Chances are that you've been using your microwave just to nuke leftovers, but they can do so much more than heat up last night's dinner—microwaves can help you peel garlic more quickly, get more juice out of lemons, disinfect your kitchen, dry out herbs, give beauty products new life, cause exciting explosions, and even arc weld.
Apple's grand reveal of iOS 8 at WWDC in San Francisco is still a few days away, but that doesn't mean there isn't any speculation as to what features and enhancements might come packed in the new mobile operating system.
April Fool's Day, aka National Screw with Your Friends Day, is finally here. You can always pull a conventional prank, like strategically placing a whoopee cushion on your mom's chair, but that joke has been exhausted generations before smartphones were around. We live in a day and age where smack cam is the new level of pranking, so it's time to step your game up, novices.
There are few apps on my iPhone that I visit on a daily basis, and one of them is Drippler, the discovery and news app that tells you everything you need to know about your device.
Now that iOS 7 is out, what can you do that you couldn't do before? In this softModder guide, I'm going to cover all that's new and noteworthy about iOS 7. I've been playing around with it on my iPhone 5 since the first beta came out, so I'm excited to show you some of the secrets that are lurking within Apple's newest mobile operating system.
Facebook just released its new "home on Android" last Friday, appropriately called Facebook Home. Taking a cue from Amazon's Kindle, Home serves as an "operating system" that runs over Android.
Thought I would cross-post a piece I did a while ago.
While new features in Safari, Camera, Photos, Notes, Weather, Messages, and other Apple apps may steal the show on iOS 17, there are some impressive new features you need to know about when it comes to FaceTime audio and video calls.
You may know the traditional way to take a screenshot on your iPhone, but it may not be the best action for your needs. There are faster ways to capture an image of your iPhone's screen, methods for capturing overlays and other elements that won't show in regular screenshots, and even options for blocking screenshot thumbnail previews from appearing.
While it doesn't come with any iPad models out of the box, the Apple Pencil is perhaps the best iPad accessory you can get. It's a powerful writing and drawing tool with an intuitive design and user-friendliness that makes it easy to take notes, draw sketches, mark up documents, and more. And there's a lot you can do with it — some of which you may not have noticed yet.
Apple's iOS 13 has been available for beta testing since June, and the stable release pushed out to everyone on Thursday, Sept. 19. To help you make the most out of iOS 13 for iPhone, we've rounded up everything you'll want to know, whether a colossal feature, small settings change, interface update, or hidden improvement.
Use this safe and easy technique next time you need to replace a shattered light bulb. You Will Need
Your iPhone only has a few physical buttons, buttons with a set number of default actions assigned to them, like sleeping your display, controlling volume levels, and even taking pictures. But as much as these buttons can do for you, they can do more. You're not stuck with the out-of-the-box defaults. Every push button on your iPhone can be customized in one way or another.
In less than a month, WWDC, Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, will reveal the company's plans for the upcoming iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 software updates. But we already know what accessibility features will be hitting iPhones and iPads later this year, and many of them will be helpful to everyone, not just users with accessibility issues.
Missing a FaceTime video call no longer means missing out on a conversation. With the latest FaceTime update, an incoming caller can leave you a video message when you don't answer — and you can leave a video message for somebody who misses or rejects your FaceTime video call.
An invaluable button on your iPhone can do hundreds, even thousands, of amazing things, but most iPhone users don't even know it exists. You can't push it. You can't click it. You can't press it. But it's the largest button on your iPhone, more powerful than the versatile Side button, and it's hiding in plain sight.
The most recent premium flagship smartphones from Google — the Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 6 Pro — are equipped with displays cable of 1440 QHD+ resolution. But they also come with a tool to downgrade to 1080p FHD+, which you may want to do in certain situations.
There's a feature that every Apple Watch owner should know about — one that makes navigating menus, tapping tiny icons, and interacting with complications, among other things, much easier on the small display.
Your iPhone's clipboard can only save one item at a time, so it may seem impossible to retrieve your entire history of copied text, images, and other content. Luckily, there is a workaround you can use to find and copy your past clipboard contents, but you have to implement it first.
The newest feature for Pixel smartphones puts a home theater in your pocket. Spatial Audio outputs sound that appears to come from in front of and behind you, adding a new level of immersion to your streaming video and music apps.
It's easy to copy text from webpages, messages, documents, and other views on your Android device — except when it isn't. Many apps block or prohibit text selection, forcing you to take screenshots or write out the whole excerpt manually. But you don't have to resort to those methods since there's a simple workaround to selecting and copying text from uncooperative apps.
Apple removed the option to quickly change between miles and kilometers when using Apple Maps on iOS 16, but it's not entirely gone — it's just not as easy to find.
There are many ways to access the Google Assistant on your phone, but Android 12 adds another one for Google Pixel models that may be the best way yet.
Google dropped new features for its Pixel lineup of phones, and there's something here for everyone.
"Unfortunately, no one can be told what the matrix is, you have to see it for yourself." That's the line just before Morpheus gives Thomas Anderson (aka Neo) the red pill, finally opening his eyes to the tapestry of code that has veiled his eyes for his entire life.
What is old is new again. In this case, a classic arcade game gets the augmented reality treatment. In a new promotion playing off its ad campaign featuring actor Craig Robinson (The Office, Hot Tub Time Machine), Pizza Hut has turned its pizza boxes into a virtual Pac-Man game via web-based AR technology.
The Lens Studio app has become a cornerstone of Snap and its augmented reality technology portfolio by giving developers, creatives, and novices the ability to create augmented reality camera effects for Snapchat.
Up and coming Los Angeles-based rock group Palaye Royale has managed to grow a substantial social media following, and now the group is looking to grow its fan base through the power of augmented reality.
Ever since China's Nreal unveiled its Light smartglasses at CES two years ago, an army of look-alikes have emerged from the Asian nation.
Every mainstream Android home screen app looks and behaves almost exactly like Google's Pixel Launcher. It's the trendsetter, like the Nexus Launcher before it. But when all your options are modeled after the same thing, that really takes the "custom" out of "custom launcher."
Google's legendary phone series fittingly ended with the Nexus 6 (P), and all the replicants that have come in its wake failed to unite the geek crowd quite as well. It might seem silly to think back on a smartphone with a sense of nostalgia, but if any Android phone deserves it, it's the Nexus.
The two primary design paradigms in Samsung's One UI Android skin are vertical padding and rounded UI elements. The extra empty space at the top of most menus moves touchable elements closer to your thumb, and the rounded UI elements match the curved corners of modern smartphone screens. While you can't add the vertical padding on other Android phones, you can now get the rounded corners.
Standard notifications on Android are pretty intuitive, but the little popup toast messages that appear at the bottom of the screen can be a bit elusive. They come and they go, and that's about it. You can't long-press them to change their settings or even tell which app displayed them in the first place.
Android 11 made a pretty significant UI change to the menu that appears when you press and hold your power button. Google created an entirely new system that apps can use to populate quick toggles in this menu, but the trouble is, not many apps are using this system yet.
While iPhone cameras these days are downright impressive, the same can't be said for the Camera app. In true Apple form, Camera is as simple as possible, forcing you to go third-party for pro-level features. With iOS 14, however, Apple adds a little extra professionalism, allowing you to lock focus and exposure separately.
You can't beat Samsung's hardware, but their software still isn't for everyone. That's the thing, though — software can be replaced. So if you're more a fan of Google's vision for Android, but you can't get enough of Samsung's beautiful screens and build quality, you're just 11 steps away from getting the best of both worlds.
It's been a while since Android got a true Easter egg with a new software update. Remember when Google added Marshmallow's Flappy Bird-style mini game? For Android 11, we get a new game, and like Android Nougat, it revolves around the infamous Android Neko cat.
Biometrics have a major flaw: they don't work well with personal protective equipment. Whether it's a mask obscuring facial recognition or gloves blocking the fingerprint scanner, it's a lot harder to unlock your phone when you're wearing the proper PPE. Thankfully, there are a few ways to speed things up.
The average iPhone user has between 60 to 90 applications installed. On one of my devices, I have over 600. With a ton of apps to sort through, it can sometimes be challenging to find the one you're looking for without having to use the Search tool (which is even better in iOS 14). Even then, you may still come up dry.
By default, the One UI launcher on Galaxy phones makes you scroll all the way back to the left when you hit the end of your app list. Luckily, Samsung has its own solution to help fix this problem if it annoys you. Save yourself a bunch of extra swipes and read on to learn more.