During E3, many major game developers announced plans to bring console and PC franchises to mobile. These titles are designed for more serious gamers with competition in mind. All of this points to a shift in mobile hardware priorities — soon, gamers will need gaming phones just like PC players need a gaming rig.
Android lets you sync your contacts across devices. The OS will use not only contacts saved on your phone, but also your Gmail. This choice can lead to a contacts list populated with entries that don't have a phone number, which can quickly add up. To mitigate this problem, there are a few methods.
A burner number isn't just for criminals and cheating spouses. In this digital world, with many of our interactions being conducted online, a throwaway phone number acts as a buffer — it lets you enjoy the web without having to give out your personal information, such as real name or phone number.
If you're a console or PC gamer, you may be quick to ignore the mobile version of Fortnite Battle Royale. The lower graphics and the switch to touchscreen controls may be enough reason to dismiss this version of the game. But don't be so quick to judge — there are actually some clear advantages to playing on mobile.
Now that we've had a chance to jump into the Lumin SDK documentation at Magic Leap's Creator Portal, we now have much more detail about how the device will function and utilize software than any single piece of content released by Magic Leap to date.
At the end of 2017, Mozilla introduced the world to Quantum. While desktop Firefox received all the improvements, Android users were stuck waiting for one of the biggest components to hit, which brought speed that surpassed Google Chrome. Well the wait is over, the new and improved Firefox Mobile is finally here.
Snapchat offers a rich experience for anyone looking to communicate with pictures in addition to (or instead of) words. There are many ways to share your snaps, from Memories to My Story. You can even draw all over your snaps, creating a unique experience that hinges on your own illustrations. Sometimes, though, you want to customize your snaps in a different way. In a more collage-y sort of way.
Coming into this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the common sentiment among observers was that this was expected to be the big year for augmented reality.
It's been nearly two months since Samsung kicked off the official Galaxy S8 beta program for Android Oreo. The Korean manufacturer recently announced that the beta is ending on January 15, so it's time to move on to the official build. Today, an official (non-beta) build of Oreo for the S8 has leaked.
Safari for iPhone is generally a good mobile browsing experience — except when it isn't. Popup ads are a real issue, and they cause both great annoyance as well as concern over iOS security. How do you stop these nuisances and return to a web without fear of popups?
Apple's Mail app for iOS isn't a bad email client by any means. However, it just doesn't cut it for iPhone users that want a more intelligent and advanced email solution. If you're in the market for an app like that, Spark is absolutely your best bet.
Technology ages rapidly. We're conditioned to refresh our iPhones every one or two years, and why wouldn't we? New iPhones are fast, and our old ones inevitably slow down, sometimes to an unusable degree. However, it turns out, there's something we can do about that, and it doesn't involve buying a new iPhone at all.
Having your home and work addresses set in Apple Maps makes them incredibly easy to navigate to no matter where you're located. If you move to a new house, stay in a hotel or resort while vacationing, report to a different office, or have multiple job sites to visit regularly, updating these addresses isn't only straightforward — there's more than one way to do it.
Cyber Week 2017 is still upon us. If you're looking for an iPhone X deal, you might still have time to score one. But maybe you already have — a reported six million people purchased the newest iPhone over the Black Friday weekend. If you're one of those lucky millions, there's a slight learning curve to using the X over other iPhone models.
The next frontier for AR hardware is the consumer headset, and tech companies of varying size and tenure are working hard to strike the right mix between comfort, cool factor, and cost. How these companies handle the hype and flow of information vary wildly.
So you're thinking about downloading the Galaxy S8 Oreo beta, but you're not sure if it's stable enough to use. It is a beta, of course, so you might want to wait for others to give it a try. Over the past ten days I've used the Galaxy S8+ running Android Oreo as my daily driver, running down the best new features. Let's take a look at the bugs, the performance, and the battery life.
So, your grandmother finally wants to ditch her flip phone for a shiny new smartphone? Congratulations. But helping her get used to her new device, even when it's an iPhone, is no small task. Grandma mastered checking her email in late-2012 and just recently learned there's a thing called "Facebook." But we love grandma, and thanks to this guide, we can definitely make this happen for her.
Since the release of the T-Mobile G1, the Play Store has been flooded with apps that claim to improve performance by clearing cache and storage. These apps are typically useless, rarely providing more than a temporary fix which Android undoes immediately. As Android has continued to improve cache and storage management, such apps have become more trivial. However, there are few decent ones out there.
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.
On the surface, iOS 10.2 might look the same as iOS 10.3, but there's one big difference between the two versions: iOS 10.2 can now be jailbroken! Jailbreaking your iPhone means gaining access to thousands of tweaks and mods which greatly enhance the iOS experience, so this is great news for the power users out there.
Apple likes to make their products simple. However, sometimes that simplicity leads to a confusing user-experience. Take the Apple TV, for example. How do you turn it off? Just press the power button, right? Sorry, there is no power button. Okay, so it's like an iPhone and has a nondescript button designated as a power button, right? Nope.
The launch of the Audi A8 marks the world's first Level 3 car on offer in retail channels, except there is one catch: it can only take full control of driving at speeds of 37.3 mph or less.
Four augmented reality companies made deals this week to grow their businesses. Two companies, TechSee and Car360, completed funding rounds, while DAQRI signed with a production partner and Decalomania landed a prime spot with a top retailer.
When I booted up my second Sega Forever title, I wasn't sure what to expect. Sonic 1 was fun, but the controls weren't great. Touch screen controls can be excellent when the game is designed for them, but retrofitting a game designed for a physical controller to be played on a smartphone, well, sometimes is a bit disastrous.
The de Blasio Administration of New York City has announced that the NYU Tandon School of Engineering will be hosting the country's first publicly funded VR/AR facility.
We are in a pretty major technology boom at the moment. One that will likely make the industrial revolution look tiny. And one of these technologies that are building up to lead the way is something called augmented reality.
Google Assistant was just released for iOS today. You may know it as the AI-powered assistant that makes Google Home tick, or perhaps you've heard from one of many review sites about how much better it is than Siri. Well, before you run off to the App Store to install Google Assistant, let me save you some time: It sucks.
If you're a developer in the augmented and mixed reality space, there's a high probability that you're intimately familiar with the 3D application and game engine Unity. In May, at VisionSummit 2017, Microsoft announced that 91% of all HoloLens applications have been made with the software. But there's a section of Unity that you may not be familiar with, which has become very important to augmented, mixed, and virtual reality (known collectively as XR, for "extended reality") — Unity Labs.
Have you ever had a burning sensation when you urinate? Low fever, back pain, and maybe cloudy urine? Male or female, it could have been a urinary tract infection. If it lasted long enough, the chances are good you went to the doctor for help. For about 20% of women, standard testing for a UTI does not reveal the presence of infection-causing bacteria, even though bacteria may be causing their symptoms. Well, a new test may provide better answers.
As much as you try to safeguard your personal information, you may have made a small mistake by giving your phone number to the wrong entity, and now you're being bombarded with dozens of spam calls every day. To help parse your call log and reject the proper numbers without answering or trudging through voicemail, a good reverse phone lookup app is needed.
The sun-drenched people of Phoenix can now sign up to ride in an automated car, for free, courtesy of Waymo. The Alphabet affiliate announced its "early ride program," which will (hopefully) demonstrate how self-driving cars will fit into people's everyday lives. Highlighting a challenge Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has spoken about that faces the driverless industry.
Every Tuesday, Next Reality will give readers a rundown of the augmented and mixed reality news briefs from the preceding week that we didn't cover already. This way, you'll never miss anything of importance in the Next Reality landscape, and will always know what's going on with new augmented and mixed reality tech and applications.
If you ever imagined turning the surface of your desk into one large augmented computer, well the future might not be far off, my friends. Lampix, the company that transforms any surface into a smart surface, is currently working on a portable and quite fashionable lamp to project an augmented computer onto any surface that you can interact with using your hands.
An advance in the race to stop birth defects caused by Zika-infected mothers has been made by a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. They have identified the process Zika uses to gain entry into the placenta, and published their findings in the journal Biochemistry.
Coming up at the end of May is the world's largest conference and expo dedicated to all things augmented and virtual reality, the Augmented World Expo, more commonly known just as AWE. And this year, a few of us from NextReality are going to be there.
"Necessity, not novelty," is a phrase I use often when it comes to HoloLens development. It would be fair to call it my mantra, or mission statement, as I prototype and explore software creation on this new frontier of mixed reality.
Alphabet's moonshot factory, X (formerly "Google X"), is a secretive place, but it seems that when they are close to graduating a project, then they need to staff it up quickly. Watching for these job ads is one easy way to know they're close to budding off a baby.
Most of us don't get the opportunity to see election coverage first hand, but with virtual reality, we're not as restricted. AltspaceVR has teamed up with NBC News to let you log in on your computer or VR headset and actually take part in the action—just not physically.
Whether you made the switch from iOS, or you came from a different Android device, there's a lot to learn about your new Galaxy device. Samsung does things a bit differently, and thanks to their TouchWiz interface, there are tons of added features to take advantage of—though some folks might find these extras to be a bit too much.
Drones are popular little toys, but they're not the easiest things to control. While hand gestures may not change that too much, donning a HoloLens and flying a physical object with a wave of your hand at least makes the process feel a lot more like a telekinesis.
