It's that time of year again. Each spring, Google likes to have a bit of fun with April Fool's Day. Pranks have ranged from a fake email printing service called Gmail Paper to a search engine for smells. It's all fun and games, but this year, they've taken that mantra rather seriously with a Pac-Man game baked right into Google Maps.
With the release of various new and updated Samsung Galaxy S6 apps and features, like Smart Switch, Smart Remote, and wallpapers, something that's a home screen staple for most Android users was still missing.
Granting seamless access to your favorite or most utilized apps with just a tap, the Galaxy S5's "Toolbox" feature is one that plenty of other Android users wish they had. Instead of holding your breath for your manufacturer to implement something similar, or hoping that Samsung releases it on Google Play, you can mimic it on your device today with a few simple steps.
As one of the most frequently used Android browsers, making Chrome work faster and more efficiently is something we can surely all appreciate. And just like its computer-based counterpart, there are experimental flags for the mobile app that can speed browsing up significantly.
During class or while at work, it can take an immense amount of self-control to resist navigating over to Reddit. The link-aggregator and meme-warehouse makes it too easy to kill time... most of which you should be spending on various other tasks.
When my Nexus 5 received the Lollipop update, one of the first things I noticed was how subtle and quiet the new lock and unlock sounds were. Sure, this is a minor quibble, but it's also an easy fix.
Apple's keyboard has a set of media controls to navigate the music playing on iTunes, allowing you to play, pause, skip, and replay songs and videos. Unfortunately, these controls are exclusive to iTunes; if you're playing music from Spotify, Pandora, or the myriad of other online web-based services (Amazon, Rdio, SoundCloud, etc.), you're out of luck.
Maybe it was the years of concerts with deafening speakers blasting music into my ears, but I always listen to my tunes as loud as the volume allows me. So, it's pretty annoying when I get a "high volume" warning every time I listen to music on my OnePlus One with my headphones on. We've previously shown you how to remove this same warning by using the NoSafeVolumeWarning, an Xposed module that required root access. Thankfully, the very liberal OnePlus One has a built-in feature that lets you...
Windows 8 may have introduced a new, intuitive touch-based interface, but plenty of Microsoft loyalists were unhappy with the absence of the classic start menu that they were so accustomed to.
I'm the type of person that rarely has an audible ringer enabled on my phone. Haptic feedback (vibration) is enough for me... most of the time. When my phone isn't in my pocket, I become the type of person who frequently misses calls and texts—and no one likes that person.
On earlier Android versions, you were able to hold down on an app's icon in the recent apps menu (aka app switcher) and jump straight to the app's info page. From there, you could easily uninstall the app, force-stop its activity, or clear its cache and data.
Notifications sometimes come in bulk on Android—especially after booting up. While some of them are helpful or informative, most can be immediately dismissed as soon as they come in.
Allowing the use of third-party keyboards on iOS 8 was a great move on Apple's part, providing iPhone users with choices when it came to an often-used and important aspect of their operating system. Unfortunately, as cool as all these keyboards are, they all use the same boring, stock font.
For the most part, Finder has had the same basic functionality through the various releases of OS X. But Apple's lack of interest in adding new bells and whistles to the backbone of their operating system simply means that 3rd-party developers get to shine, and Tran Ky Nam is one such developer. He created his own extension for Finder that adds tabbed browsing, dual pane mode, cut & paste functionality, and much, much more.
When exercising at a high intensity, you know to expect some level of pain. That can make it difficult to identify when your body gives you a warning sign of injury. If you pay close attention, however, you can tell the good hurt from the bad. I talked to Dr. Brian Parr again, professor at the Dept. of Exercise and Sports Science at the University of South Carolina Aiken, who explained which symptoms of exercise are normal and which are bad:
Pie controls are navigation soft keys that can be displayed by swiping up or from the side of your screen, allowing you to navigate, search, call up the power menu, take screenshots, and a lot more. Not only are pie controls functional, they make using Immersive Mode a breeze since the regular nav bar was no longer required.
Skimming through the hundreds of photos you may have on your iPhone for that one selfie of you and your friends in Los Angeles can be a tedious task, especially if you were inebriated and snapping pics indiscriminately. Thankfully, as one of the many cool features available in iOS 8, the Photos app now lets you search your images based on date or location.
If you've used Twitter on your smartphone sometime in the past two weeks, you've probably noticed that tweets from users you don't follow have been popping up on your timeline.
Personality is something we're constantly attempting to inject into our lives, whether it be the car we drive or clothing we wear—and our mobile devices are no exception.
This year's Google I/O brought the announcement of Android L, as well as the Preview builds of L for the Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 (2013), installed using either ADB on Windows or fastboot on any computer. Unfortunately, those of us without a Nexus device are out of luck—but not entirely.
The first thing you probably noticed after turning on your LG G3 for the first time was its gorgeous Quad HD display. The G3 is the first device to offer the soon-to-be standard QHD screen, and it's a beauty. That being said, the colors can look flat and dull, especially when compared to my previous device, the Galaxy S4.
There are a gazillion app switchers on the market, and some are really awesome, like Edge, GloveBox, Loopr, and Switchr, to name just a few. However, these can all be a little bit more complicated and cumbersome than necessary when I just want to switch back to the last app I was in.
On a recent trip to Palm Springs, I found myself navigating with Google Maps and virtually exploring my destiniation using its built-in Street View feature. The thing is, using Street View can make keeping track of your exact location difficult as you zoom in, out, and about. It's a little discombobulating.
Thanks to a recent back-end update to Google's Search app, every KitKat-running device can use "Okay, Google" from within any app—even the lock screen. However, the default settings for the OnePlus One's mic leave it unable to detect your voice unless you have it right up to your face. That isn't a good look for anyone, but thankfully there is an easy fix to get this working correctly.
Podcasts have been around and popular for close to a decade now. For the uninitiated, podcasts are like radio shows that can be downloaded directly from the web and listened to on any device. Up until now, only paid apps allowed podcasts to be casted via Chromecast, but with the latest update to Xavier Guillemane's Podcast Addict, you can now do the same thing for free!
Samsung and Microsoft do it out of the box, Google does it with a little tweaking, and they all do it well—multitasking. While we can hope for better (or simply any) multitasking integration for the next iteration of the iPad and iPad mini, a new jailbreak tweak eliminates the wait.
This is a prank me and two friends from my high school did this last summer. We went to Walmart to try pranking shoppers. In this video, we were throwing things in walmart. We took super soft stuffed animals (to make sure we didn't hurt anybody) and threw them over the aisle to try putting things in people's carts. If they didn't have a cart we'd try to land it close to them.
I never want to bump into my ex-girlfriend while out in the city (talk about a buzz kill), so if I could get an alert telling me that she's at Shortstops down the street, I'll avoid that area completely. This is where the new, interesting app Cloak - Incognito Mode for Real Life from dev Brian Moore comes in.
Android devices are awesome, let me just state that now, but when iOS 7 came out, the new flat theme caught my eye. Yes, we can easily apply new themes on our Nexus 7 tablets to make it look more like iOS 7, but they won't actually change the individual look and feel of apps like Instagram.
Your Note 3 is a magnificently large phone. So much so that it has a handful of built-in options that make it easier to use with one hand, collectively called "One-handed operation." While these settings are helpful, they have to be manually enabled and disabled whenever you're done using them.
Pinch-to-zoom has been a well-known feature in Google Maps, but one-finger zoom has always been a more practical way of navigating, especially for those of us using our phones with one hand.
I like to hop between apps pretty often, and luckily my Samsung Galaxy S3 let's me do that fairly quickly. By simply holding the Home button for a few seconds, it will bring up my most recent apps, and I can switch between them with a simple tap. So if I am playing Injustice: Gods Among Us and want to switch the song currently playing on Pandora, I can bring up the recent apps menu to navigate there. While this default app switcher is more than adequate, it takes up the entire screen and coul...
It's fairly easy to switch between running apps on the Nexus 7 by hitting the Recent apps key in the Navigation bar at the bottom of your screen, but for me—it's just not good enough. I don't particularly like leaving the app I'm currently in to see this menu, and the menu itself is kind of clunky, and overall, not as fast as I'd like it to be.
It seems like most of the really cool and interesting modifications you can make to your Android device always require special root access, so when a fun mod comes along that doesn't require root—I feel it's my duty to alert you.
One little known feature on Android devices is TalkBack, which provides you with spoken feedback and vibrations in order to help you navigate your device. Obviously, if you're not blind or visually impaired, this isn't a feature you're likely to use.
The rumors are flying everywhere about the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 getting updated to Jelly Bean 4.2, but as of now, we have no freakin' idea when. Among all of the features sported in the update, Photo Sphere is one of the more popular, allowing you to snap incredible and immersive 360 degree photographs. So, until that update comes, you're probably still marooned with Jelly Bean 4.1.2 on your Note 2, and that means no Photo Sphere camera.
When it comes to your smartphone, you don't have to be a cheater to want a little privacy. I don't even like people playing Temple Run on my mobile because I don't want anyone beating the achievements I've been working on getting myself.
While Siri's integration with the iPhone is becoming increasingly substantial, restrictions with the intelligent personal assistant are apparent when it comes to third-party apps like Google Maps, Netflix, and Spotify (unless your iPhone is jailbroken, of course). As an avid Spotify user, it's distressing that I can't use Siri to navigate through the music streaming service's extensive library. In the car, I use Spotify about 90% of the time and it can become increasingly frustrating to chang...
Samsung bucked the trend and threw hard keys onto the Galaxy S3 while most manufacturers are going the soft key route. This hack will add on-screen buttons to your TouchWiz-based ROM. You'll need a root file manager with a system writable text editor—I recommend ES File Explorer for this, but feel free to use whatever you want. If using ES, hit Menu, Settings, go down to Root Settings, and check Root Exploerer, Up to Root, and Mount File System.
Facebook has been looking to launch a new product for a while now, and it seems they've finally realized what they're best at—being as creepy as possible. If you thought your boss checking out your girlfriend's beach photos was weird, Facebook's new Graph Search has only upped the ante. Now, I don't want to be an alarmist, because I'm sure there are a bunch of great things a Facebook search would find. If you're single, perhaps you could search "Girls that are single that like Goodfellas." Th...
