Image credit: http://www.retrobrick.com/moto8000.html

In 1983 Motorola released the DynaTAC 8000x. This phone, which is sometimes referred to as “The Brick,” was the first FCC-approved commercial handheld cell phone. It cost $3,995, stored 30 phone numbers, and needed to be charged every eight hours. Oh yeah, and it took a full ten hours to recharge.

Today’s cell phones don’t usually take 10 hours to charge. But today’s phones often have dozens of features such as large, bright screens; 4G and/or Wi-Fi connectivity; GPS, applications, and more. Each of these features taxes the phone’s battery little by little.

Android phones, like many of today’s phones, lose battery life quickly due to their large numbers of features. Below are some tips for sustaining the battery life of Android phones.

Advice from around the Web

Mike says, “Almost everything about Android phones is getting bigger and better. The screens, processors, and antennas are larger and faster but one thing just can’t keep up with the rest – the battery. Batteries are being taxed further and further with all of these new technologies, and they haven’t quite caught up.”

He has the following advice:

Apps - Having multiple apps all running at once uses up your battery quickly. Turn off the apps that you aren’t using. To do this, go into your settings and tap “Applications” then tap “Manage applications.” Here you can see which apps are running. Tap the app you want to stop running, then tap “stop.”

Power control - Phones using Android version 2.1 or newer have a widget called “Power control,” which allows you to turn off GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and sync all at once. Turning these four features off could save a lot of battery power.

4G - Newer phones have a switch to turn the 4G antennae off, which uses a lot of battery power when on.

The authors of this article state that today’s phones lose battery life due to “thinner designs with less room for the battery, larger screens, faster processors, software that runs in the background, and power-hungry GPS chips … The move to 3G and 4G networks has also taken its toll.”

The authors have the following advice:

Adobe Flash - Change your phone’s settings so that Adobe Flash only runs when told to do so. To change these settings, go to your browser and tap the menu button. Then go to Settings, Enable Plug-ins and set this to On Demand.

Apps - The authors recommend keeping your apps updated because some of the newer versions of apps use less battery power than older versions. To make sure your apps are updated, go to your Market app, then tap the menu, then go to My Apps.

Microsoft Exchange - If you use Microsoft Exchange for emails, the authors of the article recommend keeping your email folder size below 150 MB. To check the size of your email folder, go to Outlook, then right-click your Inbox, then go to Properties > General > Folder Size. You can archive or delete emails to reduce the size of this email folder.

Screen brightness - The authors recommend setting your Android’s screen brightness to adjust automatically according to your environment. You can go here to get a quick tutorial on setting your screen’s brightness.

Messaging apps - The authors say “this is a big one” regarding saving battery life:  Messaging apps such as Twitter, Facebook and email require lots of battery juice. You can set these apps to only pull data manually, which will save a lot of battery power.

vWorkApp was featured on Zoho’s blog!

The Economist said that “Zoho is the most comprehensive suite of web-based programmes for small businesses…”

Zoho, according to the Zoho.com About Us page, is a “comprehensive suite of award-winning on-line business, productivity & collaboration applications.” One of Zoho’s applications is a CRM tool.

And now, for the first time ever, Zoho and vWorkApp have created a solution that combines customer relationship management with mobile job dispatching and scheduling.

If you want to read the full blog post, go to Dispatch Jobs made easy with vWorkApp and Zoho CRM.

If you’d like to learn more about setting up vWorkApp and Zoho CRM, please shoot us an email at sales@vworkapp.com or call us at 1-877-785-2832.

Below are a couple screenshots with how vWorkApp looks in Zoho’s CRM tool. Click each image to zoom in.

vWorkApp now has a Getting Started guide, which is a step-by-step guide to help you get started with vWorkApp! This guide will help you add workers in the Dashboard, connect and set up mobile phones, create and schedule jobs, add customers, and add templates and forms.

Voxer is an iPhone and Android application that turns your phone into a Walkie Talkie. What I like most about it is that I can send super quick voice messages to friends. I despise talking on the phone and typing text messages takes forever. Anyone who doesn’t have time to have full conversations on the phone via talk and can’t type messages quickly would greatly benefit from using Voxer.

Why Voxer is good in business

Voxer is a free application that makes it easy to communicate with coworkers. Other than being a perfectly useful Walkie Talkie, it’s also a way to share photos, record your location, and type messages if you want to. Plus you can use group chats, which makes it very easy to  share all of this information with your entire team.

Check out Voxer for the iPhone or Android mobile devices.

Screenshots of GroundLink on the iPhone

I recently wrote about Uber changing the taxi industry. Another company called GroundLink is also doing its part to change the taxi industry. GroundLink is “an established aggregator and solutions provider to the ground travel industry.” From what I’ve read so far, it seems like it’s very similar to Uber.

Both Uber and GroundLink provide an affordable luxury passenger transportation service.

GroundLink was founded in 2003 and is currently headquartered in New York City, New York.

Price comparisons

Below I’ve compared the price of taking a “general taxicab,” an Uber car, and a GroundLink car from the vWorkApp office to the SFO airport.

According to http://www.worldtaximeter.com/san-francisco, a ride from the vWorkApp office to SFO (a distance of 20.54 kilometers or about 12.76 miles) in a general taxicab would cost $39.06. This price doesn’t include a tip. With a 15% tip, the total cost would be about $45. See the screenshot below:

Doing that same trip with Uber (and including a tip) would be $65:

Doing that same trip with GroundLink (not sure if tip is included in the price) would be between $59 and $69:

Why would someone choose Uber or GroundLink over a general taxicab?

Companies like Uber or GroundLink provide a high quality, reliable transportation service for  less than the price of a limousine.

Taxicabs are a bit more affordable than Uber or GroundLink. The higher price of Uber and GroundLink is reflected in their transportation reliability and higher quality of overall service.

NOTE: This is for iOS devices including iPhones and iPad. This feature for Android devices is coming soon!

vWorkApp users can now accept and decline jobs. How does this work? A dispatcher schedules a job to a driver named Mr Driver. Mr Driver is busy and cannot accept the job, so he opens the job and presses the decline button. The dispatcher will see that the job was declined and can immediately send the job to another driver.

Setting up Accept/Decline

The current default setting for vWorkApp has the accept/decline options disabled. You must do the following steps to enable accept/decline.

Part 1 – for the dispatcher.

Go to the vWorkApp dashboard.

1. Go to the Admin tab.
2. Go to the Settings tab.
3. Click the radio button to the left of Enabled if you want to use accept and decline. Then be sure to click Save.

Done! You can choose to use Timer if you want a driver to accept a job within a certain amount of time e.g. within 60 seconds. If the job is not accepted within that time frame, it will automatically be declined and sent to another worker.

After the Dashboard is set up…

Part 2 – for the driver.

After the dashboard is set up, the driver must go into vWorkApp on his phone. He must have version 4.0 of vWorkApp installed on his phone for accept/decline to work. He can check this by opening the app, going into Settings, then clicking About vWork at the bottom of the screen.

Then you’ll be able to see your version of vWorkApp. See the image below:

The next step is to go to a scheduled job. Click the job. You will see the Accept and Decline buttons on the bottom of the screen!

Close up:

Cool.

Recently my friend and I were walking home from a bar at 3AM. We thought about getting a cab, but then we decided that we’d be safe walking home that night. But we ended up getting some very unwanted attention from some men. Perhaps we could have taken a cab home to prevent something like this from happening?

The problem was that the cab we reserved to pick us up never showed up. And we couldn’t flag any cabs down. We had to walk.

Then I heard about Uber, a passenger transport company using GPS and mobile tech to provide low-end luxury car transportation.

How Uber works

Here’s how Uber works from a passenger’s point of view: You install the Uber app on your smartphone and enter your credit card information. When you need a cab, you open up the app and set a pickup location. Then a driver will pick you up, drop you off, and automatically charge your credit card.

It’s a bit more expensive than a cab, but for me it’s more than worth the price. The car is clean, the drivers are nice, and most importantly, the service is reliable.

Uber and taxi politics

However, there are others who do not like Uber. For example, there’s this article on TechCrunch.com explaining some recent issues with Uber’s presence in Washington DC. To sum it up, Ron Linton, the head of Washington DC’s Taxi Commission, claims that Uber “is operating illegally…we plan to take steps against them.”  [Source 1; below]

Uber posted this in their blog in response:

“We launched in Washington last month confident that we are compliant with the rules and regulations with the District. Prior to launching we had conversations with representatives of the taxi commission that helped us understand the regulatory landscape and convinced us that the Uber transportation alternative was legal in the city of Washington, DC.” [Source 2; below]

How Uber could change the taxi industry