Pandora has a simple rating system that works by hitting either the thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon on a track that's playing on your station. If you choose the former, the song you like along with others similar to it will play with more frequency, while selecting the latter will prevent that song and others like it from playing in your station moving forward.
One of the best parts of Pandora is its personalized stations that auto-generate songs within the specific style or genre you've chosen. Not only does this play your favorite tracks with regularity, but it also opens your ears to previously unknown songs or artists — ones you may fall in love with and want to share with others.
Whether you're out for a drive, commuting to work, or just taking a stroll, listening to your favorite tracks on Pandora takes the legwork out of choosing which songs to play next. After a while, however, you go-to playlist can get repetitive, as the same songs from the same artists seem to play over and over. Luckily, Pandora makes it easy to add variety to your stations in just a few taps.
Even three years after its initial release, Niantic's Pokémon GO is still going strong. If you're an Android user still on the hunt for your city's latest Pokémon haul, however, you'll want to listen up — Niantic is cutting support for aging Android devices, meaning soon your dream of catching 'em all may be coming to an end.
While you can now apply a dark theme to Samsung Messages thanks to One UI, you may want to further personalize your texting app. A great way to do this is by applying a custom font, which not only enhances the app aesthetically, but can also go a long way towards making your texts more readable and help you process information better.
Haptic feedback is one of the iPhone's most underrated features. With Face ID, you'll feel a satisfying tap or two when buying something in the App Store or iTunes, unlocking protected notes, viewing saved passwords in Settings, and the list goes on. For the first time, Apple has added haptic feedback when unlocking your iPhone via Face ID, as well as a way to disable haptic feedback for Face ID entirely.
When it comes to customizing Android, there's no better way to make it your own than by installing a custom ROM. You gain new features that were not accessible on the stock firmware that came with the phone, and you get complete control over how your system looks and feels. But there's definitely a learning curve.
For me, there's nothing better than popping on a favorite show or new movie after a long day at the office — except when there's a friend or two I can talk to about that crazy ending. Netflix doesn't double as a social media app, so you can't chat about what you're watching there. What you can do is share your latest obsession to your Instagram story, to get the discussion going with all your followers.
You can't use social media these days without running into stories. They're simply everywhere. If you're an avid Facebook Messenger user, you know that you can view your friend's Facebook and Messenger stories at the top of your Chats list. However, a new Messenger feature puts yours and other people's stories inline for chats.
Whenever you move into a new home, whether that's a house or apartment, changing addresses on all your online accounts is one of the most monotonous tasks that needs to be done. It's even more tedious when you have to update both shipping and billing addresses. But it's necessary, and if you regularly use PayPal, it'll be one of the first places you'll want to update.
When it comes to customizing Android, there's nothing quite like Magisk. You can potentially combine dozens of modules to create a one of a kind user experience tailored to you, but not all modules will work well together. You might run into a bootloop by accident once in a while, which could cause some issues on its own.
The price of hacking Wi-Fi has fallen dramatically, and low-cost microcontrollers are increasingly being turned into cheap yet powerful hacking tools. One of the most popular is the ESP8266, an Arduino-programmable chip on which the Wi-Fi Deauther project is based. On this inexpensive board, a hacker can create fake networks, clone real ones, or disable all Wi-Fi in an area from a slick web interface.
Making a purchase through PayPal is great because you have the option to pay using your account balance, a bank account, debit card, credit card, rewards balance, or even PayPal's own credit product. You need to pick one to be your preferred payment method for each in-stores and online but, unfortunately, changing these preferences can get a bit tricky on your iPhone or Android phone.
Apple just released the second public beta for iOS 12.3 today, Tuesday, April 9, one day after the release of the iOS 12.3 developer beta 2. This update introduces new Japanese "Date & Time" updates as well as changes to Wallet transactions. Overall, iOS 12.3 includes Apple TV Channels, premium monthly subscriptions with content available directly in the TV app across the Apple ecosystem.
Apple just released iOS 12.3 dev beta 2 today, Monday, April 8, which follows the first iOS 12.3 beta by twelve days. This update introduces new Japanese Date & Time features as well as updates to Wallet transactions. As a whole, iOS 12.3 introduces Apple's previously announced Apple TV Channels, premium monthly subscriptions with content you can watch right in the TV app across Apple products.
If you're a long-time Spark user, you'll know that one of the only drawbacks to the app used to be its lack of rich text-editing tools such as hyperlinking. If you needed to link out to a site in an email, your best bet was to grab a computer to get the job done. Well, close those laptops and shut down those PCs — Spark corrected this issue, implementing support for hyperlinking right into the app.
The partnership between Magic Leap and leading South Korean wireless carrier SK Telecom took on an added importance earlier this week as the company unveiled the world's first nationwide 5G network.
Just weeks after revealing plans to port one of its most vital augmented reality products from HoloLens to the smartphone world, Microsoft has finally opened the mobile software floodgates to the public.
News+ is Apple's new digital subscription service for written media that costs $9.99 per month. There is a free trial offered for one month, but you'll start getting charged the monthly fee as soon as your 30 days are up. While it's not very obvious, there is a way to cancel the auto-renewal right before you get charged.
It's a magical time of year for basketball fans, with the NCAA Tournament in full swing and NBA frontrunners in the midst of their push to clinch spots in the playoffs.
New updates are always exciting, even more so when Google's behind the wheel. Yes, Android 10 "Q" is here, at least in beta form, ready for software testers to dive in and explore all the new changes. Among those changes, however, lie some issues. We won't sugarcoat it — there are some annoying things baked into Android 10.
If your phone is running Android 10, you can now share your Wi-Fi network with friends using a handy QR code. The other person doesn't have to be running Android 10 — in fact, you can even share this code with iPhone users. In most situations, this is now the fastest way to share your Wi-Fi password.
If you want to get started sniffing Wi-Fi networks, you usually need to start with a wireless network adapter. But thanks to a Wi-Fi sniffing library written in Arduino and the ultra-cheap ESP8266 chip, you might not need one. For less than $10 in electronics, you can build a tiny Arduino Wi-Fi sniffer that saves Wireshark-compatible PCAP files and fits anywhere.
The word on the street is Android users want a dark mode. With the increased usage of AMOLED panels on smartphones (including some midrange devices), there is a considerable demand for dark themes and their battery saving benefits. Recently, Nova just added the feature to Google Discover.
The legal drama framing the closure of Meta Company continues even after the company's assets have been sold to a new owner.
The home bar, that tiny sliver of color at the bottom of the screen on Home button-less iPhone models, is helpful when first getting used to an iPhone X or newer's gestures. It helps you learn how to swipe up to unlock, go to the home screen, view the app switcher, and so on. But after a few weeks, it just becomes an annoying eyesore you can't get rid of — unless you have a jailbroken iPhone X.
Apple released iOS 12.2 beta 4 to developers on Monday, March 4, and that means public beta testers will likely get the update on Tuesday. The update features a fresh "News" app icon, a new "Apple TV Remote" tile in Control Center, and a tweaked "About" page, in addition to seemingly under-the-hood updates. If you're not yet on the beta, now's your chance to see it for yourself.
One of the best things about Android is the ability to customize every aspect of your device to make it your own. However, unless you have prior knowledge or experience with every single setting available to you, you might have missed a few critical features without even knowing it. Some settings are easy to find, while others might be tucked away in another menu of their own.
As Magic Leap continues to spread its influence in the US with the help of wireless carrier AT&T, the augmented reality startup is also working its way into East Asia.
Some websites block image downloads on their webpages so you can't save them for reuse. That means long-pressing or force-pressing on protected images in Safari on your iPhone will not do anything or will omit the "Save Image" option. Taking a screenshot is the obvious solution to bypass restrictions, but you won't get the best quality. Thankfully, there's another way.
When Apple released its Downtime feature in iOS 12, it gave us an easy way to control how much time we spend on our iPhones — but it wasn't perfect. When setting Downtime, you' were forced to use the same time schedule for every day of the week, so your weekdays and weekends had the same restrictions. Apple fixed that issue in iOS 12.2 and later, so lockout periods can be more customized.
In a way, Twitter is the town square of our era, where people can share and discuss ideas on a wide variety of topics. While the tech giant has its own app for Android, it's pretty bare-bones when it comes to features. This has paved the way for third-party clients that are rich with customization options.
Many apps, including Facebook, Twitter, and Facebook, do not let you download videos, even if they are living on your own account. Saving these videos usually requires a third-party app or screen recorder, which is inconvenient and can result in loss of quality. However, TikTok, the newish popular short-form video platform, makes it easy to download videos — even if they're not yours.
YouTube has a couple of basic gestures: you can double tap each half of the video to skip forward or back ten seconds, and you can swipe down to minimize the video. But wouldn't it be more useful if there were gestures to control brightness and volume? Well, as with all things Android, where there's a will, there's a way.
When Google finally gave us a dark theme for YouTube, it was a bit disappointing. They didn't use a pure black background, reducing some of the battery savings you'd get with an OLED panel. But with the help of another app, we can fix this, and not only get a real dark mode, but other colors as well.
Recently, buzz for the Google Pixel 4 has been rising thanks to a patent discovered by 91mobiles. This patent appears to show an almost bezel-less phone with a screen-to-body ratio we have only dreamt of, and no notch in sight. The problem is this isn't the Google Pixel 4. It's actually the Pixel 2 XL.
Despite being at the helms of the RCS push, Google Fi has yet to support the new messaging protocol. It would've made too much sense if the Google-created MVNO was one of the first to support the feature Google's been pushing on other OEMs and carriers for years, but alas, they haven't. Well, better late than never — Google has finally announced support for RCS Universal Profile on Fi.
Apple released iOS 12.1.3 beta 4 to software developers on Thursday, Jan. 10, just three days after beta 3 came out. Public beta testers also received the update. In general, iOS 12.1.3 fixes a VoiceOver issue with ECG and Irregular Heart Rate notifications, as well as a fix in audio quality on the latest iPad Pro models.
Despite the hype and potential of immersive computing, the augmented reality industry is showing that it is not invincible, as another AR hardware maker, this time Osterhout Design Group (ODG), is reportedly going out of business.
Apple released the iOS 12.1.3 developer beta on Monday, Jan. 7, and the iOS 12.1.3 public beta followed shortly behind. Apple has been pretty on point with its public beta releases for iPhone, always releasing the same day as the dev version unless it's the very start of a beta build (i.e., iOS 12.1.3 beta 1), in which case they come out a day later.
