A new smartglasses powerhouse is rising in Europe, led by two of the region's leading brands, optical systems company Zeiss (also known as Carl Zeiss) and telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom.
With Signal's class-leading end-to-end encryption, you can be sure your messages will remain secure as they travel to the recipient. However, once the message arrives, its privacy is completely dependent on the receiver, who could share it anywhere if they wanted. To patch this vulnerability, Signal added disappearing messaging.
If you're like me, your iPhone has way too many Safari tabs open. Links from other applications open up new tabs automatically, it's too easy to open up new tabs to search, and sometimes you're skittish about closing pages you don't want to forget about. This all creates a massive mess that requires cleaning house, and there's an easy trick to doing just that.
If you want to automate tasks with your smartphone, IFTTT is a great app. It does a tremendous job of helping you find applets or creating your own from scratch, so it's easy to connect your favorite online services and make them react to each other. With all this personal information, though, you should ensure that your data is secure by enabling two-step verification.
Although it sounds like a foodie's take on Facebook, what Calabasas, California-based FaceCake actually offers is more about augmented reality fashion marketing rather than food selfies.
Apple didn't invent the concept of photos with videos embedded (that credit goes to HTC and their Zoe feature), but they sure did popularize this functionality when they came out with Live Photos. If you're jealous of iPhone users, you certainly don't need to be — there are several great ways to recreate Live Photos on Android.
If you've read our list of the best email clients for iOS, you'll know Apple's Mail app doesn't cut it when it comes to third-party integration. If you want to use some of your favorite apps directly in your mail client's calendar, go with Outlook.
The Play Store hasn't been the most secure place for apps lately. A quick Google search for "Play Store malware" will give you a taste of some of the malicious apps that snuck their way onto Android's official app store. Google is aware of the problem and they're tying to fix it, but their new Play Protect program doesn't have a great track record, so you might want to look elsewhere.
Mozilla baked an easily missed feature into their Firefox Browser for Android called the "tab queue," which you should definitely be using if you find yourself opening links a lot from emails, texts, and other link-heavy apps. With tab queuing enabled, you can save links as new tabs in Firefox without ever leaving the current app you're in.
You might be proficient at sending your family and friends money using Apple Pay Cash on your iPhone, but what about when you need some digital currency in your wallet to buy in-app purchases or to get back the money you spent on someone's lunch? Requesting some Apple Pay Cash can be done a few different ways, none of which are hard.
WhatsApp is a great app to keep in touch with friends and family across phone brands and countries, but sharing a post on Instagram hasn't always been as easy as it should have been considering Facebook owns both companies. Now, whether you have Android or iOS, all it takes is a few taps.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened its re:INVENT developers expo with a bang by launching Amazon Sumerian, a new tool that could become the dominant platform for building cross-platform augmented and virtual reality applications.
Android's Quick Settings menu gives you easy access to certain actions from any screen, but the tiles available are largely dependent on your phone's OEM skin. For instance, the Google Cast button that can cast your entire screen has been exclusive to Nexus and Pixel devices, even though other phones have the requisite software to use it. Fortunately, there's a way to add it on any device running Nougat or higher.
Root, TWRP, Xposed, Magisk, custom ROMs — before you can have any of these, the first thing you should do is unlock your bootloader. Thankfully, the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL are some of the most modder-friendly phones out there, so you only need to send a single fastboot command to unlock the bootloader.
When it comes to augmented reality smartglasses, for now, it's still a mostly enterprise world, since the form and function of most are more acceptable on a job site versus your local cafe, and the still high price tags are far more palatable to major companies rather than individuals.
The new and improved Side button, as well as a plethora of new swipe gestures, are responsible for picking up the slack left by the missing Home button on the iPhone X. If you're really missing that Home button, however, Apple's built-in AssistiveTouch tool can help you out by adding a virtual Home button on your iPhone X's screen.
A potentially groundbreaking new app targeting retail financial services hopes to bring augmented reality to your local bank and credit union.
The Pixel 2 debuted a really cool feature that identifies any songs playing nearby and automatically displays the track's name on your lock screen. It's honestly one of the most inventive smartphone features we've seen in a while, especially considering how Google did it — but strangely, it's not enabled by default.
Apple Music's name reveals a lot about itself — it's made by Apple, and it has a lot of music. 40 million songs, in fact, if the iPhone-maker is to be believed. With that many songs, you may find a gem before any of your friends or family do. How can you share that song with them?
Google's new Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL have a new camera mode called "Motion Photos." As the name implies, it's quite similar to Apple's Live Photos feature or HTC's Zoe before it. For every picture you take, a few seconds of video footage from before and after the shot was taken will be embedded in the file, which gives you two ways to relive that moment.
The iPhone X has a new unlocking mechanism called Face ID, which replaces the old Touch ID system since the phone no longer has a fingerprint sensor. The way it works is simple — you just look at the phone, it recognizes your face, then the system unlocks — so Apple deserves the praise they're getting for it. But did you know you can get almost this exact same feature on any Android device right now?
The standing desk movement has gained momentum over the past few years as research has pointed to the detrimental health effects of sitting at a desk all day.
The Xposed Framework is an incredibly powerful tool. But because of this power, there's a chance that something could go wrong when installing a broken or incompatible module, which can cause bootloops or even soft-brick your phone.
Let's say you want to send out a message to all of your friends. Normally, you'd have to put all of the recipients into one giant group thread to do this. But when people started responding to your message, everyone in the group would get a notification, so your friends would probably be annoyed that you started the group thread in the first place. Luckily, if you're using WhatsApp, this isn't an issue.
If thieves, hackers, law enforcement, or other would-be enemies should ever gain entry to your smartphone, they could also access conversations you've had in Signal Private Messenger. To better secure your encrypted communications, you can password-protect the whole app and its contents — but only on Android. Even then, it's necessary to perform data deletion on a periodic basis, if not immediately.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Niantic must be blushing constantly, as numerous copies of Pokémon GO have spawned over the past year or so, seeking to capture the same success, often adding the lure of tangible prizes from brand partnerships.
There's good news for iOS 11 beta testers — Apple just dropped the fourth version of the iOS 11 developer beta today. That means the newest iOS 11 public beta 3 will be released in a day or two.
Snapchat is rolling out some awesome new features in their update today. The major update comes just two weeks after the company's premiere of backdrop, snap shopping, and voice clip features. They rolled out two new features this time, Multi-Snaps and the Tint Brush.
A new feature in Android O is making it incredibly easy to multitask while you're watching a video. It's called Picture-in-Picture mode, and if you've ever used a TV with this option, you should already have a pretty good idea of how it works.
The primary method of activating Siri is done by pressing and holding either the Home or Side button, depending on the iPhone model, but there's a much better way to ask a question to Siri or command it to do something — and you don't need to touch your iPhone at all to do it.
According to a new study from the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford, people are getting their news from ... unexpected sources. Put away your CNN app and stop checking the New York Times because a familiar app is now keeping you up to date on current events: WhatsApp.
Shapr is a new networking app that aims to help professionals connect more efficiently, and draws much of its format from dating-focused social networking apps. Shapr could be especially useful for those who have recently moved into their industry or location, and for those seeking employers or employees. For example, the app already has 65,000 users just in New York City alone.
New "radar road signature" technology from Bosch will be used to create maps for high-accuracy self driving. The new map is the first to use radar signals for a localization layer.
Apple gave us the ability to invert colors on the screen a very long time ago. Then they gave us grayscale mode in iOS 8, Night Shift in iOS 9, and the red screen filter in iOS 10. While the long-awaited "Dark Mode" finally appeared in iOS 13, iOS 11 and iOS 12 both have a decent placeholder for it you can use on your iPhone.
Three years ago, with VR enthusiasts prepared to throw their money at Oculus to get their hands on the yet-to-be-release Rift headset, Google surprised the audience for Google I/O with Google Cardboard, a seemingly late April Fool's joke that actually jump-started virtual reality.
The Augmented World Expo (AWE) is upon us, and that means it's time to get excited about all the awesome next reality things to come.
The Note 7 debacle taught Samsung an important lesson on cramming oversized batteries into their handsets, and they've applied it diligently to their Galaxy S8 and S8+. You might even say the company has gone a little too far in trying to achieve a balance between battery size and battery life, as it not only not only sets screen resolutions to 1080p by default and warns users about maxing out display brightness, but it also keeps close tabs on individual apps' battery usage.
Intel launched their Advanced Vehicle Lab in Silicon Valley this week, and the tech giant is now on the hunt for potential partners.
Recent launches of YouTube TV and YouTube Go created a bit of excitement on the web. Though the latter allows downloading, it doesn't allow background playback, as that would require a YouTube Red subscription for $10 a month. However, there's still a way to get both of these features without paying a dime.
Those of us that work with or around augmented and mixed reality have seen a powerful shift in the last year as the popularity and interest have grown in the field. With Microsoft's HoloLens release, the popularity of Pokémon GO, and the constant rumor mill known as Magic Leap, the terms augmented reality and mixed reality have started to become a part of the modern vernacular more and more each passing day.
