Google Warranty

My Nexus 10 died! :( What was pretty spectacular though was my experience of chasing up my warranty with Google. I Googled "nexus 10 warranty" and within seconds had a 1800 number (which is a free call in Australia) and after 60 seconds on the phone, I was talking to a real life person. After verifying that the device was dead, I had to purchase a new one, however the money will be held in an escrow arrangement until I get the new one, place the old one in a postage bag provided and it returns to the factory for assessment.

So far so good! I'll post my experience in the next few days.

Group text and email on Android

I still can't believe that the Gmail app on Android, in 2014, will not allow you to interact with your GMail groups! It is crazy to think that you need a third party app to send emails and texts to your GMail groups this late in the technology game.

I understand that they are trying to discourage spam masters from clogging the internet from their mobile devices, but there should be another way.

Enter "Group SMS & Scheduler". It's ugly, but in terms of functionality, it is the best one I have been able to find. It still seems a bit of a convoluted process and I live in hope that one day Google will make the functionality available natively. Until then, give this one a crack.

Offline Gmail Tizzy

I use Offline Gmail. It is really hand on the train, going through tunnels and underground stations. It works mainly like the full blown website with minimal limitations. You email to your hearts content and when the browser detects a connection, it squirts the emails in your outbox on their way and retrieves your incoming emails from Google's servers. Really nice. No need for an email client.

Yesterday I had to change my password (long story) and it sent Offline Gmail into a bit of a tizzy. Resetting Offline Gmail is a bit of an archaic exercise so I thought I would share the link here with others.

This is what you need to do to unbunch Offline Gmail's panties when they all get in a twist when you do something like change a password on the server.

Managing your device on Google Play

I just started using Pushbullet (more on that in another post) and it gave me a list of Google devices, one of which I have not used for quite a few months now. I am not sure if you are aware of how to manage your devices through the Google Play store. You can find all the information and instructions you need to manage your devices in the Play store here.

Mashable

One of the news sources that I use had a series of interesting articles. They are behind a paywall so I thought I would seek out the source of their articles.

It turns out it was Mashable. I downloaded their Android app immediately. I use it at least everyday. I have found it to be smooth, simple, elegant and clean. In addition, their articles are great!

Confirming my pain... Soccer Livescores App

I am an Australian fan of the world game (football in most places around the world, and soccer in the USA, some parts of Australia and other parts of the world).

At the moment, I am experiencing quite a bit of pain with my beloved Melbourne Heart rooted at the bottom of the A-League table with no apparent plans to go anywhere. I am also a massive Tottenham Hotspur fan as well as interested in Fiorentina in the Italian Serie A and Shimizu S-Pulse in the Japanese J-League.

The wonderful app Soccer Livescores is my app of choice when trying to keep in touch with the many different teams I follow in the many leagues around the world.

Falling in love with Currents again

I use a combination of GReader Pro and Pocket for my news reading. Over the last week, I have started using Google Currents again. It is simple, clean and very easy to share articles from (although there is a trick to it, you need to tap the article title to get the sharing bar to pop up).

I whimsically installed Flipboard again to try it out but found that it didn't quite do it for me. I flicked over to Currents to see what was new and was surprised to see it has simplified even further and scales really nicely between small and large screens.

Give it a try if you haven't already. See what you reckon.