I'm not a morning person, so getting a "Good Morning" message on my iPhone when I wake up makes me want to toss it across the room. If you feel the same way about this morning greeting, there's an easy way to stop it from showing up on your lock screen. This also applies if your "Good Morning" is actually "Good Afternoon" or "Good Evening," depending on your sleep schedule.
Apple may pride itself on its commitment to user privacy and security, but it isn't invulnerable. We now know there is a bug in the latest version of iOS 12 and iOS 12.1 beta that allows those in the know to bypass your passcode and access contacts and photos. This applies to both Face ID and Touch ID-enabled iPhones. Not only do we know about the bug itself, we know exactly how to exploit it.
One option you won't find buried in the Galaxy Note 9's Settings is the ability to return the navigation bar to black. Samsung changed the default color to white with the Note 8, removing any ability to bring the black color back. But thanks to a neat app, Note 9 users can do it themselves.
With Android Pie, Google added a genuinely useful feature for Pixels called App Suggestions, which uses AI to predict the apps you might want to use next. These show up at the top of your app drawer and in the new dock in the revamped multitasking UI for quick access. But here's the trouble: Muscle memory is a thing.
By now, you already know that the Magic Leap One ships with an array of apps to immediately get you accustomed to operating in your new spatial computing reality. The first one we're going to focus on is Screens, an app we told you about previously, but only now have managed to try for ourselves.
In iOS, Apple provides a few live wallpapers that you can use for the background on your iPhone's lock screen, but these animated options are just wavy color shifts and ink-in-water effects. To really customize your lock screen, you can use a Live Photo for your wallpaper. If you can't find the right Live Photo, GIFs are the next best thing, and experimenting with them feels like a game almost.
It's no secret that iOS 11 is one buggy piece of software. Remarkably, even after three major updates, we're still seeing issues with our iPhones. This time, the glitches have come for 3D Touch on iPhones running the new iOS 11.3 update.
Your email is just that — yours. You shouldn't have to worry about other people gaining access to it on your iPhone. Fortunately, Outlook agrees, and has included a way for you to protect your messages with one of two keys no one possesses but you — your face or fingerprint.
Word games can expand your vocabulary skills in all sorts of exciting and creative ways. Because of this, both the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store are awash with word games, making it hard to differentiate between good and bad titles. This is especially troublesome if you're looking to purchase a game, as everyone hates to waste hard-earned cash.
Now that we've had significant time with Samsung's Oreo Beta for the Galaxy S8, many interesting features have come to light. As we continue using the new software, we have uncovered more subtle changes. The home screen already received a few new customization features, it's only fitting that the edge screen get some love, too.
The iPhone X is Apple at its most classic — they take away a key feature that seems odd at first, but usually, the change pans out in the end. So is the case for the long-lived Home button, whose last appearance may be on the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. That begs the question — how do you use an iPhone without a Home button?
Update 10/23: The hits just keep on coming. We're now seeing reports of a "smearing" effect when scrolling through apps on the Pixel XL 2. We'll expand on that at the bottom of this article, but it's still worth reading the background information on issues with LG's new POLED displays.
All to often, many of us are struck with a brilliant idea out of nowhere, only to forget about it moments later thanks to the distractions of daily life. Sometimes, the actual process of jotting these ideas down in our iPhones can be a holdup, as the idea we want to record fades from memory before we can even unlock our devices and open Notes to get started.
The Pixel 2 has finally arrived. Google unveiled their newest flagship phones on October 4th, and there's quite a few changes in store. For one thing, most of Google's official renders have already showed us something new: The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL will have a Google Search bar at the bottom of their home screens.
The Galaxy S8's Always On Display is a fantastic feature that gives you a brief overview without having to wake up your phone. But AOD now has a virtual home button, which kinda ruins the sleek look and can even cause screen burn-in.
Replacing your iPhone fingerprint sensor has been one of Apple's most cruel tortures. It's a slow and painful process made worse last year when Error 53 messages started appearing on the phones of users who had tried to repair their sensors outside of Apple. The error rendered the phones essentially useless. Since then, Apple has provided fixes but is now finally making it much easier to replace your iPhone fingerprint sensor with the releasing of "Horizon Machines" to official repair locations.
The Galaxy S8's AMOLED display is prone to screen burn-in, particularly with the navigation and status bars. But hiding these bars would make it hard to navigate your phone — that's where Pie Controls come into play.
Samsung's new personal assistant, Bixby, is making its debut on the Galaxy S8 and S8+. In addition to taking voice commands and performing visual searches, a new Hello Bixby feature predicts what you might want to do next with an integrated home screen feed. All of these features look nice, but if you're not ready to shell out at least $750 for a new phone, you'll be glad to know that Hello Bixby just leaked.
Google Assistant has introduced tappable shortcuts on the Google app for Android, iOS, and Google.com this week.
If you have stuck volume buttons, it can be a real pain to adjust sound levels since your only other option is to use the volume menu in Settings. But even if your volume rocker is working fine, it's still a little weird to have to click a mechanical button to control one of the most central aspects of an operating system that is otherwise entirely touch-based.
Almost every Android device comes with a Google search bar embedded directly into its stock home screen app. But Google search is available in so many different places on Android that having this bar in your launcher is almost overkill. On top of that, Google recently changed the logo overlay to a more colorful one that may clash with your home screen theme, so there's plenty of reasons to dislike this feature.
Sometimes it's the smallest feature in your smartphone that makes the biggest difference in user experience. Take screen timeout, for instance. You can probably think of plenty of times when your handset's display blacked out while you were in the middle of something. You could have been cooking with a recipe on the screen or looking at chords while you learned a new riff on your guitar.
The iPhone has a handy feature called AssistiveTouch that lets you quickly adjust volume, lock your screen, rotate your display, and even navigate through the phone's interface using a virtual home button. In a way, it's a lot like the on-screen navigation bar that you'll find on some Android devices, but with a lot more functionality, and bundled together in a floating bubble interface.
If your mechanical home button or capacitive navigation keys are on the fritz, doing something as simple as navigating your phone's interface becomes a tedious chore. In this situation, some users have turned to root mods that enable Android's software navigation bar to solve the problem, but not everyone is willing or able to root their device.
Starting with iOS 7, the iPhone has had a cool feature that lets you see upcoming calendar events right on your lock screen, and it only got better with iOS 10. Android used to have this feature with its lock screen widget system, but that was removed back in the Lollipop days, so there's nothing quite like iOS 10's "Today View" feature anymore.
If you follow tech, you're probably familiar with Siri, Apple's personal voice assistant, which has been integrated heavily into iOS ever since iOS 5. But you might not have known that Siri is capable of performing some tasks when the iPhone is in a locked state. The default state of iOS is to allow access to Siri from the lock screen, most likely for the convenience of hands-free access to the phone.
Some manufacturers, like Samsung and LG, have had split-screen multitasking on their custom versions of Android for years. But starting with Android Nougat, Google added this functionality to AOSP, which means that all phones and tablets running Android 7.0 or higher will now have a new multi-window mode.
When Google issues an Android update, the changes are usually all over the place—fixing issues, adding functionality, playing catch-up with the latest thing Apple added to iOS. It's how the smartphone wars have evolved, where the two competing operating systems continually match and one-up each other.
When you're on the road, the last thing you need to be doing is fumbling around with your phone. But with online radio services like Spotify and Google Play Music, you almost have to use your phone to play music through your stereo, because the in-dash head units on most cars lack the ability to connect to these services.
The widget selection on Android is one of the main things that set it apart from other mobile operating systems. You can get quick, at-a-glance information for topics like weather, news, music, and much more, all without ever leaving your home screen.
Samsung's latest flagship devices, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, as well as the Note7, have a useful feature called "Always On Display." With this one enabled, the clock and some other information will continue to be shown on the screen, even when you lock your phone or turn your screen off.
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.
Ever since iOS 8, you could add widgets on your iPhone using the "Edit" menu on the Today view page, but there's an easier and faster way to get widgets set up for viewing via a right swipe on the lock screen, a swipe right from the first home screen page, and a swipe down from center top everywhere else.
Your iPhone's lock screen is about to get a major upgrade in iOS 10, as shown off by Apple at WWDC '16, and it will make dealing with notifications and apps a breeze. The new lock screen has been fully redesigned to give users better and faster interaction with the apps they need. It's also snappier and more aesthetically pleasing with notifications no longer darkening the wallpaper.
When Android Nougat is released sometime this fall (or sooner), a new feature called "Quick Reply" will allow users to respond to incoming text messages directly from the notification. It will definitely be nice to carry on a conversation without leaving the screen you're currently viewing, but unfortunately, most of us won't get that Android Nougat update for quite some time.
Why, for the love of God, do people keep inventing ridiculous devices that make the simplest things more complicated in the name of convenience? This may be a rhetorical question that will forever go unanswered—because these crazy gadgets just keep rolling out, one after the other.
Aside from changing your wallpaper, there's not much you can do to customize the home screen on your iPhone besides nesting folders, hiding folder names, and hiding apps—and those aren't even actual features. They're simply glitches that Apple never took care of, and now there's another, even cooler one to add to that list.
When a friend asks me what screen recording software is best to use, I always say the same thing—you don't need any! Even though it's been around since 2009, many Mac owners do not realize that they have a powerful screen recording software built right into OS X.
Samsung's latest flagship devices—the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge—both sport an interesting new feature called Always On Display, or simply AOD. When enabled, this feature keeps the clock, date, and other bits of information visible at all times—even when the screen is off.
Desserts always taste better when they are sugar-coated—and even more so when they're coated in powdered sugar. In particular, crinkle cookies—cake-y cookies that are chewy on the inside and crispy on the outside—are famous for the powdered sugar that creates their cracked appearance.
