While photography usually gets all the love, our phones have gotten really good at capturing video. Think about it — when was the last time you needed a camcorder for a vacation? With mobile cameras getting better each year, we're now at a point where smartphones can be used f ...more
A lot of people still trust their web browsers to remember every online account password for them. If you're one of those users, you need to adopt a more secure way of managing passwords, because browser-stored passwords are hacker gold mines. With a USB Rubber Ducky and physi ...more
Android's settings menu is actually pretty daunting. There are options for nearly everything, so in the sea of various menus and submenus, it's easy to overlook important privacy and security settings. On Google's Pixel phones in particular, there are 20 such settings that you ...more
Streaming movies and TV shows on phones is more popular today than ever, but what about when you're on a plane, have a limited data plan, or will be in a no-service area? You'll want to download your movies and TV shows instead. While Netflix is excellent, you can't rent or do ...more
For many, phones are starting to replace televisions as the primary device for watching videos. Thanks to their portability and easy to use apps, it's often simpler to watch Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, or Prime Instant Video on the smaller screen. But not every phone is suited to ...more
You can mod every aspect of your phone's software with root, but if you want to make changes at the hardware level, you'll need a custom kernel. If you've looked into custom kernels before, one name undoubtedly kept coming up: ElementalX. It's easily the best custom kernel out ...more
There's always an iPhone in our list of top phones for privacy and security, due in large part to advanced security measures like Face ID, consistent iOS updates, and easy ways to prevent unwanted access and excessive data sharing. However, some of those options actually do th ...more
One of Android's biggest strengths is its flexibility. There's usually more than one way to perform the same task, which makes it easy to find an alternate method that works better for you. Android also has some hidden features that newer users might not be aware of, so we mad ...more
The Play Store hasn't been the most secure place for apps lately. A quick Google search for "Play Store malware" will give you a taste of some of the malicious apps that snuck their way onto Android's official app store. Google is aware of the problem and they're tying to fix ...more
Privacy and security go hand in hand, especially for smartphones. When it comes to privacy, you decide what personal information about yourself is out there to discover. Security, on the other hand, is all about enforcing those privacy decisions. Sometimes privacy and securit ...more
It always looks different when it's not about you. The Internet is our world's Alterego. Those many bits don't really make sense unless we want them to be valuable, to mean something. Our rush to the future is too fast to keep up with. Denying technology is ignorance, isolat ...more
Apple previewed new cognitive, speech, and vision accessibility tools for the iPhone back in May, and they've finally been realized with the iOS 17 release. But there are more accessibility features than that hiding in Apple's latest software update — and they're not just for ...more
It hasn't been long since Apple released iOS 16.0 with over 350 new features, but iOS 16.1 just came out with even more cool updates for your iPhone. While some of the recent upgrades were expected, others are somewhat surprising — and there's even one that you may not even th ...more
Apple's latest iPhone and iPad software, iOS 15.5 and iPadOS 15.5, became available on May 16, so you can download and install it right now if you haven't already. While there aren't as many new features as iOS 15.4 and iPadOS 15.4 had, there are a few big ones in the U.S. you ...more
Mobile gaming has exploded in recent years, with experts predicting 2.4 billion global mobile players by the end of 2019. It already accounts for 47% of the worldwide gaming market, besting console and PC. No wonder we've seen the rise of gaming smartphones, a class of phones ...more
Your phone's keyboard is one of the most commonly used apps. Whether you're typing out status updates, sending private messages, or just bombarding everyone in sight with as many emoji as you possibly can, you probably couldn't get by without a good keyboard app. Since Androi ...more
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 centere ...more
Even though most phones don't have Oreo yet, Google has released Android 9.0 Pie. It's available on Google's own Pixel devices, and updates should soon be available to partnered devices from Essential, Nokia, Oppo, Sony, Vivo, and Xiaomi. We're already digging into it to highl ...more
Sometimes I forget that I'm also a fiction writer, so I thought it might be a nice change of pace to share one of my stories with you. I wrote this piece awhile ago for an anthology that never came together and I'm tired of just sitting on it. It's one of the more odd stories ...more
Your iPhone's Messages app has some impressive new features and changes with iOS 17, and you've probably already noticed some of them just by using the updated app. But there are less apparent features, even hidden ones, that have likely eluded you that you're going to want to ...more
It can be very frustrating: You open your Messages app, send an iMessage, and then see that dreaded red exclamation point or horrible green SMS bubble. At this point, you may be curious whether it's just your iPhone or whether iMessage is broken for everyone, but how do you fi ...more
When iOS 14 was released, the "Favorites" widget, which provided quick access to your most-used contacts, was nowhere to be seen. There's a workaround that brings it back via the Shortcuts app, but the original Favorites widget was better all around. For those of you looking f ...more
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. These are the first smartphones wit ...more