Battery life is and most likely always will be an issue with iPhones and other smartphones and tablets, but Apple is making it easier for us to save juice when we need to. To help monitor per-app battery usage, iOS 8 now lets us view battery usage stats for individual apps.
Gaining major consumer support and the ire of Big Cable, Aereo today announced support for the Chromecast through it's Android app. A revolution for cord-cutters, Aereo lets you record and stream live broadcast TV on your computer, smartphone, tablet, or media streaming player (Apple TV, Roku, and now Chromecast).
I love Android, and I think its apps are great—the polish that came with the Ice Cream Sandwich update truly put Android design on the map. That being said, one of the more frequent complaints from iOS fans continues to be that apps just "run smoother" and "look better" on iOS than they do Android.
One of the world's largest music festivals in kicking off this weekend in southern California, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. With a diverse lineup ranging from AFI to Empire of the Sun to HAIM to Muse, the music world is on display this weekend and the next.
Numbers are everywhere in life, and some are better at doing the math than others. Unless you're Gert Mittring, it's safe to say you use the calculator app on your tablet just as much as I do, and it's often disrupting your other tasks.
Good battery life is one of the most important things any phone or tablet should have, but iOS 7 isn't always that great at handling power consumption. That leads to tunnel vision on the status bar's battery meter. After all, you don't want to be stranded in the middle of nowhere with no juice left to make a call.
Modern smartphones can easily handle anything you throw at them, but it's always good to keep a tight grasp of what your phone is actually doing and how well it's doing it. System information can be viewed by looking through your Application Manager, but this process makes it difficult to keep an eye on usage in real time.
Mobile gaming, in case you haven't noticed, is huge. From the astronomical popularity of Candy Crush Saga, to the ease of using old school emulators, we love gaming on our mobile devices. The future is also bright, just take a look at the Oculus Rift, an immersive virtual world that just might change the way we view and play games.
There are countless things you can do to your lock screen to customize it, including adding app shortcuts that adapt to your time and location or custom widgets with DashClock. However, one thing you can't easily do in KitKat is change your lock screen background to be different from your home screen wallpaper.
While some Android applications have built-in gestures that allow you to perform certain actions, it's not a feature that's been comprehensively, let alone consistently implemented. If you're on Twitter or Facebook and you want to go back, the only global way is by tapping on the capacitive back button at the bottom of your device. Thanks to XDA dev PeterCxy, you can now enable a global swipe back gesture on your Android smartphone or tablet, making it easier than ever to backtrack within apps.
If you're really popular, like myself, then you're constantly receiving a steady flow of notifications on your Android device. This is either a nuisance, or a reassurance of your popularity. Sometimes you get too many notifications at one time to view, or you accidentally swipe an important alert away, rendering it lost forever.
Apple computers have long been maligned as the computer for Starbucks aficionados and graphic artists. "Dude, have you used Excel on a Mac? It's terrible," says everyone that owns a Dell. The whole PC versus Mac battle was encapsulated in what I think to be the greatest ad campaign of all time, "I'm a PC and I'm a Mac." And yes, I know that PC really stands for Personal Computer, which means that a Mac would be a PC, but for the sake of the article, it will mean all things non Mac.
Getting into fastboot or recovery mode on your Android device is nothing new, especially if you're a softModder. Accessing the bootloader menu is the genesis to a lot of mods, and if you're like me and constantly tweak your device, you probably get irritated every time you have to shutdown, then use the power button and volume rockers to access the special menus.
We may all have a Nexus 7 tablet, but we don't all want to have the exact same look and feel, which is why we softMod for a more personalized vibe. There are hundreds of cool mods you can perform on your Nexus 7, whether stock or rooted, but one of my favorites in Android 4.4 KitKat was unlocking the hidden battery percentage icon in the Status bar.
It's fairly easy to switch between running apps on the Nexus 7 by hitting the Recent apps key in the Navigation bar at the bottom of your screen, but for me—it's just not good enough. I don't particularly like leaving the app I'm currently in to see this menu, and the menu itself is kind of clunky, and overall, not as fast as I'd like it to be.
While the Play Store has a plethora of apps available for finding lost Android phones, Google came out with its own web-based application, Google Device Manager, earlier this year to help you keep track of all your Android devices and remote lock, erase, ring, and track if need be.
I don't like paying for repairs, and I don't like purchasing extended warranties. When one of my gadgets break, I perform emergency surgery and try and fix it myself. It doesn't always go well, but I've managed to resuscitate a few iPhones, an HDTV, an Android tablet, multiple MacBook Pros, and other gadgets seemingly on their deathbeds.
If you had the original Microsoft Surface with Windows 8 and a Type or Touch cover, you know how big a pain in the ass it was to change the scrolling direction of the trackpad.
If smartphone video games have a weakness, it's probably their inability to emulate the riveting and immersive experience that consoles offer.
Smartphones are almost completely controlled through touchscreens now, but most of them still rely on physical buttons to turn it on or adjust volume. When those buttons stop working, you've got trouble (especially if it's your Home button).
While there is definitely no shortage of video game emulators in the Android Market, it lacks in modern gaming consoles. Nintendo 64, Game Boys, and Sega Genesis are all accounted for, but what about emulators for some of the gaming consoles that have come out in the, let's say...past decade?
Not a lot of people send letters anymore. It could be because our laptops, smartphones, and tablets have taken over and we communicate electronically now. Or, it could be because envelope glue tastes terrible. If you were considering sending out nice, handmade Valentine's Day cards this year, but were so disgusted by the thought of licking all those envelopes that you changed your mind, you're in luck.
A lot of people text nonstop, but there are situations where it's either not allowed or considered rude to use your phone. Let's say you're in class or in a meeting at work, band you're expecting an important message or phone call. Rather than trying to check your phone discreetly, wouldn't it be better if you could just see your calls and messages on your computer?
One of the coolest things for readers using the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 is the stock Smart Rotation feature. While most smartphones use the accelerometer to adjust the screen orientation, Smart Rotation actually uses the camera to detect your face-to-screen angle and adjusts accordingly. Now, if only there was a way that all Android users can continue reading an article or text without sporadic and unexpected 90-degree turns of their screen. Wait, there is!
Remember these? Sadly, I don't, but I'm sure someone out there does. Anyone? This monstrosity, called the Macintosh Plus, was introduced in 1986 for the low-low price of $2,599. Wait...what? Almost three grand for that bulky baby?!? With a whopping 1MB of RAM standard?!? Whoa there...
Got a Samsung tablet with an S Pen stylus? Then you might be one of the many people irked about having to manually choose a different keyboard layout after pulling the S Pen out of the device. For instance, if you have a Samsung Galaxy Note I or Note II, when you pull the S Pen out, the keyboard layout stays the same. But if you'd like it to switch to a different keyboard, say, from the stock Samsung keyboard to something like SwiftKey, then you're out of luck.
Google is constantly adding new ways to do things quicker on its devices. Everything from multi-screen capabilities to lock-screen widgets has been added to the new updates of the Android OS, making its devices very powerful and efficient. Something that Android hasn't paid much attention to, though, is the ability to access applications easily from places other than the home screen. So, XDA Developers member Cyansmoker decided to take matters into his own hands creating an application that a...
Solving long and extensively complicated equations in grade school was tough to do by hand. Keeping track of which part of the equation to solve first took time, training, and lots of bad grades.
Most of us have traded our desktop systems for laptops, tablets, and mobile devices, meaning there's a lot of outdated hardware sitting in attics. Want to give your old computer a new purpose? Matthew Chappee turned his iMac G4 into an HDTV using the guide by Dremel Junkie. One thing to note before you take on this project yourself is that if you want to use it to watch cable, you'll need a converter box to get around the MPAA's HDCP restriction. But, a converter box is considerably less expe...
With some Samsung Galaxy S III owners still waiting for the Android Jelly Bean 4.1 update to hit their device, Google has wasted no time in releasing information on their next operating system update—Android Jelly Bean 4.2, which will come stock with the newer Nexus 7 and 10 tablets, and the all-new Nexus 4 smartphone. While the two Android updates are fairly similar, one of the big features in Jelly Bean 4.2 that sets the two apart is the new camera application, which has a feature called Ph...
One of the more innovative features about the new Windows 8 operating system is the ability to unlock the screen via a picture password. This new feature allows the user to select any photo they would like and use taps, circles or straight lines to unlock the device. The video below shows the picture unlock in action.
There are thousands of articles published every day about smartphones, tablets, eReaders, and any other kind of gadgets you can think of. The problem is that most people only really care about news related to the devices they actually own. So how do you filter out all of the stuff you don't care about? That's what Drippler does. It pulls news, tips, and app reviews and recommendations from all over the web and puts them all in one place, but only for the devices you want to read about. You te...
Android's operating system has garnered much of its popularity due to the high amount of customization the user has at their fingertips. Whether it's customizing your home screen, lockscreen or even operating system, Android has always been one step ahead of Apple in the customization department. And now you can even design your own web browser.
So you've made a somersaulting robot, one that delivers your beer, and even a robot you can ride, but you want to try out something really different. Why not add a steam engine?
Got an upset stomach or a little heartburn? America's favorite pink pill will cure it right up. But did you know that there's actually metal hiding in those chewable Pepto-Bismol tablets? Yes, metal. Technically, it's a poor metal, but metal's metal, right? Well, we do tend to eat a lot of iron in our diets, because it carries oxygen throughout our bodies, so consuming metallic minerals isn't anything abnormal. But you'd never think that Pepto-Bismol is actually made up of metal.
Want an electric car without the price tag? You could always build your own, or maybe just hack your old gas guzzler into an eco-friendly electric machine... This weekend at Defcon, security consultant David Brown showed off his "Voltswagon" project, a 1974 Beetle named Shocky that he converted to electric for only $6,000. He removed the old combustion engine, radiator, and a few other unneeded parts to make it lighter. Then he loaded it with batteries front and back, ten Interstate DC-29, 12...
Are you the next Ed Hardy? If you're sure that you've got the creative design chops to be the next trendy Hollywood fashion designer, then start practicing by honing your chops on Photoshop. This Photoshop tutorial teaches you how to draw a skull with a Wacom Tablet in Photoshop. You'll learn a very impressive technique for illustrating skulls. All work is done with a pen, and you'll be drawing the skull from a picture.
Life is too chaotic to be organized all the time, but little steps in the right direction make things easier overall. File folders keep paperwork from spiraling out of control. Spice jars take the clutter out of cabinets. Storage totes keep basements neat and tidy. But to find what you're looking for faster, you need a label maker.
Android has a single text file named build.prop that determines tons of various system-wide settings on your device. You need root access to edit this file, since it's stored on the system partition—but the various lines of codes it contains are actually fairly easy to interpret and modify.
As one of the most powerful Android apps for connecting your phone or tablet to your other devices in various ways, Pushbullet had always been a fan—and Gadget Hacks—favorite.
