Media subscriptions are all the rage these days. Between Netflix, Apple Music, HBO Now, and countless more, your TV, movie, and music options have never been better. Unfortunately, all these choices weigh heavily on your wallet. So, when there's an opportunity to snag not just Spotify but Hulu and Showtime as well, all for just a tad bit over five dollars a month, how could you turn that down?
You can easily deck out your favorite phone with great wallpapers, ringtones, and icons, but what about fonts? Not all Android skins let you change the system font, and even when they do, the options are often limited to a few choices. Certain root apps can open up the system font to customization, but some of these can cause problems now that Google introduced a security measure called SafetyNet.
Haptic feedback and vibration of our smartphones have come a long way in recent years. These features are much more premium now than they once were, but most users are still unable to adjust the intensity for notifications or phone calls. Most higher-end devices make less noise on surfaces than in the past, but adjusting these values can still come in handy even today.
Following in the iPhone X's footsteps, the iPhone XS and XS Max, as well as the iPhone XR, have all ditched the iconic Home button last seen on the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, which is one giant leap toward Jony Ive's ultimate vision of an iPhone that's a clean slab of glass. However, without the Home button, a lot of tasks have changed, most notably, entering and exiting DFU mode in iTunes.
Apple's new iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max are sure to be hits this year. Of course, that means plenty of hungry customers are looking to sign up for a model once preorders begin on Friday, Sept. 14, for the XS models, and Oct. 19 for the XR. Luckily, there are preemptive actions you can take right now to avoid waiting outside an Apple Store overnight or getting kicked out of the preorder queue online.
OnePlus will be releasing a new phone in the second half of 2018, specifically, an upgrade to their T-series. Over the past two years, #T versions have come out about five months after their predecessors and have included small updates that fix any problems from the previous OnePlus device. While we do know a bit about OnePlus 6T, what it could be is much more exciting.
On August 1, Google Play started requiring new app submissions to target at least Android 8.0 Oreo's API. Then, as of November 1, all updates to existing apps were required target the same API. While at first glance, this change may mean little to you, it will have a profound impact on Android. Now, your favorite apps will be getting better.
Instagram has long-resisted easily resharing content. While it's been testing a "regram" feature for a long time, it still lags behind apps such as Twitter and Facebook when it comes to resharing content. But while Instagram is a bastion of original material, there is a feature in place for you to reshare stories from those you follow. Your friends can reshare your stories too.
There's always an iPhone in our list of top phones for privacy and security, due in large part to advanced security measures like Face ID, consistent iOS updates, and easy ways to prevent unwanted access and excessive data sharing. However, some of those options actually do the opposite and hinder security. It all depends on how you use your iPhone, but you should at least know everything available.
When you hear people say the iPhone "just works," it's because of all the finishing touches Apple adds to iOS. A perfect example of this is the new QR-scanning feature in iOS 12 — by tapping a single button in the iPhone's Control Center, you can scan a QR code within seconds.
Perhaps the best thing about Android is the endless amount of customization you can add to your device. From icon packs to custom launchers and even custom ROMs, there's truly something for everyone. One of the most popular options among Android enthusiasts is adding a system wide dark theme. The methods to do this vary, but you can now automate this process thanks to Android Oreo.
With the exception of "Reflection" on the iPhone X, Apple hasn't updated their catalog of ringtones and alarms since iOS 7 dropped back in 2013. Since then, the company has come a long way with the quality of the iPhone's speakers, but their tones haven't adapted to meet those changes. That's left an opening for others to create their own ringtones mastered for the iPhone.
Google has started blocking certain devices from accessing the Google Play Store and other Google services. This is part of an effort to clamp down on OEMs that skirt its certification requirements, but now millions of phones have been uncertified to download or update Google apps. Fortunately, there are a few workarounds.
Using Hydra, Ncrack, and other brute-forcing tools to crack passwords for the first time can be frustrating and confusing. To ease into the process, let's discuss automating and optimizing brute-force attacks for potentially vulnerable services such as SMTP, SSH, IMAP, and FTP discovered by Nmap, a popular network scanning utility.
2017 was a down year for HTC. First, the U11 and U Ultra were widely criticized. Later, Google purchased a large chunk of HTC's manufacturing division, leaving the Taiwanese company running with a skeleton crew after losing 2,000 key employees. But that's not stopping HTC — their flagship U12+ was just announced, and it's quite impressive.
Android used to have a notification ticker, but those days are long gone. Now, important new messages pop up on the top half of your screen with what's known as a "heads up notification." If you're in the middle of something, these popup notifications can be pretty annoying — luckily, it's pretty easy to turn them off.
Google's launchers are some of the most polished home screen apps out there, but they lack the ability to customize. With the old Google Now Launcher, we had Xposed GEL Settings to add options for tweaking the layout, but that project was abandoned when the Pixel Launcher came out. Now, a new root mod will give us some key customization settings for Google's latest launcher.
While Animal Crossing's emphasis has always been on making friends with the animals that populate your world, each subsequent game following its initial release has stressed relationships with human players more and more. In Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, making human friends is a crucial part of the process with the inclusion of market boxes, Shovelstrike Quarry, and giving "kudos."
The OnePlus 5T was just released, and it's packing several new useful features. While many OnePlus 5 buyers are feeling frustrated with the quick release cycle, lots of fans are still clamoring to buy the new device. Aside from the larger screen, most of the buzz around the 5T has centered around the new face unlock method. Thanks to a clever hack, you can now get this feature on almost any phone!
There are a lot of Android phones out there, and chances are that someone in your life is looking for one this holiday season. Well, there also happens to be a lot of Black Friday deals on Android phones this year. So we've rounded up the best deals taking place on Black Friday weekend to help you save big.
So after being teased last Christmas with an email promising that the Meta 2 was shipping, nearly a year later, we finally have one of the units that we ordered. Without a moment's hesitation, I tore the package open, set the device up, and started working with it.
In one of my previous articles, I discussed ShinoBot, a remote administration tool that makes itself obvious. The goal is to see if the user could detect a remote administration tool or RAT on their system. In this article, I'll be demonstrating the use of Pupy, an actual RAT, on a target Ubuntu 16.04 server.
With four major carriers, buying an iPhone X or iPhone 8 can be more complicated than you'd think. While Apple has its own iPhone upgrade program, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile all have versions of their own. Which plan you choose depends on your needs and, of course, your carrier. However, getting around to upgrading can be challenging to say the least.
When Apple announced their ARKit platform in June, they immediately staked the claim to the largest augmented reality hardware platform, with millions of iPhones and iPads compatible with iOS 11 becoming AR devices this fall.
One of the most popular usages of modern-day smartphones is listening to music. It doesn't matter if you download or stream your tunes, you are part of a massive group of users who do exactly the same. While statistics are a bit foggy on how many smartphones users download music, we do know that over 68% of American smartphone owners stream music on a daily basis.
Who doesn't love listening to music or playlists when driving? The open road and an awesome playlist make for a perfect pairing, but it can become quite the challenge if you're trying to navigate at the same time. That's why Waze's built-in audio controls for compatible apps like Spotify and Pandora are so useful, so you can always keep your eyes on the map and road ahead of you.
Look no further than Flint, Michigan, to discover the serious consequences of contaminated drinking water. Around the world, water polluted by pathogens and toxins sickens people or cuts them off from safe drinking water. Looking for a solution, researchers created tiny, swimming robots that pack a powerful punch against waterborne pathogens.
The stock home screen app that comes with your phone is nothing compared to Nova Launcher. Not only is Nova faster, but it's got tons of customization tweaks like gestures, adjustable grid sizes, and icon packs, just to name a few.
Stakeholders in the driverless industry are anxiously awaiting changes the US Department of Transportation (DOT) is making to self-driving vehicle guidelines.
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.
When a new jailbreak method comes out, Apple is quick to patch the vulnerability it exploits by issuing a new iOS update. If you were to accept such an update, you'd no longer be able to jailbreak your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch unless you could roll back your firmware to a version that could be jailbroken. But Apple even takes things a step further and stops signing older iOS firmware versions, which makes downgrading next to impossible. This is where your SHSH2 blobs come into play.
Oftentimes, seemingly insignificant, nondescript features have the most impact on enhancing our Android's usability. A great example is Nougat's inclusion of customizable Quick Settings tiles, which adds greatly to the user experience by letting individuals tailor their expandable status bars to suit their unique needs.
Up until now, enabling full-time Immersive Mode on an Android device has been a tedious task which required you to run individual ADB commands each time you wanted to toggle it on or off. This was a shame, too, since Immersive Mode helps reclaim lots of screen real estate by auto-hiding your navigation and status bars.
Deep down inside, Kindle Fires are actually Android tablets — the only trouble is, Amazon has layered so much of a skin on top of it all that you can't normally use Android's main app store, the Google Play Store. The Amazon Appstore, which comes bundled with Kindle Fire devices, only has about 600,000 apps, so it would be great if you could access Google Play's library, which boasts 2.8 million.
The Samsung Galaxy S8's almost bezel-less display is truly a sight to behold, especially when set to Immersive Mode. While transparent when on the home screen, the navigation and status bars on the S8 will often turn opaque depending on what app you're using at the moment. This, in turn, can detract from the overall experience when viewing anything from the S8's display, as the bars along the top and bottom of the screen bump the phone's aspect ratio down to lower levels.
Now that Android Nougat lets you add your own custom Quick Settings tiles, your pull-down menu is probably getting a lot more crowded than it used to be, with all sorts of new and useful toggles. But the trouble is, you can only add up to nine entries before your Quick Settings tiles spill over into a second pane that you have to access by swiping, and that's not exactly "quick."
Dutch filmmaker Anthony Van der Meer published his 2015 thesis short from Willem de Kooning Academy in South Holland online in December 2016. It's a brilliant piece of work that managed to be touching, alarming, and informative at the same time. His documentary, which already has over 6 million views on YouTube, covered the journey made by a stolen smartphone and how the theft and ensuing tracking affected all parties involved.
Paranoid Android has always been one of the most popular custom ROMs because of the inventive features its developers add to Android. Two of the biggest draws in particular have to be the "Halo" notification bubble, and the "Pie" navigation buttons, which can both fundamentally change the way you interact with your device.
Mobile security researchers at Kryptowire recently uncovered spyware preinstalled on hundreds of thousands of Android smartphones by FOTA provider Adups which was gathering personally identifiable information (PII) such as call logs, app usage data, and even the full contents of text messages and sending these to a third-party server—all without the users' knowledge.
One of the only downsides to the Pixel XL is that Google's flagship phone does not have stereo speakers. But if Android's awesome development community has taught us anything over the years, it's that limitations like these can be bypassed with some creative software tinkering.
