Delete all photo files in a Camera directory.

My photos were in the thousand already and I have saved all files to my laptop harddrive. Here are the steps:

1. Open all apps menu and touch-press "File browser" icon.You will be presented with several directories.
2. Select /mnt/sdcar/DCIM
3. Select Camera under DCIM. thus the full directory path is /mnet/sdcard/DCIM/Camera
4. Touch-press the Menu button and select "Delete all". This will delete all files in the desired directory.

The above steps may be followed for other directories.

When will Motorola offers updates to Fire XT phone OS?

Our interest was piqued by the following news item, posted on December 3: mobileburn.com: android 4.1 jellybean now rolling out to Motorola DROID RAZR HD and Droid RAZR MAXX-HD

I understand our Motorola Fire XT is a low-end inexpensive device, but we feel shortchanged since a lot of Chinese phones now offers Android 4 OS. Ah well, we are shackled to version 2.35 Gingerbread.

Now I can only look with my lips closed tight at Samsung's Note 2, Galaxy S2 and S3 users as they are blessed with newer Android OS (Icecream Sandwich or Jellybean) versions!

There is only one way to get out of this rut! Increase or augment our incomes to buy the more capable products which are powered by dual and quadcore ARM devicies!

Scientific calculators for the Motorola Fire XT

Your Moto Fire smartphone is a sophisticated mobile computing device, capable of much more than implied by the simple built-in calculator. Here are some calculator software I downloaded using my BestApps utility software:

• ti5x - A Texas Instruments TI58,TI59 calculator Something is wrong with the calculator keyboard. The last two rows cannot be seen!
• Free42 - An HP 42 calculator
• Droid48 - An HP 48 stack based calculator
• gCalc - scientific calculator with graphing capability!
• Graph 89 - A Texas Instruments TI-89 emulator software. Requires your TI 89 ROM image.
• Mathlab Calc - with graphing capability. An ads supported calculator, requiring an internet connection.

We will post photos and some instructions soon for the Droid 48.

A working panoramic application for my Motorola XT 531:Photaf!

Searching using my Best Apps Android application resulted in a list of SOME of the available panoramic software for my Moto XT 351XT phone:

• Panorama Camera 360
• Easy Panorana Camera Trial
• Panorama Beta
• DermanDar Panorama
• Photaf Panorama (Free)
• LoopLR Social Video
• Pro Ca[ture Free - Camera

The first software which I found to work well in my Android 3.5 is the Photaf Panorama, which is also available in a Pro verion. Here is an example of panoramic shots easily created with Photaf. I created a similar panorama photo with the Sony compact camera before and I am now smiling that a free software can do what the Sony cam can do! There is no need to buy a special camera with a built -in camera feature! One nice thing about the Photaf software are the bubble level indicators for horizontal and vertical orientation.

Basic Phone Functions

Draft!

We want the owner of the Moto Fire XT 531 to familiarize himself with the front layout of this phone. Photo from a screenshot of page 2 of the pdf manual. The problem with a smartphone is that the basic functions may get lost in the may application icons appearing in the screen! Here is a summary of the basic phone function commands for this inexpensive Android smartphone.

• To make a call: Press Home/Contacts. You will see Phone, Call log Favourites icons in the top row.
  • Method 1. Press Phone icon. You can directly press the phone number or select from the contact list.
  • Method 2. Press Contacts icon. Select callee, two icons (call and messaging) will be shown. Then select phone icon.
• Send text messages.
  • Method 1. Via Home/Contacts-Recipient in contact list. Press Home/Contacts and select recipient. Select Messaging icon.
  • Method 2. Via Home/Contacts-Recipient not in contact list, number known. Input phone number in To field. Compose text. Send text.
  • Method 3. Via Home/All Apps/Messaging. Tap on New Message. Specify number or select from contact list. Compose Message and tap Send.
• View text messages| notifications. Tap Home/Menu/Notifications.

To be continued with photo illustrations.

What? There is now a dual sim version XT 532??!

Note: draft! until I remove this line, this article is not in final form! I thought I will have a long time discovering all features of my Moto XT 531. Sounds like my enthusiasm has been deflated a little with a bump with reality. There is now an XT 532! but I dont know if they are available in Metro Manila mobile stores. Visit Daily Smart where we get the following specs:

XT 532 feature	XT 531
2G Network: GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 – SIM 1 and SIM 2	single SIM only
3G Network: HSDPA 850 / 2100 – SIM 1, 7.2 Mbit/s, UMTS, EDGE	no change
Dimensions: 114x62x12, 61.9mm(Width),114mm (Height), 11.95mm (Thickness	practically no change
Weight: 115 grams	114 g
capacitive touchscreen TFT display of 3.5 inches, 320x480(~165 ppi pixel density)	no change
Multitouch	no change
Switch Moto UI	no change
Touch Controls	no change
Vibration and MP3 ringtones	no change
Speakerphone	no change
3.5 mm headphone jack,	no change
microSD card slot up to 32GB, microSDHC, microSDC	no change
512 MB ​​ROM, 512Mb RAM	no change
GPRS Class 12 (4 +1 / 3 +2 / 2 +3 / 1 +4 slots), 32 – 48 kbps
EDGE Class 12
HSDPA	7.2 Mbps
HSUPA
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot	no change
Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, EDR	no change
microUSB 2.0, HS	no change
5 megapixel camera with autofocus, geo-tagging and LED flash	no change
Video	no change
Primary Camera 5 Megapixels, autofocus	No change
Video Camera Recorder 640x480 VGA 24 fps	no change
Front camera 0.3 Megapixels VGA	no change
Android OS 2.3.7 (Gingerbread)	Android OS 2.3.5
Single Processor core (single-core) 800 MHz	no change
Accelerometer sensor	no change
Proximity sensor	no change
Digital compass	software
Messaging SMS, MMS, Email, Push Email, IM	no change
Browser WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML	no change
GPS with A-GPS	no change
Java MIDP emulator	no change
Color black
Dual SIM (dual stand-by)	Single SIM only
Integrated SNS
Audio Player: MP3/WAV/AAC +
Video Player: MP4/H.263/H.264/WMV
Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Talk	no change
Document viewer
Photo Viewer	no change
Organizer	no change
Voice recorder
Predictive text input	no change
Standard battery Li-Ion 1500 mAh	average 8h, standby 28 days(672 h), 1540 mAh
Release date: ?	August 5, 2011

I think the major changes are in the dual sim capability and the Android Gingerbread versions. The small differences are not so significant. I can make the switch and simply buy the XT532. We are requesting Motorola to put an identifier for their mobile smartphones! Further reading: gsm arena moto fire xt spec phone arena Motorola XT 531

Transfer photo files from phone to computer using a USB cable

Connect the supplied usb cable from the phone to a usb port of the comuter. Your phone will ask your if you want to turn on USB Storage. Tap that prompt, and in your Linux (mine has a Ubuntu OS) computer, open a terminal and type df. Your android phone should appear in the list.

$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1            113179556  70826336  36603960  66% /
udev                   1405852         4   1405848   1% /dev
tmpfs                   565908       952    564956   1% /run
none                      5120         0      5120   0% /run/lock
none                   1414760       116   1414644   1% /run/shm
/dev/sdb1             15105408    181952  14923456   2% /media/9338-1802

Notice the "/media/9338-1802" entry? That is how the Moto fire looks as a file system to the PC. Where are the image files stored? Look in the directory "/media/9338-1802/DCIM/Camera". Now in the terminal you can copy or even move the image files to any directory in the PC. For example,

mkdir ~/my-moto
cd  ~/my-moto
mv -v /media/9338-1802/DCIM/Camera/* .

All your image files stored in the Fire XT/DCIM/Camera directory will now be moved to the current director ~/my-moto. The whole procedure is quite fast! You forgot wher your USB cable is? That will be a topic of future articles.