If you are on a budget and routinely trash your headphones, JLab Audio’s Flex is just what you have been looking for: a decent pair of cans built to withstand regular abuse.
The Flex headphones come folded down compactly into their included case, and for $70 deliver pretty impressive sound quality.
A whispered conversation in a library is about 30 decibels. A normally loud chat comes in at around 65 decibels. A jackhammer at 50 feet is 95 decibels, and also the loudness at which our ears can get damaged with prolonged exposure.
The Phantom speaker I’ve been using as my main television and Bluetooth speaker for the last couple of weeks tops out at 99 decibels. This sucker gets loud, without any distortion, real quick. It’s easy to use, looks amazing in any room, and will change your experience of music and movies from the moment you turn it on.
While it looks like something out of the future depicted in a Kubrick film, has an ungainly outdoor-style power cable, and is heavier than you’d think, the Phantom is simply the best home speaker I’ve ever encountered.
For two grand, it had better be.
In Apple’s Messages app, you can easily add emojis with a quick click on the little happy face icon in the iMessage text field. If you use a chat app like Slack, you can do the same.
But what if you want to add an emoji to an email, a letter, or any other text field? Turns out there’s an often-overlooked menu item (with a corresponding keyboard shortcut) that lets you do just that.
Check it out.
Who doesn’t want to play piano? Learning to tickle the ivories must be right up there with writing the great American novel: Many of us have a hankering to become more musical.
The fantastic $299 ONE Light smart keyboard is the way to go if you want a piano that will show you how to play without hiring a teacher.
Notification Center on OS X seems like a great idea, most of the time, until you get a ton of notifications about things you really don’t care about all at once. You’ve got to click all the little “close” boxes, or click and drag the Notification banners to the right. It can be downright disconcerting.
You can turn on Do Not Disturb for 24 hours, after which it’ll default back to “Disturb.” You can hack your way in and turn off the feature altogether, but then you wouldn’t be able to see any Notifications, ever.
If you want the best of both worlds–Notifications that you can open the Center to see but that don’t pop onto your screen all the time–check out this cool tip.
After the rumblings and grumblings that we’ll get our first look at the Apple Watch 2 in as soon as three months, the Internet is ablaze with all of the great features the update “should” have. But let’s not go overboard, here, because not all of these suggestions would make the new wearable better.
We aren’t talking about Android compatibility, complete independence from its paired phone, or a better battery life; we’d welcome any of those updates in a second. But we couldn’t really see a need or want for a few of the rumored/desired new features, regardless of how crazy awesome they might seem at first.
Not every Apple TV is in a household full of self-realized adults. Apple knows this and has set up some restrictions, similar to the parental controls on iOS.
That way, you can make sure that your kids aren’t purchasing anything (or playing/watching anything) without your consent.
Here’s how to set it all up on your Apple TV.
There are plenty of iPhone cases on the market to protect and/or decorate your beloved device, but very few come close to being Apple-worthy.
This one is.
I’m a big fan of getting instructions off the internet: recipes, directions on car maintenance, or video game walkthroughs, for example. The problem is that you need to be online to view them.
Now in iOS 9, however, there’s a way to save web pages to a handy, offline-friendly PDF file. The next time you’re flying on an airplane and trying to get through Broken Age with a walkthrough, you’ll be in luck.
Here’s how to convert any webpage in iOS 9’s mobile Safari to a PDF and then read it in (or send it from) iBooks.
Instagram’s new app Boomerang lets users create one-second videos of everyday moments, then share them to Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.
The new app is a lot like the new Live Photos feature Apple introduced on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. Boomerang takes a burst of five photos, stitches them together into a mini-video, then plays the clip in forward and then reverse — you know, just like a boomerang!
Here’s how it works:
Quick – how often do you check your iPhone when you’re around other people? When you’re out dining? At home on the couch, maybe watching TV? At the bar? At parties?
If you’re anything like the rest of us, the answer is somewhere between “often” and “far too often.”
Photographer Eric Pickersgill noticed this phenomenon while sitting at a cafe one morning and decided to make some art about it. He calls the project Removed.
Those on the lookout for a new streaming box this fall will have a tough decision to make when the fourth-generation models of both Apple TV and Roku hit the market. And while they both have some solid features, which one you end up buying depends a lot on what you already own.
Here’s how the two streamers measure up.
It seems iPhone 6s customers are having a love affair with the new rose gold color option. Numerous reports indicate that it’s the most popular color choice for this year’s iPhone release. It’s all shiny and new as soon as you get it, but ten minutes later you realize you’re probably in the market for a new case. And yes, it’s about to completely shield the rose gold goodness.
You sit back in your chair, sigh and begin to question if there’s even hope left in this universe. The good news is there are more than a few cases that will let you show off that new rose gold iPhone, or even just your deep passion for rose gold as a color and fashion statement. Take a look at a few of your best options.
As a bonus, all of these cases are less than 25 bucks each.
A new, slightly hidden feature in iOS 9 hopes to help keep your connection as strong as possible.
Apple’s latest version of its mobile firmware contains a lot of obvious changes (Passbook is now called Wallet, for example), but a lot of the biggest and best changes are buried away just waiting for you to discover them. One of these hidden gems is the Wi-Fi Assist feature, which might just solve one of the most annoying issues we saw in earlier versions of the operating system.
Here’s what it is and how it can help you.
Pixeljam is no stranger to making iPhone and Mac games, but now the studio is taking on another challenge: transforming the way crowdfunding works to make it better for game developers and other creative types.
Company co-founder Miles Tillman describes the crowdfunding project as an “experiment” that’s an alternative to popular services like Indiegogo and Kickstarter. Pixeljam’s new platform lets backers donate money just like the others, but prioritizes transparent communication, instant gratification and actually making the game ahead of crowdfunding staples like producing slick videos and stressing out over fundraising goals and deadlines.
Nokia’s N9 is an interesting new challenge to the iPhone. Its had a lot of criticism since it was announced a couple of days ago, but I want to concentrate on something I think it does pretty well: simplify the touch screen interface.
