The cinematic photos feature in Google Photos can create impressive three-dimensional views of normally flat images, turning ordinary pictures into life-like representations of the moment captured. Google Photos would automatically pick images from your library to apply the effect to. Now, you can choose images on demand from your library — it's just not super obvious that you can.
Android has a new security feature that every Android smartphone user needs to start using — even you. It won't change how you use your phone, but it will make life harder for nearby thieves.
Because our smartphones are ever present, frequently used apps become the topic of conversation in social situations. This often leads to sharing app links via messages, either by copying/pasting an app's URL or sending it through the sharing menu. However, there's another way to share an app, and it's most valuable when you need to share multiple apps and app updates without an internet connection.
A massive new feature is about to hit Apple Music next week. Anyone can check it out, but only Apple Music subscribers through an Individual, Student, Family, or Apple One plan can take full advantage of the new perk that's been years in the making.
The most recent premium flagship smartphones from Google — the Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 6 Pro — are equipped with displays cable of 1440 QHD+ resolution. But they also come with a tool to downgrade to 1080p FHD+, which you may want to do in certain situations.
Widgets can display essential information from an app right on your iPhone's Lock Screen, but there's an even bigger reason you should be using them: fast access to your most-used apps.
Google Photos is not only an exceptional cross-platform app for photo storage but also a handy tool for generating and creating collages, movies, and animations from your photos and videos. When it comes to collages, you can now customize them and dress them up with vibrant templates.
You don't need to pay for an app or subscription to have your audio notes transcribed for you on your Android smartphone. There's an easy, free way to do it on almost any Google Pixel, and you can even use it on other Android devices.
If you haven't been using Spotlight Search on your iPhone, we've got ten reasons for you to start. Apple's made some significant improvements to the search interface available on the Home Screen and Lock Screen, and it's more useful than ever.
Gmail uses TLS, or Transport Layer Security, by default for all email communications, so all of your emails will use the standard encryption as long as the recipients also support TLS. But there's a way to add even more security to your Gmail emails, and you can use your iPhone's Mail app to do it.
You may not always want to, but there will probably be a time when you'll want to know if an email you send — like a job application or a support request — is opened by the recipient. It's actually easy to implement, and you may be using an email client on your device right now that supports email tracking.
Have you ever seen an image on social media, somebody's blog, or a news website that shows an iPhone or iPad screenshot with an actual iPhone or iPad model framed around it? You can do that too, and it's really easy to accomplish with a third-party app — but you can do the same thing with a shortcut that won't bug you to pay or subscribe.
Apple has given third-party developers access to Picture in Picture on iPad since iOS 9 and, more recently, on iPhone since iOS 14, but YouTube has been one of the few not to support the feature outside of Safari or premium memberships. Thankfully, that's no longer the case if you live in the U.S.
Apple's iOS 15.4 update for iPhone is out after 46 days of beta testing, and it has some exciting features you won't want to miss. Here's everything you need to know about the new software.
Amid a troubling resurgence in coronavirus cases, led by the new Delta variant, augmented reality is once again moving back into the spotlight as a solution, especially now that the move to return to offices has been stalled.
In our review of Amazon's non-augmented reality Echo Frames smartglasses, we made the case for audio virtual assistants being the linchpin for AR wearables.
I drop my smartphone a lot. Like an absurd amount of times. Practically multiple times a day. So it's surprising that my iPhone 12 Pro has lasted nine months without a cracked screen yet. Part of that has to do with the late-2020 model's durability, and the other part is thanks to my protective case.
The legal battle between Epic Games and augmented reality startup Nreal isn't cooling off anytime soon.
When you're a writer with work published across various online platforms, building a portfolio of your work can be pretty time-consuming. That's where Authory comes in.
The most viral internet cat of the moment is a virtual kitty trapped in a billboard in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, Japan.
The march of Snap to become the world's augmented reality engine isn't slowing down. In a new deal announced on Thursday, Snap has revealed that it has signed an agreement to become the software driving Universal Music Group's (UMG) mobile AR music offerings.
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.
If you like to listen to popular songs from huge musicians and hard-to-find music from obscure indie artists, SoundCloud is for you — and you don't have to pay a dime. When you find a song you really love and want to play it back even when you're not connected to the internet, SoundCloud has offline listening, but there is a way to download your favorite tracks onto your iPhone for longevity.
Thanks to the grandest of puns, May the 4th is Star Wars Day. And what better way to pay tribute to the space opera than with the augmented reality superpowers of Snapchat.
Facebook's annual earnings call on Wednesday didn't come with any big surprises, that is, if you took everything at face value.
One of the smaller frustrations of the coronavirus pandemic is unlocking your iPhone with Face ID while wearing a mask. If you have an iPhone with Touch ID, you won't need to punch in your passcode every time Face ID fails since you can use your fingerprint. But for those of us without Home buttons, unlocking our iPhones just got a lot easier — even if we're wearing a mask.
Museum curators typically frown upon visitors touching paintings, sculptures, and artifacts, but not when those exhibits are displayed in augmented reality.
Most of you probably hate ads on your smartphone, but they're a part of modern digital life. As long as apps like Instagram are free to use, then we'll need to pay by dealing with posts, videos, and pop-ups trying to sell us stuff. Well, not necessarily, so long as you're OK with a few compromises.
San Francisco-based augmented reality company Scope AR has made building AR instructional content for mobile devices and AR wearables as easy as throwing together a PowerPoint deck, primarily via its WorkLink platform.
With its emphasis on well-rounded audible entertainment, Deezer gives all music and podcast fans the best of both worlds. As great as the app is, it's inconvenient to constantly tell Siri to play your music and podcasts through Deezer so that it doesn't default to Apple Music or Apple Podcasts instead. But as of iOS 14.5, you can set Deezer as your iPhone's "default" music player for Siri.
Apple's two iCloud storage plans have made it easier than ever to free up space on your iPhone to take more pictures, play more mobile games, and download more music. The plan prices range from $0.99 to $9.99, which isn't bad, but not everyone wants to pay for storage. So deleting items becomes a great option to free up storage — especially music and music videos.
As Apple, Google, Snap, and Facebook wrestle for positioning to lure developers and creators to build augmented reality experiences for their respective tools, Facebook is looking at a learning approach for its Spark AR platform.
Apple Music's Replay feature sucks. Aside from not being very accessible, it offers a fraction of your history compared to Spotify Wrapped, which does a deep dive into what you listened to over the last year. Not only that but Spotify packages data into visuals you can share on social media. While you could share Replay screenshots, there are better options out there for Apple Music users.
I won't mince words: the Notes widget in iOS 14 is bad. But you're not stuck with it if you want sticky notes on your home screen.
This week, developer Niantic began rolling out a new feature called AR Mapping to Pokémon GO that has bigger implications on the realism of augmented reality in mobile gaming and beyond.
Android 11 has a new power menu with integrated contactless payment cards and smart home toggles. It's definitely futuristic — so much so that it pushed out a tool many of us use in the present: the screenshot button.
The Music app for iPhone underwent a significant update back in iOS 8.4 when the Apple Music subscription service was incorporated into the user interface. It then had another transformation in iOS 10 that improved the UI for everyone. But things can still feel a little cluttered in Music, even in iOS 14, especially if you don't or never will subscribe to Apple Music.
Apple released the first beta for iOS 14.2 to iPhone developers on Thursday, Sept. 17. A significant new feature that iOS 14.2 brings to the table is a new Control Center tile for Shazam music recognition. A simple tap of the tile will launch the operating system's built-in Shazam capabilities, scanning for music playing in the immediate area.
Let's say that the screen on your iPhone is showing signs of discoloration, which makes the display annoying to use. You'll need a replacement display or a new iPhone as soon as possible. If you have one of the newer iPhone models, the cost to fix it might be more than your wallet can handle, but a warranty may still cover it, and there are ways to check quickly.
Even if you pay for YouTube Premium, you are not exempt from ads. YouTube will stop adding pre-roll and interstitial ads, but content creators still have their own advertisements baked into videos. These product placements can be even worse than ads, and they're not the only annoyance embedded into videos. To put it nicely, YouTube is starting to have a problem with distractions.
