Oh, Waze—you know, that Google-owned traffic navigation app that tempts drivers into stopping at local food joints like Dunkin' Donuts and Taco Bell? Well, now you can even order a large iced coffee through the app before you even arrive at a fast food hotspot.
Earlier last week, there were a number of fake five-star WhatsApp reviews to be found on the Google Play Store. Now, Gmail, Chrome, Messenger, and Firefox are all the latest victims to be saturated in five-star spam that wrongly refers to the word "game" in reference to non-game apps.
Google Maps now allows users to share their location in real time and update their friends and family on their location and estimated time of arrival when making a trip.
Instagram enthusiasts will be pleased to know that there is finally a way to post your Live Photos on the service.
Sony offers a set of free games to its PlayStation Plus subscribers every month, but it's easy to miss out if you're not constantly around your console. Perhaps you're traveling, or maybe you've stayed up one too many nights playing Uncharted, leading to a period of PlayStation detox. No matter what the case is, the good news is that you can use the PlayStation app for Android or iOS to claim these monthly free games without getting up from your seat.
Google Assistant has introduced tappable shortcuts on the Google app for Android, iOS, and Google.com this week.
Google's personal messaging service Allo could reveal your search history and other private information to friends if the Google Assistant bot is called upon in chats, according to a story from Re/code.
Uber has recently been updating their app on a weekly basis to ensure that users have the smoothest travel experience possible. The entire UI was recently redesigned to increase user-friendliness, the total app size was reduced to improve performance, and an intelligent shortcuts feature was added which tries to guess your next destination.
If your Android phone was made by Samsung, LG, HTC, or any other manufacturer that likes to apply skins on top of stock Android, then your camera app is tied to the custom gallery app that was preinstalled on your device. In other words, when you tap that little image preview icon after taking a picture, you'll be taken to a camera roll interface that was made by an electronics manufacturer.
Creative thoughts are fleeting, so when an idea strikes, you have to jot it down as quickly as possible or risk forgetting it altogether. Let's say you randomly think of a perfect tweet while you're using your phone. You exit whatever app you were using, head to the home screen, dig through your app drawer, open Twitter—and by the time you make it to the "What's happening?" screen, you totally forgot what you were going to say.
We've been hearing rumors suggesting that the upcoming iPhone 7 would be announced a bit early this year—perhaps being unveiled as soon as September 7, with preorders opening up a day or two after.
We're inching closer towards the singularity—that point where technology advances to the steepest slope of the logistic function S-curve and simply skyrockets at a rate we've never seen before. Somewhere along the way, the line between humans and the tech we rely on will become blurred, and MIT's latest project might very well be a step in that direction.
With every flagship device they release, Samsung makes sure to add in at least a few little software goodies. Last year's Galaxy Note5 was no exception, because among other things, Samsung included a revamped version of their useful utility called Air Command that gave users quick access to tools and common functions with a small floating bubble.
Last year's inaugural Amazon Prime Day may have been a bit of a bust, but the online retail giant seems to be making up for it this year with some killer deals.
The internet, as I understand it, is a wonderful, magical place where people congregate to share memes and viral videos. Well, okay... there's a lot more to it than that, but let's just focus in on the good stuff.
The internet has officially been taken over by GIFs—they're everybody's favorite method of communication these days, and nary a meme would exist without them. But even with the abundance of GIF-sharing websites, and even GIF keyboards, we're still a bit lacking in regard to creating GIFs on a mobile device.
It looks as though Samsung will continue to tone down the look of TouchWiz, according to a leaked look at the newest "Grace" user interface for the upcoming Galaxy Note 7. HDblog, who acquired the leaked UI, shows off the beta version of the new skin in their video below.
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.
The beauty of Nexus devices is they receive firmware updates faster than any other Android phone, and keep getting updates for years longer than most of the competition. This means that you can always use the great new features that come along with an Android update, and even more importantly, your phone gets monthly security patches to keep hackers and malware at bay.
Many apps and services that are available for Android can only work if they have access to your Google account. While you're setting up one of these apps, you'll see a popup that says something like "This app would like to access your Google account," and the options are "Accept" or "Cancel." Of course we tap "Accept" here to ensure that the app will work properly, but what are the long-term repercussions of doing that?
Several Samsung phones have a feature that turns the screen black and white when the battery is getting low. This takes advantage of the AMOLED display in these devices, because unlike red, green, and blue pixels, no battery power is used to display black pixels on this type of screen.
iPhone and iPad users are getting a huge update with iOS 10, and one of the biggest (and most sought after) redesigns is to the Music app, as shown at Apple's WWDC '16. The redesign essentially makes the user interface easier to navigate, which was something that was fairly clunky starting in iOS 8.4 when Apple Music was first released.
Apple unveiled huge improvements for Messages in iOS 10 at WWDC '16, and my favorite new feature is that searching for emojis will be much, much easier. But there's a lot more to this update besides emojis.
I was skeptical when I first heard about GifWidget, an Android widget that lets you place GIFs on your home screen. As much as I love GIFs, did I really need to see this, this, this, or this, or even this, forever repeating on my phone?
Rooted users have been able to remap their hardware buttons since the earliest days of Android, allowing them to change the functionality behind one of the most centralized methods of interacting with a phone or tablet. Up until now, however, non-rooted users have been left out in the cold, meaning these buttons could only perform the functions assigned to them by the device manufacturer.
Lenovo unveiled the latest Motorola smartphones, Moto Z and Moto Z Force, today at Tech World '16. As expected, both models include strong magnets on the back that allow users to snap on various Moto Mods attachments such as a battery pack, projector, or JBL speakers.
Apple's Live Photos is a cool feature that lets you turn ordinary pictures into a GIF-like animated photos. However, these images have some pretty big drawbacks: they live only in the iOS universe and can be shaky without a tripod.
Smartphones tend to struggle when it comes to recording video in low light situations. Danish phone manufacturer Lumigon included a good camera capable of shooting 4K video on its latest phone, The T3, but the real interest lies in the second camera, which is a dedicated night vision shooter.
When Hey Siri was first introduced in iOS 8, it was a pretty lackluster feature since you had to be plugged into a power source in order to even use it. Since then, newer devices (iPhone 6s, 6s Plus, SE, 9.7-inch iPad Pro) don't need to plug in to have always-on Siri, which makes the feature actually worthwhile—when it works.
We recently covered an app called Touch Controls for YouTube that allows you to swipe up or down on any YouTube video to quickly adjust volume levels or brightness. As awesome as that app is, commenters here and on our YouTube channel thought it was lacking one big feature—the ability to seek forward or backward in the video by swiping the screen.
The upcoming version of Android has already been made available to certain devices for beta testing, but we won't see the official release of Android Nougat until sometime later this year, maybe even sooner than expected. The trouble here is that Google has made it really hard to wait patiently, because they've basically just teased us with a massive visual overhaul to the world's biggest mobile operating system.
The iPhone's pinch-to-zoom feature lets you easily enlarge photos to focus in on one particular area a little better, but after you've zoomed in to a certain degree, the image quickly snaps back and prevents you from zooming in any further. This is mostly meant to keep you from zooming in too far and getting lost, but a lot of times, the max zoom level just isn't close enough.
The Moto X and Moto Z have a set of features that let you launch common shortcuts by shaking your phone in one direction or another. For instance, there's a chop gesture that turns on the LED flashlight, and a wrist-twist gesture that instantly opens the camera app.
If you're tired of Google tracking you, but love how Chrome works, CyanogenMod has you covered. Their browser is called Gello, which is based off Chromium, Chrome's open-source counterpart. It's basically a souped-up version of Chrome—without all of the intrusive Google stuff. So if you're uncomfortable with Google displaying personalized ads based on your browsing history, or using your location to bring the "Physical Web" to your phone, you won't have to worry about any of that with Gello.
There was a somewhat recent outbreak of malware on Android, and it came from an unlikely source—the Google Play Store. Several established apps have received updates a few months ago that contained an unwanted add-on called either DU Quick Charge, DU Battery Boost, DU Boost Charge, DU Speed Charge, DU Speed Booster, or another name starting with DU.
CyanogenMod, the popular custom ROM available for many Android devices, has a nice little feature that displays a music visualizer beneath your on-screen navigation keys while you're listening to your favorite songs. It's a subtle touch, but it makes for a more immersive experience when you're jamming out while using your phone or tablet.
HTC's newest flagship smartphone, the HTC 10, has been met with nearly universal acclaim despite a weak amount of sales over the last few months. Most reviewers point to the device's gorgeous hardware as its main attraction, but at the same time, it certainly has some nice software to match, as this year's Sense 8 may be one of the best manufacturer skins ever.
You find and update all of your apps using the iOS App Store, and if you have updates scheduled automatically, it could be working hard on a daily basis. With all of that work, it can lose its footing from time to time and cause things not to work as they should.
Android 6.0 introduced a new feature called Direct Share that allows apps to pin a more specific set of targets to Android's share menu. You've probably seen it already—messaging apps will allow you to share a file directly to a specific contact instead of just to the main app, and there are several other implementations like this.
The VLC Player app for Android has a really nice feature that allows you to adjust brightness and volume by sliding your finger up or down on the left or right side of your screen, respectively. It helps keep you immersed in the video while you're in full screen mode, since you don't have to mess around with any popups or overlays to perform these basic functions.
