One of the biggest advantages of the front-mounted ultrasonic fingerprint sensor found on the Galaxy S10 and S10+ is that you no longer have to physically pick up your device and reach around the back to unlock it. Instead, you simply place your finger on the screen for easier access and added convenience — at least on paper.
Whether we like it or not, our personal information and smartphones are tied together at the hip. The former needs the latter to deliver a personalized experience that matches our individual needs. This personal data, however, makes your phone a prime target for thieves of all sorts to turn your privacy into illicit profit.
Text conversations can get confusing fast. In the time it takes to type up a response to your friend, they can send you one, two, three, or more messages. Once you send the original reply, it no longer makes sense in the context of the chat. Clear up the confusion with Facebook Messenger's "new" quote reply feature, which shows both you and your friend exactly what message you're responding to.
The word on the street is Android users want a dark mode. With the increased usage of AMOLED panels on smartphones (including some midrange devices), there is a considerable demand for dark themes and their battery saving benefits. Recently, Nova just added the feature to Google Discover.
News junkies who own the Magic Leap One received some good news on Thursday, as CNN has published an app for the headset to display the network's news coverage in augmented reality.
The actual augmented reality portion of Pokémon GO is about to get even more fun for players. On Tuesday, the company revealed GO Snapshot, an extension of AR+ Mode facilitated by ARKit and ARCore that will enable players to pose Pokémon characters in augmented reality for photo capture.
Browsing the web can be dangerous. With all of the various threats out there, it isn't enough to just avoid bad links and visit only HTTPS websites. You need to take advantage of the tools available to you so you don't end up the victim of some scam. Fortunately, Opera is making this a bit easier.
Sileo is an ideal marketplace for developers to showcase apps, tweaks, and themes that Apple would never allow in the App Store. While a majority of these packages are free to try out, there are jailbreak apps that cost money for your iPhone. But actually paying for mods can be a bit tricky.
With the increasing popularity of OLED displays, companies like Apple, Google, and Samsung have all shifted away from traditional LCDs for their flagship devices. An OLED screen provides deeper blacks and is better for battery life since each pixel can be controlled individually while emitting its own light. This, in turn, has made dark themes an important software feature.
Though not as flashy as Face ID and other features, Low Power Mode has become one of the unsung heroes of iOS. When you're away from a charger, enabling this feature will dial back performance and networking to help you eke out up to three extra hours of battery life. If your device is jailbroken, you can even automate Low Power Mode to ensure your battery never dips to critical levels while out and about.
First, there was SnapCat. Now, we have DogChat! Or SnapBark? In October, Snapchat took social media by storm with its Lenses for cats. But the latest addition to the camera app has given dog lovers an augmented reality Christmas gift they won't want to return.
Boomerangs are a staple camera feature for Instagram and its users. The idea is to take up to 20 frames of video, which Instagram then processes into a looping movie that plays forward and backward. Since Facebook owns Instagram, it was only a matter of time before the feature hit its namesake apps, so it's not surprising that Messenger now supports the popular camera technique.
One of the headlining features in Samsung's One UI update is a new dark mode that turns stock apps and system menus black. But something you may have missed is what this theme does to the Samsung Internet app and all the websites you visit.
Apple just released the first version of the iOS 12.1.2 beta to developers on Monday, Dec. 10. The update arrives mere days after the Cupertino-based company seeded the official version of iOS 12.1.1 to the public, itself of which had been in beta development since Halloween.
The app that Lego demoed at this year's iPhone launch event is now available in the App Store, and it showcases several new capabilities available in ARKit 2.0.
French cosmetics giant L'Oréal isn't wasting any time putting its new subsidiary, ModiFace, to work. On Thursday, the company launched a new tool that enables a photo-realistic augmented reality simulation of nail polish shades and textures to be accurately displayed on a user's fingers in real time.
It looks like the Harry Potter version of Pokémon GO won't appear in 2018 after all, as the company has decided pushed the game's release to 2019.
The Pixel 3 runs stock Android, so you might think that since you've used an Android device before, you should know your way around the new phone by default. But Google has actually added several great Pixel-exclusive software features to its flagships, and not all of them are easily discoverable.
With Android Pie beta now available for the Galaxy S9 and S9+, Samsung is well on its way to catching up to major competitors like the Google Pixel 3 in terms of giving its users the latest and greatest software Android has to offer. Of course, Samsung has added its own touches to the software to make Android Pie its own and set it apart from the rest of the crowd.
On Thursday, yet another piece of the Magic Leap puzzle fell into place at Twilio's Signal developer and customer conference in San Francisco.
It wouldn't be iPhone season without a new controversy. Chargegate, Apple's latest PR nightmare, is the name being used for charging issues on some iPhone XS and XS Max devices. If you plug in your iPhone at night — or whenever — then wake up or come back later and see that your iPhone has even less battery power, you're affected. But there is a fix you can implement right now.
With the Galaxy Note 9's 6.4-inch AMOLED display, split screen is far more useful since each half of the screen is relatively large. The problem is that there are some noticeable omissions in the list of apps which support the feature. However, Samsung offers a fix for this.
This year marks the first for Apple to exclude the Home button from any new iPhones. If you're going from a Home-button iPhone to a new XS, XS Max, or XR, you might be a bit stumped when trying to perform basic tasks, such as activating Siri. While you can't hold down the Home button any longer, there's a new method that's just as quick.
Following closely behind the developer beta, Apple released the first public beta for iOS 12.1 to testers Thursday, Sept. 20. The update comes only two days after developers received their first look at 12.1. Both the developer and public betas surprisingly mark the return of Group FaceTime, allowing beta testers to chat with up to 31 other friends.
Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM) is making it easier for its passengers to travel by employing an incredibly practical new augmented reality feature included an update to its iOS app.
These days, it seems new phones get announced every other week. We've grown accustomed to glossing over the specs, looking at some press renders, then moving on to check out the next phone. If you had done this in September 2008, you might have overlooked what would become one of the most important phones of all time.
Improved security options in iOS 12 provide you with automatic password suggestions, a way to find and change weak passwords, auto-filling of 2FA codes, and Siri integration. Most of these apply to iCloud Keychain, but Apple hasn't forgotten about users of third-party password managers; In iOS 12, you can use 1Password, LastPass, and others with the AutoFill feature in websites and apps.
If there's one strength of Apple's that iOS and Android fans can agree on, it's the company's dedication to user privacy. With each new iteration of iOS, Apple builds upon these foundations, enhancing and increasing each iPhone's ability to protect its user's data. In iOS 12, Apple has added many new features to Safari, most of which have their own unique way of keeping you safe online.
Less than four months after Snapchat introduced its Snappables platform, Facebook has met the challenge with its own AR gaming feature that surpasses the originator.
Online shopping giant Shopify literally cannot wait for ARKit 2.0 to arrive via iOS 12 this fall to implement its latest augmented reality feature.
Augmented reality experiences created in Lens Studio now have a permanent home in the Snapchat app. On Tuesday, Lens Explorer will begin giving users access to a scrollable screen full of a variety of new Lens Studio creations.
When you receive a photo or video from a contact in WhatsApp, after you load it, it's automatically saved to your phone's local storage. That means all received content from WhatsApp is visible to anyone who gains access to your default photo gallery. Luckily, there's a new feature available for the Android version of the app that can prevent this from happening.
The roster of handsets supporting Google's augmented reality toolkit now includes 46 Android models as well as support for ARKit-compatible iPhones and iPads.
Samsung's Good Lock app has has breathed much needed life into its TouchWiz UI by giving us the ability to customize our Galaxy phones in ways that previously would've required root or a custom ROM. One companion app in particular even lets you personalize your lock screen to set it apart from the rest of the crowd.
A revamped Recent Apps overview is one of the most significant changes set to arrive with Android P when it touches down later this year. Incredibly, Samsung has beaten Google to the punch, and has made this feature available for all its Oreo-based Galaxy handsets courtesy of its Good Locks app.
Regal Cinema's augmented reality magazine Moviebill enjoyed a big debut in April and it has its sights set on an even bigger (virtually) outing with its next edition.
One of the best features in the Apple News app is the ability to save stories for later. If you see an interesting or important article but don't have time to read it right away, there's a good chance you'll never find it again unless you save it. Ever since News' birth in iOS 9, accessing these bookmarked stories was as easy as going to the "Saved" tab, but that's no longer the case in iOS 12.
It's no secret that Android has a messaging problem. iPhone users can turn to iMessage as a one-stop shop for all their messaging needs — features like read receipts and the ability to text from a computer have been standard with Apple products for quite some time. Android has no such solution, but Google's looking to fix that with a huge update to the Android Messages app.
If you're on iOS 11.4.1 or iOS 12 and go more than an hour without unlocking your iPhone, an "Unlock iPhone to Use Accessories" message will appear whenever you connect your iPhone to a computer or other device that tries to use the Lightning cable's data lines. This is to protect you, but it can be annoying if you have no reason to believe that law enforcement or criminals will have access to your iPhone.
Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a great way to add another layer of security to sensitive third-party apps and websites like Venmo. However, before iOS 12, to log into a particular 2FA-secured app or site on your iPhone, you'd have to memorize or copy the SMS code from Messages, then jump back in a timely manner to log in. Apple's latest iOS version streamlines this process.
