Movie Mate Pro Makes Finding and Tracking Movies a Breeze

Summary 8/10

Movie Mate Pro is a simple yet informative app that helps you keep track of all kinds of informatiom about movies.

• Movie Mate Pro 2.0.1  |  
• Free or $0.99  |  
• TGOMEWS

I love watching movies. I have a pretty decent collection, reference movies often, and always have a list of movies I want to see — both old and new. Just recently I noticed my brother updating a list on his phone of movies he’d like to see while we were watching previews in the theater. He was using a simple text file, but I started to wonder what kind of apps existed to do just that. Then Rita told me about Movie Mate Pro [Editor note: you're welcome!].

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Movie Mate Pro is a simple yet informative app that helps you keep track of all kinds of informatiom about movies.

Movie Mate Pro intro and Box Office screen

Clean Interface

The first thing you’ll notice about Movie Mate Pro is how clean the interface is. It follows Google’s guidelines for designing apps and employs the Holo theme. There are several screens with different movie listings to view, including Box Office (or current films), Opening, Coming Soon, and even DVD Releases. You can swipe left or right to see each of these screens. They each look like the above Box Office screen.

The icons that go across the top are pretty intuitive as well. The first icon is the layout icon which allows you to switch between just two different layouts: movie posters with titles (pictured above) and movie posters with titles and ratings (pictured below).

Alternate listing layout and search results

The next icon is for Search. This functionality is available on every screen, which I thought was a fantastic move by the developers. Searching for a title will display the posters, titles, and ratings for the results, seemingly sorted by rating. If I had one request here, it would be to allow to sort by title or at least change the rating rankings. Right now it seems Rotten Tomatoes takes precedence, followed by Flickster, then IMDB.

The last icon is the Menu icon, which reveals three items: Favorites, Watchlist, and Settings. These are all pretty standard screens. Both Favorites and Watchlist allow you to remove movies as well as sort the list by either release date or title. I do wish there was more of an archiving feature for the Watchlist. Instead of just removing a movie, you should be able to mark it “watched,” much like the way you do on IMDB. The Settings screen includes some ability to clear your lists and search history, as well as customize movie results.

Favorites and Watchlist

Movies

Now onto the important part – viewing movies! This area is certainly the most impressive section on the app, including a lot of information laid out in a very navigatable way.

Movie Overview and Reviews

There are four screens to swipe through: The Overview, Synopsis, Reviews, and Tweets — which is a list of tweets mentioning the movie. On the Overview screen, you will find a lot of information about the movie:

• Three different ratings from Rotten Tomatoes, Flickster, and IMDB
• Rotten Tomatoes’ short general review which is based on the reviews
• Basic information about the movie including the Director, Cast, Runtime, Release Year/Date, Genre, Studio, and DVD Release.

You can also easily watch the trailer on YouTube. While I do wish it launched the native YouTube app and not the mobile website, I was very surprised by how well this worked.

Trailer for the greatest story ever told.

There is also a way to “share” the movie you’re looking at, however it only allows you to comment with a hashtag for the movie title and restricts you to an @reply directed at the app’s own Twitter handle. This area should really be relabeled to “Tweet” or changed to share a link to the movie’s IMDB page.

Conclusion

Movie Mate Pro is a really nice, well designed, informative app that is a must for movie people. It’s a great reference tool and incredibly useful for keeping track of your Watchlist. While there are a few things that I think should be fixed — like an archive and better sharing — the app is well worth the $0.99 price it asks for.

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Keep Tabs on New Movie Releases With eTrizzle

As you know, I’m a pretty big fan of movies! Earlier this year I reviewed Movie Mate Pro, an app for tracking theatrical releases. There is another side to the coin though; what about movies out of theaters that are released for purchase or streaming? With the amount of different online options out there, it can get tough to keep track of them all. That’s where eTrizzle comes in.

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eTrizzle helps you decide what to watch while at home. It’s a simple app/website that will aggregate movie listings from several online streaming/purchasing services, including: iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, Redbox, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Redbox Instant, and more. Even better, it’s well-organized and easy to search.

The Home Screen: New Releases

When you first open up the app, you’re taken to a list of the newest releases from across all of the supported services. As you can see from the above screenshot, each listing includes the title, movie poster, and Rotten Tomatos rating. Pressing one of the movies will take you to full listing screen with ratings, synopsis, actors, rating, runtime, the ability to view the trailer, and the list of services on which the movie is available.

Single Movie Screens

As you can see, streaming services will not list a price, whereas downloadable versions of the movie will. Pressing on one of the services will take you to a webpage for that movie; while this is OK for services like Amazon and Redbox (and even Google Play, I suppose), this proves problematic for Netflix and Hulu, where you cannot stream from a mobile browser. eTrizzle should really check for the native app and then if it’s not installed, kick the user to the Google Play store or website.

I also feel that services like Google Play, Netflix, and Hulu should be checking certain devices or OS for a native app, but responsibility here belongs to eTrizzle.

This is really the main/only functionality of eTrizzle (hence the short review). However, the app does have some fantastic organization options I want to talk about.

Stay Organized!

eTrizzle lets you not only do a text search using the bar at the top of each screen, but also allows you to browse movies by a lot of different criteria. There are dropdowns available that let you filter by things like Genre, Service, and even New/Popular.

Dropdown options for Genre and Service

At the bottom of the screen there are also 4 buttons: New, Popular, Services, and Browse. While the first three are self-explainatory, Browse has some pretty nifty lists you can check out, including: Free, Streaming, and Top Movies of 2012. This is followed by a list of all the genres.

The Browse Screen

I thought this was a really nice touch as it gives the user different exploring or discovery options.

Wishlist

While I really do like the service, I think it’s fairly obvious that they are just generating content exactly as it appears on their website. I’d really like to see better native integration by calling on-device apps for faster streaming/purchase. This would make the app incredibly powerful. I’d also really like to see a “Favorites” option that would allow me to keep a list of the movies I want to see, so I could quickly rent or stream when I’m ready to watch them.

Conclusion

eTrizzle is a really nice aggregator that helps you keep track of newly released movies, available for purchase of streaming. While I will continute to use it for that reason alone, I really would like to see some tighter integration with Android to make it feel like a native app. Right now, it feels more like a mobile-optimized website. I’ll hold off on giving it a rating now and look forward to what the developers will do in future builds!

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Manage Your Finances With Mint

Summary 8/10

Mint pulls in all your personal finance accounts into one place, so you can manage your money from anywhere. Track your spending, create a budget, and save more.

As a freelancer I’ve gotten into the habit of being very meticulous with my finances. Weekly, I go over my income, spending, and projected income and expenses for the following weeks. I like to paint a two week picture of what my bank accounts will look like.

While I use several tools for this, Mint is what I use for spending, previous data, and organization. If I ever need to check something while I’m out, well, luckily they have a freshly minted (teehee)Android App.

The Mint.com service and this app are only available in the US and Canada.

So what exactly is Mint? From their website:

Mint pulls all your financial accounts into one place. Set a budget, track your goals and do more with your money, for free!

I primarily use the website, but let’s take a look at how the Android app stacks up.

Mint’s first screens

Once you log in, you’re taken to a very nice dashboard displaying your Accounts Total, Budget, Cash Flow, Alerts, Advice, and Investments. Tapping any of these sections will take you to a more detailed screen, which we’ll look at later.

Possibly the best part about the Mint Android app is how easy it is to add transactions. As you’ll likely want to do this right away while you’re out and using cash, Mint has made it incredibly simple to do — just press the “+” sign in the bottom right to go to the Add Transaction screen.

Adding a transaction

Here you can add the amount, what kind of transation it is (income, expense, payment type, and so on), and a category, notes, and tags — Mint will even geotag it using your current location. A really nice touch is that you can split cash transations with your latest ATM withdrawal.

Viewing Accounts

Tapping the Accounts section from the home screen will take you to a list of all of your accounts, each of which you can then tap to view more details.

Viewing accounts

As you can see from the above screenshots, you’ll get a list of your transactions per account. Much like with adding a transaction, you have the ability to edit categories, notes, and tags by opening a specific transaction. My only complaint here is that I cannot add new tags while editing a transaction (or adding one, which is even more important).

The last thing I’d like to note about viewing transactions is that when you’re in the detailed view (which is the same screen you go to to edit a transation), you can easily traverse through transactions by using the left and right arrows at the bottom of the screen. This is much easier than having to bounce back and forth between detailed view and the master list.

Other Features

From the home screen, there are a few other ways to view your transactions organized in a different way. If you check out the Cash Flow or Investments sections, you’ll get two different views of transactions.

The Cash Flow and Investments sections

Under Cash Flow, you can organize transations by category and merchant, which is a nice way to see where you spend the most. Like the Accounts section you can also edit and view more details. The same goes with Investments: this section will give you a view of all the places you have investments and well as the ability to view and edit transactions. I really like that they separated the section out since the money here is not liquid — you can’t really spend it, so it’s sensible to have a separate section and total.

Budgets, Alerts, and Advice

Viewing and editing transactions aren’t the only things you can do in Mint. From the home screen, you can also view you budget totals, alerts, and advice. Alerts and advice are pretty straight forward and treated like an inbox.

Alerts and Advice

My only complaint here is that I cannot mark all alerts or advice as read, I actually have to open each one individually.

This is likely because Advice is advertising on Mint. I really shouldn’t complain as this is a clever, unintrusive, and sometimes helpful way to do ads.

Budgets are a nice way for you to manage your money, and the app’s Budget screen is really nice:

Budgets

It’s color coordinated to show you if you’re over, on, or under budget, and by how much. Pressing on one of the budgets will take you to a list of the transations for that budget. My biggest complaint with the app is related to this section, and it’s that you can’t adjust a budget. I can see it being the case where you notice the spending needs for a particular budget has changed and you’d like to adjust, but you’ll have to wait until you’re in front of a computer, unfortunately.

Settings and Widgets

The last set of features I’d like to talk about are the Settings and Widgets.

Settings and Widgets

These are pretty simple. The Settings area allows you to set a four-digit passcode, and you can grant both phone search and widget access to your data, as well as logout/wipe financial data.

The widget is a simple 4×1 box that displays your cash and credit balances. Personally I’d like to see a bit more customization here — maybe even the ability to pick an account to view, or a 4×3 box with separate account lists, as the current widget isn’t really reflective of my only spending money.

Final Thoughts

All in all, Mint for Android is a great app. There’s a lot of great information right at your fingertips, and since this is a relatively new app, I’m sure we’ll only see improvements moving forward.

While it could use the addition of some big missing features like adjusting budgets, I know a lot of time went into this — especially the design, which breaks from the sterotype that Android apps are not as well designed as some other mobile OS apps. This is a beautifully designed app that give you information as soon as you start the app up.

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Make Banking Easy With Simple

Summary 9/10

The Simple app allows you to manage your account from the completely online bank of the same name. View activity, deposit checks, find ATMs and more.

Let’s face it: we can do pretty much anything with our phones these days — get our location and see what’s in the area, find people nearby, track packages, get traffic updates and flight updates. And that’s just the stuff we can do with Google Now! If we move beyond the scope of “built-in Android functionality,” there’s a whole other world of things we can do, including complete banking. Online. From our phones.

I found out about Simple, a completely online bank, a little over a year ago and could not wait to try it. In January, my wait was over when I got an invite to try their brand new Android app. Since this isn’t a review of the web app, I won’t go into too much detail about the sign-up process, but I will say that since this is completely online banking — there are no brick and mortar locations — it’s incredibly important that the mobile app works in conjuction with the web service to give you a comparable experience. So how does it stack up? Let’s take a look!

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Using Simple

When you sign into the Simple app for the first time, it will ask you for a PIN to use on your device. This measure is there to protect your data while preventing you from having to put in your password each time — which is nice, because mine is pretty long. After you choose your PIN, you’re brought to the home screen, which is a list of your Activity.

PIN / Activity Screen

On the Activity screen, you will see a list of all of your deposits, withdrawals, interest paymets, etc. You can then press one of the entries to view more details:

• Date and time
• Amount
• Category, which it will figure out based on the transaction, or you can specify manually
• and even Memo and Location.

Entry / Categories

Back on the full Activities list, if you swipe from left to right, you will reveal a menu with all of the functionality Simple has to offer. This includes your standard functions like Settings, Log Out, and Account Numbers (standard for a bank anyway), but it also includes a couple of cool features: Deposit Check and ATM Finder.

Deposit Checks

Since Simple has no physical locations, they need to have other ways for users to make deposits. They support direct deposit and Online transfers from other banks, but the app also supports check deposits. This functionality is activated 30 days after you open your account for security purposes. Simple’s support was nice enough to give me access early for this review.

To deposit a check, select “Deposit Check.” You will be brought to a screen where you put in the amount. This is pretty straight forward, but I thought it was a nice touch that they added a “00″ button.

Enter Check Amount

Then you use the camera to take a picture of both the front and back of your check. On my Galaxy Nexus at least, this happens quickly and cleanly. I haven’t had a problem yet. I’ve used a couple of other apps for depositing checks and this one by far works the best.

To verify the check they have you write your account number on the back, under your signature. When you get to the part where you take a photo of the back of the check, the app adds your account number in the corner — this is another nice touch to save you some time!

Deposit a Check

That’s it! They should notify you shortly after that to let you know the check — or at least part of it — has cleared.

The only issue is with depositing cash, which is not a function of Simple but of online-only banking in general. You essentially need another account to make transfers if you want to deposit cash into your account.

ATM Finder

So we talked about getting money in, but not out. Something I haven’t mentioned up until now is that when you sign up for Simple, on top of access to the app they send you a (very sleek looking) ATM/Debit card. This is how you get your money out.

I would love to tell you the app supports NFC, but alas at this point it does not. My guess is this has something to do with Simple being an iPhone app first, as well as NFC not being as popular as we’d all like.

Aside from using the debit card to make purchases, you can find an ATM to withdraw money from. Of course, you’ll want to avoid fees and that’s where the ATM Finder comes in.

ATM Finder

The ATM Finder will grab your current location and find the closest fee-free ATM. This is definitely something all Banking apps should have, regardless of whether or not they have physical locations!

Overall Thoughts

I think the Simple app is really fantastic. It’s beautifully designed, easy to use, has great functionality, and has a lot of little thoughtful additions that make life easier for the users. On top of that, the customer support is top notch.

My wish list for the app consists of only two things: optional notifications for when checks clear or something fishy happens, and the ability to manage goals from the app. On the web interface, you can set and view goals; Simple will put money away that is separate from your “Safe to Spend” balance. I wish I could, at the very least, view my goals from the app.

Other than that, the app is rock solid and I would strongly recommend it. It’s invite-only right now and unfortunately I’m fresh out of invites, but if given the opportunity, you should definitely try it out!

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McAfee: World Class Protection for Your Mobile

Summary 8/10

Backed by the world’s largest dedicated security company, McAfee Mobile Security is the industry-leading mobile security solution in the market.

• McAfee Mobile Security  |  
• $29.99  |  
• McAfee

Windows is a great operating system. It is user friendly, affordable and supports legacy hardware and software fabulously. But it is prone to virus, malware and spyware attacks, often. Without an antivirus and firewall software, your safety isn’t assured at all. This one drawback has tarnished the Windows brand for decades and eventually gave way to the rise of Mac and to some extent desktop Linux.

Now I’m seeing a similar trend with the Android ecosystem. I knew antivirus software existed for Android, but only after researching for our recent roundup did I discover how many of them are available for download in the market. All security biggies from Norton to ESET have set shop. The funny thing is that we are yet to witness mass malware attacks of scale in our green robot community. But that’s a discussion for another time; for today, let us take McAfee Mobile Security for a spin.

Overview

McAfee Mobile Security works on Android versions 2.1 and up. The app costs $29.99 but you can try it out for free for seven days. A 30 day trial would have been nice, but since all the features of the app are unlocked, seven days should be plenty of time to make a decision.

Setting Up

Registering Your Mobile

You will have to verify your mobile number before you can start using the free trial version – I guess this is to ensure that you don’t uninstall and reinstall the free trial without paying up. But what they don’t mention is that the SMS is not free – though, fortunately, it wasn’t an international SMS and I was charged only for a local SMS. Although the countdown timer indicates the process might take about three minutes, within a few seconds my mobile number was verified.

Adding Buddies

Immediately after the verification screen, the app gets down to take care of business. First up, we have the alerts set up for if your mobile gets stolen. Once you add the number of your buddies and your own contact information, the app will alert all of you when someone who steals your mobile phone changes the SIM card.

You can either add the numbers manually or use the phonebook. Once you have added all the information, choose a six digit PIN code to ensure that only you can disable or edit this option. Do note that you wont be able to proceed without adding a buddy number. This is great, but I would have appreciated it more if there was an option to add my second number directly too. The registraton took a couple of minutes and requires email verification.

For the safety of my app, I was willing to jump through the hoops and the app then displayed the login information for the web app. The web app can be used to manage and control your device remotely when it goes missing.

Securing the Device

Action Center

The warning notification and screen make sure that the major holes in the security situation are brought to your attention. The app primarily wanted to be christened the device admin, meaning it would have all rights to reset the passwords, wipe the phone, watch logins, force lock your phone and to see if your passwords are secure enough. Sounds like overkill to me and I chose to ignore it.

The idea behind this doomsday plan is to ensure that the McAfee Mobile Security app isn’t uninstalled by anyone else. So, make the decision based on how valuable the phone and the information stored in it are to you.

Initiating a Scan

The first thing I wanted to do, which I eventually did, was to start a scan. Consider that, although I wasn’t able to root my Wildfire, I have tried heaven and earth, installing every possible APK to get root access fully ignoring the legitimacy of the source. To my delight the scan was complete in a minute. Taking into account that the phone in question is owned by an app reviewer who installs a truck load of apps and never bothers to uninstall them, I would say that’s a huge accomplishment.

A Scan in Progress

As expected, the scan didn’t find any threats at all. However, the developers should consider adding a splash screen or something to let the user know that the scan is complete and an option to proceed to the next screen.

Backup Options

Backup and Restore Options

The app helps you back up text messages, call logs, contacts and media files. Backups can be done manually or you can set up automatic backups which are more convenient and fool proof. Despite claiming to upload “media files”, McAfee Mobile Security only scans and finds images. MP3 and video files weren’t displayed at all.

Final Thoughts

For years, McAfee has been my trusted bodyguard of my desktop PC. They push updates regularly, the system resources were never clogged and no viruses were ever allowed enter PC. Naturally, I expected the same level of performance when it comes to my mobile phone – maybe even better given the relatively lower horsepower in my HTC Wildfire. And the app did a splendid job.

But the real question is do we need to install an antivirus software in our mobile phones? Personally, I find these Android security threat forecasts to be far fetched when they actually try to project Android as weak and vulnerable. But if you are in need of a reliable backup and anti-theft protection, then check out McAfee Mobile Security without fail.

For alternative apps to help combat phone theft, take a look at our article Phone Theft: Some Precautions You Can Take.

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