Tiny Flashlight Review
The application I chose to review is a simple flashlight program, appropriately named Tiny Flashlight. There comes a time in every man’s (or woman’s) life in which they need a flashlight, but the only convenient source of portable light is in a cell phone, which is much more often carried. However, sometimes this cell phone light is not very bright and is ultimately unsuitable for the required purpose.
Thankfully, there is the Flashlight program created by Nikolay Ananiev. This program works very well by not only changing the screen to a mostly solid white, but it also seems to increase the brightness of the screen. On a phone with a moderately-sized screen, this is generally adequate for most lighting needs (such as seeing behind a computer to know where those darn USB ports are). On a tablet, you can see even more.
Using the program is quite easy. There are a few different modes of lighting, from the standard light to a red and blue flashing “police” light. The learning curve is so shallow, there is not much needed to learn about it other than looking. This app does not really exploit the mobile platform in terms of software, but it does take advantage of the fact that it will be loaded on a mobile device that people tend to carry everywhere, which is convenient when a flashlight would be needed.
Looking at the reviews on the Android Market, people tend to really like this application. Most reviews are 5/5, with 4/5 having another sizeable portion. I do not have a device with a camera flash, but other reviews have mentioned that this program can enable the flash, which could be a better source of light in some cases. I probably would not have known this otherwise. Some reviews have mentioned that other flashlight apps already exist, but this one has some other cool extras (such as flashing police lights and color changing lights) that are worth going to this app for instead.
I have not been able to break this app, but I did read one review saying that a certain model may have issues with turning the camera LED off at times.
Finally, there are small ads at the bottom of the screen, which are bound to be a decent source of revenue for a relatively simple app like this, especially when it was created by a single person.
(this was run using an actual device, and I’m not yet sure how to take screenshots. These images came from the Android market, and are more marketing images with screenshots as a small part of it)
