To quote MKBHD, cheap phones are getting good. Each year we are seeing manufacturers start to offer more for much less. This not only translates to cheaper flagship phones, but better budget phones. The latest example of this is the Alcatel 3V, which is redefining what you can get at $150.
Auto rotation is generally useful, but it gets annoying when you trigger it accidentally. In past Android versions, you could lock rotation into portrait mode as a workaround, but you'd have to disable this every time you wanted to put your phone in landscape mode. Luckily, Android Pie has a great fix for this.
On May 17 2018, Valve released the Android beta version of their Steam Link app, which allows you to stream Steam games from your computer directly to your phone. You'll probably also want to connect your favorite controller to your phone, but you may run into some issues if you prefer Valve's own Steam Controller.
Marvel's Future Fight gave gamers the ability to brawl through near-countless levels as their favorite superhero. Not to be outdone, DC has soft launched DC Unchained in select Southeast Asian countries in preparation of a worldwide debut. If you're willing to put in a little work, however, you can try this game anywhere right now.
You really can't beat Google Photos. Not only does it give you free unlimited cloud storage and let you search for almost any object in one of your pictures, but it also packs a few powerful editing tools. Among these is a dead-simple way to create your own animated GIFs out of any set of pictures.
Apple has taken great strides to ensure that iPhone users are having an Apple Maps experience on par or even better than Google Maps can provide. One of the factors powering this is extensions, which adds functionality to certain apps by giving them permission to interact. Among all the possibilities, one extension will let you reserve dinner tables right from inside Apple Maps.
Even though smartphone audio quality has improved in recent years, the tiny built-in speakers aren't always loud enough. But if you want to turn the volume up to 11, all you need is a few household items to make a rig that will amplify your phone's speakers throughout the whole house.
MLB.TV is a great service that lets you watch most Major League Baseball games in North America, as long as you're a subscriber, of course. While I personally love it, blackouts can ruin the ability to watch my favorite teams. Fortunately, MLB At Bat Android users have an easy way to bypass blackout restrictions — and with no root required.
While Instagram users can attach links to images, they can only do so in stories, and only if they meet the special requirements that most users cannot obtain. Snapchat, on the other hand, lets anyone add a link, and it can be done in regular snaps and in your story. This feature has only been around since July 2017, so you may have missed it and not even realized it was a possibility.
If you want to play a game in the Play Store before committing to actually downloading and installing it, you can do that with Google's Android Instant Apps technology. However, if you don't see a "Try Now" button on the app's Play Store page, you'll need to check your Android device's settings to make sure you can play games instantly.
The Galaxy S9 is an audio powerhouse. It has the first set of stereo speakers on a Samsung flagship, and it even comes standard with a set of AKG-tuned earbuds that would normally cost $99. But if you want to further enhance your audio experience, there's a feature that will customize audio output to your own specific hearing.
While TouchWiz as an Android skin isn't a favorite among many, Samsung Internet is a fantastic web browser that S9 owners should be happy to have preinstalled out of the box. But you don't need to buy Samsung's latest flagship to try their browser — Samsung Internet is available to all compatible Android phones.
Samsung's Galaxy S9 was recently announced with features like AR Emoji and Dual Aperture, but great functionality lives underneath them — such as the ability to have your home screen auto-rotate to landscape mode. It's a nice feature, but with a little work, you can already do this on any Android phone.
Apple's Animoji on the iPhone X might allow you to use your own facial movements to control your favorite emoji, but Samsung is looking to make you the focus of the interactive icon with the introduction of AR Emoji. Instead of a dragon or an alien, Samsung wants your unique look to define your avatar.
|UPDATE: The event is now over and we've learned all there is to know about the new Galaxy S9 and S9+. But if you're still interested in watching Samsung's presentation, we've left the replay video embedded below.
One of the more exciting features in Android Oreo is the Autofill API. With this tool, third-party password managers can autofill login information into other apps. LastPass added this feature to their beta app a while back, but now, Autofill is finally available in the official stable version of LastPass.
During the unveiling of its content partnership with the NBA, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz, with an assist from former player/current pitchman Shaquille O'Neal, described at least one of the ways fans would be able to experience sports using the augmented reality device.
On Tuesday, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver joined Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz on stage to unveil a partnership between the two companies.
When it comes to media players, few are more capable than VLC. With its extensive codec support, VLC is able to play almost any video file. Partly due to its open-source nature, features are constantly added. This trend has continued with a new update that added native Chromecast support.
Every dollar that comes your way is a blessing, especially when it comes to trading in the volatile world of bitcoins. Thankfully, Coinbase rewards you for sending much valued customers their way, giving you more money to feed your cryptocurrency trading needs.
Android's share intents system is great in theory, but the execution can sometimes be frustrating. When you tap the "Share" button next to a link, app, or file, you see a list of apps you can share that item with. But it seems like every time you use this function, the list of apps is in a different order — especially when it comes to the Direct Share targets at the top.
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.
Instagram stories are a great way to share your day-to-day experiences with your followers. However, it can be disappointing to see them go after 24 hours, especially if you shared something really special. Now, Instagram has a way for you and your followers to relive those great stories you've created with a new feature called Story Highlights.
Any internet user will need to download files eventually, and most simply have faith that what they are downloading is trustworthy. This doesn't give much clarity into the contents of the file, but if the file's author published the original checksum, comparing it to the SHA-256 hash of the downloaded file can ensure nothing was tampered with.
Have you ever wanted the perfect radio station for an artist, genre, or even one to match your mood? Luckily, Google Play Music has an extensive radio feature that takes you exactly where you and your friends want to go for a quiet brunch, or a neighbors-banging-on-the-walls dance party.
Chis Lacy's Action Launcher is easily one of the best third-party home screen apps for Android. If you're interested in the basic feature set of this impressive app, check our our overview of the top five launchers on Android. Today, we're taking an in-depth look at the brand new Adaptive Folders feature included in the latest update.
We've had a lot of fun digging into the Oreo update for the Galaxy S8. Thus far, we compiled a full list of the biggest changes and ran down some of our favorites. One of the most user-facing components on a smartphone is the camera. Samsung made sure to add some nice tweaks to the camera UI in Oreo too, bringing it more in-line with the camera on the Galaxy Note 8.
Aside from the second-generation iPhone SE, all new iPhone models since the iPhone X have had Face ID instead of Touch ID as the biometric authentication technology. While Touch ID can be touchy, Face ID is not without its own issues. If you can't get Face ID on your iPhone to recognize your face and unlock your iPhone, there are plenty of things you can try to get it working again.
If you're following the classic Halloween playbook closely, you've already got a costume or three picked out, you've binged-watched your favorite horror movies, and you've likely visited a haunted house. But it's 2017, so how about trying something new, like a haunted house that's not actually there?
Whether you use VSCO to take all of your photos or you use it primarily to edit photos you take with others apps on your iOS or Android phone, you're at some point going to want your VSCO pics to end up in your Camera Roll or Gallery. VSCO doesn't add them there by default, but there's a couple of ways to get them there.
Thanks to their partnership with Tidal, over 30 million Sprint customers can access Hi-Fi audio on the go. And the Jay-Z-owned music service isn't limited to just Sprint customers — for $19.99/month, anyone can listen to lossless audio from their favorite artists. But streaming uncompressed audio files uses a lot more data than standard quality, so how do you use Tidal without hitting your data cap?
With so many Chromecast-powered devices available, chances are, you're near something with casting abilities right now. Whether it's Android TV, Google Home, or any one of the various gadgets with Chromecast built-in, you can use a more powerful speaker to play media from your smartphone. The only caveat is that the app you're streaming from needs to support Google Cast, but thankfully, Tidal does.
Over the years, Kodi (formerly XBMC) has become one of the most popular media players. It provides all the essential functionality needed for any home theater setup while remaining open source and free. However, Kodi is not limited to just your living room. With the Kodi app for iOS or Android, you get a streaming media player that can act as a video player, music player, picture gallery, and so much more.
Anyone who knows me well is aware that I am a cyberpunk junkie. The conflict between lowlifes, corporations, and the government, flavored with dystopian future, high technology, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and noir storytelling, just does something for me.
Eventually, we all get tired of our home screens. There's nothing wrong with it, but after hundreds of times seeing the same thing, it all starts looking a bit stale. You can rearrange icons and widgets, or even just pick a new wallpaper — but sometimes, your layout is perfect and you still want a fresh look. Well, thanks to Action Launcher and icon packs, this is really easy to accomplish.
The highly anticipated iPhone X is finally up for preorder, and it's been almost as exciting as we expected. With the dual cameras, bezel-less display, and high-tech facial recognition, there's almost nothing on the iPhone X that won't be liked. But around the same time as the iPhone X's announcement, another phone was revealed, and almost everyone seems to have forgotten about it. We didn't.
The cutting-edge iPhone X, XS, XS Max, and XR have one-upped their Android competitors when it comes to facial recognition. Apple packed these flagships with an array of front-facing sensors to complement its selfie camera, which allows the new device to more accurately analyze faces, which you need for Face ID, Touch ID's replacement.
Generally speaking, in terms of modern devices, the more simple you make an interface to navigate, the more successful the product is.
The Xposed Framework lets you modify your phone's software like nothing else. But because of how powerful this tool can be, it seems like things are always in development. This is certainly the case with many Xposed modules, to the point where some have several alpha and beta releases before they go mainstream.
Back in 2009, largely due to the sheer number of users demanding it, Spotify added an amazing little feature — the ability to disable volume normalization. While the feature is nothing more than a toggle on the visual front, the audible difference is far superior and moons apart.
