Live Activities is Apple's hottest new feature for iPhone, but it's not always straightforward. Sometimes you'll trigger one without realizing it, but it may seem frustratingly impossible to start one when you really want it.
There's a hidden feature on iOS that will turn your iPhone or Apple Watch into a remote control for your nearby iPad or other Apple devices — and it's nowhere near as complicated as Switch Control.
The App Library is an excellent tool for browsing all the apps on your iPhone, especially since it includes every one of the home screen bookmarks you've made for websites and shortcuts. But it's all the way past your last home screen page. If you have a lot of visible home screen pages, that's a lot of swiping to open the App Library. Luckily, there is a trick to accessing it faster.
Apple's Dynamic Island is an animated, interactive isle surrounding the front-facing camera on the iPhone 14 Pro series. It's a small capsule when nothing is going on but fluidly stretches across the screen for notifications, alerts, and ongoing activities like music, timers, and directions. It can even expand with controls and more information. And now, you can get Dynamic Island on your Android phone.
Apple's Contacts app just got its biggest update ever. Since the first iPhone in 2008, there have only been minor upgrades here and there to how you manage and interact with contacts. That changes with iOS 16.
Safari keeps getting better and better on the iPhone, and that's exactly what happened with the latest Safari 16 update for iOS.
The new iPhone 14, 14 Plus, 14 Pro, and 14 Pro Max all come with great, never-before-seen-on-iPhone features, including the A16 Bionic chip, Bluetooth 5.3, precision dual-frequency GPS, and dual ambient light sensors. But that's only a few new features exclusive to the 2022 lineup.
Spoofed phone calls originate from one source that's disguising its phone number as a different one, and you probably get these calls all the time. Maybe they're numbers from your local area code or for prominent businesses, but the callers are just hijacking those digits to fool you into picking up. Turns out, making a spoofed call is something anybody can do — even you.
Most of you have probably wondered at least once who has been checking out your social media profiles. While most platforms prohibit you from seeing who's viewed your profile, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, TikTok is one of the few places that lets you track profile visitors. And unlike with LinkedIn, you don't have to pay for the privilege.
Apple unrolled an array of nifty iPhone features in iOS 15. One of the more valuable updates lets you group all your untimely notifications and view them throughout the day at only the times you choose.
Whenever you need to digitally share large bodies of real-world text, you'd likely show a photo of it or manually type everything into the document or chat. But iOS 15 has a much better way for your iPhone.
It's already been a banner year for mergers and acquisitions in the augmented reality industry, with WaveOptics and Ubiquity6 among the notable companies acquired. Two of the more active M&A players, Snap and Epic Games, continued their respective buying sprees this week with major deals supporting their AR strategies.
While Snap may eventually compete with Apple and Samsung in selling smartglasses to consumers, today it is helping them achieve their business objectives via augmented reality.
The makers of arguably the two most important mobile AR apps, Niantic and Snap, both had good news this week, with the former preparing to replicate its success with Pokémon GO for another franchise and the latter notching another popular augmented reality Lens for Snapchat.
The last few weeks were fairly busy in the realm of augmented reality and remote meetings developments. Most of that activity was generated by some mammoth announcements from Snap and its Spectacles AR smartglasses, and Google, with its Project Starline experimental holographic video conferencing system.
We're still basking in the afterglow of the HUGE Snap Partner Summit last week, where Snap made Snapchat a much stronger augmented reality platform while also unveiling the AR smartglasses version of Spectacles. This week, we got a peek at how Spectacles AR started and got our hands on Lenses from Lego and Disney featured during the keynote.
Apple has a sterling reputation when it comes to managing its supply chain; it's where CEO Tim Cook proved his mettle to succeed Steve Jobs. Now, the company has made a strategic investment with a supplier that will be crucial to its future plans for AR wearables.
The Apple ecosystem might be strong, but so is the pull from devices outside Cupertino's walls. If you've ever felt curious about what life could be like with a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, be that an S21 or a Note20, you don't need to make the switch to know. In fact, you can give it a go right on your iPhone.
Microsoft believes its Mesh platform can help developers build immersive AR apps more easily. We spoke with a member of the Microsoft team to learn more about the platform.
Snapchat parent company Snap took a huge step towards the realm of smartglasses with the third iteration of its camera-equipped Spectacles sunglasses.
The augmented reality industry has grown steadily over the past four years, but now it is on a collision course with uber-popular non-fungible tokens technology, with Looking Glass and music artist Reggie Watts among the latest to strike while the iron is hot.
Among the various components of the emerging augmented reality space, the most lucrative is the advertising market. The prospect of turning every object, every location, ever signpost in the real world into a discount code or virtual transaction interface is why AR will ultimately be more profitable than VR.
Outside of plastic surgery disasters or costumes, augmented reality is the closest we can get to morphing our likenesses into those of animals.
If you're getting into automation, Bash scripting is usually the way to go. However, there are a couple of limitations, and one of them is logging into another device like a Raspberry Pi and running a script automatically. To help in those situations, we're going to automate delivering an SSH payload with an "expect" script.
Google released the first build of Android 12 almost exactly one year after dropping Android 11, which is remarkable in the midst of a global pandemic. But you can tell the Android engineers have been hard at work while quarantining, because the latest OS version is absolutely packed with new features.
Shortcuts are meant to make your life easier, and iPhone shortcuts are no exception. They can use different triggers, manual or automated, to perform actions in the background, allowing you to do things like send a prewritten text message during a bad date or change your wallpaper at certain times of the day. However, sometimes it's not only about the shortcut itself but about how fast you can run it.
If you just got an iPhone 12, 12 Pro, 12 Pro Max, or 12 mini, and you've never owned an iPhone before, some of the most basic tasks can be baffling. Shutting it down, force-restarting it, quitting apps, and even viewing the percentage of battery remaining sound simple but aren't very intuitive for new iPhone owners. Another big question mark is screenshots, and there are several ways to take them.
Apple has an excellent reputation for its privacy and security policies. That said, it isn't a perfect reputation. Take Siri, for example. The helpful iOS assistant isn't just communicating with you — Apple saves and listens to a history of your Siri interactions. If you don't want Apple storing your Siri history forever, there's something you can do about it.
The iPhone 12, 12 mini, 12 Pro, and 12 Pro Max all have positive coverage surrounding their refreshed design, camera upgrades, and 5G connectivity. One piece of negative press you might've seen, however, is about the charger. Specifically, that there's a Lightning to USB-C cable in the box but no power adapter. That means you'll need a charger, and we've got some good recommendations for you.
According to the CDC, one in four U.S. adults has a disability, where limitations can involve vision, cognitive function, hearing, motor skills, and more. That's why the iPhone has accessibility features; so that everyone can use an iPhone, not just those without any impairments. Apple's iOS 14 has only made the iPhone even more accessible, and the new tools benefit everyone, not just those that need them.
Aside from home screen widgets, one of the most exciting updates to the iPhone with iOS 14 is Picture in Picture mode. With it, you can watch minimized versions of videos on top of other apps so you can multitask like a pro. However, not every service is on board with Apple's new features. YouTube is the primary culprit, but there is a workaround.
In the tech world, our data is always under attack. When you download and install a new app, it can be difficult to know what information the app is actually accessing. Thankfully, a new emphasis on privacy in iOS 14 changes the game, exposing more of what your apps want access to — and even changing some behavior along the way.
We've wanted them for years, and Apple has finally made widgets accessible on the home screen in iOS 14. These are not the same widgets found in past versions of iOS. They're more data-rich, more colorful, and more versatile. And best of all, both the home screen and Today View get access to them.
I've covered augmented reality apps for about three years now and the most useful mobile app I've encountered over that time is Google Lens.
It feels like just yesterday Apple unveiled iOS 13 to the world, introducing game-changing features like system-wide dark mode and enhanced editing tools in Photos. But WWDC 2020 is rapidly approaching, which means iOS 14 is as well. As it turns out, we don't need to wait for an official announcement to get an idea of what new features and changes are coming to iPhone this year.
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.
You're a busy, on-the-go professional, so you deserve an email client that keeps up with you. "Mail" on iPhone wasn't always the best option, but thanks to iOS 13, it feels like a completely different app. That said, there are plenty of alternatives that offer a different experience. Better yet, these apps are free. You won't need to spend a dime to try them out for yourself.
When you're checking out photos and video on Instagram, its default bright white layout can literally be an eyesore, especially in dimly lit settings where the bleached UI feels blinding. Luckily, there's a really simple way to switch from the normal light mode to a dark mode look in the iPhone and Android app.
If we were to assign a theme for the 2019 edition of the Next Reality 30 (NR30), it might be something along the lines of, "What have you done for me lately?"
|Choose Your View: Quick Bullet Points | Detailed Descriptions Android's newest major update is a special one — it's the tenth full version of the world's most commonly used operating system. The latest release, dubbed simply Android 10 (codename Android Q), was first showcased as a beta back in March 2019, so we've been digging around in it for several months. There's one dramatic visual change, plus there are a lot of goodies in general.
