Android phones, apps and tablets

Chromecast from where?

I got mine from here. £35 delivered.

Is the battery life of the nexus 5 as bad as reviews say it is?

Its fine; I graduated from iPhone 4s (and years of apple brain wash) to this, the battery goes easily for a day and some with my usage. In doubt keep this in your saddlebag: Anker® Astro Mini 3000mAh Ultra-Compact Portable Lipstick-Sized External Battery Backup Charger Power Bank Charger for iPhone 5 (Apple adapters not included) 4S 4 3GS, iPod, Samsung Galaxy Note, Galexy S4, Galaxy S3, Galaxy S2, Galaxy Nexus, HTC One X, One S, Sensation G14, ThunderBolt, Nokia N9 Lumia 920 900, Blackberry Z10, Sony Xperia Z; Google Glass, GoPro and More - Black: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

Is the battery life of the nexus 5 as bad as reviews say it is?

I charged mine up the night before last and I'm still on 44% now...

Ah Ok - as long as I can get a day out of it. My iPhone 4 rarely makes it past 6pm. One of the main reasons I want to change.

Thanks all. Glad to hear it's OK - all the reviews I've read are good and at almost half the price of HTC one etc it's a bit of a no-brainer other than the battery thing.

Plex isn't working very well for me, keeps dropping out... Grrr...

You got the server working? What's dropping out? The connection between the server and whatever device you're viewing from? The Now TV box is Wifi but I'm still getting decent 720 streamed without any pauses or buffering. Is the server going to sleep, perhaps?

Oh - another noob question. Using macs and itunes with an android? No fun?

Best Android handset for iPhone convert? Looking at the Nexus.

You'll be wanting something pretty then, with limited functionality and no difficult options and such. ;)

Nexus, HTC, Samsung - have a play and choose. For a geek, the Nexus makes sense but the others do have some nice stuff on 'em. I do still have a soft spot for HTC's offerings but they are more costly.

This "it's better because it gets upgrades sooner" argument has been wearing thing lately as Google keep killing services off that we actually like. Reader, Chat, Latitude, etc. as well as permissions creep into existing apps..

Is the battery life of the nexus 5 as bad as reviews say it is?

I don't know what reviews are saying but it's on par with every other smartphone I've had, if not better. Depends what crap you do with it, innit.

Oh - another noob question. Using macs and itunes with an android? No fun?

Assuming your music isn't DRM'd and you can connect to a broadband connection with plenty of upstream bandwidth, Google Play has an app you run on your computer which adds "all" (up to 20k) the tracks it finds to your Google Account, so you can stream them anywhere, or mark tracks/albums "to keep" and your phone will fetch them (has settings for wifi-only vs anytime).

Tracks bought via iTunes within the last 4 years should be DRM-free.

umm.. yeah.. let's just say the majority of my music library was otherwise acquired.

Nexus seems to be running away with my money right now. Fuck you iPhone!

Just upload your library to Google Music, works a treat...

+1

I've always wanted a tattoo but have never been able to decide on a design that reflects something important enough to me to have permanently inked on my skin apart from the words:

"FUCK ITUNES"

I'm sure I can always get a "FUCK GOOGLE" tat added later.

How about "FUCKT0NES"?

Catchy

You can install the Google music manager on your desktop and it syncs any folders you point it at automatically in the background.

You can also just use Android File Transfer for OS X to transfer music on to your phone.

But it doesn't do FLAC.

But then again, neither did iTuNeS or anything mAc.

You can install the Google music manager on your desktop and it syncs any folders you point it at automatically in the background.

Fine if you want your whole collection on your phone, or if you just want specific albums or playlists. Overall it is fine, but I have gone of 'Google Music'. The sync is over wifi, but the data is sourced from your cloud account as opposed to your local computer.

You can also just use Android File Transfer for OS X to transfer music on to your phone.

This is painful, only good if you ware dealing with albums or subsets of a large collection.

My solution is to use Spotify to manage my music. I want specific albums and am a big playlist junkie. So for me this is the best solution, also the syncing is from your computer to your phone via wifi.

Spotify to sync does not require a subscription! But they recently have gone ad supported for mobile.

but the data is sourced from your cloud account as opposed to your local computer

You say this like it is a bad thing where I would say "that's the whole point of it"

+1

I've always wanted a tattoo but have never been able to decide on a design that reflects something important enough to me to have permanently inked on my skin apart from the words:

"FUCK ITUNES"

I'm sure I can always get a "FUCK GOOGLE" tat added later.

Get FUCK TAXIS instead.

Plex isn't working very well for me, keeps dropping out... Grrr...

can't remember the settings off the top of my head but turning off upnp and fiddling with the sound conversion settings in plex media centre cleared up some issues I had with stability.

will check when i have a minute and I'm back home to confirm what i did.

all sounds rather complicated. This is what I had feared.

Oh - another noob question. Using macs and itunes with an android? No fun?

In addition to the other replies I use Doubletwist to sync iTunes from my Mac to my phone. It works well - you can sync either wirelessly or via usb depending on the phone. I have a nexus 4 that won't sync via usb due to it being mtp so i do wirelessly (you have to have the paid version of Doubletwist to do this). I set up smart playlists in iTunes on the Mac and get them to auto-sync. You can easily control what syncs - e.g. I set a data limit on the smart playlists to only put 10gig of music on my phone.

Question to others. I tried Google play music when it first came out but a) it didn't recognise meta-data e.g. ratings b} had no smart playlist functionality c) as was cloud delivered was no good if I had no data connection - the storing locally thing seemed useless.

Is it worth trying again?