Advertisers must love when their commercials go viral. Take for instance the Esurance commercial where an elderly woman completely misunderstands Facebook jargon.
Move over, Spike Jonze; Microsoft has published a mixed reality music video featuring holograms of Reggie Watts filmed through a HoloLens.
At the end of June, Unity 2017.1, the newest version of the popular 3D development engine, went live. And with that release, it brought out some very cool new features like Timeline and Cinemachine, to name a few. Now, for those of us that develop with Unity and follow the beta program closely, these features are not new at all. What is more likely the case is that we have spent a good deal of time using these features for a few months and even possibly helped iron out a few bugs.
Anchor has been called the audio equivalent of Snapchat. The app lets you record audio and broadcast it to whomever you follow. If you haven't heard of the app, get familiar with it because it has announced an easy way for you to record and publish podcasts from your smartphone.
Cell phones have advanced rapidly since their inception. However, one frustrating aspect of our handheld computers is that we sometimes expect more than they can handle. We want smartphones to do all our PCs can do, but in many cases, that just isn't possible; especially when that comes to viewing and sending certain file types. WhatsApp is taking steps to bridge that gap now, by allowing users to send whatever kind of file they want, with one or two restrictions ...
Snapchat's newest feature will allow you to see where your friends are posting from around the world. Called Snap Map, this easy-to-use update gives users the ability to view your friends' stories and locations on a map.
Music has always been able to connect us. Spotify is now offering an innovative new way to do just that. The company announced today that they have launched a new feature in collaboration with the Messenger app that allows you to share and make playlists with friends.
With iOS 11, Apple's very own Notes app will now come standard with a number of new features that aim to make it significantly more user-friendly and help it compete against more popular notepads like OneNote and Evernote.
For $0.25 per transaction, PayPal will soon be allowing you to transfer money through their app that will get delivered within seconds rather than days.
Aspiring engineers, your challenge, should you choose to accept it, has been issued by Jaguar Land Rover.
Social media is kind of depressing. On one hand, we love knowing what's happening in the lives of others. On the other hand, everyone seems happier, better looking, and more successful than you. We're putting on a facade by posting statuses and writing comments that present the person we want others to think we are, rather than truly expressing ourselves. Yes, social media has facilitated movements and miraculous events, but let's be real. For the most part, none of it matters.
One of the first things you'll notice about iOS 11 is how the Notification Center now has the same interface as your lock screen. It's pretty confusing at first, and it's pissed off tons of users, but it's really not that bad once you learn all of its features.
In an effort to make its services more accessible to users who live in developing countries, Facebook has released a streamlined version of its messenger app. Messenger Lite, at less than 5 MB, is much smaller than its regular 25 MB counterpart and was developed for use on older and lower-end phones. Finally, the app is now available for download in the US.
Stop me if you've heard this one before. You plop a marshmallow down in front of a kid and propose the following: You can eat this marshmallow now, or you can wait twenty minutes and eat two marshmallows. What do you think the kid is going to do? Better still, what do you think you would do? Personally, I'd eat the first marshmallow without hesitation. But now we're getting off track ...
Pinterest, a worldwide catalog of ideas shared by over 175 million users every month, is dominated by Android users, who are now the app's fastest growing group. Pinterest has since taken notice, and has started to incorporate handy home screen shortcuts for users with Android 7.1 or higher.
The Galaxy S8 and S8+ haven't even hit shelves yet, but some of the stock apps from Samsung's latest flagships have already been leaked. The biggest one so far is the new Samsung Experience Launcher, which replaces TouchWiz Home, and is quite a bit different from anything you'll find on previous Galaxy models.
Bitmoji has experienced explosive success this year thanks to Snapchat. The app allows users to create their own personal emoji and send responses to other friends, and even though it's only two and a half years old, this customizable emoji app is growing at an impressive pace.
Oh, Waze—you know, that Google-owned traffic navigation app that tempts drivers into stopping at local food joints like Dunkin' Donuts and Taco Bell? Well, now you can even order a large iced coffee through the app before you even arrive at a fast food hotspot.
TrueCaller is sharing your phone activity by revealing the last time your phone was used to contacts. The application used to identify unknown callers launched in 2009 and has faced a wealth of privacy concerns before.
The latest Google Play Services update has somehow broken major functionality in both Titanium Backup and Substratum. Titanium Backup has suddenly become stuck at zero percent while restoring, and Substratum simply fails to apply themes anymore. Both of these apps do require root, but they've slowly become essential to rooted users, especially since apps like these come into play when you're deciding what your next phone should be.
Anybody who was around in the '80s and '90s associates Sony with music still to this day, thanks to their wildly successful Walkman brand. And that's not even mentioning their major label record company. Indeed, the Tokyo-based electronics maker/media conglomerate has music embedded in its DNA, and that's certainly noticeable in the stock Music app included with their Xperia phones.
Now that Android 7.1.1 has been released, several features that were previously exclusive to Google's new Pixel phones are now available on the Nexus 6P. However, Google seems to be holding back on the Pixel's best features, as things like the "Night Light" red screen filter, "Moves" gestures, Google Assistant, blue accent color, and the new solid navigation buttons are still only officially available on the Pixel.
Being able to take screenshots on Android isn't something we were always able to do. It was added to stock Android in Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 (Gingerbread 2.3, if you were a Samsung TouchWiz user) as a simple full screen screenshot, and that's the way it's remained ever since—until now.
We all got a little jealous of the iPhone 7 Plus's dual-lens camera during the Apple Keynote in September. It's okay, you can admit it. But just because your Android doesn't have two lenses doesn't mean you can't recreate the fun bokeh effect of the iPhone's now wildly popular Portrait Mode.
For photographers, the "plus" in the iPhone Plus models used to mean optical image stabilization, but now that the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus both have OIS on board, that "plus" has moved onto something else—the dual-lens camera. Actually, the new dual-lens setup on the iPhone 7 Plus is a much bigger deal than OIS ever was. While OIS stabilizes the image before it's converted to digital information from the sensor, creating a much cleaner photo, two lenses working together in unison unleashes...
Snapchat has already found a compelling way to create advertisements in augmented reality with their branded filters, but they continue to experiment with new ways to monetize the bridging of the real and digital worlds. Their latest idea, which requires users to "snap" an image to unlock content, could succeed where QR codes haven't.
When it comes to customization, you just can't beat Android. Not only can you replace your home screen, switch your default apps, and apply icon packs, but you can even replace your entire lock screen by installing a simple app. Considering that the lock screen is the first interface you encounter when you pick up your phone, that last one might even be the biggest change you can make without root access.
The default screen timeout on most Android devices is 30 seconds. This usually offers a good balance of usability and battery savings, but sometimes, you need the screen to stay on longer. For instance, practically every time I try to show something on my phone to someone else, the screen locks before they get a chance to see it. But increasing the system-wide screen timeout isn't a great solution either, because this can lead to unnecessary battery drain and even screen burn-in.
We recently covered a set of ported apps from the new cloud-based smartphone, the Nextbit Robin. These ported APKs brought two of the Robin's slick new stock apps—Camera and Gallery—to any other device, but the launcher was conspicuously absent.
New releases of iOS are always pretty exciting. I remember the anticipation buildup of iOS 7 before it was announced at WWDC 2013, as it was expected to be a complete game changer compared to previous versions—and it was.
Apple's Live Photos is a cool feature that lets you turn ordinary pictures into a GIF-like animated photos. However, these images have some pretty big drawbacks: they live only in the iOS universe and can be shaky without a tripod.
Music is definitely more immersive when it's accompanied by a bit of visual stimuli, which is why CyanogenMod and other custom ROMs have started integrating music visualizers into elements of the Android system UI. It's a great effect, but it's not necessarily something that's worth replacing your stock firmware over.
Google I/O is like Christmas for smartphone fans. At their annual developer's conference, the Mountain View search giant gave us a glimpse of what they've been working on over the past year—and they've been quite busy, to say the least.
Google released an amazing swipe keyboard a few months ago called Gboard that has Google Search built right into it; This makes adding pics, GIFs, videos, and links to articles, restaurants, and shops a breeze. It even helps you search for emojis! The only problem is that Gboard is for iOS devices only, meaning only an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch can use its magical powers.
Smartphones are designed to be used in portrait mode primarily, so smartphone apps are created with that layout in mind. This means that practically every app on your phone is vertically oriented, which, in turn, means that we have to scroll up and down quite a bit.
Whether you're performing a factory reset to get your device ready for sale or trade-in, or you're wiping your device in the hopes of fixing software issues, there's a right way and a wrong way to go about it. Sure, it seems like a simple task on the surface, but if you're not careful, you could end up wasting a lot of time or losing precious data.
According to sources, Google has been working on a travel app for some time, and now it has a name: Google Trips. Google Trips aims to be the all-in-one place to go for travel information about your trip. It hasn't been officially announced, but from the leaks that have come out so far, think of it like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and your itinerary in one.
Now that smartphones have ensured that we're connected to the internet 24/7, online privacy has become more important than ever. With data-mining apps hoping to sell your information for targeted ads, and government agencies only one subpoena away from knowing every detail of your private life, encryption has become our last line of defense.
The only knock on Samsung's last round of flagship devices is that TouchWiz is still alive and kicking. Aside from this overbearing skin that's been applied on top of Android, the Galaxy S6, S6 edge, Note 5, and this year's Galaxy S7 models are some of the best phones money can buy.
It seems like Microsoft has finally come to the realization that their Windows Phone mobile operating system is probably never going to compete in today's smartphone market. Why do I say that, you ask? Because they've recently started to embrace the more popular platforms by releasing some quality iOS and Android apps.
