Download and Install Android Apps Directly from Google+ Plus Post Stream

Google is now allowing its Android Smartphone, Tablet and Desktop device users to Download and Install Android Apps Directly from Google+ Plus Post Stream instead of visiting Google Play or Android Market for the installation of Android Applications. Whenever a Google+ Plus user (a Social Networking Website from Google) pasted a Google Play Application link as a new post or status into its Google+ Plus Stream, an 'Install' or 'Buy' Button will be placed and visible to that particular Google+ Plus Post and whenever any user clicked on that post or link it will take a user to Google Play store with a prompt to Purchase or Directly Install the app to an Android device.

How to Get Publisher ID After Adsense Account is Disabled

This is a very simple, but very important tip for all publishers - in particular, it will be important for those monetizing their YouTube channels with Adsense, but every publisher who still has an active Adsense account should pay attention to this one fact.

When your Adsense account is disabled, you NEED your publisher ID to file your appeal. If you've removed your ad codes from your website, or if you have a YouTube channel, you'll have problems finding that Publisher ID if you haven't kept track of it.

The time to store that information in a safe place is BEFORE you find yourself with a disabled account. In truth, no publisher wants to have their account disabled, and most publisher's going into Adsense don't give much thought to the chance that their account may be disabled, so most don't think much about safe-guarding their adsense information.

FIRST STEPS

The first steps are to create a new folder in the "My Documents" section of your computer. Title it simply "Google Stuff".

Inside that new folder, create a folder for Adsense, and one for Blogger (if you use Blogger), and one for "Google Account".

Go to your email account and download emails you still have from Adsense - if you still have your approval email, you should save that.

To save mail from your gmail account, open the email, click the "printer" icon in the upper right of the mail. That will open your email on a printable page. Select the small arrow from the printer on the left hand menu to get the drop down menu - you don't actually want to print the page, you want to save it. Choose the option to save as a .pdf and save the email to your Adsense folder.

Any other important emails you've received from Adsense should also be saved - policy violation notices, etc. can be saved for future.

Next, you'll want to login to your Adsense account (www.google.com/adsense) and go to your Account Settings page. Take a screenshot of that page. The account settings page in your adsense account provides all the personal information associated with your Adsense account - your login, your Publisher-ID, your Customer ID (which is different from your Publisher ID), your payment details, etc. It will even provide a list of sites you've authorized to display your ads if you use the allowed sites list.

A larger version of the above page can be downloaded here.

Save the screenshot in your Adsense folder.

Finally, go to your Payments Page. If you aren't a US publisher, you don't receive tax forms like the 1099, but you can access a printable "earnings statement" for each payment you've received. On your payments page, click the "details" link next to the payment issued, and click the "Statement of Earnings" at the bottom of the blue box. That will load a printable earnings statement. You probably don't really want to print them, so take a screenshot for the Statement of Earnings and save it in your Adsense folder. Save as many as you think you'll need.

You should save a copy of your earnings statement each time you get paid. If you should be unlucky enough to have your Adsense account disabled, you will not be able to get back into your account to get this information, so it only makes good sense to get it at payment time, each month.

Now you not only have the information you'd need to file an appeal for a disabled account, but you have records of previous payments and all the data associated with your Adsense account. This takes very little time to set up, but can save you a world of grief in the future.

NEXT STEPS

Because your Adsense account is also linked to your Google Account, you'll want make sure you go to your Google account page and set up the security information if you haven't already done so. As well, click the link on the left of the page for "Data Liberation". The Data Liberation page will allow you to download information stored for a number of Google products, like all the images in your Picasa albums, or the information in your Google Profile, and your circles. Simply download the information package to your Google folder on your computer.

Along with that, you may also want to take a screenshot of your Google account page, since it also provides the login information for your Google account, and the alternate email address you've provided (if any).

Lastly, if you use Blogger for any of your sites that use Adsense, download your blog to back it up (do so regularly), along with your template. You can save the template by going to the "Template" page in your Blog and saving the xml file.

To export and backup your blog's data (posts, etc.) click the settings link, then choose "Other" and from that page, select "export blog". This will export your posts in the proper file format and you can save these in your Blogger folder on your computer. Should something happen to your blog, you can restore it using the "import" button on the same page.

Google Nexus 7 Review

The tablet market is one which is arguably already sewn up. It’s already done. Dead. Finished. It’s already Apple’s.

Or is it?

With Apple undoubtedly heading the charts in and around the $500 price bracket, there is plenty of room for manufacturers to play below that mark. As the netbook market showed years ago, if you can make something cheap, people will buy it, regardless of whether it’s any good or not.

So, with that business model firmly in mind, Amazon set about undercutting Apple’s iPad, and with the Kindle Fire, the online retailer changed the game. We’d seen plenty of cheap Android tablets before, yes, but this was the first time one was any good.

Now Google is doing what it tends to do with Android, and by releasing a Nexus device manufactured by ASUS into the market, the search giant will be hoping to set a new bar that the competition will need to work towards. The Nexus 7 is a new, 7-inch tablet that hopes to take the Kindle Fire head on whilst showcasing the very latest in Android â€" Jelly Bean 4.1.

In order to really understand the Nexus 7, we wanted to spend some time with one. We wanted to see whether that 7-inch form factor was large enough to be usable without being stuck in no man’s land between a large smartphone and an iPad. Is the 7-inch tablet filling a gap that doesn’t need to be filled?

Hardware

The first thing you notice when you get your hands on the Nexus 7 is its size. Around the size of a paperback book, the Nexus 7 feels great in the hand. Any concerns about the tablet being too small may be justified for some, but for us, this size tablet may actually be preferable to the larger, 9.7-inch tablet. Yes, you sacrifice some screen space, but you make up for that in portability and ergonomics. The Nexus 7 feels great in the hand.

The hardware itself is pretty standard fare. Up front there is that 7-inch, 1280×800 display. It’s a nice screen, and we had no complaints with black levels or contrast, and certainly never felt the screen suffered because of the low price point. Movies looked great, as did games like Dead Trigger. No complaints here.

The face of the Nexus 7 is button-free thanks to Android’s newfound hatred of hardware buttons. On the right side of the device you’ll find the sleep/wake button and the usual volume toggle. That’s your lot as far as buttons go.

Camera-wise, we have a 1.2 megapixel camera on the front, with no camera on the rear. We don’t really mind the lack of a rear camera, though we are sure some will. We’ve never been ones for taking photos or videos with a tablet, but that doesn’t mean people won’t lament the lack of the option, either.

The Nexus 7 also features NFC technology, allowing the use of NFC tags for all sorts of magic as well as Google Wallet. Android Beam also uses the NFC chip, making the sharing of files and photos as easy as possible.

The rear of the device is made of a kind of rubbery plastic. That may sound ‘cheap’ but, oddly enough, adds a feeling of quality to the tablet while also making it less slippery in the hand. We like it, even though we didn’t expect to!

Software

Google’s Nexus 7 is the first device to ship with the new Jelly Bean version of Android. Version 4.1, Jelly Bean brings the base of Ice Cream Sandwich and adds some more polish, while seeking to make the Android experience as buttery smooth as possible.

‘Buttery smooth’ is probably a very apt description, too. Google’s Project Butter is perhaps the most important addition to Android this time around. Apart from the mildly comical name, Project Butter is actually rather important.

Google is apparently well aware that the experience of using Android can sometimes be a little lacking in polish. With quad-core phones and gigabytes of memory the norm, many phone still find they cannot compete with the iPhone when it comes to slick visuals and animations. Google knows that iOS has the edge in the appearance of speed, and Project Butter aims to fix that.

We’ll be covering Jelly Bean in all its glory in another, dedicated post, so watch out for that coming in the next day or so. With the Nexus 7 offering the purest of pure Android experiences, what you see in Android 4.1, Jelly Bean, is what you get on the Nexus 7.

What we will say is this; the Nexus 7 is blessed with the best version of Android yet.

Battery Life and Performance

Inside the Nexus 7, ASUS and Google went for a quad-core Tegra 3 CPU with 1GB of memory. Coupled with that buttery smooth Jelly Bean experience, the powerful hardware inside the Nexus 7 means the tablet is responsive when switching between apps and playing high-end games. Multitasking is handled quickly and smoothly, and animations are flawless. At no point did we wish for more speed when using the Nexus 7, which is an impressive feat for the under $200 tablet. The Nexus 7 packs plenty of punch, and is a pleasure to use.

You’ll be able to use it for a good long time, too, because the battery life we experienced with the Nexus 7 was excellent. Google claims the Nexus 7 will sit in standby for 300 hours, while 10 hours of web browsing can be expected according to the specifications on Google’s website. We’ve no reason to disbelieve these numbers, and the Nexus 7 rarely needed charging in our tests. Playing power hungry games will always drain lots of power, though, so that battery life will obviously very much depend on how you use the Nexus 7.

Issues

With that out of the way, on to the elephant in the room. The build quality.

Google chose to enlist the services of ASUS to bring the Nexus 7 to market. Unfortunately, that decision appears to have left buyers with more issues than it really should.

A cursory glance at any tablet forum will show that there are one or two real issues that seem to be cropping up now that the Nexus 7 production has ramped up, and thousands of people are getting their hands on the device. The Redmond Pie Nexus 7 is not free of issues, either.

The most obvious issue relates to the screen, and how it is fitted to the Nexus 7′s body. Some buyers, and by some we mean lots of them, are reporting that the screen does not sit flushed with the tablet’s bezel, particularly on the left hand side. While that may be some overzealous people finding issues that are not there, it seems that ill-fitting bezels are just the beginning.

Again, on the left side, many screens are simply loose. Pushing down on the edge of our unit, for example, has the entire screen move inwards. The movement is accompanied with a click, which doesn’t sound great the first time you do it, and immediately has you wondering whether you just cracked your new toy’s screen. Luckily that’s not the case.

According to the various forums across the internet, removing the back of the Nexus 7 reveals a piece of foam on that left hand side that appears to push the screen outwards. When you push the screen like we mentioned earlier, that foam gets compressed. We are told that removing that foam can fix the issue, which makes us wonder why it is there in the first place, and what risk is being created by removing it. Still, if it works, it works.

We have also heard reports of screens that appear ‘washed out’ and lack color, as well as devices shipping with speakers that do not work. Admittedly, all tablets, smartphones and indeed any electronic equipment will have faults when manufactured on this kind of scale, but when the same issues crop up repeatedly for different people, then it’s worth mentioning.

Of course, the answer to any of these issues is to send the tablet back for a replacement, but we’ve heard of people going through half a dozen devices, all with the same issue, particularly the loose screen problem. Not great news at all.

Wrap-up

When all is said and done, the Nexus 7 is a $200 tablet. It is undeniably one of the best budget tablets on the market right now, especially when Jelly Bean is taken into account. It’s fast, looks great and comes in at the right price.

We can’t help but be put off by the potential issues, though, and if you can be sure to avoid them then the Nexus 7 is a very capable tablet. If you can forgive some manufacturing foibles on a $200 tablet then you’re going to be very happy with the Nexus 7. Unfortunately, poor quality control lets the device down in our eyes, which is a real shame.

Screen issues aside, though, and the Nexus 7 is a great little tablet.

For discussion on this topic: Check out the threads on Facebook or Google+.

You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple and the web.

•