With most of HTC's staff working on getting Sense updated to Android Lollipop, their piecemeal approach to individual app updates now comes to their Gallery app. The new update is available for all HTC devices running KitKat, but if you have the HTC Service Pack installed, it will run on any Android device running 4.4 or above.
Google has updated its Search application for iOS with their new Material Design aesthetic, taking cues from Android's redesigned look with refreshed colors, depth effects, and new animations. But the update doesn't stop there; there are several new and useful features added to the mix. Download Google Search for iOS for free from the iOS App Store to check out all the new goodness for yourself.
While having a ton of friends on Snapchat does wonders to stroke my ego, sending content to all of them at once becomes a hassle when I have to go one by one, checking each contact individually.
With countless images and messages packed into one small device, security is always a high priority amongst iPhone users. For this reason, we've previously shown you how to make your iPhone's passcode match the current time, which made figuring out your passcode a lot more difficult for wandering eyes.
If you're someone who likes to customize their user experience, stock Android is a lot like a blank canvas. The firmware that comes preinstalled on Nexus devices is just Android—no manufacturer skins or carrier bloat involved. This simplicity opens up the door for many root mods and flashable ZIPs that can be installed in a custom recovery.
Confirmation numbers, grocery lists, addresses, and phone numbers are all things we need to quickly jot down on our phones, but the thing is, they're never extremely easy to access later. You have to figure out which app you wrote them in, meaning lots of needless searching and scrolling. Even if you use a dedicated note-taking app, those extra steps of actually opening the app to find a UPS tracking number can be an unnecessary pain.
Reading articles on an Android phone using Chrome Browser can be a little bit of a battle; it often times requires adjusting the page to fit the screen in order to make it easier to read and scroll through. I sometimes lose this struggle and give up trying to read on my device, saving the article for a later time when I'm on my laptop.
When playing a game or using an app, incoming call alerts can be extremely irritating on my Galaxy S4 because they insist on taking over the entire screen. The alert is a little different on other Android phones, depending on the manufacturer's skin, but all are fairly intrusive in one way or another.
A few months ago, we showed off a great third-party keyboard for iOS 8 called CooolKey which lets you customize the keyboard itself with any background image you want. Well, take that idea and apply it to the Control Center and we have CCBackground.
It's not the additions Apple brought to iOS 8 that irk me, but what they didn't add that breaks my heart. We did get some cool new features, like battery stats and interactive notifications, but what about a simple customization feature that most—the option to have a transparent dock background?
Amazon is currently offering over $80 in free Android apps in the Amazon Appstore, but only for Friday and Saturday, so make sure to grab them quick before they all go back to normal price. Highlights include the Fleksy Keyboard (normally $3.99), Oxford Dictionary of English with Audio (normally $24.99), and EasyTether (normally $9.99).
As far as customization goes, there's nothing you can do to change the look and function of the Control Center on your iPhone. By default, you can't alter the system toggles, but if your device is jailbroken, it's a completely different story. With the help of a tweak from developer plipala, called CCSettings for iOS 8, you can add, remove, and rearrange your Control Center toggles.
One of my favorite new additions to iOS is the ability to view battery usage stats on a per-app basis, which is helpful in knowing exactly which apps are taking up all of my iPhone's battery life. If you jailbreak iOS 8 on your device, you can take Apple's stock battery stats feature even further to give you details on how those apps are actually using the battery.
While we wait for our chance to get our hands on Android Lollipop, Google has already released Material Design updates to most of their apps. I love the new direction of the updated UI, but something just seemed to be lacking in tying everything together.
Call it OCD if you will, but I make it a priority to have a clean Notification panel. Like a chalkboard that isn't wiped spotless, I get an unsettling feeling that something in the universe isn't complete when there's unnecessary clutter in the drop-down. For this reason, I loathe the fact that I can't remove the "Wi-Fi connected" tile from my "Notifications."
As smartphones become increasingly integral parts of our lives, so does data throttling. Personally, I try to save data any way that I can, so to stave off unnecessary usage, I use the GoogleOfflineVoice to limit the amount of data consumed by voice typing.
Back in the days of iOS 6, iPhone users were able to send a quick tweet from their notification center, but that has long since been removed. This convenient feature was missed enough on iOS 7 for devs to create a jailbreak tweak in its absence. Thankfully, due to the new widget capabilities of iOS 8, we can have Twitter back in the Notification Center along with Facebook.
iOS 8's third-party keyboard functionality is one of the best new additions to Apple's mobile operating system, allowing us to use swipe gestures, custom backgrounds, minimal designs, and many other features that the stock keyboard lacks.
Whether I'm writing up something online, playing games in Chrome, or just browsing the annals of the Internet, I always like to keep a tab open for YouTube so I can listen to interviews, trailers, and music videos at the same time. But a tab can get lost, and it's not easy to "watch" if I don't have a second display to utilize—even with snapping windows.
One of the easiest ways to adjust brightness on an Android device is to use the slider found in the notification shade. Unfortunately, for some odd reason, the Sprint variant of the LG G3 does not have this feature.
Living in a densely populated city means that I usually have a strong cell signal, but that isn't always the case when I start driving out to the boonies. When I do get that occasional dropped call, it makes more sense to shoot off a text or email instead of trekking around trying to get more bars.
The Billboard Charts have been a measurement of commercial success for pop songs since roughly the time that radios became a household item. In its modern form, Billboard ranks the sales and performance of all singles with its "Hot 100" chart, as well as many other genre-specific rankings.
Like a car, your Mac needs to be monitored and cared for to keep it running as smoothly as possible. While your vehicle comes with a ton of gauges to keep track of your oil, temperature, and in some cases, even tire pressure, your Mac has no easy way to watch for low memory or high disk usage. Normally you would have to open up Activity Monitor to take a look at your usage stats, but now there is something better.
The new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are supposed to last a lot longer in your pocket with improved battery life, but that doesn't mean that iOS 8 will be that friendly on your older iPhone model. All of those awesome new features could be killing your battery, but with some simple tweaking, your battery life concerns will be a mere afterthought.
Google's Chromecast streaming device is a marvel of functionality and form. Even with powerful features such as screen mirroring and collaborative party playlists, it's the device's idle screen that first catches the eyes of most folks.
I consider myself a lover of music from all genres, but sometimes a song comes on and I just have to press next. That could be a tedious task, since I often in another app that I'm highly engaged in. Other times, my MacBook is across the room from me without easy access to keyboard shortcuts.
Despite being one of the largest and most feature driven companies on the planet, Google can sometimes come up short. I have my Chromecast running 24/7, and while I use my phone to cast most of my content, I sometimes find a video while browsing Reddit or LiveLeak on my laptop and I'd rather just cast it from there.
Your Galaxy S5 is jammed to the brim with all sorts of electronic sensors. These are capable of reading humidity levels, ambient temperature, air pressure, and much more. Yet, while this data is constantly being collected by your phone, there aren't any built-in apps that are capable of displaying much of it.
Everyone has that one friend who just can't help but send multiple texts in rapid-fire succession, when they just as easily could have been consolidated into one easy-to-read message. Alert after alert, this becomes extremely annoying as your phone shoots notification sounds and vibrations at you like it was possessed.
As soon as you plug a set of headphones into a Samsung Galaxy series device, a bar pops up in the notification tray that lets you select from a list of "recommended apps" for earphones. It's a convenient little feature that shows the apps you're most likely to use based on previous activity.
If you've ever owned an HTC device or anything in the Nexus line, odds are, you have typed the word "fastboot" into your command line at one time or another. That said, odds are, you have only just barely scratched the surface of what this handy little Android tool can do. Let's take a deeper look.
This past year, Facebook spent $19 billion purchasing the popular messaging app WhatsApp, and for good reason. Mark Zuckerberg isn't going to spend that type of money on just any application. WhatsApp is widely popular and frequently used by more than 500 million users worldwide, which is almost twenty percent of the Earth's population.
Personality is something we're constantly attempting to inject into our lives, whether it be the car we drive or clothing we wear—and our mobile devices are no exception.
This year's Google I/O brought the announcement of Android L, as well as the Preview builds of L for the Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 (2013), installed using either ADB on Windows or fastboot on any computer. Unfortunately, those of us without a Nexus device are out of luck—but not entirely.
Jotting down notes is something we all do, and with the convenience of Google Keep, it is easier than ever to have them synced across all your devices.
Finding a unique wallpaper can be extremely difficult, and even the most dynamic wallpapers become exhausted and boring to look at after a while. Searching for new, interesting wallpapers can become a tedious task, so instead, let's just make our own instead.
In previous guides, we showed you how to easily tweak your Google Keyboard by using various colors and shapes, installing an Android L theme, or adding a convenient number row to its main display. And now, you can add another Google Keyboard theme to your arsenal by making it look like your iOS friend's iPad or iPhone keyboard.
Battery drain. App crashes. Random reboots. All of these issues can be attributed to an uncooperative third-party app on your Nexus device. To be sure that's the problem, rebooting into "Safe Mode" is the way to go.
Maybe it is narcissistic to take selfies, but it has become a socially accepted norm, no matter how stupid you might look doing it. Since so many people are seemingly in love with themselves and mobile photography, I thought it was about time to show you how to step up your selfie game.
Much like the high volume warning, there are various minute features on Android that users either hate or just find annoying. Thankfully, there are developers out there that sympathize. It may seem frivolous, but one feature that a lot of people want eliminated is the screen waking whenever a charger is plugged in.
