Depending on your device, when you lower your brightness slider all the way to the minimum, it may still emit a considerable amount of light. This is because manufacturers have the option of setting a minimum brightness value, and while 1 would be the true minimum brightness that your display is capable of, some have set is as high as 5 or even 10.
The Google Chrome browser does mostly everything well and integrates nicely with other Google services, but it's not exactly renowned for speed. With a rooted device and the aid of an app called Kernel Adiutor, however, you can make Chrome as nimble as some of the fastest browsers on the market.
Google's Allo is still a work in progress, but the innovations to the chat and messaging app just keep on coming. The latest update rolling out now includes chat backups and a group incognito feature that we're very excited about.
Listen up, fool! You can now get a (loud) nudge in the right direction by Mr. T, thanks to Waze. The navigation app has incorporated a few well-known voices over the past few years, but none have had us more excited than the addition of this beloved fixture of the 1980s. Waze made the announcement that Mr. T's voice would be joining the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Morgan Freeman via their company blog. That's the great news. The bad news is that Mr. T is only available for Waze users i...
While the technology continues to mature, businesses from various industries continue to adopt augmented reality to improve the efficiency of business processes. In this edition of Brief Reality, as conference season continues, we see examples of augmented reality applied to logistics processes and marketing of industrial supplies, as well as the topic of discussion at another trade show.
The good news keeps on coming for Samsung! According to the market research firm Strategy Analytics, the Korean giant sold a whopping 7.2 million Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones in the first quarter of this year. That totals 55 million of the company's flagship smartphones sold since their launch in March 2016.
Those of us that work with or around augmented and mixed reality have seen a powerful shift in the last year as the popularity and interest have grown in the field. With Microsoft's HoloLens release, the popularity of Pokémon GO, and the constant rumor mill known as Magic Leap, the terms augmented reality and mixed reality have started to become a part of the modern vernacular more and more each passing day.
DSP Manager, Dolby Atmos, ViPER4Android — how are you supposed to pick just one from the wide variety of Android equalizers? Depending on your OEM, your phone may have come with a stock equalizer, but they're usually not enough. Combine them with a third-party equalizer, and then we're getting somewhere. However, installing multiple equalizers at the same time has always seemed to cause audio glitches — until now.
An expert in the driverless market has earmarked Porsche as the company to watch in the automated car race.
Texas has become only the latest state to face an unfortunate outbreak of mumps, but so far seems to be the hardest hit. On April 12, two days before the CDC's report was released, the Texas Department of State Health Services released a health advisory indicating this is the highest instance of mumps reported in 22 years.
As with any new smartphone (but especially with Apple), the iPhone 8 is generating rumor after rumor. This newest rumor, however, rocks the boat a bit, as BGR reports that the iPhone 8 may release at Apple's standard time in the fall, but the 3D camera will be pushed to the 8s.
In a twist in the tumultuous lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Uber revealed today that they found a document on an employee device, allegedly stolen from Waymo.
For all of its drama, Uber's driverless program has states like Arizona excited for the future of self-driving vehicles. But it's not Arizona alone that supports the driverless craze; the Illinois House of Representatives will hear a bill that would allow driverless cars on the road with or without human operators.
Dreaded are the days when you're working on a masterpiece, then all of a sudden, your Windows computer crashes, loses power, or an app just gets up and quits. Well, now there's an app for that.
A baby with severe Zika-related birth defects was born in San Diego County this week, prompting officials to urge pregnant women to avoid disease hotspots.
Facebook Messenger has now incorporated a live location sharing feature, one week after Google Maps revealed its own real-time location tool. On Monday, the social media giant announced the new feature, which will allow users to share their live whereabouts with friends at the press of a button.
A new app called Roadie now makes life a little easier by connecting users to people who can transport their stuff. The app allows users to transport anything from dogs to getting rid of your ex's things. Furthermore, anyone can register as a sender, or become a driver to make an extra buck. The app is very easy to use: simply download (the app is available on both iOS and Android) and register using an email address or with Facebook. Using the profile you've created, users then select whethe...
Sony offers a set of free games to its PlayStation Plus subscribers every month, but it's easy to miss out if you're not constantly around your console. Perhaps you're traveling, or maybe you've stayed up one too many nights playing Uncharted, leading to a period of PlayStation detox. No matter what the case is, the good news is that you can use the PlayStation app for Android or iOS to claim these monthly free games without getting up from your seat.
Thanks to Google's latest update to their Motion Still app, iPhone users can now pick a new frame for Live Photos. The app fixes everything annoying about Apple's Live Photos, and this is just another great feature to add to Motion Still's impressive features list.
In February, the popular Facebook-owned WhatsApp Messenger service jumped on the "stories" bandwagon and replaced their in-app, text-based "About Me" status (you know, those lovely little messages where you can say "Sleeping" or "Not Sleeping" under the tiny nub of your profile picture). Taking its place was a clone of Snapchat's Stories feature, continuing the social media giant's recent trend of shamelessly copying Snapchat.
China just confirmed a sixth avian flu outbreak since October. On Tuesday, the Ministry of Agriculture stated that there had been another instance of bird flu in the Hubei province, of the H5N6 influenza virus. The outbreak occurred in the city of Daye, which is home to some 900,000 people, but hasn't been linked to human infections yet.
Future mothers hoping to use donated semen might want to think twice before using any samples from the Miami-Dade Country area of Florida. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is warning that sperm from as far back as June 2016 may be infected with the Zika virus. Damn those mosquitoes.
When it comes to ad blocking on Android, there's no better app than AdAway. The popular root mod filters out ads at the hosts file level, so no extra processing power is used, and your phone is literally incapable of loading most ads.
There are already a few ways to use your home computer on the go, but none of them feel very natural when you're out and about, and are clunky options at best. Samsung wants to change that with Monitorless, their upcoming augmented reality smartglasses, which offer remote desktop viewing capabilities as well as the ability to switch between augmented and virtual reality modes using electrochromic glass.
Crayon, a free 3D drawing application by the mysteriously named arkalian, showed up in the Windows Store recently, so I gave it a try like I do all new apps for Windows Holographic. Truthfully, I loaded it up not expecting much, but wow, was I wrong. It's a simple idea, but it's executed well enough to make it a truly great experience on the HoloLens.
Emoji, emojis, smilies, or smileys—whatever you want to call them, those little yellow icons have firmly implanted themselves in the human lexicon. However, just like with localized languages and dialects, emoji can be very different from one another depending on the device or operating system you're using.
While all of my previous Have You Seen This? posts have all focused on individual HoloLens apps in the Windows Store, this time I'll be sharing a couple at once. These holographic applications are really simple in scope, so there is not a lot to say about them, yet they are interesting enough for me to want to share them with you.
In addition to trying to give Pokémon a life on the HoloLens, Sky Zhou, a founding member of mixed reality studio Matrix Inception, won Microsoft's Actiongram Fantasy Contest Quest last month for his video concept on slaying dragons. But fantastical creatures aren't the only thing Sky can whip up on the HoloLens.
A few days ago, I pulled up the Windows Store on my HoloLens and saw a few new applications. One that caught my attention was Oriental Museum, which lets you explore China's Forbidden City, and the other one is very similar free demo app called Secrets of Ancient Egypt by Link Development.
When Apple released the iOS 10.2 update to the public on December 12, 2016, iPhone users got a slew of new features, including new emojis, a brand new TV app, the ability to save camera settings, and more. But out of all of these new features, the one that interests me the most is something they didn't even include in the release notes—star ratings are back in the Music app!
Google Drive has a very simple way to switch from iOS to Android. iPhone users who want to take the plunge into the wonderful world of Android, but were hesitant to do so in the past because of the laborious process of backing up their data, can back up their contacts, photos, videos, and calendars with the tap of a button.
Today, December 7, it was officially announced that Magic Leap has found their replacement for the recently departed Brian Wallace. Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz has tapped Brenda Freeman, former EVP and Chief Marketing Officer of National Geographic Channel, as their new Chief Marketing Officer.
Skype is one of the most popular messaging and video chat services for a good reason—it's packed to the brim with tons of cool features. But one bit of functionality that Microsoft left out is the ability to block friend requests from people that aren't in your contacts, which can lead to a lot of unwanted notifications from spammers and bots.
The HoloLens is the world's first untethered holographic head-mounted computer, which Microsoft has been rather proud of—and they have every reason to be. Of course, as soon as we developers get adjusted to the idea of keeping the scope of our projects inside the bounds of the HoloLens' processing power, Microsoft hits us with the Holographic Remoting Player.
Super Mario Bros. is one of the most renowned games in history. It helped resurrect a dying video game industry in the mid-'80s and still remains one of the best-selling video games of all time—one reason why the new NES Classic Edition is so popular and impossible to get these days. Its simple story of a plumber trying to rescue a princess resulted in a video game empire for Nintendo.
Blue light (like that from our smartphone) tricks the human brain into thinking it's still daytime, even if it's coming from something as small as a screen. So while you're playing around with your new Pixel or Pixel XL after dark, subconscious signals to be awake are preventing you from getting to sleep as early as you should.
Whatever you think of Google's new Pixel phones, the one thing we know for sure is that these are the most polarizing devices in recent memory. On the one hand, we've seen reviews in which longtime Android users say they'll be walking away from the OS all together thanks to Pixel. On the other hand, you've got the iPhone-obsessed David Pierce over at WIRED saying he'll be switching immediately.
Walking while taking a video is always a pain. But it doesn't have to be, especially with Google's new Pixel smartphone and its new and improved Electronic Image Stabilization (EIS) feature. A new video, released on Reddit, pitted the Pixel's EIS against the Nexus 6P with some incredible results.
Android clearly wasn't made with bilingual users in mind. When you set a default system locale, every app on your phone uses that region's language—and there's no granular control here. This really becomes an issue if you use social media or news apps that are primarily in a different language, because apps are generally written in the developer's native tongue, then poorly translated to all other languages.
Most popular virtual reality headsets, like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, require a tethered connection to the computer and that imposes some obvious restrictions on how much we can move in our space. We'd all prefer a simpler, untethered option, and Intel wants to provide just that.
