Because the 12 months winds to a detailed, many frenzied smartphone customers haven’t had the prospect to discover main updates to the Google and iPhone working methods that arrived this fall. As you lastly get a breather — or possibly even a brand new telephone in your present haul — why not begin with a number of the extra personally partaking options that may enable you to ease into Android 14 or iOS 17? Listed here are some highlights.
Categorical Your self
Google’s launch of Android 14 was centered largely on bettering safety and accessibility options. However Google has additionally added contemporary methods to customise telephone screens with new wallpaper, app widgets and shortcuts. To get began, open the Settings app, choose Wallpaper & Type and make your selections to personalize your gadget.
Apple has loads of choices in its iOS 17 Wallpaper settings, however with final week’s iOS 17.2 replace, customers can get deeply private otherwise with the new Journal app included with the software program; it’s additionally within the App Retailer. Journal is a free digital diary for recording ideas and emotions via textual content, pictures and subject strategies. You’ll be able to again up your encrypted entries to your iCloud account, the place you get 5 gigabytes of free on-line storage earlier than Apple begins charging.
Apple’s multimedia Journal is much like third-party apps like Day One and Journey, which have free and paid premium variations. Whereas Google has not but added its personal devoted diary app to Android, some folks use the corporate’s free Hold and Docs apps for his or her pensive moments.
Search Your World
Picture-based search provides one other dimension to actions like purchasing, museum-going, journey or simply strolling round city. Apple’s current Visible Look Up characteristic for figuring out objects in photographs obtained a lift in iOS 17 and now works on movies as effectively. To make use of it, simply open a photograph or pause a video in your telephone and faucet the Information icon (the third from the left) on the backside of the display. If extra data is offered in regards to the picture topic, faucet Look As much as see the search outcomes.
(One other trick with Visible Look Up: If you see a glowing white define round the principle object in a photograph, faucet it to open a pop-up menu. Choose Add Sticker to avoid wasting a silhouetted copy of the item that you may ship in a message or insert from the iPhone’s emoji keyboard.)
Google Lens, launched in 2017, has steadily develop into extra correct with its pairing of object identification and related web search outcomes. Say you’re in a museum and need extra data on the paintings you’re via your telephone’s digital camera. Faucet the adjoining Google Lens icon to see the articles Google Search rounds up.
Google Lens works on objects in nonetheless photographs and exported frames from video clips. It’s out there as an Android app however is built-in elsewhere, together with within the stand-alone Google app for Android and iOS.
Each Apple’s Visible Look Up and Google Lens can acknowledge, copy and translate textual content in pictures you see via the digital camera. Examine every firm’s privateness coverage you probably have data-collection issues.
Blast Off
Android’s builders have been sneaking little surprises into the system’s code for years, and this 12 months’s replace brings a hidden sport. To uncover it, open the Settings app and scroll all the way down to About Cellphone. Faucet it after which faucet Android Model.
On the subsequent display, rapidly faucet Android Model thrice to begin the sport. On the sport display, press and maintain the Android 14 emblem till the telephone begins to vibrate and a tiny spaceship seems. Press your finger on the display to get steering controls and use the place data within the nook to fly to totally different stars.
Slip Into Standby
Apple’s iOS 17 features a Standby characteristic that turns the iPhone lock display into a sensible show for exhibiting off the time, temperature, photographs, music, recipes and different apps. When enabled in iPhone Settings, the Standby mode kicks on when the telephone is charging and sitting steady within the horizontal display orientation.
If you happen to don’t take care of the default widgets, press and maintain your finger on both aspect of the display to decide on new ones from the record of Standby-compatible choices. The Night time Mode possibility within the settings offers the display a crimson tint when you determine to make use of the telephone as a bedside clock.
