Preorders for the LG G6 have all been fulfilled, and the phone has been up for grabs at local cell phone providers for three weeks now. However, not every LG G6 was created and released equally. The T-Mobile variant of the LG G6 features an unlockable bootloader, while most ot ...more
Figuring out exactly which apps on your phone are eating through resources and battery life can be a difficult task. Though some information can be found in Android's battery menu, the charts and graphs provided here pale in comparison to what's offered by the GSam app. If you ...more
Perhaps one of CyanogenMod's greatest features was its built-in theme engine. It wasn't perfect, but it got the job done and gave users a unique look. Now that CyangenMod is defunct, and the developers behind its successor, LineageOS, have confirmed they won't be continuing th ...more
Final Fantasy XV, the latest release in the long-running Final Fantasy franchise, has been a massive success, shipping around 6 million copies worldwide in less than two months. Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire is a mobile game based off this popular console iteration, and has s ...more
Fans of rhythm tap games and traditional one-on-one fighters finally have something to bring them closer together. DuelBeats, a fighting game that lets you perform moves by tapping to the beat of a song, has been released as a soft launch for both iOS and Android in New Zealan ...more
Chinese search engine giant, Baidu, has just announced its own autonomous car platform which is intended to speed up the development of driverless vehicles. On Tuesday, the company launched Project Apollo, which provides a software and hardware solution to specific partners a ...more
Fans of fighting game series such as Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are in for a treat! Skullgirls has entered the crowded field of the mobile fighting genre and has touched down in the form of a soft launch for iOS devices, which is now available for download in Canada and ...more
Jam City's Panda Pop was a great success that helped millions of users waste vast amounts of precious time with its bubble-popping panda cuddliness. Not wanting to mess with success, Jam City has now simply re-skinned the game to feature all the beloved characters from Charles ...more
Tom Clancy games, like Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon: Wildlands, are famous for their realistic and immersive gameplay that focuses on covert, low-intensity warfare. Ubisoft now appears to be testing the overcrowded waters of mobile gaming with the release of ShadowBreak, and ha ...more
Netmarble's ChronoBlade, a mobile role-playing game, has made its way to iOS and Android by way of a soft launch that will make it exclusive to users in Canada and Singapore for a couple of months. Its console-quality graphics and extra features will surely make it a hit when ...more
The "Discover" tab in the latest version of the Google Home app has a new tip that says multiple users are now supported. Google Home uses a built-in speaker and microphone combo to give users access to smart search, a personal assistant, and smart home controls. This addition ...more
When Google added new security measures to Android Marshmallow, it had a lasting impact on the entire process of rooting. These measures prevent the the Superuser daemon (the process that handles requests for root access) from getting the permissions it needs to do its job at ...more
No one is safe anymore, it seems. Google's Project Zero has just uncovered how easy it is for attackers to target your phone's Wi-Fi chip, which is essentially a mini processor for Wi-Fi that detects and processes networks. Most iPhone and Android phones run on a Broadcom Wi- ...more
Great news, zombie killers! Zombie Gunship's long overdue sequel, Zombie Gunship Survival, has finally arrived for iOS and Android devices as a soft launch available for download in the Philippines—which means that with a little tinkering, you can play the new game in any coun ...more
Samsung's new personal assistant, Bixby, is making its debut on the Galaxy S8 and S8+. In addition to taking voice commands and performing visual searches, a new Hello Bixby feature predicts what you might want to do next with an integrated home screen feed. All of these featu ...more
We've all been hit by inopportune screen rotations at some point or another. Having the display orientation suddenly go from portrait to landscape when reading an interesting article in bed is one of the biggest irritations that come with using a smartphone (at least, for me). ...more
Just days after the first Android O preview build was released, the development community had already started bringing some of the exclusive features over to older Android versions. For instance, the Pixel Launcher received an update in Android O, and developer linuxct quickly ...more
Dynasty Warriors has finally been unleashed on the world of mobile gaming. The latest installment in the popular series is called Dynasty Warriors: Unleashed, and it sends you rampaging through armies using a variety of devastating attacks, all while collecting and upgrading o ...more
Baidu's self-driving car unit has had a tough week. Today, the company's leading artificial intelligence (AI) expert, Andrew Ng, announced in an optimistic blog post that he would be leaving the Chinese search engine company to pursue AI research on his own. This comes right ...more
If you're ever in a major accident or have a bout with acute onset health problems, first responders will need to know as much information about you in order to provide proper care. For this reason, paramedics and firemen have been trained to search a subject's cell phone to f ...more
The YouTube app for Android doesn't exactly offer the greatest user experience. For one thing, it opens to an arbitrary "Home" tab instead of your subscriptions, so you see a list of what YouTube thinks you want to watch instead of your favorite channels. In addition to that, ...more
The iPhone has a handy feature called AssistiveTouch that lets you quickly adjust volume, lock your screen, rotate your display, and even navigate through the phone's interface using a virtual home button. In a way, it's a lot like the on-screen navigation bar that you'll find ...more
Android apps check your system locale settings to determine which language they should display. For the most part, it's a seamless experience—except for those times when an app has not been translated into your language of choice, in which case the app will usually default to ...more
In this first part of our tutorial series on making physical objects come to life on HoloLens, we are going to set up Vuforia in Unity. I would plan to keep a Vuforia tab open in your web browser throughout most of this tutorial, and when developing in general, since Vuforia ...more
If you need to do some hardcore multitasking on your Windows PC, a second monitor can go a long way towards getting things done. If you opt to "extend" your Windows desktop across a dual monitor setup, it's as if you have two computers side by side, with each display getting i ...more
No matter which smartphone you buy, it will come with an internet browser preinstalled. Depending on your OEM, the default browser might be called Samsung Internet, HTC Internet, Silk Browser by Amazon, ASUS Browser, or Google Chrome—there's just so many stock browsers availab ...more
Metasploit is an extremely popular pentesting tool capable of enumeration, exploitation, and injecting shell code, and is a part of almost every hacking toolkit. So there's no way I could leave this out of our series on getting your Mac set up for hacking. Luckily for those o ...more
The Google Chrome browser for Android is packed with many great features, but it definitely has a bad rep for being slow and laggy on low-end or midrange devices. Without a top-notch processor, you'll likely notice some stutter with choppy scrolling, and pages can take too lon ...more
Starting with iOS 7, the iPhone has had a cool feature that lets you see upcoming calendar events right on your lock screen, and it only got better with iOS 10. Android used to have this feature with its lock screen widget system, but that was removed back in the Lollipop days ...more
YouTube has gotten so big over the years that it is now viewed by more 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the United States. But even though online video platforms continue to gain ground on traditional TV stations, there's one aspect to the viewing experience that live ...more
Many midrange phones are being manufactured without a gyroscope sensor—the Moto X Play, third-generation Moto G, and several of Samsung's Galaxy Grand models, among others. It's not exactly an essential smartphone sensor, and leaving this out keeps the phone's price point down ...more
You may not know what HTTP is exactly, but you definitely know that every single website you visit starts with it. Without the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, there'd be no easy way to view all the text, media, and data that you're able to see online. However, all communication b ...more
The only way to know which Pokémon are in your area in Pokémon GO is the cryptic "nearby" list, which sometimes doesn't work—and also doesn't tell you which direction to head off to hunt that Pokémon you're looking for. Luckily, there's a new app that makes it a lot easier to ...more
Pokémon GO has become a cultural phenomenon. Finally, we can do what we always dreamed of back when we were kids—catch Pokémon in real life! But let's not forget that we're in adulthood now, and in adulthood, we can catch Pokémon by day and celebrate our successes at night. I ...more
Several major web services—most notably Facebook—have horrendous Android apps that occupy way too much space and drain battery life at an alarming rate. Such issues have led to a new trend where third-party developers create minimalist "lite" apps that are essentially the mobi ...more
Our brains do a magnificent amount of work to process visual stimuli, but they aren't difficult to fool. Optical illusions can trick our minds into believing what we're seeing is real, even if it's not—and virtual and mixed reality technologies take advantage of this little lo ...more
If you're standing in a foreign city, surrounded by signage in a language you don't understand, you won't suddenly be able to read it. But with a clever feature in Google's Translate app, your smartphone can. The app began as Word Lens, an augmented reality (AR) project by Qu ...more
Automated bots are growing on Facebook Messenger, and while they can be helpful, they also have the potential to get very annoying, very quickly. That's because these bots are enabled by default to send you "sponsored messages," or, you know, spam. Unfortunately, there doesn' ...more
While it may not sound scary right off the bat, Blue Coat Systems now has an intermediate certificate authority. If you don't know what a certificate authority (CA) is, or who Blue Coat is, who cares, right? But you should... whether you use Mac or Windows. Blue Coat is notor ...more
Depending on your device, Android's power (aka restart) menu can range from utilitarian and boring to almost completely useless. Some devices don't even allow you to reboot, let alone reboot to recovery mode or Fastboot, and for such a centralized menu, the glaring lack of Mat ...more
GIFs are awesome, but GIFing from your keyboard is some next-level stuff, and Apple knows this. That's why they've included a way to find and send GIFs in Messages from the stock iOS 10 keyboard. However, iOS 10 is not out for the public just yet, so if you want to easily send ...more
Amazon has completely changed the way we purchase household items, to the point where many of us haven't visited a big box, brick-and-mortar store like Walmart or Best Buy in years. And when you think about it, all of this success comes down to two main factors—convenience and ...more
Over the course of the past year, a lot of Android apps have added pull-to-refresh functionality. It's a very useful and intuitive gesture, because all you have to do to refresh the page you're viewing is scroll to the top of the screen, then slide your finger down one more ti ...more
If you're looking to customize your Android beyond its stock options, things can get confusing quickly. One of the best places to get into developer mode is the XDA forums. XDA is home to hundreds of independent Android developers, all eager to showcase their wares. Everythin ...more
Android's personal assistant is more than just a sassy backtalker—it's a full-on suite of all the information you could need at a given time. Google Now, as it's called, uses data from various sources to predict what you'll want to know before you even search for it, and it's ...more
You gotta love Android—not only can you replace your default home screen entirely, but there are tons of options that provide alternative methods for launching apps with ease. We've covered some of these options in the past, including an app called Bar Launcher that lets you l ...more
If you've ever prematurely dismissed all of your push notifications before you got a chance to read each one, you know how annoying it can be to dig through all of your apps to try and find the one with the missed notification. Android does have a built-in notification histor ...more
Whether you're ready to admit it or not, we've all got our alter egos—especially when it comes to the internet. Perhaps you have one Facebook account that you use publicly, while maintaining a second account for more private interactions. But this isn't exactly the easiest th ...more
OS X is built upon a UNIX foundation, which grants you access to the benefits that UNIX offers, including the standard toolkit (make, gcc, clang, git, perl, svn, size, strings, id, and a lot more) via the command line developer tools, which are an essential if you're a develop ...more
If you've ever used the YouTube mobile app for Android or iOS, you've probably noticed a cool little multitasking feature it has. While watching any video, you can simply swipe down on your screen to shrink the video down to a thumbnail view, which then allows you to browse th ...more
If Android is all about options, then iOS is all about new features. Every year without fail, Apple announces a cool software component that brings something new to the table, and this year was no different. The headlining feature to go along with the iPhone 6s is called "Liv ...more
Because of Apple's iron grip over iOS, hiding stock applications is a topic we frequently like to cover. While not everyone may think that Apple's preinstalled iOS apps are bloatware, that's exactly what some of them are. For instance, the Apple Watch app; it's basically just ...more
Android has a built-in browser called WebView that any app can use, which makes it easy for developers to display webpages without actually having to build an internet browser into their apps. But WebView is a stripped-down, bare bones browser with no ties to Android's default ...more
School internet filters serve a valid purpose—they keep students from wandering off into the deep corners of the web while still allowing at least some internet access. But a lot of these restrictions are completely ridiculous, to the point where some school districts block ac ...more
We're near the end of a productive year for Apple, one that introduced a new Apple TV, the iPad Mini 4 (in conjunction with the Apple Pen), the iPad Pro, and the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, as well as iOS 9. Now, the second major update to iOS 9—version 9.2—has just been released t ...more
Hello null_byters, after some time out here we are again with another tutorial, continuing our beautiful series, today we will write our first real world bash script. BEFORE WE START Before we start today's lesson Let's recap what we learned in the previous lesson, right now ...more
BlackBerry has yet to find a home amongst the iPhone and popular Android phones, with sales plummeting over the last couple years, but this might be a thing of the past thanks to their latest device, the BlackBerry Priv. It has decent numbers so far and was even sold out on Am ...more
Android's Quick Settings menu is quite handy—just swipe down with two fingers from the top of your screen and you're ready to toggle several different system settings on or off. It got even better with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, since you can even use the hidden System UI Tuner ...more
With a slab-style touchscreen device, butt dialing is always going to be a problem. While you're moving about, your phone can unlock itself and give your most recent contact a ring, leading to an awkward one-sided conversation where the other person gets to eavesdrop on everyt ...more
With new messaging services being pushed out constantly, it can be a pain trying to keep track of them all on your Android device. We had previously shown how to stay on top of them all with a unified "inbox" app, but that still requires you to have each individual app install ...more