Purchasing an actual book from a brick-and-mortar store is becoming increasingly less common for people to do, but it hasn't completely gone out of style just yet. There's something about entering a bookstore and viewing all the potential great stories and epic tales just sitting on the shelves, waiting to be discovered.
Being fixated on all of the great additions to Android 5.0 Lollipop, it can be a little difficult to take notice in the features that went missing. For instance, lock screen widgets. It's speculated that the lack of practical use for lock screen widgets and the implementation of the revamped Lollipop lock screen may have lead to their departure, but some of us want them back!
NFC, or near-field communications, is a hardware feature that has been built into most Android phones for the last four years. It's essentially a low-power data connection that can be used to initiate a quick command by bringing your device within range of a compatible receiver, be it tap-and-pay with Google Wallet, a file transfer via Android Beam, or a Tasker profile triggered by a specific NFC tag.
Sitting at home alone on Friday night, I'm often in the mood to watch something more recent than the offerings on Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video. And since the demise of video rental stores, that leaves me with browsing through the Redbox catalogue, then strolling down to the nearest 7-Eleven to pick up my movie.
Android has plenty of features that provide multitasking support, which are especially useful on smartphones with larger screens. One such feature that I loved on the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 was the popup browser, which brought up a floating window whenever I opened a link inside of third-party apps like Facebook and Twitter.
Google's original messaging service got a nice version bump today. Hangouts now sports stickers, video chat filters, an updated Material Design interface, and a few new features that should make the service a little more fun and easy to use.
Android is all about customization: "Be together. Not the same," as Google's latest ads for the platform put it. Changing your device's boot animation, for instance, is one of the many great ways you can add a touch of personal flair.
Before you head to class, work, or sleep, you're probably doing the same thing over and over again—toggling off system settings like Wi-Fi, sound, data, or brightness, depending on the circumstances. Schedules and routines can help increase efficiency, so while you abide to a particular schedule, so should your Android.
As competition for Spotify and Pandora, Samsung released Milk Music earlier in 2014, a free music streaming service for their Android devices. While Milk was unique to Galaxy owners only, it was popular enough that we showed you ways to get it on non-Galaxy devices as well.
Google has already started to roll out the over-the-air update of Android 5.0 Lollipop to older Nexus series phones and tablets, but chances are it will take a long time for the OTA to hit your device.
Whether you're in a movie theater, driving, or just want to temporarily unplug from the grid, you need to ignore or completely silence your phone. You'll still receive calls and texts during this time, but in a world where people expect instant gratification, you'll end up looking like a jerk who doesn't answer back.
With the Power key located on the back of the device, LG included a convenient "double-tap to sleep" function in their G2 and G3 devices. The function allows users to simply double-tap the display to put their device to sleep instead of picking it up and pressing the Power key.
As smartphones become increasingly integral parts of our lives, so does data throttling. Personally, I try to save data any way that I can, so to stave off unnecessary usage, I use the GoogleOfflineVoice to limit the amount of data consumed by voice typing.
Accumulating approximately one million downloads on the Google Play Store in less than 72 hours from its initial release, TouchPal instantly became a favorite among Android users.
Contrary to what you may think, clearing or swiping away apps in the Recent Apps view on your Android device does not necessarily stop app activity or running tasks—and these running processes can actually be eating away at your battery life. Depending on the app or process, it may only be a small percentage, but every little bit helps these days.
Creating interesting photographs used to be more fun, before we all collectively decided that color filters and rotations qualified as "unique" smartphone pics. Scrolling through my Instagram feed only confirms that these supposedly special, filter-laden photos are actually the norm now.
Most Android devices allow you to simply replace a ZIP file in your /system/media folder if you want to change your boot animation. Unfortunately, though, this isn't the case for the Galaxy S5, as it's been buried deep in Samsung's TouchWiz skin.
Your Galaxy S5 is jammed to the brim with all sorts of electronic sensors. These are capable of reading humidity levels, ambient temperature, air pressure, and much more. Yet, while this data is constantly being collected by your phone, there aren't any built-in apps that are capable of displaying much of it.
When you misplace your Android device, finding it with the Android Device Manager, or even better, Whistle Me, can help you find it no problem. But what about when your phone is not just hiding under the couch cushions? Your worst nightmare just came true. It's officially gone.
HTC has made it their mission to get updates out to its devices as quickly as possible, with new builds slated for release 90-days after Google finalizes a build—this is dubbed HTC Advantage.
Maybe it is narcissistic to take selfies, but it has become a socially accepted norm, no matter how stupid you might look doing it. Since so many people are seemingly in love with themselves and mobile photography, I thought it was about time to show you how to step up your selfie game.
There are a gazillion app switchers on the market, and some are really awesome, like Edge, GloveBox, Loopr, and Switchr, to name just a few. However, these can all be a little bit more complicated and cumbersome than necessary when I just want to switch back to the last app I was in.
Android uses a set of permissions that apps can request to perform certain actions, and you're notified of these permissions each time you install an app. The problem here is the fact that you aren't given any built-in way to deny apps these permissions (although Danny just showed a workaround for this).
If hearing the names of classic PC games like Commander Keen, Fallout, Master of Orion, and Wolfenstein 3D send you into a fit of nostalgia, then DosBox Turbo is the perfect app for your Android device.
Remember the good old days of Winamp? It was one of the first mainstream media players to support music visualizations, graphics with intricate designs that react to the tempo and pitch of the audio playing.
Screen timeouts serve mostly as security measures and energy savers, but they can also interrupt you when you're reading a book or editing a document. There is no built-in way to manage screen timeouts on a per-app basis, but if you've got root access, you can do just that using Never Sleep from Android dev Hamzah Malik.
The beauty of having a Google Play Edition HTC One is the ability to get as close to stock Android as possible while still getting some extra non-Google, proprietary HTC features. The newest version of Android, 4.4.3, has just hit the Nexus and Google Play Edition line of phones, but if you are rooted with a custom recovery, you will not be able to apply the OTA.
According to a recent survey conducted by Edison Research and Statista, Pandora still has a firm grasp as the most popular music streaming service in the United States. With iHeartRadio, iTunes Radio, and even Spotify trailing behind by a large margin, it doesn't look like Pandora will lose their footing in the near future.
As the world becomes increasingly more connected, there's been a rise in translation solutions. Whether it's Google Translate or Word Lens, there is an ever-growing need to understand and be understood, no matter what your native tongue is. There are plenty of extensions you can add to your computer that can translate text on-the-fly, but what about your phone?
According to T-Mobile's website, an Android version bump is due out today. While details of specific changes are sparse, the support documentation for Nexus devices very clearly notes a release date of June 2nd for the software. Sprint may have jumped the gun with its own outing of a 4.4.3 update about a month ago, but all indications point towards today's date marking the beginning of a staged-rollout from Google.
For the most part, Google Play Music makes it extremely easy to upload and organize your music library, as well as access it quickly using the default settings—but there are a few things it could do better.
Numbers are everywhere in life, and some are better at doing the math than others. Unless you're Gert Mittring, it's safe to say you use the calculator app on your tablet just as much as I do, and it's often disrupting your other tasks.
Utility tool apps provide extremely powerful and useful lightweight replacements for your parents' heavy archaic tools—everything from flashlights to tracking systems and more.
The little black status bar at the top of your screen is great for at-a-glance info, but let's face it—it's pretty ugly. If you want to hide it completely, only showing it when you need it, check out our guide on using Immersive Mode in KitKat. However, if you want to keep the at-a-glance convenience and have it blend in with your apps, try out Tinted Status Bar.
Like most of you, I find myself scrolling through endless lists of Facebook feeds, Instagram lists, and tweets. Most of the time, it's a pain to scroll all the way back up to the top. Unlike iOS devices, Android has never had a solution to quickly scrolling to the top of a list in an app, but now with a simple Xposed mod, that hole has been filled.
Android devices are awesome, let me just state that now, but when iOS 7 came out, the new flat theme caught my eye. Yes, we can easily apply new themes on our Nexus 7 tablets to make it look more like iOS 7, but they won't actually change the individual look and feel of apps like Instagram.
Scrolling through Instagram, you're going to come across a lot of photographs and videos that you "like." But sometimes, you're going to want to remember a photo, and naturally want to save it to your device so you can look at it for forever and ever.
Android 4.4 KitKat has begun rolling out for the Galaxy Note 3 in India, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, and several other countries, and an unofficial build for AT&T customers has been leaked for all of us stateside.
If you have an older Samsung Galaxy Y smartphone, one thing you should be doing is using an microSD or microSDHC memory card to help improve your Android's processing speed and make it easier to transfer large or small files easily. These cards are also compatible with certain cameras and can be inserted into some computers. While all this is all good and well, you'll still need to know how and where to put your SD card in order to indulge in any of these benefits. Your Samsung Galaxy Y (the ...
To say that there are a lot of app switchers and launchers available is an understatement. We've covered a few ourselves, including Loopr and Switchr. But why not check out one more?