WhatsApp has rolled out a feature where you can now message yourself!

Have you been amongst those people, who would simply send your friends and family members a message or share a link, just so it stays noted for you to refer back to later? Well, looks like WhatsApp has noticed that and made it simple, by now allowing you to simply message yourself and stop bombarding others WhatsApp threads!

Messages sent to yourself will be visible on all of your linked devices, and they will continue to remain end-to-end encrypted as per the USP of WhatsApp security.

Simply open a new chat, and when you’re selecting a contact to message, you’ll see your own contact right at the top of the list. Additionally, a different chat caption shows up when opening this chat – Message yourself.

This feature had been around for quite some time in most of the messaging platforms including Slack and Telegram where you can message yourself. Even most of the Email clients allow you to do this. WhatsApp seems to have taken note of this, and tried to offer it the easier way… Simply chat with yourself!

Google, in collaboration with Samsung, has come up with their new Google Health Connect app, now in Beta. It’s the one app that can track all the health and fitness data coming in from multiple other apps which track their own devices respectively.

So I used to have Google Fit to track my runs, Fitbit to track my Heart Rate, WeightWatchers to track my weight and so on. However, with all my fitness data fragmented across apps, I would never have one wholesome view of all my Health data. To answer this problem, Google has launched Health Connect by Android, giving me a simple way to share data between my health, fitness, and wellbeing apps without compromising on privacy.

Whether you’re focused on activity or sleep, nutrition or vitals, sharing data between your apps can help you better understand your health. Health Connect gives you simple controls, so you only share the data you want to. Health Connect stores the health and fitness data from your apps in one place, offline and on your device, so you can easily manage the data from your different apps.

At launch, more than 10 health, fitness, and wellness apps will support Health Connect, including Fitbit, Samsung Health, MyFitnessPal, Oura, and Peloton.

For users, one can easily manage permissions in a single place, with granular controls to see which apps are accessing data at any given time. Android users will now be able to sync and get credit for their Peloton workouts in apps like Oura, MyFitnessPal, WeightWatchers and Lifesum. Now, through a single integration with Health Connect, Peloton Members will have the option to share their workout stats across the ecosystem of apps they use to support their overall wellness.

For developers, the new app reduces the cost of building multiple API connections for data sharing between different apps. Now, with Health Connect, building an integration with a new app is as simple as reading in new data from Health Connect, rather than building a whole new integration. Health Connect’s data schema supports more than 40 data types across six categories to ensure data consistency across apps.

Amazon Photos app for Android offers unlimited storage space for any resolution for its Prime members! While it is limited to 5GB for other free users.

Remember those good old days, prior to July 2021, when Google Photos used to allow unlimited storage for photos. Unfortunately, since then, Google stopped the unlimited storage offering, and instead limited it to the overall 15GB Google account storage limit and started to encourage everyone to buy storage using their Google One platform.

With over 200 million users having Amazon Prime subscription, it certainly feels like atleast one member of a family across the world (where Amazon operates its Prime subscription services) might be having a Prime subscription. And Amazon has announced that every Prime member can share their unlimited storage benefits with upto 5 others, thats a market of a whooping 1 billion people who are eligible for the unlimited storage!

Amazon Photos Features

• Unlimited storage is obviously the hilghlight of the offering
• Auto-save photos for easy backup and to free up memory on your phone – So you don’t forget to sync your photos online
• Back up your photos and videos securely with Amazon – so you don’t have to worry for the safe keeping of your favorite memories
• Share photos and albums via SMS, email, and other apps
• See your photos on your Fire TV, tablet, computer, or on the Echo Show, where available
• Organization – They offer some really interesting ways to organize the photos and to be able to search them easily by keyword, location, and more

Time to download Amazon Photos app and share your reviews in the comments!

Whatsapp finally debuts a much awaited feature, the Whatsapp call links. A feature that has been existing in Zoom, Google meet and Microsoft teams, and maybe even since the days of Webex, where you’d create a call link, traditionally known as call bridge, and share it with people you would like to invite to participate in the meeting.

The feature will be available soon for group calls of upto 32 people!

One main advantage of Whatsapp call links over and above the already existing group calls is that anyone having the access to the link can join the call. They don’t necessarily have to be in your contact list. Though with one caveat that they should be having a Whatsapp account.

This has been a feature long missed on Whatsapp, specially during the Pandemic days, when most of the enterprises moved to Work From Home culture, and different companies would subscribe to different services like Google suite or Microsoft Teams, or Skype. Now, considering the wide acceptance of Whatsapp, they surely are bound to make a dent in the Work From Home industry as Whatsapp becomes more common a platform that most of us are acquianted to.

The feature is being slowly rolled out and if you don’t already have it, don’t feel left out as you could expect it in one of the upcoming Whatsapp updates.

Till May 31st 2021, Google photos offered Unlimited storage for your photos and videos saved in High quality. However, lot has changed since then.

Google has now brought the storage used by Google Photos to within the 15GB Google account limits.

Today most of our smart phones are equiped with cameras having 4K resolutions, getting each photograph almost consuming close to 20MB each and a 4K video of a minute using up a storage of ~ 200MB. Although most of these phones come with more than 128GB of storage, but with a lack of expandable memory, it is hardly enough to store your valuable memories. And to top it up, the 15GB offered by Google is hardly enough to backup all your photos and videos.

Let’s explore the top 10 free cloud backup options that we have

UnLim: Unlimited cloud storage

Storage: Unlimited

Cost: Free

Download

They boast of offering Unlimited storage for not only your photos and videos, but any kind of files!

• Unlim uses Telegram API and gives ability to use telegram “Saved Messages” as unlimited cloud storage
• It is complete free of charge with infinity storage.

Terabox: Cloud Storage Space

Storage: 1TB

Cost: Free

Download

They offer 1TB parmanently free cloud storage space for not only photos and videos, but all your files, including be able to preview the uploaded videos online.

• Can search your uploaded files
• Archive and download multiple files at a time
• Transfer files to other storages

Degoo: 100 GB Cloud Storage

Storage: 100GB

Cost: Free

Download

Degoo allows you to store all your files as well as share them with your close ones directly

• All data is encrypted
• Automatic backups
• Stream backedup music and videos without having to download them back to your device
• Image optimizer to optimize your images and save space

Cloud Storage: Cloud Drive App

Storage: 100GB

Cost: Free

Download

Is a complete backup app, where you can backup your entire phone. By entire phone, we mean, the backup is not limite to only files, but also your contacts!

• Contacts and SMS backups
• Backup all file types
• Use as additional storage and not limited to only backups

MEGA

Storage: 20GB

Cost: Free

Download

Coming from the house of Mega Cloud is an encrypted cloud storage that can be accessed across devices including the browser

• Secure encrypted storage
• Upload files from any device
• Share files online

Digiboxx Cloud Storage App

Storage: 20GB

Cost: Free

Download

An app that can not only offer cloud storage for all your files, but can also help you organize them in folders as well as tags

• Multipl-lingual app with support for Indian languages
• Lock a folder or file with a password
• Share files online
• Organize files with tags to be easily searchable

Box

Storage: 10GB

Cost: Free

Download

One app that not only stores files but also allows you to collaborate and share online your files

• Support all file types
• Can share files online
• Collaborate with others online or on the app

Icedrive Secure Cloud Storage

Storage: 10GB

Cost: Free

Download

App perfect for automated uploads of all your photos and videos to the cloud!

• 2FA security
• Password protect shareable files
• Stream multimedia files without downloading

Genie9 Cloud Backup

Storage: 10GB

Cost: Free

Download

Backup everything in your smartphone with this app including contacts, call logs, SMS and Calendar

• Perfect to use while migrating devices
• Can organize photos and videos on a timeline
• Share files online

pCloud: Cloud Storage

Storage: 10GB

Cost: Free

Download

Upload and share all file types with auto-upload enabled!

• Choose whether to store your files in US or EU for privacy reasons
• End to end encrypted files
• Stream multimedia files online without downloading
• Work on important files even when offline

With so many free cloud storages around, some only for multimedia, some for all file types and some others for storing not only files but even contacts and SMSs, it all comes down to which app is the best suited for your use.

When the free apps themselves provide storage from 10GB to unlimited, ever wonder why are there paid cloud storage apps and what is/are the premium features they offer? We’ll review this in our next post, stay tuned.

Over the years, there have been multiple social media applications starting from the success of Orkut to the market leader Facebook, from the innovative Twitter, which brought in the concept of micro blogging to TikTok. Now wishing to get their share in this social media industry is Crowwd.

Over the past few years, ever since the Indian government has been pushing for “Make in India” applications, we have seen the birth of new age applications like the Koo app, which is a competitor to Twitter and the Digiboxx, which is almost a competitor to Google Drive. Riding on the same bandwagon comes Crowwd, as they advertise the fact that it is “Made in India” right on the splash page of their app!

The signup process is quite straight forward, however it is mandatory to signup with your mobile number as they send you an OTP in order to verify and login. Once signed up and logged in, you are onboarded through a series of screens to choose your interests, based on which you are recommended a selection of Communities that you could join.

When you look at the choice of communities, they mostly seem to be professional communities including College, organization, hacker clubs, programming clubs, etc. Wonder if creating a new community has any approval process involved!

Once you are done going through signup screens, you land onto a screen which would remind you of our age old Facebook Feeds! There is some new nomenclature here though. The tabs are called Explore, My feeds and Confessions.

Crowwd provides channels that are like a group messaging platform which brings your community members to a single place, helping them share interesting thoughts and ideas with each other. Create your own public/private channel and bring your audience on board to get a whole new experience.

There may be many apps on Playstore that help you in setting up reminders for different habits that you plan on inculcating in your day to day life, but we can tell one thing for sure, there is no app as intuitive as the Otternal Life app.

The first thing that will catch your eyes and get you stuck with the app is the very first onboarding steps that you take to create your first habit. It might just remind you of your childhood days when you’d always have a toy to talk to and guide you to do stuff!

Features

• Extremely user friendly and fun to setup
• Intuitive user interface
• Can created unlimited habits
• Can setup reminders for each of the habits
• Get notified with reminders
• Write your own journal at the end of the day
• Track your progress on the built in calendar
• Absolutely free, no ads
• Works offline, no internet connectivity required

Get the Otternal life app!