitions you have in the phone will become available as regular USB drives. Don’t forget to un-mount them after you finished the transfer, or applications in your phone relying on the SD card will malfunction. Read More…

Kindle Fire just started shipping yesterday and a super easy one click root / jailbreak solution is already available. We went through the steps, were able to reproduce it and duplicate the end result and we also streamlined it a bit especially for the ones that do not excel in computer skills so here it is for your Kindle Fire rooting / jailbreaking pleasure.

What is the root process bringing to the table? The possibility to install Google Android Marketplace (remember, by default Kindle Fire only comes with Amazon Marketplace), sideloading books on Kindle Fire is another enticing possibility as well.

First of all, all the credit goes to the user death2all11o that posted the solution on AndroidForums and also on XDA Developers.

Step 0. Enable sideloading on Kindle Fire

…or enable the installation of apps from unknown sources. This is exactly sideloading apps many of you are probably interested in. If you only want to add a market like GetJar, this is the only step you want to perform. Touch the top bar on your Kindle Fire and select More…->Device then turn on the Installation from unknown sources. It is that easy, thanks Amazon for not deliberately trying to hide this option. If you need a complete tutorial in enabling sideload on Kindle Fire, here it is! Read More…

If you are like me and bought a Galaxy S2  / Skyrocket (or thinking to buy one) you might be anxious to root it as soon as possible and unleash its full power (including possible overclock, etc). The are several solutions available at this point, but the easiest one comes from Android Creative Syndicate which recently launched Easy Root (thanks, all the credit goes to you – Shabbypenguin and the team at Android Creative Syndicate)

This procedure will also install Superuser and it won’t even require (in my case) to restart your phone. To check if proper rooted, just download something like Set CPU or root check from the Android Market, run it and you should see the Superuser pop-up pop-up prompting for access.

What is Easy Root? Basically a package consisting in ADB, a number of batch files and utilities designed to work together and root your Samsung Galaxy S2 Skyrocket in one easy step. In order to do it, you need to perform the following steps:

Step 1: Prerequisites

Before starting the process, yu will need to download the following files:

a. Samsung USB drives from here (22.81MB) – for Windows platform, name Samsung_USB_Driver_for_Mobile_Phones_v1_3_2200_0.exe Read More…

Following several other popular articles from CyanogenMod 7 series, today we’ll go in detail and provide a step by step tutorial to install the popular Android CyanogenMod 7.1 on the super cheap HP TouchPad tablet that many of us scored some time ago. Before we actually proceed with the tutorial, I need to say that none of the information described here is new, but picked up from various forums. For the software, my thanks and the full recognition goes to the amazing CyanogenMod team that spent their time and effort to provide us with excellent software for free. I did go through the steps myself while installing the CyanogenMod onto my two TouchPads, and went also through my share of hurdles and mistakes. The result? A very functional Android CyanogenMod 7 TouchPad with applications like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Facebook, Android Market, Amazon App Market, games, news, YouTube, eBook reader, etc. I almost forgot, overclocked perfectly stable to 1.8Ghz as well, which gave me a quadrant score of 2753. And that is only the beginning considering that the hardware acceleration is incomplete and the version is still a very young Alpha one.

That being said, the standard disclaimer here: This process changes your devices at a very low level. Proceed only if you know what you are doing. While a complete brick is highly unlikely, it is certainly possible. You have been warned! This version of CyanogenMod 7 is Alpha, so expect crashes and other issues.

And now, let’s proceed with the tutorial! Eventually, the end result should be something like this: Read More…

Cool, my $99 HP Touchpad is set to become much more valuable. CyanogenMod team released a video showing CM7 working quite well on the HP TouchPad altough everything is still alfa level. Considering the speed of the porting, we expect some usable images to come soon, and at the lengendary CyanogenMod quality as well, exactly the way we enjoyed their work for quite some time on Nook Color.

In a letter to RootzWiki, the first website to announce an official effort for an Android port, CyanogenMod team expressed their intention to provide a multiboot solution as well as adding hardware acceleration to the package. No ETA was provided but I think the CyanogenMod accomplishments speak for themselves.

I had a number of requests for tutorial  Nook Touch describing how to restore a rooted nook Touch to its factory default state. I’ll describe a number of methods to be used based on the gravity of the issue. If the Nook Touch still works well, you might need the quick procedure. If it is bricked, you probably need to take the more drastic measures including a complete firmware re-flash. Let’s proceed!

Note: this article, at least for the firmware re-flash part requires you to be familiar with this procedure. If you rooted your device, you probably are. However, a quick read into our initial How to root Nook Touch article might help.

Restore Nook Touch Method 1: interrupt the booting process 8 times

Step 1: Power off the Nook Touch.

Step 2: Power it on again. Read More…