Apple caught a lot of flak for removing the headphone jack in their iPhone 7 models, but they definitely got the last laugh when preorders with a delivery date of September 16 sold out within minutes. Headphone jack or not, the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus are still highly desirable products, and consumers have confirmed this by voting with their wallets.
It feels like forever, but the wait is almost over. In less than a week, everyone will be able to try out all the cool new features in Apple's new iOS 10. This new update will be available on September 13 to most iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch users via the "Software Update" section in Settings.
Among the many new changes ushered in by the iPhone 7, only one has the potential to completely change the way you interact with your smartphone—a new 3D Touch-enabled home button. Instead of the mechanical click we've grown accustomed to, your home button will now behave like the rest of the phone's touch screen interface.
Over the years, we've covered many different methods for enabling background playback for YouTube videos on Android, but none have ever been as easy as this: Simply watch the videos with Firefox for Android, and they'll continue playing when you leave the app.
When Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $19.3 billion back in 2014, we all knew this was coming—it just took longer than we thought. But starting today, the data mining became official, and now, information from your favorite messaging app is no longer out of reach for the world's biggest social media site.
We've been hearing rumors suggesting that the upcoming iPhone 7 would be announced a bit early this year—perhaps being unveiled as soon as September 7, with preorders opening up a day or two after.
We're inching closer towards the singularity—that point where technology advances to the steepest slope of the logistic function S-curve and simply skyrockets at a rate we've never seen before. Somewhere along the way, the line between humans and the tech we rely on will become blurred, and MIT's latest project might very well be a step in that direction.
Drones are popular little toys, but they're not the easiest things to control. While hand gestures may not change that too much, donning a HoloLens and flying a physical object with a wave of your hand at least makes the process feel a lot more like a telekinesis.
If you've ever wanted to live in the Matrix—or at least the iconic digital rain data visualization that Neo saw when realizing he was, indeed, the "one"—you can now do that with the Microsoft HoloLens. Just download The Red Pill.
With every flagship device they release, Samsung makes sure to add in at least a few little software goodies. Last year's Galaxy Note5 was no exception, because among other things, Samsung included a revamped version of their useful utility called Air Command that gave users quick access to tools and common functions with a small floating bubble.
Most newer Android devices manufactured in 2014 or later have a built-in pedometer for tracking your fitness activity. This step counter is a great way to keep yourself in shape and motivated, but developer Leonardo Cavaletti has come up with an even better way to put it to use.
Last year's inaugural Amazon Prime Day may have been a bit of a bust, but the online retail giant seems to be making up for it this year with some killer deals.
After a relatively short beta-testing period, Pokémon Go is now rolling out to Android and iOS devices right now. If you want to catch 'em all in the real world, your wait is over.
The internet has officially been taken over by GIFs—they're everybody's favorite method of communication these days, and nary a meme would exist without them. But even with the abundance of GIF-sharing websites, and even GIF keyboards, we're still a bit lacking in regard to creating GIFs on a mobile device.
Google's Chrome browser comes pre-loaded on the vast majority of today's Android devices, and it's one of the fastest, most stable, and useful browsers out there. But it does have one major annoyance—while a page is loading, you'll see a link, then reach to tap it, but an element further up the page will load, and the link will jump out from underneath your fingertip.
It looks as though Samsung will continue to tone down the look of TouchWiz, according to a leaked look at the newest "Grace" user interface for the upcoming Galaxy Note 7. HDblog, who acquired the leaked UI, shows off the beta version of the new skin in their video below.
If you have any group chats going, you're surely familiar with this scenario: One person sends a picture, then, within 30 seconds or so, all other participants chime in with one-word responses like "Cute," or "Awesome." It's a social nicety, so you have to expect this behavior, but that doesn't make it any less annoying when your phone randomly beeps and vibrates ten times in a row because of it.
We recently covered a set of ported apps from the new cloud-based smartphone, the Nextbit Robin. These ported APKs brought two of the Robin's slick new stock apps—Camera and Gallery—to any other device, but the launcher was conspicuously absent.
The beauty of Nexus devices is they receive firmware updates faster than any other Android phone, and keep getting updates for years longer than most of the competition. This means that you can always use the great new features that come along with an Android update, and even more importantly, your phone gets monthly security patches to keep hackers and malware at bay.
While Magic Leap and ILMxLABs blew the internet's collective mind with a mixed reality Star Wars game demo last week, it'll likely be awhile before we see either the game or the hardware that'll run it. In the meantime, you can get one of the most famous Star Wars holographic messages on the HoloLens: Princess Leia's message to Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Many apps and services that are available for Android can only work if they have access to your Google account. While you're setting up one of these apps, you'll see a popup that says something like "This app would like to access your Google account," and the options are "Accept" or "Cancel." Of course we tap "Accept" here to ensure that the app will work properly, but what are the long-term repercussions of doing that?
Several Samsung phones have a feature that turns the screen black and white when the battery is getting low. This takes advantage of the AMOLED display in these devices, because unlike red, green, and blue pixels, no battery power is used to display black pixels on this type of screen.
iPhone and iPad users are getting a huge update with iOS 10, and one of the biggest (and most sought after) redesigns is to the Music app, as shown at Apple's WWDC '16. The redesign essentially makes the user interface easier to navigate, which was something that was fairly clunky starting in iOS 8.4 when Apple Music was first released.
Apple unveiled huge improvements for Messages in iOS 10 at WWDC '16, and my favorite new feature is that searching for emojis will be much, much easier. But there's a lot more to this update besides emojis.
I was skeptical when I first heard about GifWidget, an Android widget that lets you place GIFs on your home screen. As much as I love GIFs, did I really need to see this, this, this, or this, or even this, forever repeating on my phone?
Rooted users have been able to remap their hardware buttons since the earliest days of Android, allowing them to change the functionality behind one of the most centralized methods of interacting with a phone or tablet. Up until now, however, non-rooted users have been left out in the cold, meaning these buttons could only perform the functions assigned to them by the device manufacturer.
Lenovo unveiled the latest Motorola smartphones, Moto Z and Moto Z Force, today at Tech World '16. As expected, both models include strong magnets on the back that allow users to snap on various Moto Mods attachments such as a battery pack, projector, or JBL speakers.
Apple's Live Photos is a cool feature that lets you turn ordinary pictures into a GIF-like animated photos. However, these images have some pretty big drawbacks: they live only in the iOS universe and can be shaky without a tripod.
Smartphones tend to struggle when it comes to recording video in low light situations. Danish phone manufacturer Lumigon included a good camera capable of shooting 4K video on its latest phone, The T3, but the real interest lies in the second camera, which is a dedicated night vision shooter.
When Hey Siri was first introduced in iOS 8, it was a pretty lackluster feature since you had to be plugged into a power source in order to even use it. Since then, newer devices (iPhone 6s, 6s Plus, SE, 9.7-inch iPad Pro) don't need to plug in to have always-on Siri, which makes the feature actually worthwhile—when it works.
We recently covered an app called Touch Controls for YouTube that allows you to swipe up or down on any YouTube video to quickly adjust volume levels or brightness. As awesome as that app is, commenters here and on our YouTube channel thought it was lacking one big feature—the ability to seek forward or backward in the video by swiping the screen.
The Unicode Consortium just unveiled 72 new emojis that will be included in the upcoming Unicode 9.0 release, but we're not here to talk about the winners. Instead, let's take a look at the five poor emojis that will have to wait until at least next year to join the Unicode roster.
The upcoming version of Android has already been made available to certain devices for beta testing, but we won't see the official release of Android Nougat until sometime later this year, maybe even sooner than expected. The trouble here is that Google has made it really hard to wait patiently, because they've basically just teased us with a massive visual overhaul to the world's biggest mobile operating system.
More proof is emerging that the iPhone 7 won't include a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and damn—it is not pretty. These third-party Lightning-to-3.5 mm dongles were spotted on Chinese site Tama, and they give us a glimpse into a horrifying future in which we have to attach one of these clunky monstrosities to an iPhone just to connect a set of standard headphones.
The iPhone's pinch-to-zoom feature lets you easily enlarge photos to focus in on one particular area a little better, but after you've zoomed in to a certain degree, the image quickly snaps back and prevents you from zooming in any further. This is mostly meant to keep you from zooming in too far and getting lost, but a lot of times, the max zoom level just isn't close enough.
The Moto X and Moto Z have a set of features that let you launch common shortcuts by shaking your phone in one direction or another. For instance, there's a chop gesture that turns on the LED flashlight, and a wrist-twist gesture that instantly opens the camera app.
When Android Nougat is released sometime this fall (or sooner), a new feature called "Quick Reply" will allow users to respond to incoming text messages directly from the notification. It will definitely be nice to carry on a conversation without leaving the screen you're currently viewing, but unfortunately, most of us won't get that Android Nougat update for quite some time.
If you're tired of Google tracking you, but love how Chrome works, CyanogenMod has you covered. Their browser is called Gello, which is based off Chromium, Chrome's open-source counterpart. It's basically a souped-up version of Chrome—without all of the intrusive Google stuff. So if you're uncomfortable with Google displaying personalized ads based on your browsing history, or using your location to bring the "Physical Web" to your phone, you won't have to worry about any of that with Gello.
There was a somewhat recent outbreak of malware on Android, and it came from an unlikely source—the Google Play Store. Several established apps have received updates a few months ago that contained an unwanted add-on called either DU Quick Charge, DU Battery Boost, DU Boost Charge, DU Speed Charge, DU Speed Booster, or another name starting with DU.
Google Play Music has teamed up with TripAdvisor to make planning your next vacation a little more fun, and they're throwing in a nice deal for good measure.