Instead you buy a “mat” which does the charging and each device has a special case or replacement battery compartment which accepts the charge.

It’s a US company but UK versions of their products are available. Indeed, their prices are quite competitive right now with massive price drops on many of their products.

But.. and there’s a but… their range is rubbish. If you don’t own an Apple or Blackberry you’re likely to be out of luck. They also support the Nintendo DS and DSi and 2 Android phones. The Apple iPod Touch is supported but not the latest generation and in the case of the Android phones, both are US models and don’t appear to be supported in the UK at all.

I contacted them via Twitter to ask if they had plans for a receiver for the incredibly popular Samsung Galaxy S 2… they didn’t.

So, it begs the question – “what’s the point?”. Well, unless you have a phone named after a fruit.

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Playstation Network has gone down… again. No warnings and, worryingly, Sony are saying it’s due to “unscheduled maintenance” – the same thing they said after being recently hacked.

It went down early afternoon GMT and there are now reports of it being restored – a number of hours ago in the US. Many are hopefully suggesting this might indicate the Playstation store is to return, but I doubt.

However, the big problem – again – has been Sony. No reporting of the issue (their blog and Twitter feed is quiet) and, indeed, the UK PlayStation Network website has, throughout the entire afternoon, shown the network to be “online” – that is, until you try and log in.

Although Sony themselves are saying nothing via Twitter, plenty of people have something to say to Sony in return – sadly, most of which won’t be suitable for this site. Needless to say, people are not happy, with many talking about switching to Xbox. After everything that’s recently happened, you’d really think Sony would be pulling out every stop available to them at every turn. Instead we have another missed opportunity – PSN goes down again, with no support from Sony. Poor.

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If you’re a WP developer I’d recommend following his Twitter feed.

Available on SlideShare are a couple of excellent presentations of his – again, if you’re “into” WordPress, these are excellent (and non-techie).

The first is titled “Designing WordPress” and was given at Heart & Sole 2011. Heart & Sole is a UK event in which professionals working in Web design and development get together to to interact, share experiences and learn together.

And there’s a matching video of the presentation, courtesy of Vimeo…

The second (and most recent) presentation is titled “Taking Control of WordPress: How to Build a Better Blog” and was given at TBU 11, another UK event but this time for travel bloggers.

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That sounds a good thing, right?

Well, most of the plugins (bar one) are available separately from Automattic and, this way, you can at least only install the components you actually need (reducing bulk and load on your installation).

Here’s a run down of what Jetpack adds and where else, if possible, you can get the same functionality from…

• WordPress.com stats – site stats delivered from WordPress.com. Download from the plugin directory.
• Twitter Widget – the plugin library is chock full of Twitter widgets and general plugins. However, Automattic have their own Twitter widget named Wickett Twitter Widget which, looking at the code, looks pretty much to be the same plugin!
• Gravatar Hovercards -various blogs have posted about how to add these to your WordPress blog yourself (as I have done). Alternatively, download a plugin from the directory.
• WP.me shortlinks – a way of adding the WP.me URL shortener to your blog. As far as I can tell, this is not available as a separate plugin.
• Sharedaddy – a social sharing tool. There are various alternatives, or you can download Sharedaddy from the plugin directory.
• LaTeX – let’s you mark up your posts with the LaTeX markup language which is perfect, for example, for complex mathematical equations. Download from the plugin directory.
• After the Deadline – adds advanced spell check and grammar checking facilities. Download from the plugin directory.
• Shortcode Embed – puts LOADs of useful shortcodes to your fingertips, including video embedding. However, I suspect there are few of these that can’t be found elsewhere in other plugins. Instead of bulking up your site with shortcodes that may not be used, why not just install plugins to add those that you need?

From what I can tell, the only feature that you can’t get elsewhere is “WP.me shortcuts” (a feature I’d like!).

So, the answer is to install those that you want separately? It would be, but there’s a dark cloud in the Jetpack FAQ…

As we upgrade each of our individual plugins to be a part of Jetpack, we’ll prompt you to switch over to the new, Jetpack-powered version.

Oh. You’re going to be forced to install all of them as Jetpack.

I don’t get it. What’s the point of Jetpack? Ok, so they’ve bundled a number of (their) plugins together – but isn’t the joy of WordPress plugins that you can mix and match as you choose from different authors, getting each just the way you need it?

This post has been updated from the original, as I thought that individual components of Jetpack couldn’t be deactivated, which would have lead to more serious concerns. After further testing, however, I’ve found that this is not the case.

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It turns out that you can’t download MMS message when you’re using Wi-Fi. Now, this maybe a T-Mobile limited thing, but when you received an MMS, you get a simple text inviting you to download the media that’s attached to it (usually a picture). In my case, I’d click on the download button and it would then state that the download had failed – nothing more.

For, what I assume is, security reasons, this only works when using the phones data connection, not Wi-fi (where I guess it can’t authenticate you properly). If you’re using the latter, the data connection is not in use. So, turn off Wi-fi and the download works.

A simple fix, as it turns out, but frustrating until I knew.

Meantime, T-Mobile have, helpfully, put a useful tip on Twitter…

Having trouble sending MMS in your G2, ensure WiFi is switched off and re-try

Only the day after I found this out. I assume that was aimed at me

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I haven’t linked to any of the apps, as they should all be searchable in the Android Marketplace.

Oh, and I haven’t listed games (they’re a lot more of a personal choice, I find).

Information

The BBC news widget is particularly useful, providing easy access to the various BBC news feeds.

Movies, by Flixster, uses GPS to good use by displaying nearby cinemas and listing for their current shows. However, when viewing other information, such as trailers, it does appear to have constant network issues and this feature therefore doesn’t appear to work. A shame.

Google Sky Map is a fascinating educational tool that lets you point your phone heavenward and view the stars and planets whilst moving around.

ShopSavvy is a barcode scanner that will then look the product up to try and find prices. Useful for when you’re out shopping.

WikiMobile provides a mobile interface to Wikipedia.

Media

Until an official BBC iPlayer app appears, beebPlayer will help – it will let you view iPlayer TV content, along with listening to live Radio. Sadly, there’s no iPlayer radio content available.

Amazon MP3 provides access and purchasing capabilities for MP3 tracks from the Amazon website. They also have free tracks, although it’s best to look these up on the main Amazon site and then search for them on the app, as there’s no option on the app to list free tracks.

Last.fm is a streaming music player for the popular website, whereas Simple Last.fm Scrobbler will send details of all the music you’ve listened to, to the very same site for statistics purposes.

And for those who haven’t come across Shazam before, it may come as a bit of a revelation. The next time you’re at the pub and can’t identify a piece of music, simply use this app and it will work it out for you.

Lastly, I come to Podcasts. I initially used Google’s own Listen app but that simply failed to pick up new episodes of subscribed “shows”. I’m now trying out BeyondPod, which is only free for the first week. So far, it seems to work nicely.

Messaging

Meebo is a good, all-purpose instant messaging client.

And, if you find the default text messaging software a little bland, you could try Handcent, which includes speech bubble style conversation threads and is generally, well, a little more inspiring.

By default, reminders on Android are a bit lacking – you get a text or a missed call and you don’t get to hear about it after the initial reminder. Missed Reminder will keep nagging you and has a plethora of options, from LED colours to flashing the trackball.

Network

3G Watchdog is an excellent way of monitoring your data usage (you just need to know what your data usage  limit is and when it runs to/from).

In an attempt to preserve battery power, the phone will automatically drop wi-fi connection when the phone is in standby. This option can be changed via the settings, but you may want to be able to switch this on/off as required. Wi-Fi Lock is a useful widget to do just that.

Office

AK Notepad is, well, just that – a useful note facility. However, if you want to stick a note on your screen, then I’d recommend Sticky Note.

Integrating with my existing online services, Quick Save will add a facility to quickly add links to Read it Later, and Astrid will synchronise and allow me to update my Remember the Milk to-do lists.

A more recent find is cloudList which allows you to create “tick lists” which can be accessed on both your phone and on their website.

WordPress have released their own app, WordPress for Android, which allows the quick editing of posts.

Sadly lacking is an app for Google Reader.

Social Networks

Facebook have their own App and, for eBay, Pocket Auctions works well.

I’m not mentioning a Twitter client right now, as I’m in the middle of reviewing a number – more on that in a later post!

Tools

Advanced Task Manager provides quick lists of running apps and ways to quickly “kill” them. There’s even a widget to perform an instant kill.

For file management, I’d turn to ASTRO which, erm, does just that.

Profilechanger is not very pretty but does exactly what I want – allows me to change profiles at certain times of the day – in my case, it goes silent overnight.

One the facilities sadly lacking in Android is the ability to backup your data and your apps. MyBackup Pro does just that – both onto your SD card and online. However, unlike most of my other recommendations, this isn’t a freebie. Give the trial a go though!

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This version includes a new data type of “image73″, which will return a 73 pixel version of a Twitter users profile picture, and a way of embedding Twitter data directly into your posts and pages.

As always, details are on the official plugin page.

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First, and foremost, you can now pass various options to the URL shortening options. Secondly, a workaround is in place for a reported, known error.

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Flu Pandemic Level – updated to version 1.1. Re-tested and code tidied up, but no major changes.

Simple Wakoopa List – updated to version 2. This is a major update which introduces a new caching system, a new method of passing parameters, along with a slew of new switchable options.

Simple PayPal Donate – updated to version 1.2. Re-tested and code tidied up. New parameters to allow a target to be specified, and for the button image ALT text to be modified.

There’s more to come, including a brand new Twitter plugin.

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Unfortunately, passing, say, this title to Twitter, via the URL, causes problems. First you have to URL encode and the mixture of the HTML encoding and the URL encoding produces a mess that Twitter simply doesn’t cope with very well.

However, the standard HTML decoding in PHP didn’t seem to work 100% with, for example, apostrophes not being decoded. After much head scratching and some frustration I found that this was due to the parameters that I was using.

The following line will correctly decode the post title to plain text…

html_entity_decode(get_the_title($post->ID),ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8');

To then encode is to be passed via URL, then simply use this…

urlencode(html_entity_decode(get_the_title($post->ID),ENT_QUOTES,'UTF-8'));

It seems obvious now

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