Ever since Telecom Regulatory Authority of India(TRAI) made it strict for telemarketers by cutting down on SMS count and strictly following National Consumer Preference Register(NCPR) and Do-Not-Disturb(DND) features, there have been millions of people getting registered. All this started with the over enthusiasm of tele-marketers shooting tens of thousands of SMS with advertisements for people who were never even interested to try their products.

How to check if mobile number is registered with  DND or NCPR?

Provide your 10 digit mobile number at TRAI’s NCPR registry website and click the Search button.

If your mobile number is not in NCP Registry or not registered as DND mobile number, then you get a message stating the same.

And, if the mobile number is registered in NCPR and the DND mode is activated, then the results show the same that this particular number is covered by DND rules and the customer should not be bothered with pesky marketing calls and tons of sms each and every day.

It does not worry me if I get 10 messages in a day from marketing guys. But, what worries me and bothers me a ton is, at times I get the same SMS message more than 10 times.

This just signifies that the merchant sending the SMS messages had bought the list of mobile numbers from tons of resources and is unable to filter out the common numbers in all the lists he had purchased.

So, what is your DND mode? Are you comfortable with the number of calls that you are getting even though you are registered with DND? Let us know in the comments section below.

Guest Post by Michael Dorf, LearnComputer.com Founder

Creating “Good” Android Apps

You have heard people say it: “App X is a good app”. You didn’t think about it at the time, but it begs the question. What makes a good Android app? How can you determine if the app you are writing will be good or not? It seems like a subjective thing but there are some areas that all apps could focus on that would make them better. In this article, I will explore the factors that you need to consider when creating an Android application to ensure that you also end up on the list of “good” apps, instead of the other way around.

Reliability

Users want the applications that they use to be reliable. The app should open correctly, perform its function without problems and close correctly, without tying up memory or other resources on the device. Reliability can be determined by testing the app on various devices and under different conditions in order to discover if there are things that were missed that cause the app to behave differently. Changes in feature state can often cause poorly tested apps to break down such as turning the phone into airplane mode or turning off the Wi-Fi. Ensure that you do not leave your user hanging in limbo due to insufficient testing before release.

Stability

Along with reliability, is the stability of the app. The application should not crash, freeze or give error messages to the user. Stability issues vary from annoying to unusable depending on the severity of the problem and may lead to your users being very frustrated and angry at your product that doesn’t work. Make sure to test your application for various environmental changes or problems that could cause your product to have stability problems and work towards creating more resilient applications.

Consistency

Your mobile platform has a set of guidelines on how applications should look and feel, to maintain a certain consistency with the platform. Users will automatically perceive applications that follow this guideline as being better than those that deviate because consistency enhances the user experience and allows them to be more comfortable with your user interface. Making changes to these guidelines or going beyond the limits may cause your user to feel uncomfortable and they could look unfavorably on your app although it meets the previous two factors.

Practicality

This mainly applies to apps that already have lots of competition in the app store or that perform a basic task. What does your calendar application bring to the table that I haven’t already seen? How is your flashlight app better than the hundreds of others already out there? Be sure you are providing some kind of unique service or function to your users or you will only been held up against tons of competition, usually unfavorably.

Budget Conscious

Good applications are often deemed a good value as well. Users do not mind paying for applications that are worth the cost because they provide a sought after and often valuable function. Developers should also think about the cost of their application on a monthly basis if data is necessary for the app to function. Putting some thought into the design of the application can sometimes decrease the amount of data traffic necessary as well as show the application to be worth purchasing by the user.

No (or Few) Ads

It may be an effective means of advertising or revenue generation by the developer, but advertisements are annoying to the user and do not lead to them thinking of your application favorably. Do not create unnecessary inconveniences to your user by having ads pop up while they are using your tool or game.

Hopefully you have found this list of design considerations helpful while creating your own Android application. Putting yourself in the user’s place when making design decisions can be a helpful way of finding the correct path. Knowing ins and outs of Android SDK is another advantage. Effective Android training can go a long way to making you a real expert developer. Remember that once you create one great application, users will be more inclined to purchase something from you again and you will find that the techniques of development and testing come easier the more you work at it. Creating a strong customer base is the first clue that you are becoming a star Android application developer.

Author Byline

Michael Dorf is the founder of LearnComputer (learncomputer.com), an open source training school which offers instructor-led local, online and onsite Android training courses for companies and public. Our flagship Android Bootcamp course will get you writing Android apps in just FOUR days! There is simply no better way to learn Android!

Wouldn’t it be easier if you get to know when an email sent by you gets opened by the recipients? Such that there will be no reasons like, “I didn’t get your email” or “It might have been lost in Spam”. Well, authentic emails too at times get an invitation to join into the spam folder, so no wonder if your email ends up in the spam folder now and then. But, the matter in hand is, how can you know whether your email had been opened? A few days back, I have written about Email management add-on which sends an email only on specified time. This present article will be an extension to that article.

This is the kind of email you get when you use the email tracking add-on that I am talking about.

The process is simple. All you need to do is, install RightInbox Firefox add-on or Google Chrome extension and restart the browser.

Next time, you check your Gmail inbox and plan to compose an email, you will be seeing the following buttons above the ‘To:’ field.

Now, all you need to do is, compose your email and select ‘Send Later’(to schedule your email) or ‘Track’- to track whether your email has been opened or not.

This is highly efficient and can be used effectively for email marketing tracking and as an email management application embedded right into your Gmail account. I am unaware whether the same can be used for bulk email marketing. If it’s possible, then it would be a great advantage to the internet marketing community as they can easily track the impressions and click-through(CTR) of their marketing emails.

Currently, RightInbox is free and in beta stage. They are planning to pull in pricing features in the near future.

Try it once and let us know how you found the application to be. If you are using any other email management or email tracking software, let us know. Will be glad to review the same too.

One of the finest photo app that beautifies a normal photo taken from a mobile camera is open for public on Android operating system. Apple iOS users on iPhone and iPod Touch had been fanatics about the photo app, Instagram and it had grown like a mammoth within a few months since it’s released. Now, having more than a million users and still growing on Apple iOS, Instagram has released it’s first Android app for mobile phones running on Android Operating system. And, yeah, it looks beautiful.

I woke up at 6:30 AM and was looking out to write a blog post and as soon as I opened my Gmail account, I found an invite from Instagram stating that the app is ready for release and it’s available on the Google Market, aka Google Play Store. Oh, boy, I ran like a child running after a candy van and downloaded the 13MB file(yeah, it’s heavy).

If you remember, a Instagram asked people to provide their email addresses to be intimated of the release and from then onwards I had kept my fingers crossed hoping to get an invite to download it. But, strangely, Instagram did not send out any special invites, but its open for the public to download. You can download Instagram for Android here.

I am going to play around with it and let you know more on how it turns out to be.

Update: I uninstalled the app after downloading 13MB of it and installing it and playing with it for a little time. I, being an Android lover do not need an app which does the same thing as several thousands of apps in Google Play store. I can create far more hi-res images with wonderful effects and do not wish to be bogged down by scaled images which aren’t worth anything. And also, I cant move the app to SD card, waste of 13MB of internal memory.

Goodbye Instagram.

Now is the right time for mobile enthusiasts who wish to have video ringtones on their mobile phones. Even though this kind of a service was planned on paper a few years back, the market penetration did not happen due to low specifications of the so-called mobile phones. But, if you take the present mobile phone market into consideration, there are tons of models to choose from running dual core processors and juicing Android OS to it’s full potential. Vringo thought this is the right time for video ringtones service and it launched the same along with Tata Docomo and Hungama networks.

Tata Teleservices announced Vringo Video Ringtones as a new VAS for Indian customers at a price of ……

Re 1 per day with auto renewal at the end of every month. The users will also have to pay for the data charges that they incur when they download the video ringtones on to their own mobile handsets.

While Hungama is providing the video content from it’s own catalogue, Tata Teleservices are aiding it by providing network support and enabling the users to download video ringtones.

Activation of this service is a simple process.

1. Tata DOCOMO customers must visit the online portal of Vringo Video Ringtones on their mobile browsers and register on it.
2. After registration, the users can browse from various genres of Bollywood content and download their favorite video ringtone to their own mobile phones.

Here is how the service looks like.

What do you think of this premium Value Added Service? Would you like using a video ringtone and get away from the usually used audio ring tones? Provide your opinions in the comments section below.

Update: I installed Vringo on my mobile Samsung Galaxy Ace 5830 running on Android 3.2.1 and used it for a day and uninstalled it as it was lagging the video display. Videos were playing slow and I could not accept the calls as soon as I dragged that Green accept call slider. And this may be a cool addition to teenagers and young adults, but may not suit for a 30 year old freelancing professional. But give it a try and check on your phones once. May be my installed applications were eating up RAM and making the Vringo app a bit slow.