Chromecasts can make for some fun nights. Whether you're setting up a collaborative YouTube watch list, letting everyone add to a giant party playlist, or playing games like Cardcast and Big Web Quiz, Google's streaming media stick is a hit by all accounts.
At $349 off contract, the Nexus 5 has always been one of the best bang-for-your-buck smartphones on the market. In order to keep the price that low, however, Google had to pass up on some of the minor features that other flagship phones offer.
Notifications are an integral part of our day-to-day smartphone usage. They allow us to easily see and act upon all of the latest information that comes our way. Well, most of the time, that is.
With Nexus devices already enjoying Android 5.0 Lollipop, most other manufacturers are scrambling to get their flagships updated to Google's latest operating system. While HTC has promised Lollipop by the end of 2015, OEMs such as Motorola and Sony have already issued updates to their latest models. Then there's Samsung.
Keeping a close eye on your device storage can be a 24/7 job, especially if you're space is filling up and your device doesn't have SD card support. No matter how close of an eye you keep on it, there are always going to be apps updating databases, adding to their cache, and deleting old files.
Many reminder apps offer various bells and whistles that make them overly complicated to use when all you want to do is one or two things. If the only things you care about doing are setting quick reminders and adding timers, you probably don't care about cloud syncing or calendar integration features.
While the new Google Inbox is currently invite-only, if you were able to snag one, you'll want to learn the best ways to navigate it. Google Inbox coins itself as "The inbox that works for you," and after a brief run through of it, we think it's definitely living up to that slogan.
Google continues to be the most commonly-used search engine for a reason. While continuing to stay ahead of the pack with advanced semantic search functions, Google even introduced Knowledge Graph results that offer key information without ever having to click a search result.
Reminding a spouse or roommate to pick up some last-minute groceries is typically done with a quick message that can easily go unnoticed or unseen. Your feeble attempt of a reminder won't work unless it's conveniently sent at the right moment, like when they're on their way home. Chances are, you'll forget to text them and they'll forget the earlier reminder you sent.
We're living through the technological revolution, and while devices like the iPhone 6 or Galaxy S5 have made life easier and more entertaining, it's possible that sometimes our smartphone usage can become uncomfortably excessive. In your own experience, think about how anxious and off you feel when you leave your phone at home—Cell Phone Separation Anxiety or Phantom Phone Vibrations shouldn't be a real thing that we deal with.
At the end of an all-day affair with friends or family, I'll unwind and go through all the pictures I took that day as a sort of recap. All too often, though, I'll come across a few that are almost perfect, except I didn't quite position my phone well enough, leaving someone's face cutoff or too much space to one side of the image. It's a fail of a basic and crucial tenet of photography—framing.
There are those who hold their phone or set it down when they're not using it, and others, like myself, who pocket it. If you're like me and are rocking the pants pocket fade, then you'll love the new Android app I found.
The updates keep coming for iOS 8, and we've got our hands on the developer release of iOS 8.1, currently in beta, which was released shortly after the iOS 8.0.2 update (and 8.0.1 failure) for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.
Extensibility is a feature that allows developers to integrate their apps into iOS 8 in different ways—that's how we have widgets in the Notification Center, more sharing options in the Photos app, the use of third-party keyboards such as SwiftKey, and more.
Many Android games use large, storage-heavy OBB files to store supplemental data. Generally, games with high-end graphics download these extra files when you install them from the Google Play Store.
When your iPhone can't be found, Find My iPhone is a true lifesaver. When you use the feature, you can ping your iPhone and even see its current location on a real-time map. But what happens when your iPhone runs out of battery? Find My iPhone can't locate a dead iPhone, can it? You might be surprised to know it can, to a certain degree.
Unless you're waiting in line for your iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus, it's a sure bet that you'll be sitting by at home for your new device to get delivered today.
Don't hit that button yet! I know that everyone is eager to update to iOS 8 as soon as humanly possible, but when it comes to enabling iCloud Drive, you need to wait.
As hilarious and fun as group messages can be on your iPad or iPhone, they can also be equally annoying. You may not necessarily want to leave a group message thread, but you don't want to be bothered by notification after notification as participants in the conversation continue to send out rapid-fire texts. Thankfully, one of iOS 8's new features now makes it extremely easy to mute notifications from specified conversation threads, single or group.
In certain situations, it can be a little difficult to get a handle on my exact location when others ask where I am or how to get to me. Now, thanks to one of the newly introduced features on iOS 8, I can easily share my exact location with friends, right from within the Messages app on my iPhone.
Anytime you surf the web on your iPad or iPhone, Safari saves which webpages you visit, the information you enter into them, and other types of data. This not only make your internet experience quicker, but it'll also keep track of everything you're doing.
There are a ton of great new features in iOS 8, and one of the most interesting (and perplexing) ones is called "Family Sharing."
There's a feature that debuted in iOS 7 that lets you to save your credit or debit card information in Safari so that you can auto-fill text boxes when purchasing something online. Unfortunately, you still had to manually fill in your card info the first time, and if you wanted to disable the feature for security concerns, it was entirely useless.
Straight out of the box, the Nexus 5 is an awesome device, but even it can be faster with better battery life. Luckily, one of the things that makes it so awesome is that there are tons of developers creating mods for it, since it runs stock Android by default. When it comes to gaining speed and better battery life, flashing a custom kernel is the way to go.
As soon as you plug a set of headphones into a Samsung Galaxy series device, a bar pops up in the notification tray that lets you select from a list of "recommended apps" for earphones. It's a convenient little feature that shows the apps you're most likely to use based on previous activity.
Normally, it's good to automatically update your apps to the latest version, but sometimes those updates take away features that you've grown to love.
Whether you are just starting or returning to college, or have already been out in the real world for some time, it's always a good idea to stay on top of your game by keeping your intellect sharp. While it may be easy to just sit in front of your TV, watching reruns of The Big Bang Theory, why not use that time to brush up on some chemistry, calculus, or general learning strategies?
The first thing we usually do with a new smartphone is download apps, and lots of them. There are your must-have games, utility apps, and of course—the free daily "app of the day" from Amazon. If you're like me, you'll install every single one of these free apps, and whether they get used or not, they'll be waiting in the app drawer.
Emoji are great for conveying your exact emotion or mood in a text message, but GIF animations are even better. They're convenient, hilarious, and they accomplish so much more than a little icon or photo ever could.
Last week, I showed off a deeply buried accessibility feature built into iOS 7 and 8 that lets you disable screen touches in certain apps. While useful for many reasons, I found it most helpful for preventing nosy family and friends from swiping through the Camera Roll when showing them a photo.
The new OnePlus One packs a 3,100 mAh battery that promises to last all day and night. While that will work for most, some of us don't quite know how to put our phone down and save some juice.
I regularly use iTunes on my home laptop and my work desktop forty-five traffic minutes away. I'm ashamed to admit it, but until recently, I'd been saving my iTunes library on a USB and transferring it back and forth, over and over again, between the two computers.
Resflux is an Xposed mod developed by Julian Paolo Dayag, aka WisdomSky, that provides users with a straightforward and functional way to customize and theme almost every aspect of the packages (apps and system components) installed on their Android device.
Android L hasn't made its official release yet, but if you installed the early release using the Windows or fastboot method, you may have noticed some minor inconveniences, like the lack of a battery percentage icon and the absence of a Clear All option in your notification tray.
Google announced Android L to the masses at their I/O event, and with it they introduced their new "Heads Up" notification system. These notifications are part of the new Material Design UI and are sure to change the way we interact with notifications on our devices.
Replacing your wallpaper is one of the easiest and quickest things you can do to keep your device from going stale, but it goes way beyond just picking an image from your gallery. If you use the Google Camera, you can create some really awesome 3D lens blur backgrounds, but what if you want more wallpapers on your wallpaper?
Over the course of the past few years, many websites have begun offering up a mobile-friendly HTML 5 version of their content. Videos that once required Adobe's Flash can now be played on any modern mobile web browser.
Mobile carriers have been the bane of my existence for as long as I've had a phone. First, they take away unlimited data, and then when you try and switch carriers, they hold your phone hostage for a up to a week before unlocking it from their network.
Facebook will let you do pretty much anything via a text message, but unless you still have a flip phone, it's more of a novelty than actually useful.
Gaining major consumer support and the ire of Big Cable, Aereo today announced support for the Chromecast through it's Android app. A revolution for cord-cutters, Aereo lets you record and stream live broadcast TV on your computer, smartphone, tablet, or media streaming player (Apple TV, Roku, and now Chromecast).
