Smartphones
How to Make Your Smartphone Photos So Much Better
Smartphone cameras and the software that automatically processes the images have become so good at creating fantastic photos on the fly that most people don’t even carry a separate camera anymore (well, except for some Gen Z-ers going retro). There are plenty of apps that can slap a filter on a picture to make it […]
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The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera
Last spring, Anthony Tabarez celebrated prom like many of today’s high schoolers: dancing the night away and capturing it through photos and videos. The snapshots show Mr. Tabarez, 18, and his friends grinning, jumping around and waving their arms from a crowded dance floor. But instead of using his smartphone, Mr. Tabarez documented prom night […]
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4 iPhone and Android Tricks You May Not Know About
This summer marks 15 years since Apple released the first iPhone, and since then, smartphones have become the Swiss Army knives of technology. But with the avalanche of updates since 2007, less-obvious features are often buried in the process. Here’s a quick look at some possibly overlooked tools, shown here in iOS 15 and Android […]
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The Default Tech Settings You Should Turn Off Right Away
There’s a catchy saying going around with a valuable lesson about our personal technology: The devil is in the defaults. The saying refers to the default settings that tech companies embed deep in the devices, apps and websites we use. These settings typically make us share data about our activities and location. We can usually […]
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So Much Tech. So Few Winners.
We know that in the 15 years since the iPhone went on sale, technology has seeped into every crevice of our lives. Tech has reshaped politics, industries, leisure time, culture and people’s relationships to one another — for better and for worse. The march of technology has also come with this puzzling reality: Hardly any […]
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In a Post-Roe World, the Future of Digital Privacy Looks Even Grimmer
Some location data analytics companies, including Foursquare, recently announced that they were restricting the use, sharing and sale of data on consumers’ visits to sensitive locations like reproductive health clinics. But law enforcement agencies with warrants may still obtain such location records. The phone carriers that operate the backbone of the wireless internet for smartphones […]
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The Rise of the 0.5 Selfie
Julia Herzig, a 22-year-old from Larchmont, N.Y., has “an obsession.” It’s with taking a new kind of selfie — one that doesn’t exactly conform. In some of these selfies, Ms. Herzig’s forehead bulges across half of the frame. Her eyes are half disks, peering up at something beyond the camera. Her nose juts out. Her […]
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App Rules Are Twisted to Absurdity
Apps have become a huge economy, but the rules that govern them are nearly impossible to understand. Apple and Google have twisted their decade-old rules for their app stores like a pretzel to the point where they may no longer make sense. This has made buying digital stuff in apps convoluted as heck. One example: […]
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What Europe’s Universal Charger Mandate Means for You
Most of us own multiple types of chargers to replenish our devices. That’s because many products, like Apple phones and Microsoft Surface computers, are plugged in with wires that use unique connectors. Soon, that may no longer be the case. This month, the European Union announced a mandate that will require all new portable devices […]
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