With YouTube TV and DirecTV Now starting at $40/month, and others like Sling TV offering an eye-catching $25/month plan, streaming cable services may sound like a great way to cut costs while cutting the cord. But when you look at all the factors, the price you pay may very well end up being just as high as your traditional cable bill — if not more.
As Samsung's very own take on Android 9.0 Pie, the newly-dubbed One UI (formerly Samsung Experience, and TouchWiz before that) comes with a slew of new features and redesigned elements for the Galaxy's interface. Many of the changes, like the redesigned native app icons, are readily apparent, but other features got subtle enhancements that greatly improve user friendliness.
Apple's stock Podcasts app in iOS remains my go-to for all of my podcast-listening needs, but skipping around during an episode can be frustrating. Scrubbing audio along the timeline is often an imprecise maneuver, which is why the skip buttons can be so useful and efficient. Without customizing skip lengths, however, you may find yourself tapping far more than you need to.
Android Pie has finally made its way to signature Galaxy devices like the Note 9, S9 and S8. As you all know, Samsung Experience got a major makeover and has been renamed to One UI, featuring significant aesthetic changes to many of its native apps.
Included with iOS 12 is an easier-to-use Do Not Disturb mode. Not only is there a new Bedtime Mode that makes waking up less annoying, but also new ways to quickly launch the DND temporarily. One example is having the ability to set Do Not Disturb based on a time of day — specifically, morning or evening.
If you have an Apple Watch, you might know that the activity awards you earn can be shared with your friends as iMessage stickers on your iPhone. However, you first have to earn achievements in order to use them as stickers. That changes somewhat with iOS 12, as Apple added animated activity stickers for all Apple Watch users, whether they've earned award badges or not.
Samsung has made curved displays a signature element of their flagship phones, but the Edge Screen, as it's called, has proven to be a magnet for accidental touches. Fortunately, Samsung has developed a little known app to help prevent this problem.
With all the talk about the impending release of the Magic Leap One, some have forgotten a very important, competing release on the near horizon: the HoloLens 2.0. Well, now we have new information that tells us when (roughly) the device will be released, as well as a few other exciting tidbits.
If you have yet to receive your invitation to next weekend's royal wedding in the UK, then you can still experience part of the pomp and circumstance in augmented reality courtesy of ABC News.
Epic Games just released update v3.4 for Fortnite Battle Royale on all four platforms. This new version brings a number of UI changes, performance improvements, and bug fixes, but the addition that will get the most players excited is a new weapon: the Guided Missile.
Even though most phones don't have Oreo yet, Google has released Android 9.0 Pie. It's available on Google's own Pixel devices, and updates should soon be available to partnered devices from Essential, Nokia, Oppo, Sony, Vivo, and Xiaomi. We're already digging into it to highlight all of the features and changes.
For some, going to the dentist can be a terrifying experience, but a new use of augmented reality could go a long way toward making the trip feel more like it's worth the orthodontic angst.
Bitcoin's wild price fluctuations — and by extension, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum — can be terrifying if you're new to trading cryptocurrency. Seasoned traders, however, see these price movements as opportunities to maximize their holdings and profits. With Coinbase, you can trade cryptocurrencies more efficiently.
Last week, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz teased his Twitter followers with some "fun and cool stuff" to share in the coming days. On Monday, he made good on that promise, sort of.
Now that Apple Pay Cash has arrived, you (hopefully) might end up getting sent some money right from inside an iMessage. If so, that money gets added to your Apple Pay Cash card in iOS 11.2, which you can use just like any other card in your digital wallet. If you're not so lucky, you can still add money to the card yourself without having to wait for a contact to send you money first.
With the advent of ARKit, apps that can place virtual furniture in a real room have become nearly a universal practice for furniture retailers, with Pottery Barn being the latest to join the fray.
Exotic sports cars are the province of the ridiculously wealthy but, thanks to augmented reality, you can now get closer than ever to a Bugatti Chiron.
So, your grandmother finally wants to ditch her flip phone for a shiny new smartphone? Congratulations. But helping her get used to her new device, even when it's an iPhone, is no small task. Grandma mastered checking her email in late-2012 and just recently learned there's a thing called "Facebook." But we love grandma, and thanks to this guide, we can definitely make this happen for her.
This week, Samsung officially kicked off the Oreo Beta Program for the Galaxy S8 and S8+ in North America and several other markets. The full list of changes is quite substantial, so we'll be running through them in a series of posts detailing what's new. First up, the Galaxy phones inherit notification channels from Android 8.0.
While some companies like IKEA and Lowe's zig towards ARKit to entice shoppers, Target has opted to zag to broader appeal with an augmented reality see-before-you-buy tool for its mobile website.
IKEA won't be alone among ARKit apps for visualizing home décor and improvements when iOS 11 arrives next week.
Gestures are a big deal on an iPhone X, XS, XS Max, XR, 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max. Without a Home button on Apple's super-premium smartphones, several actions had to be mapped to gestures instead, which impacts other areas of the system such as the Control Center.
It was extremely simple in iOS 10 to switch your iPhone's display to warmer colors at night, but iOS 11 buried the "Night Shift" toggle for some reason. So don't beat yourself up if you couldn't find the setting right away.
If you're not a fan of your iPhone's ability to adjust screen brightness by itself, you've probably turned off auto-brightness on multiple occasions in the past. All you would do is go to your "Display & Brightness" settings and toggle it off, but that's no longer the case in iOS 11 and iOS 12 — whether you have an iPhone X, XS, XS Max, XR or any older supported iPhone.
In the "Do Not Disturb" menu in your iPhone's settings, you can choose to allow phone calls from everyone, your favorites, or specific groups. However, this does not apply to text messages, only phone calls, so there's no way to get vibration or sound alert for messages from select contacts — but that doesn't mean there isn't a way.
The app SketchAR is an easy, innovative way to trace what you want to draw onto the canvas of your choice. It was first released on iOS and Android Tango phones, but now, finally, it has been released on Microsoft's HoloLens.
Hutch Interiors, Inc., makers of an eponymous augmented reality home design app for iOS and Android, has closed a series A round of funding, led by online real estate company Zillow Group, totaling $10 million.
Cyclists of the world, new AR glasses are here to improve your rides. Possessing 2 GB RAM, a quad-core CPU, GPS, 16 to 32 GB of storage, an accelerometer, camera, gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer, Bluetooth, speaker, WiFi, and a mic, these aren't your regular UV-blocking sunglasses. Called the Everysight Raptor AR glasses, these shades project all of the information a cyclist could need to optimize their rides.
While Live Photos has been a fun addition to iOS ever since the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, there hasn't been much practical use for Apple's moving images so far. That was, until iOS 11 added advanced features such as long exposure effects that make a DSLR less and less impressive these days.
You may not have woken up like this, but you're still #flawless thanks to Microsoft's new Face Swap app for Android.
Say you're on a train to work, but you forgot your headphones. You'd normally listen to music to pass the time, but given the circumstances, your choices are to sit silently like a considerate adult, or to blare songs out of your phone's main speaker like a jerk. Thankfully, there's now a third option.
The list of HoloLens applications continues to grow as more companies discover ways to enhance their operations using augmented reality. Air New Zealand is the latest to show interest in the technology, demonstrating their vision for AR in a new concept video.
The Galaxy S8 and S8+ come with a set of AKG-tuned earbuds that would cost you $99 by themselves. Unfortunately, the earbuds alone don't automatically translate to superior sound, and they've been met with lukewarm reception. But as it turns out, there's a fairly hidden menu on Samsung's flagships that'll give you a tailor-made audio experience and help you get the most out of your S8-AKG pairing.
ModiFace, the makers of Sephora's Virtual Artist app which allows users to try on multiple different combinations of makeup through augmented reality, has just bumped up its augmented reality strategy. The company is now including a live-stream option for all those personal makeup trials you've been secretly admiring from the comfort of your own phone.
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.
The '90s were a great decade to be alive. Before the internet became a high-availability service, we were untethered from the bombardment of media present in today's culture. Children ran through the streets with levels of physical exertion beyond what's required to capture fictional creatures found in Pokémon GO. However, there were some video game consoles that kept kids indoors, such as the Game Boy, SNES, and more importantly—the first ever PlayStation.
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.
LineageOS, the successor to the wildly popular CyanogenMod custom ROM, is adding an interesting new feature that could potentially save lots of juice when your battery is running low. When enabling "Extreme power saver" mode, which can be set to kick in automatically at 15%, you'll soon have the option of changing your kernel's performance profile as well.
If your phone has an AMOLED display, it doesn't waste any battery to power black portions of the screen. This is because the individual pixels that make up an AMOLED screen emit their own light, which means the backlight you'd find behind a traditional LCD screen is not present. In other words, showing a full-screen black image on an AMOLED phone is like turning your display completely off.
After about six months of testing, Facebook has decided to start rolling out a new feature on mobile that automatically plays sound for videos in your News Feed, thanks to "positive feedback" from test users. As far as I'm concerned, they have been testing with the wrong users, because auto-playing sound is by far worse than auto-playing videos ever could be.
