Your iPhone's Camera app isn't the only place you can use Portrait mode for selfies. An easy-to-miss feature built right into iOS lets app developers leverage Apple's powerful Portrait mode effect in their own apps, so you can add a shallow focus effect to photos and videos when using the front-facing camera in FaceTime and apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Zoom.
Live Activities is Apple's hottest new feature for iPhone, but it's not always straightforward. Sometimes you'll trigger one without realizing it, but it may seem frustratingly impossible to start one when you really want it.
You may prefer reading news stories, web articles, and books on your iPhone over listening to them in spoken form. Still, sometimes it's necessary when driving, walking, cycling, cleaning, working, or performing other activities requiring a little multitasking. To help you out, Apple has a text-to-speech service on your iPhone — you just need to know how to find and set it up.
If you think you might be a likely target of a black-hat hacker, there's a new iOS security feature that offers extreme protection for your iPhone against spyware, phishing attempts, and other highly sophisticated cyberattacks.
Apple's Contacts app just got its biggest update ever. Since the first iPhone in 2008, there have only been minor upgrades here and there to how you manage and interact with contacts. That changes with iOS 16.
When you enable Low Power Mode on your iPhone, it's not always clear what measures it's taking to reduce battery drain and conserve power. Changes to energy-hungry features you use daily may be immediately noticeable, but some things you frequently use may be disabled or reduced without any apparent indicators.
You may not always want to, but there will probably be a time when you'll want to know if an email you send — like a job application or a support request — is opened by the recipient. It's actually easy to implement, and you may be using an email client on your device right now that supports email tracking.
Google Voice has a hidden feature that lets you record any phone call you're participating in, and unlike other apps, it doesn't cost a dime.
Apple's latest iPhone and iPad software, iOS 15.5 and iPadOS 15.5, became available on May 16, so you can download and install it right now if you haven't already. While there aren't as many new features as iOS 15.4 and iPadOS 15.4 had, there are a few big ones in the U.S. you'll want to know beyond Apple's minuscule "About this Update" information in the "Software Update" menu.
Music goes well with almost every Instagram story, but adding a particular song or soundtrack isn't the most obvious task if you've never tried before or haven't done so in a long time.
Believe it or not, there are legitimate iOS apps beyond the App Store that you can install on your iPhone. Some of them even work for iPad, Apple TV, and Mac, and there are also benefits to using them over apps found in the App Store.
Is your smartphone eavesdropping on you? It's a question that will never go away because it's easy to envision hackers or malicious apps taking over your device to spy on conversations, snap photos, or even record video. But fewer people will be asking it, thanks to Android 12, which has a new privacy feature that visually warns you of possible invasive surveillance.
Your Pixel's Now Playing song discovery tool received a few updates in Android 12, and the feature is finally comparable to other music recognition services.
Privacy is a growing concern in the tech industry, but Apple has fallen behind many of its peers when it comes to email security. Fortunately, iOS 15 changes that. Your email address is the key to a vast amount of personal information, not to mention a stepping stone into your other online accounts, so it's great to see new features for iPhones that protect email accounts and their contents.
Apple unrolled an array of nifty iPhone features in iOS 15. One of the more valuable updates lets you group all your untimely notifications and view them throughout the day at only the times you choose.
With the holidays right around the corner, it's easy to miss a big software update on your iPhone, and by that, I mean iOS 15.2, which was pushed out Monday, Dec. 13. There's a surprising amount of new features and changes in the updated firmware, and there are a few big ones you need to know about.
Apple's Wallet app lets you store boarding passes, concert tickets, gym memberships, vaccination cards, movie stubs, rewards cards, insurance info, student IDs, and more in one place on your iPhone, and you just double-click the Home or Side button to access them. Unfortunately, many cards and passes are not officially supported — but that doesn't mean you can't add them.
The new Material You theme engine with its fancy widgets is a sexy change for Android, but there's another new Android 12 feature that's more than just pretty colors and curves.
Today is the 10-year anniversary of the death of Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs. To commemorate the occasion, Apple has posted a message and a mini-documentary on its website.
Amazon really wants to make itself at home in your home. Like, everywhere in your home, from your doorstep to your kitchen, your kids' rooms, and everywhere in between.
While Snap may eventually compete with Apple and Samsung in selling smartglasses to consumers, today it is helping them achieve their business objectives via augmented reality.
The recent announcement that Facebook will begin inserting advertisements into its VR experience on its Oculus Quest headset has set the VR and augmented reality industry into a frenzy.
If you've recently built a Wi-Fi spy camera out of an ESP32-CAM, you can use it for a variety of things. A baby monitor at night, a security camera for catching package thieves, a hidden video streamer to catch someone going somewhere they shouldn't be — you could use it for pretty much anything. Best of all, this inexpensive camera module can perform facial detection and facial recognition!
We're still basking in the afterglow of the HUGE Snap Partner Summit last week, where Snap made Snapchat a much stronger augmented reality platform while also unveiling the AR smartglasses version of Spectacles. This week, we got a peek at how Spectacles AR started and got our hands on Lenses from Lego and Disney featured during the keynote.
On May 17, Apple announced that Lossless Audio playback for Apple Music was finally coming to subscribers in June. The long-awaited option will let users stream songs at a much higher quality than ever before. Still, in the fine print, Apple noted that you wouldn't be able to listen to the best sound quality — Hi-Resolution Lossless — on your iPhone without a DAC.
Apple's big iOS 14.5 update adds over 60 new features and changes to your iPhone, some of which are upgrades that audiophiles and even casual music listeners can appreciate. Whether you subscribe to the Apple Music streaming service or simply use the Music app for your own library of tunes, iOS 14.5 has a few things you should know about.
As a company, Facebook is not shy about talking up its AR smartglasses plans. The latest missive comes from two executives in charge of developing AR software and hardware.
The Apple ecosystem might be strong, but so is the pull from devices outside Cupertino's walls. If you've ever felt curious about what life could be like with a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, be that an S21 or a Note20, you don't need to make the switch to know. In fact, you can give it a go right on your iPhone.
Snapchat and its augmented reality capabilities have become a haven for music artists seeking to promote their new albums or simply amplify their art with immersive experiences.
Microsoft believes its Mesh platform can help developers build immersive AR apps more easily. We spoke with a member of the Microsoft team to learn more about the platform.
If you have Snap Spectacles 3, the dual camera-equipped sunglasses capable of capturing 3D photos and video, by now you've likely jazzed up the videos you've captured on the wearable with Lenses via Snapchat.
If you need to share something online but don't want your personal information attached to the file, use an anonymous file hosting site. By uploading files anonymously, you keep your IP address safe and won't need to create any kind of account that could provide further logging. You can do this in a web browser, but it's much easier to do using a shortcut on your iPhone.
The year is still off to a roaring start, with augmented reality at the center of nearly everything, from enterprise solutions, to entertainment, to safety.
Ah, subscriptions. Whether you love or hate them, they are now a fundamental part of our increasingly digital lives. If you have some essential subs on your iPad, iPhone, or Mac, like Apple Arcade, Apple Music, Apple News+, Bumble, Pandora, Tinder, or YouTube Premium, there are three key issues you need to know about that could unexpectedly stop your membership from renewing.
The process of trying out new augmented reality and virtual reality hardware is as personal as it gets. Bottom line, if you can't directly try these immersive devices on, it's difficult to really understand the benefits they can bring to your life and work.
We use our smartphones every single day. They're a part of our daily routine, and as a result, we've gotten really good at using them — especially when it comes to typing very quickly. But just how fast can you type on your iPhone? Can you match your speed on a physical keyboard for your computer or tablet? You might just surprise yourself.
Outside of plastic surgery disasters or costumes, augmented reality is the closest we can get to morphing our likenesses into those of animals.
Apple wants to support the advertising economy, but its primary focus of late has been user privacy and security. In Safari, cross-site tracking, which lets content providers track you across websites and apps to show you more targeted ads, is disabled by default. However, content providers can get around that using less privacy-invasive ad measurements, but you can stop that too in iOS 14.5.
Shortcuts are meant to make your life easier, and iPhone shortcuts are no exception. They can use different triggers, manual or automated, to perform actions in the background, allowing you to do things like send a prewritten text message during a bad date or change your wallpaper at certain times of the day. However, sometimes it's not only about the shortcut itself but about how fast you can run it.
When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. At Magic Leap, the lemons are the COVID-19 pandemic, and the lemonade is a new solution for virtual meetings born out of social distancing.
