The Google Nexus One is one of Google’s latest products. Most of us already know that Google created the Android OS for mobile phones, but the Nexus One is the first phone that Google are creating with it’s own hardware instead of just supplying the operating system. Let’s take a look at some of the hardware aspects of this phone.

The Nexus One has a 800×480 display on a 3.7 inch screen, which is a pretty decent size for a phone. It also has a 1GHz processor (Which is more powerful than processors in other key phones, such as the iPhone) and 512MB RAM, which is fairly average for one of today’s smartphones.

Google’s new phone also has a very good quality camera – With 5 megapixels. This is similar to another of today’s most popular phones, the Nokia N97 which also has a 5 megapixel camera. In terms of actual quality, the camera does seem to be of a great quality. If having a good-quality camera on your mobile phone is important to you, then the Google Nexus One would be a great idea for you to purchase.

The phone obviously uses Google’s own platform, Google Android. This has support for a lot of important features – Such as e-mail support, Facebook, voice commands and generally a nice-looking system. After testing, it does work pretty quickly most of the time, but in some occasions it can be a little slow. In most cases, this won’t have a huge effect on the operations of your phone and you may not even be able to realise it if you aren’t completing complex tasks.

One potential problem with the Google Nexus One, however, is that it may not be very effective when used in direct sunlight. For example, if you’re at the beach, it may be quite difficult to view the screen. You may not run into issues if you aren’t using the phone in direct sunlight, because apart from that, the screen is a great feature of it. It has a great touchscreen which is very responsive and works exactly as you want it.

In conclusion, the Google Nexus One phone is probably the best Android phone on the market at the moment. If you’re looking for a high-quality phone which will complete all of your day-to-day tasks such as checking e-mails, browsing the internet and obviously making phone calls, then the Nexus One would be a great purchase. If you’re in need of more information on this phone, I recommend visiting Nexus One Review.

Options for Residential Phone services – What to choose?

To talk in terms of residential communication needs, there are versatile options for home service available today, making it difficult to choose from. The best part is that now you don’t have to be restricted to using the traditional services only. If you ask me the only words to utter from my mouth would be, “Phew! Thank heavens for that.”

With more options available, one can easily choose from the wide list of choices they can decide to use for themselves, based on their needs and affordability.

Traditional Phone Service – the regular phone

Traditional phone services or POTS, has ruled the world of telecommunications for decades. It is the long-established phone system, which in fact is still preferred as the first choice by a majority of people for residential purposes. It consists of a landline service with a dial tone ported within your home premises. You can conveniently avail calling services such as long-distance phone calls, international phone calls, voicemail, call waiting and caller ID but for every service you are charged distinctly. So, collectively, it’s the phone line rent, taxes, services charges, and extra charges add up to make a huge sum of money to be paid in form of your monthly bill, which is sure to make you scream in surprise.

Owing to its rather expensive service, people have begun to shift to using other less expensive alternatives, which include internet phone services. The best part is that with voip phone you can keep the existing number but simply switch services.

Other Alternatives–Voip phone

Gradually, we see more and more consumers welcoming voip phone services in their homes and offices. The best reason to support this idea of switching is perhaps due to the cost effectiveness and affordability. Making calls using a voip phone is way cheaper than using the regular phone for that reason.

Today, we have Cable providers offering well turned-out “triple play” services, which deliver cable television, home phone service, and support a fast speed Internet all in one. If you are guessing the cost would be rocketing sky high for this all-in-one service, then you are wrong because there is a considerable cost advantage it offers over otherwise purchasing each service individually.

Nevertheless, this being digital age, there is nothing as better as using an internet phone service. If you have a high speed Internet connection that gives an excellent service quality, then you can easily get yourself a voip phone and begin making economical voice and video calls right away. Whether you use it with a computer or simply get a handset, the cost to acquiring and using the service both are by far less than other services charge.

Voip phone services offer an excellent call quality, similar to that of a traditional phone service but costs you much less, inclusive of all service charges. This is why internet phone is much performing much more better in the market than critics had anticipated. Stats say that internet phone will replace most of the traditional communication means until 2019.

Anyways, choose what you think is best for you, in terms of service quality, cost, and convenience.

Today, Apple announced the Apple iPad. This is their version of a tablet PC. It’s meant to be small, portable and be a mixture of an iPhone and a Mac. Some of the features announced make it seem like it. Let’s take a look.

Steve Jobs described in great detail about the Apple iPad’s media functionalities. First of all, iTunes is built into it. This allows you to listen to music and watch videos, just like on an iPhone. It may not be the best purchase if you’re JUST interested into listening to music, because obviously the iPad is much larger than the iPhone. However, the iPad’s huge touch screen makes it much better for watching videos on. Also, one of Apple’s aims is to make people purchase digital books. They have deals set up with most major book publishers to try and get users to purchase books from them and then read it on the iPad. This is the same with newspapers. They want users to read it digitally – Which is a great idea.

Like with the iPhone, the iPad also has YouTube built in, as well as Maps. Both of these look much better on the iPad – You can now even watch YouTube in HD! One of the downsides is that the internet browser STILL doesn’t have flash installed. For a “portable computer”, flash definitely should be included.

Now let’s look at some of the hardware aspects of the iPad. It’s very thin – 0.5 inches in thickness. It weighs 5 pounds and has a large 9.7 inch display. Amazingly, Apple has made their own processor chip just for this iPad – And it runs at 1GHz. Again, considering the iPhone has a 667MHz processor, this should have been much better in order to provide a quick user experience. The disk space options on offer vary from 16GB to 64GB, depending on how many files you’ll need to be storing.

The iPad also has WiFi built in. This is something you would expect – But what most users want is 3G networking, which allows you to browse the web wherever you are. They do offer this, but you have to purchase a separate model for this – Which costs more! This feature should be provided in all models for free.

What some news channels have been reporting is that this iPad may be competitive in the gaming market. Portable games consoles such as the DSi and the PSP may be good consoles, but the iPad has the advantage of having a much larger screen, better touch screen capabilites and a huge user base which can produce games for much lower prices. If the iPad is capable of handling higher-quality games, then this certainly could be a key player to watch out for.

One of the final things we’ll look at with the Apple iPad is the battery life. The average battery life is 10 hours whilst the battery life on standby mode is approximately a month. I believe that they’ve cut some important features out to save battery life – For example, lack of flash support as well as only being able to run one application at a time. You cannot open, eg, mail and the internet browser up at once.

And now it comes down to the price. If you don’t want 3G networking, then the price of the Apple iPad is $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB and $699 for 64GB. If you want 3G networking, it costs $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. The pricing is quite reasonable considering most tech websites were claiming it would be priced at $999.

In conclusion, the Apple iPad is very, very similar to an iPhone. However, it’s obviously much bigger and can be used to provide much better experiences with watching videos and reading books – As well as playing games. If these are the tasks you’ll be wanting to do, then this may be a good purchase for you.

iPhones are great devices. However, one main flaw is definitely the battery life. If you use it a lot, then you’ll know that the battery doesn’t last long at all. Here are some tips which should help to make your battery last longer.

First of all, this tip will save you a LOT of battery life. Lower the brightness settings in the iPhone and set Auto-Brightness to on. I find that the iPhone is at a suitable brightness at just less than half, or even a quarter. Having it on full brightness will eat up your battery very, very quickly. Let’s be honest though, nobody needs it as bright as it is on full. To change the brightness, go into Settings –> Brightness.

The next option to change is the 3G networking (If you’re on an iPhone 3G or 3GS). When Apple announced these products, they claimed 10 hours of battery life on WiFi and 5 hours of battery life while connected to 3G. That just shows you the difference. If you’re in an area with WiFi, try to connect to the WiFi Network if possible. Even better though, if you don’t need the internet at all, disable 3G and WiFi. To do this, go into Settings –> Wi-Fi –> Wi-Fi = Off. To disable 3G, go into Settings –> General –> Network –> Enable 3G = Off.

Thirdly, you should disable bluetooth on the phone if you don’t need it. This also uses your battery life which you really don’t need if you aren’t using it. Only enable bluetooth if you’re about to use it. Then when you’ve finished, disable it again. This is just one of the many ways of making your iPhone battery last longer.

If you have music on often but aren’t listening to it, you can easily turn the music off. Music does use more processing power so you shouldn’t keep it on when you don’t need to. Listening to music often is fine, just don’t keep it on when you aren’t listening to it.

What some people have found also is that your phone doesn’t last long when you’ve just purchased it. The more you use it and charge it, the longer the battery lasts. If you have only just purchased your iPhone within several days, then just keep using it normally and see how it is in around a week. It could make a lot of difference.

These are just some of the ways you can make your battery last longer. They are simple tweaks which won’t restrict your access to the iPhone, you can still continue using your iPhone in the same way.

Back in the glory days of the internet – around 1996, to be exact – Real Player was actually quite an accomplished piece of software. The VLC of its day, it could play a variety of formats reasonably well, and was great for streaming web content way before anyone had heard of YouTube. Then RealMedia decided to add some annoying nag screens. Then a music ripping program. Then a burning program. Then internet channels and radio…. It all got a bit messy.

The state of RealPlayer today is that it’s well known as being the flagship of bloatware – an application that tries to do much and ends up doing everything half as well as standalone application, so it was hard to get excited when RealPlayer announced yet another update to the product line. Still, we checked it out hoping that RealMedia had finally learned its lesson and began to emulate its much more streamlined, faster and nicer looking peers.

Rather than taking away though, RealPlayer have simply added again – this time a method for downloading video from sites like YouTube. To be fair, it does this very well and you can very quickly throw a video from YouTube onto your iPod or 360 for example. It’s encoding is quick and its options are plenty. However, while it does nothing wrong it doesn’t offer anything different to the variety of programs that have been able to do this for years.

If you’ve never converted web video before but have always wanted to, SP might be worth a try. However, if you know your way around video encoding or don’t feel a media player needs that particular feature, there’s little to offer you. One day RealPlayer might start sorting out its huge list of mediocre features to come up with a killer application, but SP is not that program.

I thought I’d make a personal post for a change.

So far in 2010 I have 3 concerts planned:

22nd March – Delain – I absolutely love Delain’s music! They’re probably my second favourite band (After Nightwish, obviously) and I’m really looking forward to seeing them.

1st May – Kiss – My dad wanted to see Kiss so I thought I’d go with him. They aren’t my favourite band but oh well, they’re still good.

10th May – Kiss – Yep it’s Kiss again. I hope they’re good the first time or this one could be quite boring!

Unfortunately I have to wait until 2011 for Nightwish to tour again, I don’t think I can wait any longer. I’ve seen them once so far in London on the 11th March, I had to travel for around 8 hours in total for that show and it was definitely worth it.

On another note, I really, really hope Nightwish release The Heart Asks Pleasure First soon. I think it would be a good idea to release it in 2010 to give Nightwish fans something to “put them on” until the next album in 2011. I absolutely love that song and all I have is pretty bad versions of it.

Welcome to the release of my JR Memberlist WordPress Plugin.

Description
This plugin allows you to display a list of users on your blog, using a simple shortcode.

It’s very simple to use. Simply enable the plugin and then enter [jrmemberlist] in any post or page you make on your blog. The memberlist will automatically replace it!

That’s all you need to do.

Installation
1. Upload `jr-memberlist.php` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
4. Use the shortcode [jrmemberlist] to show the memberlist.

FAQ
=Does this work?=
Yes.

Changelog
= 1.0.0 =
* Initial Release

Download
New Link: JR Memberlist

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me via the contact form on this website, or by leaving a comment on this post.

The Micro Niche Adsense Method is a way of earning lots of money through Google Adsense – By making lots of different websites in micro niches. For example, you find a keyword that has less than 100,000 competitors, has a few thousand searches a month and has a high value per click. Then, you make a site just about that one keyword, put adsense on it and then make it rank. You’re aiming to make $1 – $3 per day on each site which doesn’t sound much, but when you have 300 of these sites, then that’s $300 – $900 per day. Not a bad amount.

Now I’m sure you’re interested in how to make this work. I’ll tell you the exact steps I do to minimalise costs and make the process of setting up a site easier.

The first step in the micro niche adsense method is to find a keyword. For this, I use GimmeaNiche.com. It simply gives you keywords to make sites on at the click of a button. Sometimes, you may have to click it a few times until you find a good keyword to use, because not all keywords it gives will be suitable. The best keywords to use are ones which are products. This is because people are searching these keywords to BUY the goods, so you should gain more clicks on your adsense advertisements. Once you’ve found a good keyword (Preferrably multiple words), then move onto the next step.

The second step I do is double check the actual number of searches the keyword gets. For this, I use Google’s Keyword Tool. You should be able to find it with a simple search on Google. You simply enter the keyword into the box, enter the CAPTCHA code and it should give you back some information on the number of searches the keyword gets. You should be looking at the “Global Monthly Search Volume” because this is the amount of searches the keyword gets globally, not just in your country. If it has above a few thousand searches, then this is great. Move on to the next step. If it doesn’t have many searches, go back and find a new keyword.

The third step of the method is to find what advertisers are paying for the keyword. Again, I use another tool for this, which you can find on SpyFu.com. Simply enter your key term into the box and it’ll give you interesting information. You should be looking for keywords which are, at the lowest, $0.40. Of course, you cannot expect to receive $0.40 for the click since Google does take money from it. The higher the value, the more you’re likely to earn per click. If you’re happy with the value it gives, then you can move onto the next step.

The next step is to register a domain. To save money, I normally use GoDaddy and register a .info domain. You can get these currently for just over $1, which certainly isn’t bad. I try to register the exact keyword in the domain, with the words separated by hyphons. For example, if your keyword is “nightwish music shop”, then the domain you would register would be “nightwish-music-shop.info”. It is very important to get the keyword in your domain name. Once you’ve registered the domain name, you need to find hosting. The best thing to do when you’re starting off is to find some cheap hosting. Hostgator would be a good choice. Then, once you’ve reached a lot of sites (100+), then you may need to think about upgrading to a dedicated server.

After this, you’re obviously going to make the site for the key term. What I do is find some previous articles written on Ezine Articles and then rewrite them. This seems like the best idea. What you should be aiming for is a 4 page website – I normally have the homepage, two article pages and then a privacy policy. Make the articles around 300 – 500 words long each. Now for the design of the page. I personally made my own HTML theme using a program called Artisteer. You need to find a design which is very basic – And put adsense advertisements in. The adsense should be placed above the content so the first thing users see is the advertisements. I generally use two 300 * 250 advertisements and then a 160 * 600 advertisement in the sidebar. I’m having quite a lot of success with this. Once you’ve setup the website, you need to upload it to your web hosting and get the website online. Once your site is online, move onto the next step.

The final step of the micro niche adsense method is getting your website indexed and ranking on Google, which is the key determinant of your website’s success. To get your website indexed quickly, it really isn’t difficult. To start with, just submit your website to Digg.com. This normally gets your website indexed quickly. After that, you can use another tool I use, located at Verifiedfile.com/seo/. It will make lots of popups show up on your computer, just leave them until it’s finished. After your website is indexed, you need to get the website ranking for your keyword. Since you’re targetting micro niches, it makes it much easier to rank well on Google. The best thing to do is to submit articles to some article directories, build some social media links (Such as from pligg websites), maybe a few web directories too. The best way is probably finding some high pagerank pages and making relevant comments on these pages in order to gain high quality links.

If you’ve done everything correctly, move on and start a new website. Do not spend all of your time building links to one site – Build lots of links and then move on to a new site. You probably shouldn’t expect an instant ranking, you should expect to start making some money from the website after around 30 – 60 days of it being online. You should aim for 1 site being built a day. This won’t be much work each day, and after a long time of doing it, you’ll reap the rewards with a nice big paycheck from Adsense every month. Good luck with your micro niche websites!