Technical Hits

Tis the season for kicking back, crankin' up the fireplace, and finding some time-saving new tricks for that pretty slab o' glass in your pocket. Enhanced efficiency is one heck of a holiday treat, after all — and one that keeps paying off for months to come. Hey, productivity matters, and there's never a shortage of fresh Android shortcuts and enhancements just waiting to be embraced. In case you missed any of 'em the first go-round or maybe just didn't have time to try everything out, here are some of my favorite Android tips and tricks from 2017. Pour yourself some cocoa, polish up the ol' Festivus pole, and give yourself the gift of finely tuned technology. Best of all? It's the rare gift that won't cost you a single dime to acquire. 1.  16 time-saving Android shortcuts We'll start things off with a zesty power-shot of powerful shortcuts. They'll save you time and help you get around your phone like a seasoned pro. 2.  8 ways to

Honesty time: I have some friends on Facebook whose posts sometimes greatly annoy me. I can unfriend them, which would be the easiest way to rid myself of those posts, or I can “snooze” them, a new feature that Facebook is rolling out today. Originally spotted by back in Sept Techcrunch   ember, the social media juggernaut’s “Snooze” button allows users to mute people, Pages, and Groups for 30 days. This is beneficial if you find someone’s posts very annoying, but do not want to unfriend them for whatever reason. As the outlet points out, Snooze also allow Pages and Groups to retain less-active users that would otherwise unlike a page or leave a group. Once the 30 days are up, Facebook notifies you in case you want to put them to sleep again. At that point, though, you might want to consider unfollowing or unfriending that person. As  TechCrunch  accurately points out, however, the Snooze button arrives at a time when Facebook itself took on the question of whethe

One of the most important areas for every smartphone is how good its camera is, but there are two ways to judge a camera: by whether it is technically good, or whether it looks good. Often, the most accurate smartphone cameras aren’t the ones that produce pictures that look good, so how do you decide which is the best smartphone camera? For Best of Android 2017, we introduced an all-new method of testing smartphone cameras objectively, but we also wanted to see which smartphone camera looks the best. To do so, we split the camera into two parts. Below we’ll go into which is technically the best, based on all of our data. If you’re interested in which looks the best, check our 10 phone camera shootout post and vote in our poll. What we tested Given that modern photography is digital, objectively assessing image quality should be pretty straightforward, right? Wrong. As recent controversies with scoring objective image data have highlighted, it’s very tough to come up wit

Microsoft surprised folks back in October when the company released its Edge browser for ANDROID. We say “released,” but the app was in preview up until almost two weeks ago. Even so, Microsoft hit an important milestone as Edge officially surpassed one million downloads on Android. We realize how minuscule that number can be when compared to Microsoft’s other offerings on the platform. For example, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneDrive have all surpassed the 100-million-download threshold. Even Microsoft’s Authenticator app, which provides a two-step authentication process for Microsoft products and services, as well as multi-factor authentication for other services, already passed the one-million-download threshold. Even so, Edge’s one million downloads is an impressive feat. For one, it was available in preview form for almost two months before shedding its beta tag not too long ago. Also, thanks to the number of downloads, Edge is the third most-popular free commu