We've all seen the breathtaking, colorful photos of the Eagle, Egg and Cat's Eye Nebulae. You may not recognize them by name, but you've seen them, whether in astronomy textbooks, magazines, websites, album covers, or tee shirts. They are some of the most striking photographs ever taken from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
Smartphones are inherently bad for privacy. You've basically got a tracking device in your pocket, pinging off cell towers and locking onto GPS satellites. All the while, tracking cookies, advertising IDs, and usage stats follow you around the internet.
Despite the cancellation of Mobile World Congress and several high-profile companies pulling out of the upcoming Game Developers Conference, Magic Leap is pushing forward with hosting its own developer conference.
Part of the fallout from the canceled Mobile World Congress is that a range of products, ideas, and designs slated for reveal in Barcelona are now being showcased without the framing and context of the massive tech gathering.
In iOS 13, Apple added the ability to use Memoji and Animoji for your contact photo and then share your name and photo with others through iMessage. It works excellent for contacts that use iMessage, but those that don't are stuck with old pictures or gray monograms. With a few simple steps, however, any contact in your list can have their own Memoji, Animoji, or colored monogram.
It's no secret that iPhones are expensive. Whether or not you believe the price tag is justified, $1,000 is a lot to spend on an iPhone 11 Pro. But if you're in need of a new iPhone, you picked a great time. Black Friday is rapidly approaching, and for Walmart, many of those deals are already available.
Back in its infancy, the App Store was filled with text bomb apps that allowed users to send a barrage of text messages to friends, family, and foes. It was a fun way to annoy people, but Apple quickly scrubbed the apps because of technical issues. Although text bombs are still banished, you can now use a Siri Shortcut to send text bombs through iMessage on your iPhone.
Slack is meant for business, but it's inevitably used for personal reasons too, or even just to goof off with colleagues. However, you never know who's looking over your shoulder (nosy coworker? boss?), and you could get in trouble for something sent to you. That's why you might want to hide images and GIFs to help keep your conversations private.
Adobe is best known for its photo and video editing software, but they also have a number of lesser-known apps that you may be interested in. Adobe Fill & Sign, available on iPhone and Android, is the best way to electronically fill out important documents on your smartphone with a third-party app.
Last year, Readdle released a major update to their popular intelligent email client Spark, which brought a number of new features and improvements, including the ability for team members to collaborate on emails. You can draft new emails and privately discuss existing ones with your team, invite team members into email threads, and create and share links to specific emails.
The augmented reality space is brutal, and that means shifting directions quickly to meet whatever need the market demands.
Viewing and reading content on websites is inherently harder to do on an iPhone due to the relatively small display. Even if you have an iPhone XS Max or 11 Pro Max, you'll probably struggle sometimes to read through tiny text while browsing online. Thanks to a feature found within Safari's view menu in iOS 13, your eyes can rest a little easier.
There are a number of reasons you'd want to delete your Skype account. You may have decided to move away from the app in favor of another service like WhatsApp or FaceTime, or perhaps you want to erase your account due to an online hack. Regardless of why you might want to delete your Skype account, doing so isn't quite as straightforward as it appears.
In Safari for iPhone, as far back as iOS 7, you can request the full desktop version of websites. The process was streamlined starting in iOS 9, but the process remains relatively hidden and easily missed. Now, iOS 13 shines a light on it, as well as adds functionality to set the desktop view for individual websites indefinitely.
With Microsoft taking direct aim at enterprises for its HoloLens 2 with a $3,500 price tag, one startup is betting that business will be willing to pony up for glasses-free 3D displays as well.
When it comes to resistance to the elements, Samsung seems to believe in the old saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." They've carried over the IP68 rating under IEC 60529 that was first found on the S8 all the way to their tenth-anniversary flagship, the Galaxy S10. While this certainly sounds great on paper, it's natural to want to dig a little deeper and find out what the rating means.
Millions depend on Google Maps for directions, and it's easy to see why. The app comes with tons of features like offline navigation, location sharing, and more. Google is far from done, however, and continually improves upon its navigation app to make it even more efficient and safer to use.
The iPhone's notification system has drastically improved over the years, but it could still use some work. The notifications, while useful, are all monochrome, making it hard to distinguish which app posted each alert, and that's not even mentioning the drab overall look. This is where jailbreak tweaks can come in handy.
Though not as flashy as Face ID and other features, Low Power Mode has become one of the unsung heroes of iOS. When you're away from a charger, enabling this feature will dial back performance and networking to help you eke out up to three extra hours of battery life. If your device is jailbroken, you can even automate Low Power Mode to ensure your battery never dips to critical levels while out and about.
Apple has done a fantastic job of instantly patching iOS exploits through constant firmware updates to keep hackers at bay. Because of this, jailbreaking has largely been pushed to the fringes, resulting in a myriad of tweaks being abandoned by developers which, in turn, have been rendered incompatible with later jailbroken versions of iOS.
With the same starting price as its predecessor and a nice list of improvements, the OnePlus 6T is a great buy for a number of reasons. But for many Android users, the main selling point for the latest OnePlus flagship is how easy it will be to root and mod the device.
At its annual MAX event kicking off on Monday in Los Angeles, Adobe gave the audience a new preview of its forthcoming Project Aero augmented reality authoring tool during the keynote presentation.
Samsung makes more than just the Galaxy S and Note series. With a large portion of the world not able to afford phones with flagship specs, Samsung makes several different series that focus on price. The latest is the Galaxy A6, a budget option with a flagship feature.
Low Power Mode can go a long way in preserving your iPhone's battery life in a pinch. It can be set manually or appear as an option once your battery levels dip to 20 and 10 percent. If you have a jailbroken device, you can take Low Power Mode a step further by having it automatically turn on whenever using Do Not Disturb.
Starting in iOS 11, Apple introduced a QR code scanner for iPhone that's baked right into the Camera app, reducing the need for a third-party scanner. However, not everyone knew it existed, so a lot of users were still using third-party QR code scanners. In iOS 12 and later, Apple addressed the issue, making theirs much more visible, as well as improved QR code scanning in general.
Despite its fifth-place finish in our ranking of the best transcriber apps on iOS, Voicera is still worth highlighting due to numerous factors that set it apart from the crowd. Besides being completely free to use on both iPhone and Android, the app's AI-based transcription service performed extremely well in our testing.
The shifting sands of immersive computing, currently fluctuating between augmented reality and virtual reality, can be hard to navigate if you're only versed in one of the platforms. But a new series of videos from Leap Motion paints a picture of a near future world in which AR and VR will seamlessly merge together, forcing us to change the way we see both.
On Tuesday, at the Unite Berlin developers conference, Unity unveiled new tools designed specifically for augmented reality that could literally raise the technology to the next level.
Apple is putting their Workflow acquisition to use with the new Shortcuts feature, integrated right into Siri. It allows you to connect commonly-used actions to a phrase that you activate with Siri. In addition to some of the other speed improvements in iOS 12, Shortcuts helps streamline your mobile experience.
Google's ARCore has expanded its support to include the Galaxy S9 and S9+, which means you get access to all the cool new apps that can sense the world around them. But one of ARCore's coolest uses so far is still Pixel-exclusive: AR stickers built right into the Google Camera app. Thankfully, XDA user lofass33 has an ingenious workaround for using these stickers on your S9.
China-based virtual reality headset maker ANTVR has decided to enter the augmented reality space, and to do so it's launching its headset on Kickstarter. The company claims that its new Mix AR device has a field of view that surpasses the Meta 2, the HoloLens, and others within a smaller form factor and at a fraction of the price. But there's a catch.
With April coming to a close, there's a fresh group of augmented reality Snapchat lenses you should try out while they're still hot. We've got a prank lens, gamer-oriented ones for Fortnite and Fallout, and ones for the memesters out there.
If your virtual assistant can't assist you, what's the point? Anyone who has ever failed to activate Google Assistant knows the frustration that error screen can be. But there are solutions for this problem — "The Google Assistant isn't available for this account" is one message you can actually avoid.
We regret to inform you the former king of third-party keyboards, Swype, has officially retired on both Android and iOS. A few weeks ago, we noticed Swype's mysterious disappearance from the iOS App Store but had hoped it was just pulled temporarily, not gone forever. Unfortunately, Swype is no more, but there's something that's ready to take its place for you on your phone.
|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.
For parents that have an iPhone X, things are about to get a lot easier for you in iOS 11.3, which finally lets you approve app and media downloads on your child's iPhone using Face ID instead of typing in a password.
While 2017 saw the rise of "bezel-less" smartphones, none truly lived up to the name. Samsung shrank its bezels significantly, while Apple went with the infamous "notch." However, Samsung seems on the verge of kicking bezels out the door with a new patent application that embeds the front camera into the display.
For those times when we need music grouped together for a specific task, we have playlists. Playlists are the next natural step after mastering your library and radio stations. While you've probably been an All-Star of curating playlists since your mid-90s mixtapes, Google Play Music has some pretty neat features that are going to really Smash your Mouth.
To the best of my recollection, Fruit Ninja was one of the first touchscreen games that appeared to really take advantage of the new paradigm of user input, turning the player's finger into a produce-slicing katana.
We may have to wait a few years before they arrive, but reports of Apple's headset taking shape in Cupertino gives the tech world hope that its white knight for consumer AR is on its way.
