Nexus 7 not booting up

Few days back I observed that when I plugged my Nexus 7 for charging it did not show me the white battery icon which denotes that it is charging. Even after disconnecting and connecting the charger multiple times to the tablet, it was not showing any sign of life. Obviously I was a little worried and googled for any solution. I found that I am not alone and lots of other Nexus 7 users have faced similar issue.

There are various blogs, sites on which you can find solution. Google also acknowledged and posted the solution on its support site:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/3055485?hl=en-IN

Nexus 7 faces this problem if the battery is fully drained and also remains in that state for quite some time (not always the case though). I followed these steps and brought my Nexus 7 back to life:

1.    plugged the tablet to its charger

2.    pressed and held the power button for more than 15 seconds and booting process started

There is one more solution documented on the Google support site (above link) for this problem if these steps do not work.

Read more →

Racing Moto

Racing Moto is one of the games I installed on my HTC as soon I bought it (more than 1 year ago), I still play this game whenever I have some time to kill. And trust me, this is one game you will never get bored of.

It is a simple game (well it appears to be simple at the start) and my kid can also play it. It has some good graphics if not great. The plot of the game is, you are a bike rider driving on a freeway while avoiding the cars on the three lanes. Well sounds simple? Let me tell you, these car drivers are crazy and they switch lanes for no reason, only good thing is they follow the rules and turn the indicator light on ;).

As you progresses in the game the speed of your bike keeps increasing and so the craziness of the car drivers. As soon as your bike bump to any of the cars or the freeway side railing, your game is over.

Pressing on the screen while playing the game boosts the bike speed and also you score rapidly. There are three bikes available to choose, out of which two are locked at the start. These two bikes can be unlocked by scoring 30000 and 70000 points respectively. I am yet to score 70000 points :).

Here are some screen shots of the game.

Opening screen

Select your ride

The freeway

On sea bridge

Score card

You are busted

How much it costs you: Not a single penny. 

Read more →

SketchBook Mobile: Fantastic drawing / painting app with professional touch

SketchBook Mobile is a drawing application with a professional touch. It offers a lot of features for the beginners as well as professional alike.

You get a range of brush styles from simple to more fancy and amazing brushes to draw the beautiful drawings, complete with the full color palette.

Layers are also available (upto 12) to create more complex and stunning graphics. SketchBook allows the user to choose a picture from the gallery or make use of the phone camera to click one, for adding those special effects.  Pictures can also be used for layers. Transparency level of layers can be controlled along with other features like rotating, scaling, moving to name a few.  

Something I noticed though, the SketchBook app itself is not that heavy, but once you start drawing especially with the help of some of the fancy brushes, noticeable lag can be observed. This is my experience on HTC Desire S (which only has single core), I am confident the latest and more beefy smartphones can conveniently handle the load.

Here are some screenshots from the SketchBook in action.

The Opening screen

 Various drawing options

 The color palette

Various brush options

  

How much it costs you: 2 US $ (approximately).

Read more →

Sprinkle

Sprinkle is fun game which can be enjoyed by people of all age groups. It is a puzzle game with lots of challenging levels.

The plot is, there are some small creatures that live in huts, and their huts are under the danger of getting burn out by the fire which broke out. The challenge is to use water cannon and try to douse the fire, and this should be done quickly, before the huts catch fire. If hut catches fire completely well the game is over. And as the water is also in limited supply, if the fire is not doused off completely, game is over.

The challenges are divided into levels which are locked by default and the next level gets unlocked only when player score 35 or more points from the previous level.

Here are some screen shots from the game. As you can see the game has some very nice and good looking graphics.

Sprinkle opening screen

Some useful on-screen hints

Some levels are really tricky

Use the stones to press the buttons

Nice animation

How much it costs you: 2 US $ (approximately).

Read more →