Workaround To Extend Your Phone's Capacity (Nexus 4 & LG Phones)

Is 16GB really enough to store all of your apps and media without the need to worry of exceeding? If you’re a 100 app or a 1000 songs kind of person, like me, I’m afraid that amount of space won’t cut it.

I suffered a 50% storage cut after switching over from a 32GB iPhone, and without the option to expand my phone’s internal memory through SD cards with the Nexus 4, I knew there has to be another workaround; cloud storage.

Just so you know, I was already running a Dropbox account to store my documents online and that itself left me not much space for my Nexus 4 to utilize. Luckily, I got to know about LG’s 50GB promotion after reading through various forum postings.

Any new Box user will receive a free 50GB account when they download and log into Box for Android on any LG Android device. Existing Box users will receive the upgrade when they log into Box for Android on their device.

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You might be wondering, why not use Google Play to upload all your songs and stream it to your phone on-the-go similar to iTunes Match? Unfortunately, Google Play music player is currently unavailable in my area. (Boo!)

Moving along, after you’ve uploaded your files onto the free Box account, you’re done. Enjoy your free 50GB of free permanent cloud storage!

But what if you want to stream music from it, assuming that you have quite a large library of legally purchased songs? My answer to that question would be CloudAround; there’s free and paid versions.

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After you’ve got it installed in your phone, you’ll be presented with a large selection of cloud services, including your local storage to stream the music from. Once you’ve set that all up, you may now stream your beats on-the-go.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of disadvantages to this method. The most obvious one would be that it requires an Internet connection for you to stream your music on your phone. Subsequently, it depletes your battery rapidly if you’re streaming for hours at a stretch.

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Also, it consumes a considerable amount of data if you’re a heavy user. The picture above shows about 1GB of data consumed within a week where it reflects approximately 35 hours of usage.

If you’re not bothered by it, or more of a Wifi kind-of-person, then the upside of using CloudAround definitely outweighs the downside of it.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

 

iMessage Held My Conversations Hostage After Converting Away From iOS

So I got the Nexus 4.

More about that in a later post. One of the opportunity cost when converting to Android from an iPhone, would be forgoing the iMessage feature exclusively made available between iOS devices.

As much as it is a joy to have, it is also a pain to remove. There were no clear instructions on how to stop receiving iMessages from friends who are on iOS devices despite deactivation. And since I'm on another mobile platform, I was not able to receive these messages despite being sent to my service number.

 

Enable-imessage

 

The general solution, after scouring through a couple of forums, was to sign out of my Apple ID on the iPhone and also switching off iMessage through the settings panel. That does not work. After much tinkering, I manage to find a solution:

And we're done. iMessage is definitely a solid feature in the iOS department but trapping personal conversations in the case a user chooses to switch over to another mobile platform, not cool.