Alien Biopsy

Here’s a fun or possibly annoying trick. I opened this page which has an embedded SoundCloud file in it in the Dolphin web browser on my shiny, new Nexus 4 phone. I switched to another app and kind of forgot about it. Then when I got an email the song from that SoundCloud started playing again. And again every time I got an email because I still had that song open in Dolphin.

At first I thought it was just emails that triggered it but I was also able to get the song to play by opening up Google Now and pulling down my notifications drawer. And I’m beginning to suspect that just about any notification will trigger that song so long it remains embedded in a web page open in my browser while its running in the background and loaded in my phone’s memory. And since my new Nexus 4 has a lot of memory and is quite stable, that could be a very long time. 

I’ll probably eventually get tired of the song and re-open Dolphin and close that page, if for no other reason than because I have to sleep tonight. But for now I’m positively giddy at this bug which seems to only be possible because my new phone actually has too much memory and multitasks too well.

Will Google Play Kill Your Android Phone’s Battery?

Here’s a lesser known consequence of the new Google Play store. Play now defaults to allowing apps to auto-update if you don’t uncheck that option when you manually update an app. This is convenient as well as a battery killer for somebody who has a lot of apps installed. I have about two hundred apps and my EVO 3D’s battery has just been getting murdered lately; it barely makes it through an eight hour work day with minimal use now. I’m convinced that this is happening because I’ve had the Play store for a while now and most of my apps are now updating automatically.

So now I’ve set my phone to only allow auto-updates when my phone is on Wi-Fi. Data costs aren’t an issue; I’m on an unlimited plan. What this is really about is the fact that I have Wi-Fi at home and rarely use it anywhere else. So I can be reasonably certain that if I’m on Wi-Fi I’m near a charger and thus don’t need to worry about my battery getting killed by multiple app downloads and installations.

That’s my theory anyway. We’ll see how it works out in real life.