Surveillance and Monitoring Apps for Smartphone Users

For smartphone users, playing sophisticated games of espionage may be easier than ever and this is due to the ever increasing number of surveillance apps. Most of the times, these apps are programs that are downloaded and installed on smart phones, iPhones, Android phones and so on. You then need an online account to access the information being captured by the app on the smartphone.

Few of the leading surveillance apps:

Most of these apps are capable of a comprehensive monitoring of the smartphone user’s phone usage. This includes emails, text messages, calls and even location. Most of them are popularly used by parents who want to keep track of their children and protect them. They are also used by employers who want to ensure there is no misuse of the phone privileges being accorded to employees. None of these apps are available on Google Play store.

• StealthGenie–this app can be downloaded and installed on the smartphone and left to run in the background. It will help you track location of the smartphone, listen in to the calls being made and received on the phone and even access the contacts list on the smartphone. It will cost around 25$ for 3 months which is the cheapest of the lot.
• Mobile Spy– a product from Retina- X Studios, this app can be installed directly on the phone and it keeps running invisibly in the background. The data thus recorded can be accessed online with the Mobile Spy account. This app also gives you the location of the phone. You can also exert remote control over the phone. The best part about this app is the fact that it will upload all data irrespective of the fact that the user may have deleted all logs. It costs around 50$ for 3 months license.
• Mobistealth – this app will help monitor calls, video logging and change in SIM card. There is also the very useful feature of phone wipe which will enable you to delete and wipe out all data on the phone should it be lost or stolen. The remote control feature of the phone can also allow the microphone to be activated and conversations can then be heard other locations as well. Unlike others a demo of this app can downloaded by signing up on the website.
• From the house of SPYERA comes the Spyera software that can be downloaded on to iPhone, Blackberry and Android phones. It allows you to intercept live calls, read the text messages of the user and read email as well. There is also the fact that there is total protection of privacy as far as activity logs are concerned. Thus only authorized people can access and use the data generated by the software. The app is not available in google play store though can be bought directly but will make a hole in your pocket the size of an asteroid. We won’t even mention the price.
• SpyBubble is the easy option of tracking the cell phone’s use and promises easy usage, URL usage tracking and photo tracking as well. This app costs around 40 bucks and too comes with a demo.
• mSpy is another specialized software that can be installed easily and enables spy calls, cell identity tracking and monitoring of tasks and web accounts too. The website offers an online demo and app cost 100 bucks for 3 month license.

Most of these companies offer monthly subscriptions. You can even opt for a 3 or 6 month subscription and annual packages too.

About the Author:
Cynthia loves to blog on latest mobile technologies. To know about her updates please click here.

Get great Android games for 1 cent!

Update: The Humble Bundle has ended. Check back for another bundle soon.

Cheep games often means bad quality, right? Well not this time!
Introducing the Humble Bundle for Android (and Mac and Windows and Linux) 2!

Humble Bundle is a collection of games for multiple platforms and you get to choose the price, from 1 cent to a billion dollars!

In the Humble Bundle you get;

Canabalt

Cogs

Avadon

Zen Bound 2

Snuggle Truck and Smuggle Truck

…and if you pay more than the average ($6.41 at time of writing) you get;

Swords and Soldiers

You get to choose where your money goes, and a proportion of profits go to charity.
If you spend more than $1 you get product keys to use on Steam as well!
These games are great, and they run on all platforms, however you have to be quick, as there is less than 8 hours to go until the bundle ends!

Check the counter to see how much time is left and grab the bundle from here!

Fool your friends (or yourself!)

With April Fools day fast approaching,  here’s a fun little app to trick your friends into believing that your phone can charge itself using the power of the sun!

The app is called Solar Charger, so you probably know where this is heading!
When you launch the app, your screen displays a fake PV panel. Along the side of the screen, there is a spoof VU meter that adjusts depending on the light level reaching your phone’s light sensor, and can be hidden to show the rest of the panel.

You can adjust what the panel looks like from a selection of 3 styles.
It even warns you when there is too little light!

The most hilarious part of this app is that when you press the Menu button on your device, you can read some Play Store reviews, some that claim that it doesn’t work, and others that claim it does!

However, on a more serious note, scientists and engineers are working on transparent solar panels that could eventually make their way to mobile devices and enable your screen to become a PV panel.

The app is available now for free on Google Play.

Let us know about any pranks you have played with this app!

Titanium Backup Pro 4.8.4.1 In-Depth Guide and Review

Many users of Titanium Backup will agree; It is the one of the best apps for Android.
Why though? In this review we’ll tell you what Titanium can do, why you need this app and how to use all of it’s features.

When you first launch Titanium, you will be greeted by the ‘Overview’ screen. This tells you about Titanium Backup, various library files and details about your Internal and External memory.

By pressing ‘Backup and Restore’ on the toolbar, it shows a list of installed applications stored on your Internal and External Memory, as well as your system partitions. By pressing ‘Ordered by app name’, you can sort your apps in various ways, including when they were last backed up or installed, their size or the number of backups

By pressing on the button marked ‘Click to edit filters’, you are welcomed by this screen. This screen allows you to filter and search through your apps, as well as labeling them so they can be processed individually.

By tapping on an application, it will bring up a small window telling you what backups your application has and also has buttons to Backup, Wipe Data, Uninstall and Freeze.

When you restore an app, Titanium will ask you if you want to restore the Data Only (If the app is installed already), App Only or App+Data.

Titanium also allows you to add notes to individual backups. You can also protect backups, so they don’t get overwritten by newer backups.

By pressing your device’s Menu button,you have a number of options.

The most used option is Batch. This allows you to perform tasks in bulk, such as Backup, Restore, as well as other advanced tasks.

Another handy tool are the Market Tools. These allow you to fix issues with the Play Store, such as apps that won’t update or fixing market links to apps.

In the ‘More’ menu, you can use lots of awesome advanced features. The 4 most handy are ‘Send Data’ (Where you can export a list of your apps), ‘Overview of app storage use’ (Where you can see visually what apps take up the most space, ‘Create “update.zip”‘ (Where you can create a CWM-flashable package with Titanium inside it) and ‘Extract from Nandroid backup’ (Where you can extract apps from your CWM backups).

With all the features Titanium offers, the 6 dollar price tag makes it justifiable, as it could just save your life. This is the best root app ever! Titainium is highly recommended. The support from the developer is great, and also a wiki is available so that you can find answers to most of your questions.

Titanium Backup is free on Google Play, and the Pro version is available for 5.99USD on Google Play, Paypal or Moneybookers.

Download APK Of Google Play Store (The Rebranded Android Market) Now! [Video]

Just a couple of days ago, Google unveiled the Google Play Store – a rebranded version of Android Market. This move is Google’s attempt attempt in providing users with a common platform to all the apps, games, books, movies and music under one roof.

The new-look interface of the web variant of the new Google app store looks pretty impressive. However, on the smartphone app front, nothing much has changed apart from the icon and, of course, the name of the app: Google Play. Although Google has already started rolling out Google Play Store to Android devices (running Froyo and higher) over-the-air, there are quite a few users who might not have received the update yet. If you’re among such users, you can download the APK after the break.

Installing Google Play Store is quite simple, and won’t take more than a couple of minutes. Here’s what you need to do:

Poweramp v2.0 beta In-Depth Review : Verdict

Sold? Wait, there’s more!!

These features didn’t make it to beta but will be in final 2.0 release:

• 4×1, 4×2, 2×2 home screen widgets
• couple of extra skins (external apk/jars)
• widget pack compatibility
• Better skins for tablets.
• Help update (as if the current help was anything short of awesome)
• Skin SDK : The most important feature that will open a vista of customization opportunities.
• sSettings backup to sd card/restore ( Thank God!!)

Poweramp v2.0 beta In-Depth Review : Lock Screen & Settings

Now moving on to the lock screen. In words of a user at the Poweramp forum, ‘The new lock screen is epic’ & we have to agree. It is fluid with swipe to next/prev support. Shuffle/Repeat are also accessible. You can hide the Notification bar if you like.

Poweramp v2.0 beta In-Depth Review

Poweramp, if you don’t already know, is a very popular Music Player for Android. There are some other music players which come par with Poweramp in terms of features (like PlayerPro) while there are some which beat it in terms of UI (like Ubermusic).
But come v2.0, this is about to change.

Download PowerAMP v2.0-build-443-beta-3

In today’s in depth review, we have a look at Poweramp v2.0 beta. And frankly speaking, we ran out of ran out of superlatives before reaching the end of this review.

So let’s start right from the Now Playing screen.

Now playing Screen:

[Game] Asphalt 5 HVGA Port

Note: This is a free game available in Android Market. Hence, not pirated.

This will work on both Samsung Galaxy Ace & Micromax A70. Any other phone with HVGA resolution won’t have any problem playing it.

Exclusive Interview with Ronald Ammann (ramdroid)

We previously reviewed “App Quarantine” for android and really liked what we saw. We also got a chance to sit with Ronald and talk about himself, his app and a lot of other stuff.

Ace Tips: Tell us something about yourself. What you do?
Ron: My name is Ronald and I’m 33 years old. I live in Germany at Lake Constance, which borderlines with Austra, Switzerland and France. I’m working as a Software developer as long as I remember. I started to focus in Mobile development in 2009. At this time I was working on the Windows Mobile platform and released the app “Taskbar launcher” on xda-developers. When Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7 I got pissed off and quickly switched to Android, which was just starting to skyrocket at the time.

AT: When was the app “App Quarantine” published on android market?

Ron: The first version was published on Android market a little more than 3 months ago, at the end of June.

AT: How much time did it take you to develop this app?

Ron: I can’t really tell. I’ve been working on App Quarantine at least 3 months before releasing it but I didn’t code throughout all this time. Few hours here and there. During this time there were also issues with some lines in my previous employment contract that delayed the release.

AT: What was your inspiration behind this app?

Ron: Aw, to be honest I didn’t really have a concrete plan or inspiration when I started developing. Originally I was working on a backup tool (imagine Titanium Backup with a nice UI), then started adding the freeze functionality, and later removed the backup components. I just had a feeling there are too many things which would go wrong with such a tool and maybe it would be too massive to be my first app. So I focused on something more simple.

AT: Any future plans for this app?

Ron: There are always ideas for new top secret features which will be implemented in future versions. Besides, when I started out I didn’t really know if anyone would install my app, but I told myself I’d do a paid version if I’d ever reach 10.000 installations. Well I just hit that number the other day so this is also a thing that might be happen in the not too far away future.

AT: Working on any new app?

Ron: I’m always working on Android things, stuying about new APIs and trying out new stuff. This kind of research often results in ideas for new apps, but usually I stop working on them after a while because I’m not satisfied with the results, or the exactly same app is already existing. I think there should always be a reason if you publish an app, and I don’t want to release a new app if I’m not really sure about it.
AT: Well, we really liked your app and wish you good luck for the future.
Ron: Thanks.

Here is the market link for his app “App Quarantine”.

Dev’s website