It just got a whole lot easier to decide whether or not saving $50 on Amazon's new ad- and bloatware-subsidized smartphones is worth the headache of having to see an advertisement on the lock screen every time you wake the device.
Depending on your carrier and the texting app that you use, sending long SMS messages from an Android phone often results in the recipient being hit with a barrage of fragmented, out of order texts.
If you have any group chats going, you're surely familiar with this scenario: One person sends a picture, then, within 30 seconds or so, all other participants chime in with one-word responses like "Cute," or "Awesome." It's a social nicety, so you have to expect this behavior, but that doesn't make it any less annoying when your phone randomly beeps and vibrates ten times in a row because of it.
While Magic Leap and ILMxLABs blew the internet's collective mind with a mixed reality Star Wars game demo last week, it'll likely be awhile before we see either the game or the hardware that'll run it. In the meantime, you can get one of the most famous Star Wars holographic messages on the HoloLens: Princess Leia's message to Obi-Wan Kenobi.
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?
Facebook Messenger has another secret game for you to play in both the Android and iOS versions of its app. This time it's a soccer-themed game to tie in with the Copa America and Euro 2016 tournaments currently underway.
In usual Apple fashion, there are new wallpapers to go along with their new operating systems, iOS 10 and macOS Sierra. The background that's included in iOS 10 for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch is a crashing aqua-colored wave with land just below its surface, and macOS Sierra's is a razor-sharp mountain ridge from the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California.
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.
Your iPhone's lock screen is about to get a major upgrade in iOS 10, as shown off by Apple at WWDC '16, and it will make dealing with notifications and apps a breeze. The new lock screen has been fully redesigned to give users better and faster interaction with the apps they need. It's also snappier and more aesthetically pleasing with notifications no longer darkening the wallpaper.
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 announced at Tech World '16 a slew of new products, and one of them aims to upend the smartphone accessory ecosystem: Moto Mods. Moto Mods are proprietary modular add-ons developed for two new Motorola phones that were also announced in the keynote, the Moto Z and Moto Z Force. Sixteen magnetic nodes align the bottom back of the phones that connect and hold accessories, forming a case appearance. The nodes transfer both data and power at high speeds, a fact that Lenovo hammered home wi...
A developer from a firm named Tendigi came up with a way to run Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 on an iPhone 6 Plus, and it's pretty awesome. The hack is the brainchild of Nick Lee, who had previously installed Windows 95 on an Apple Watch, and you can see it in action below.
T-Mobile is going for broke. The carrier recently announced it will be giving away free stuff to its customers every Tuesday through a new app called T-Mobile Tuesdays for Android and iOS, and that's in addition to one share of stock and free in-flight Wi-Fi. The app will give out "food, movie tickets, gift cards, subscriptions, ridesharing, and more," the announcement said. You just have to be the primary account holder and you're good to go. One person will win a huge prize every Tuesday, l...
After a successful Kickstarter campaign, a new smartphone manufacturer named Nextbit emerged, then released its first flagship device—the Nextbit Robin. The headlining feature of this colorful gadget is its cloud-based app storage, but the phone itself comes with a very polished and sophisticated suite of software.
More proof is emerging that the iPhone 7 won't include a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and damn—it is not pretty. These third-party Lightning-to-3.5 mm dongles were spotted on Chinese site Tama, and they give us a glimpse into a horrifying future in which we have to attach one of these clunky monstrosities to an iPhone just to connect a set of standard headphones.
Music is definitely more immersive when it's accompanied by a bit of visual stimuli, which is why CyanogenMod and other custom ROMs have started integrating music visualizers into elements of the Android system UI. It's a great effect, but it's not necessarily something that's worth replacing your stock firmware over.
When Android Nougat is released sometime this fall (or sooner), a new feature called "Quick Reply" will allow users to respond to incoming text messages directly from the notification. It will definitely be nice to carry on a conversation without leaving the screen you're currently viewing, but unfortunately, most of us won't get that Android Nougat update for quite some time.
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.
Starting with version 6.0 Marshmallow, Android now supports fingerprint scanners natively. This change has effectively opened the floodgates, and now almost every flagship Android device includes a fingerprint scanner out of the box.
Google I/O is like Christmas for smartphone fans. At their annual developer's conference, the Mountain View search giant gave us a glimpse of what they've been working on over the past year—and they've been quite busy, to say the least.
Google kicked off I/O 2016 by debuting Assistant, a next-level version of Google Now. While you could search the web by voice before, now you'll be able to have a conversational interaction with Google. In short, it's a smart chat bot.
A motion-based lock screen app called GestureLock was among the winner's at 2106's Android Experiments I/O Challenge, and it lets you set a specific motion (gesture) that you use to gain access to your locked phone.
Instagram is the world's biggest photo-sharing site, narrowly edging out competitors like Imgur and Flickr. But unlike the competition, Instagram doesn't make it easy for users to download a full-resolution copy of any of the images hosted on their servers, as the site's main intention is to keep folks coming back and using the social media aspect of it all.
Google is launching a new app called Spaces that lets you share things from the web with small groups of people. The aim of Spaces appears to be granting you a forum with like-minded people to help cut down on off-topic comments that can steer a conversation off the rails. Spaces comes with Google Search, Chrome, and YouTube built in, so you won't need to switch apps to go hunting for interesting content to share. You can invite people to your groups—or "spaces" as they're called in the app—b...
Over the years, YouTube ads have become more and more integrated with the videos themselves, which means traditional Android ad blockers can no longer block the ads without blocking the videos. It's gotten to the point where the only ways to get rid of the ads are to either subscribe to Google Play Music and YouTube Red, or go through the complicated process of installing the Xposed Framework.
We tend to think of Google Play as Android's app store—but there's far more to it than that. Not only does it allow you to purchase apps and games, but you can also buy movies, music, books, and even devices, plus there's always those pesky in-app purchases that it also handles.
Celebrating Mother's Day just got more exploitative with Apple's Mother's Day ad. Their original Mother's Day ad shows photos and videos of mothers shot on an iPhone and uses the “Shot on iPhone” marketing line:
The Galaxy S7 edge comes with a feature called Edge Apps that lets you quickly launch your favorite apps by swiping in from the edge of your screen. It's a natural and intuitive gesture, and as a result, we've seen a recent influx of apps that look to emulate this feature.
If you get a ton of emails each day, your mailbox probably has thousands of unread messages, and that annoying badge icon will keep reminding you of it. Fortunately, iOS comes with some tools to help you bring some sense of order to that chaotic mailbox of yours.
Launcher shortcuts, which let you skip directly to a specific function on an app when you open it, first appeared in a recent Android N preview build, and now we're getting a look at how the feature might look in action.
When Google released the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P, they added official support for fingerprint scanning to Android's main code base. On the surface, this was done to ensure that the fingerprint scanner in their own devices could be used to its full extent, but because it was added to AOSP, this meant that the new Fingerprint API could be used by any Android manufacturer.
Google has been working on its voice recognition technology ever since the days when you had to call a phone number with a Silicon Valley area code to dictate your query. As you can imagine, things have come a long way in the decade or so that has passed, to the point where we talk to our phones as if they were a person nowadays.
Amazon has completely changed the way we purchase household items, to the point where many of us haven't visited a big box, brick-and-mortar store like Walmart or Best Buy in years. And when you think about it, all of this success comes down to two main factors—convenience and price.
Samsung's Galaxy S7 is an incredible piece of technology, but the Skype app that's preinstalled on some models may have some nasty issues, such as video and audio that freezes. Luckily, the fix for these problems is a simple one, although somewhat buried in the phone's Settings app.
Computer cables tangle and get in the way, but Mobile Accessory Project hopes to solve that with CONNEX, a flat cable shaped like a credit card which expands up to 1.5 feet.
We've known for a while that Facebook had planned to reintegrate SMS and MMS into its Messenger app for Android. Well, it's finally live, and it's pretty great.
One thing you have to love about Google is their sense of humor. From their annual April Fool's Day pranks to the hidden Flappy Bird mini-game in Android to tons of hidden commands in Hangouts, you can just tell that those smart guys in Mountain View still like to have a little bit of fun with their work.
3D printers have been surging in popularity for both professional and personal applications, and now OLO is on the verge of making 3D printing practical wherever you go. Their eponymous 3D printer is battery-powered and uses the light from your smartphone's screen to create 3D objects out of special "daylight" resins.
Android's personal assistant is more than just a sassy backtalker—it's a full-on suite of all the information you could need at a given time. Google Now, as it's called, uses data from various sources to predict what you'll want to know before you even search for it, and it's an amazing experience once you've got everything set up.
More often than not, when you find an app that offers a particular functionality, there are ten other apps on the Google Play Store that offer virtually the same features. But the reason we choose one app over the alternatives is mainly due to one thing—a preference for the user interface of the app we ultimately install.
