Category: Android Arena

The Size & Quality of Videos are increasing at a rapid rate as compared to the Phone Storage. Thus, Videos now take up a good size of disk space on our Android phones . This imbalance in increase of Video quality doesn’t match the speed of increase of Storage on Android which leads to lesser phone memory available for apps, and internal phone memory becoming full. So, In this tutorial we will cover How you can Compress Videos without losing quality on your Android Phones to free-up more storage.

Tutorial to Compress Videos on Android without losing Quality –

• 

  First of all download & install the Video Compressor App from the link below –
  Click here to Download Video Compressor App from Google Play.

• Launch the Video Compressor App from Menu, Not to be confused by its User Interface, the light user-interface elements of the app actually make it function faster as compared to other Video compressing Android apps.
• Once you launch the app, In the label named as “Input Video” tap on “Select” as shown in the alongside image.
• After you Tap on Select you will be asked to enter the source of the video from where you want to select the video file (We will be using “Gallery” as shown below –

  

   

• Browse through the gallery and select the video you want to compress, Once you select a video a “Play” icon will appear on the video as shown below –

  

  Now, click on the Play icon to select the Video.

•  Once you have selected the Video, you will be redirected to the App with the File location as shown below –

  

  Now simply tap the “Compress” button.

• That’s it! your video will start Compressing to the size you specified 🙂 , depending upon your phone hardware this step may take some time.
• Now, Once your compression is finished, Please delete the original Video to free-up more space.
• You can easily compress Videos from 10mb to 2mb & thus gain extra 8mb each time you delete the original video file!
• Click here to Download Video Compressor App from Google Play.
• For More such tips to increase and free-up Phone Storage – Click here for 7 Best tips to free up internal Phone Storage.

 

Cellular operators nowadays, have started providing app-specific data packs, or as as add-on to existing Internet packs. Many times, we exhaust our normal Internet data and are left with only add-on app data, for example WhatsApp , Facebook or YouTube data. Thus, whenever we try to use the app data benefits other background apps automatically connect in background and their ping & notifications result in deduction of our main balance. Here’s a simple tutorial to allow internet access only to specific selected apps on Android while restricting internet data to other apps using Android firewall .

Method to Allow internet access to specific apps & restrict internet to other apps on Android –

• First Step would be to install a Firewall app to intercept our network traffic, though most apps require root the NoRoot Firewall app below works even on non-rooted Phones –

Click here to Download NoRoot Firewall app for Android from Google Play Store.

• Now, once you have installed the firewall app tap on “Start”.
• The firewall app will now ask you for one time permission to start a VPN connection, don’t worry this is just a dummy VPN connection with your own IP address , created just to intercept and block unwanted traffic. The VPN service dialog box would look as shown below –

  

  Here “tick or checkmark – I trust this application” option and tap on “OK”.

• Now, Simply connect to your internet connection, the data access will be blocked to all apps by default. To allow Internet access to a particular app, Open the app for example WhatsApp and then return to the NoRoot Firewall App.
• Navigate to the “Pending Access” tab as shown below , This section will list out all the apps trying to access the internet –

  

  Tap on  “Allow” to enable internet to that particular app, and keep other blocking access to internet for other apps.

• You can also Stop your Firewall anytime to restore access to internet like before.

This method thus, is highly efficient and useful to prevent access to internet to other apps, thus saving money as well as data.

Recently, One of my Android Phone’s hard key buttons stopped working – The hardware keys of Menu, Home & Back below the screen were not operating . This left me looking for some alternatives and I found this easy method to Get back or Enable Home, Menu & Back soft keys on Android phone’s screen. Thus, saving me the costs required to replace the damaged hardware key’s , Here’s how you too can do the same on your Android Phone –

Method to bring Soft Menu & Back Soft keys using Back buttton App for Android (No – Root Required)

• 

  First of all you need to download the Back Button App for Android from the below link (Its a Free App) –
  Click here to Download Back Button App for Android from Google Play.

• Once you have Installed the back button app, when you launch the app it will display you a dialog box asking you to enable Back Button from Settings – > Accessibility – > Back button . Enabling the back button option in Accessibility is compulsory to activate the app, Here’s how you can do it –
  Go to Settings – > scroll down and tap on Accessibility , there you will see an option for Back Button as shown below –

  

  Now , tap on the Back Button Option and turn it “On” as shown below by sliding the off switch to right side to make it display On –

  

   

• Once you have enabled the back button in accessibility , return to the Back Button app . Now here activate the buttons by sliding the Active toggle to right hand side as shown below –

  

  Now, once you have Activated the App, The Soft Key buttons will instantaneously appear on your screen as shown below –

  

  Now, you can customize these buttons as much as you want, you can drag & move them around, or you can lock them upto a particular location.

• You can even change their size, their icons, their transparency and play around. Thus, no longer requiring to change the hardware keys. If the app doesn’t work or if you face any issues feel free to comment.

The default download manager for Android isn’t upto the mark as it lacks some basic functionalities such as resume support, multi-threaded downloads and other features. Considering, the limited connectivity of Cellular data and their fluctuating speeds we really should use Download managers on our devices so that we can utilize the resume support on downloads incase of lower speeds and in places where the speeds are higher multiple-download threads by download managers can help us to complete our downloads more quickly and efficiently. So, here are the Top 5 Download Managers & Download Accelerators for Android phones which we can use along with our existing/installed browsers (e.g Google Chrome) to increase downloading speed on Android-

Top 5 Download Manager & Accelerator Apps for Android Phones –

Note – Back in Old Symbian days we used to use UC Browser for downloading, but considering the fact that Android devices are much more complex and vulnerable & amidst reports saying UC Browser was leaking user data to Chinese servers, we skipped it and focussed only on “Pure” Download Managers and work easily with any other browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox for Android etc. To download using these Download Managers simply use Web browsers for surfing and open the Download links in any one of the following as shown in the image alongside –

 

No. 1. DMA (Download Manager Accelerator for Android) –

Not to be mislead by its common name, DMA by Keerby is one of the best Download Manager for Android which we came across, It has the best User Interface (UI) amongst all the download managers, supports resume supported downloads & 3rd Party browsers too.

Besides, the above option, it has features such as-

• Auto-retry after download failure
• Supports manual specifying of number of threads to be downloaded for each download as well as auto-determine option based upon your speed.
• Feature to download only on WiFi connection so that your cellular data isn’t wasted.

Click here to download DMA Download Manager Accelerator for Android from Google Play Store

 

No.2 ADM (Advanced Download Manager for Android) –

If you’re looking for a no-fuss light-weight download manager for Android, that will get your Job done look no further than ADM by DimonVideo . ADM provides features such as –

• Multi-threading of downloads.
• Auto-resume after download failures, Supports various themes so that you can customize ADM.
• It also supports download scheduling and also you can import list of links to be downloaded from a txt file on SD card (you can use unlimited night-pack most effectively by using the Download schedule option)

Click here to download ADM (Advanced Download Manager) for Android from Google Play Store.

 

No.3 Turbo Download Manager – TDM for Android

Though TDM works only for direct download links, but its 3rd Party browser integration is probably the best amongst all the Download accelerators .

TDM directly provides the “wedge” and “i” icons which you can use to tweak the download settings such as number of threads, etc and ability to change the download location so that handling downloads is much more easier.
Save button simply starts the file download –

Click here to download Turbo Download Manager (TDM) for Android.

 

No.4 Download Accelerator Plus by rubycell

Download Accelerator Plus is a compact download manager which is a meagre 1.3 MB in size! , Not to be mistaken by its lesser size it provides all major functions such as

• Multi-threaded parallel Downloading of Files.
• Supports background downloading even when the screen is locked.
• Provides category and time-line sorting of downloaded files so that you can easily locate your downloaded files.
• Has a small in-built web browser which helps to download from non-resume supported websites.

Click here to get Download Accelerator Plus for Android from Google Play.

 

No.5 IDM Download Manager for Android

Not to be confused with original IDM for Windows, this download manager is highly inspired from the real IDM, and copies most of the features from it . Although, the User Interface is really shabby and needs to be worked upon, the Download Speeds obtained are good  and it doesn’t leak user data to servers which makes it enter our list.

Besides this the Download Manager also supports non-resumable link downloads and whose filesize aren’t shown, and allows some features such as ability to set downloaded music files as ringtone etc.

Click  here to Download IDM Download Manager for Android from Google Play

So, these were the 5 Best Download Managers for Android, If you know of some other feel free to comment and let us know about it too 🙂