If you're in the market for a new smartphone and want nothing but the best of the best, now's the time to act. Some of the greatest phones money can buy are being released as we speak, while others are still in their prime and will continue to be for most of 2024. Whether you want an iPhone or Android, we've rounded up the best picks you have to choose from for top-of-the-line specs and advanced features.
Many of the iPhone 15, 15 Plus, 15 Pro, and 15 Pro Max features were carried over from last year's models. Still, quite a few capabilities are exclusive to the 2023 lineup, and some may be worth the upgrade.
Magic Eraser was one of Google's big selling points for the Pixel 6 and 7 series smartphones, and it's finally made its way to other Android devices. It's even available on iPhone and iPad with the latest Google Photos app.
If you're not using your iPhone's Files app yet to manage images, documents, and other files on iCloud, third-party cloud services, or your local storage, it's time to start. Apple's built-in file manager is finally a powerhouse with many tricks up its sleeve in the latest software update.
It's super easy to add filters, adjust levels, and crop images using the default photo editor on your smartphone, but there's rarely any built-in tool for removing the background in a photo. A third-party app can help isolate people and objects in your pictures, and we've found a free one that's easy to use, works with high-resolution images, and is available for Android, iOS, iPadOS, and the web.
During its annual autumn keynote address, Apple didn't move heaven and earth. Instead, the company pushed the envelope ever so slightly forward for its marquee consumer devices.
The enterprise applications powering the adoption of the HoloLens 2 are only just ramping up as developers continue to work with the still relatively new hardware.
If Pandora is your primary music app on your iPhone, you know it can be frustrating to use with Siri. The digital assistant always wants to use Apple Music instead, so you need to specify that you want to play through Pandora with almost every request. That's now a thing of the past because iOS 14.5 allows you to set Pandora as your Siri's preferred music player.
For the first time in twenty years, Apple created its own custom font in late 2014. Dubbed "San Francisco," it combined elements from Helvetica and FF DIN to create a crisp, elegant, and highly legible font that is now used in iOS, macOS, and tvOS.
It's not just iPhones. The entire smartphone market these days has a reputation for being expensive. Many flagship smartphones are advertised at $1,000 minimum. Looking for more storage space, or an extra camera or two? That price continues to rise. However, you don't need to take out a mortgage to buy a quality iPhone. In fact, when it comes to reasonable prices, you have more options than ever.
Samsung's lineup of Galaxy Note devices for 2020 include the specs-behemoth Galaxy Note 20 Ultra and the slightly more cost-effective Galaxy Note 20. Excuse the pun, but there's a lot to unpack here in terms of unique features and hardware.
Samsung uses their own SamsungOne font for their Galaxy lineup. But if you're coming from an iPhone or another Android device, you might not love it. With the help of this mod, however, you're sure to find a font that's right for you.
There was a period when Google knew they were switching to gesture navigation, but felt users weren't quite ready for it. The result was Android 9's two-button nav bar that you could both tap and swipe. Android 10 has since brought full-on gestures, and that's the version the Pixel 4 shipped with, so it never had that quirky, fun two-button setup. But you can bring it back, so to speak.
After facing reports of financial troubles over the past month, Magic Leap came out swinging this week with a big push for the enterprise segment of AR, including a repackaged Magic Leap 1, a suite of enterprise apps, and updates to Lumin OS and its supporting development ecosystem. Oh, and its AR headset managed to win a starring role in the marketing juggernaut for the forthcoming Star Wars movie.
When Facebook launched its first hardware products last year, the Portal and Portal+ smart displays, the company mostly touted its video-calling features as it faced off against Amazon and its Echo Show.
While iOS 13 introduces over 200 new features for your iPhone, one of the biggest focuses this year is Photos and Camera. The update completely overhauls the Photos app, creating a more organized and natural way to interact with your pictures and videos. You'll also find a few new tricks in the Camera app. In all, Apple has added over 30 new features to your shooting, editing, and viewing experience.
They're finally here. Apple revealed the brand new iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max on Sept. 10, and despite the questionable names, these are the best iPhone models money can buy. If you're looking to get your hands on one of these devices as soon as possible, there are few important dates you need to know.
QR codes are everywhere, from product packaging to airline boarding passes, making the scanners that read them a juicy target for hackers. Thanks to flaws in many of these proprietary scanning devices, it's possible to exploit common vulnerabilities using exploits packed into custom QR codes.
Here at Next Reality, our typical approach to all things augmented reality involves vision combined with remote control, either via a handheld device, gaze control, or hand/finger tracking.
The Pixel 3a came out of nowhere and flexed its muscles to show the industry that you can have a great phone without a hefty price tag. Since Pixel smartphones are first-party devices straight from Google, you can be sure you'll have root access one way or another. For right now the method used to get your Pixel 3a rooted will take a few steps, but they go by real quick.
Apple released iOS 12.3, the latest version iOS 12 for iPhone, on May 13. Great features to know about include Apple TV Channels such as HBO and Showtime that you can subscribe to in the TV app, support for audio, image, and video streaming to AirPlay 2-enabled TVs, and the ability to use Apple Pay to pay for content and subscriptions inside Apple's own apps.
During the Google I/O 2019 keynote, the latest Android Q Beta was released to the public for Pixel smartphones along with 15 other non-Pixel devices. It's the third Developer Preview for Android 10, but it's the first official public beta outside of Google's Pixel smartphones. A new public beta means good things are on the way as the future of Android continues to evolve.
Smartphones have put an end to camcorders. If you want to capture memorable moments in high quality, look no further than that technological marvel in your pocket. Recent Galaxy phones are shining examples of how far we've come — but the more capable a camera gets, the more complicated things can be.
What does mainstream augmented reality look like? I'm not talking about the stuff you see in concept videos and science fiction films. No. What does it really look like?
For lack of a better word, a missing iPhone sucks. Not only do you lose a physical device that cost you a small fortune, but there's also the probability you'll never see your precious data again. Hackers and thieves might, just not you. To keep this from ever happening, there are preventative measures you should take, and the sooner you do them the better.
With Unc0ver, Pwn20wnd was the first to jailbreak an iPhone and iPad running iOS 12 versions. While it initially couldn't work on all devices, it's an entirely different story now. Unc0ver currently works up to iOS 13.5 for most A7 to A13-powered devices. Plus, Chimera, another jailbreak tool, supports a similar range of models on iOS 12 to 12.3 and iOS 12.4.
The latest film addition in the American-produced Millennium series, The Girl in the Spider's Web, was just released on Blu-ray a few days ago. As you could expect, the movie has many hacking scenes throughout, just like the previous English and Swedish language movies centered around hacker Lisbeth Salander. Of course, with the quick pace of some scenes, the hacks can be hard to follow.
A rainbow table can be thought of like a dictionary, except instead of words and their definitions, it holds combinations of characters on one side and their hashed form on the other. What is a hash and why would you want to know what random combinations of characters are hashed into?
There's never been a better time for streaming videos on your phone. With so many options available (including a potential mobile-only Netflix tier) and so many new smartphones having large screens, there's a good chance you know someone who mainly use their phone for videos. And if you looking for a gift for them, there are some great options.
Everyone from first responders to hotel cleaning staff use radios operating in the sub-megahertz range to communicate, often without even encoding the transmission. While encoding and encryption are increasingly used in radio communication, an RTL-SDR adapter and smartphone are all it takes to start listening in on radio conversations happening around you.
While many are familiar with Samsung, I'm pretty sure most Americans couldn't name the second-largest smartphone OEM. It's actually Huawei, and they recently released a spec-sheet dream of a phone in the Mate 20 Pro. So naturally, we wanted to see how it compared to the largest OEM's best offering.
While the iPhone XS actually comes with a smaller battery than the iPhone X, Apple claims it, along with the XS Max and XR, offer users longer battery life than last year's first Face ID model. While that may be true, your new iPhone still ships without meeting its full battery-saving potential. There are, however, steps you can take to make sure your X, XS, XS Max, or XR makes it from morning until night.
For anyone using open source information to conduct an investigation, a balance between powerful tools and privacy controls are a must. Buscador is a virtual machine packed full of useful OSINT tools and streamlined for online research. This program can easily be set up in VirtualBox, and once that's done, we'll walk you through some of the most useful tools included in it.
To please those of us who love to mod and root our Androids, OnePlus has made both the OnePlus 5 and 5T relatively easy to customize — so much so that the 5T topped our list for the best phones for rooting. Unfortunately, unlocking the bootloader and using root to modify the firmware on your OnePlus 5 or 5T makes it hard to update to a new firmware such as Oreo when compared to stock.
Augmented reality is beginning to leak out into the mainstream world. This is thanks, in part, to ARKit and ARCore. These releases turned the current smartphones owned by millions of Apple and Android users into AR-capable machines. And while there are definitely some awesome use cases for mobile AR, the real future in AR is headworn.
Apple released the iOS 11.2 update for the iPhone to the masses early morning on Dec. 2, and here are all the new features and important bug fixes you need to know about.
As smartphone users, we live in dangerous times. The value of phones continues to rise, making them prime targets for thieves. In 2015, the FCC estimated that one million phones are stolen each year, and with several devices starting to hit the $1,000 mark now, these numbers are sure to rise. But what do you do if you fall victim to phone theft?
Google just bought a huge chunk of HTC for $1.1 billion. They're bringing in around 2,000 employees, mostly from the hardware division, and these folks will presumably work under hardware chief Rick Osterloh. There's a massive patent portfolio involved, too, so stop me if you've heard this before — Motorola, anyone?
Are you interested in video editing, but have no background in it? Are you looking to put together a short from some clips you've shot, but don't know where to start? You could use iMovie, an application that comes free with every iPhone, but then what would you do on Android? There must be a universal solution that works across both iOS and Android to let you work however and wherever you like.
While some researchers look for drugs to treat HIV, other scientists delve deep into the virus itself for answers on how it causes infections.
