Android is a fun OS, but it’s always had a nagging problem. Lag. It’s like a constant thorn in our side, perpetually taunting us with unresponsiveness and slow apps. Jelly Bean and Project Butter went a long way toward solving this issue, but what about all the other devices that aren’t on an official copy of Jelly Bean? That’s where the Jar Power Tools comes in. It’s another creative hack from the guy who made the V6 SuperCharger, ...

Android is a generally secure OS, although it occasionally falls victim to being open-source. That’s the problem with giving people the keys to the kingdom. Sometimes they do things that they don’t like. This is one of those things. One of the good folks on XDA has figured out a way to break through a pattern lock via some creative hacking. Before we get into this, we must ask that you use this information responsibly. This is only for ...

Saving nandroid backups is something which just about every Android rooter does. You’d have to be crazy not to save nandroids. That backup can be the difference between a bricked phone and a working device. We’ve written about nandroids before and how to save them. As a general rule of thumb, make a backup before doing any sort of serious system-wide modifications. However, saving backups can be a chore. It requires rebooting into recovery and puts your phone ...

If Android enjoys one real advantage over iOS, it is its open source nature. Sure, you can do some nifty tricks with jailbreaking on an iPhone, but that pales in comparison to the hacks which people have created for Android. With root access and enough determination, damn near everything is possible. We at TechNorms love tinkering with Android devices for precisely this reason. There’s a whole lot of tinkering to be done. This hack might take the prize for most ...

Here at TechNorms, we rock a variety of different devices. Some of us enjoy iPads, others the classic Galaxy S II, and our editor has a nice iPhone. It’s one of the perks of being a technology journalist, really. You can always justify a shiny new device as being a “work purchase.” However, we still hang onto some older stuff. We still have an original HTC Evo 4G, an Android phone for Sprint that is decidedly more dated ...

Android comes in a thousand different forms and flavors. This is great for those who like choice and variety when selecting a handset. However, it also means that some phones will inevitably perform worse than others. Anyone who’s used a Samsung Galaxy S II and moved to a low-end phone with an old version of Gingerbread can certainly tell the difference. The devices with less built-in power tend to struggle more and perform ...

It was just yesterday we wrote about the Angry Birds for Chrome, and a clever developer has already hacked the game to unlock all levels. When we say hack, it not something illegal or harmful, just a clever way to unlock all levels including the special Chrome levels called "Chrome ...

Nowadays almost every webmail user has more than one account on a service, and at times needs to log into them simultaneously. You have the option to do this by using different browsers. But if you want to use a single browser, IE8 has a new feature that lets you log into different webmail accounts at the same time. Internet Explorer 8 now lets you start an entirely new session by opening a “New Session” window . You can access this in the File Menu: File > New Session. If you are currently logged into your main Gmail ...

If you are a regular Hotmail and Windows live user, chances are that you have multiple Windows Live Ids. If you use the Windows Live Messenger, you can sign into only one account at a time. If you want to use another id, you need to sign out of the first account and then sign into other account. Today we will look at a simple registry hack that would let you open Multiple Windows Live Messenger Windows on your computer and sign into different Live or MSN accounts simultaneously.

The User Account Control (UAC) feature has been criticized for being a hindrance in doing everyday tasks in Windows, but we need to understand that the benefits of the UAC far outweigh its annoyances. It has dramatically improved the security situation in Windows. However, sometimes, UAC can really be annoying, when you are running a Trusted Program, and it prompts you to let it run. Against better advice you can Turn off UAC, but then we would ...