Lily Katz / Android Authority
Wireless charging and reverse wireless charging have become an established feature on premium phones, using dedicated coils to wirelessly transmit power. Now, the NFC Forum has announced the approval of a wireless charging specification to let you charge devices via NFC chips instead.
Don’t expect super-fast charging speeds though, as the standards body says you can only expect 1W speeds via this solution (slower than reverse charging via the Galaxy S20 series).
2020 marks the beginning of a new decade and the end of another. One of the best ways to look forward is to first look backward, and today we are doing so by highlighting some alternative mobile OS competitors that attempted, but ultimately failed to dethrone Android (and iOS) over the last 10 years.
Some of these offerings paved the way for Android as we know it today, inspiring some of the platform’s future features and design language.
Adam Molina / Android Authority
Many of us are remote workers nowadays, and work-from-home productivity relies heavily on a good wireless headset to both communicate with colleagues and block out the sounds of noisy roommates. Sure, Bluetooth audio quality can’t hold a candle to wired options, but it’s convenient for most and preferred by many. Here are the best Bluetooth headphones you can get today.
This list of the best Bluetooth headphones comes from the audio experts at our sister site SoundGuys.
Fitbit Alta HRFor casual users, this is one of the most comprehensive and well-made fitness trackers out there. However, serious athletes need not apply.
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Anyone who has used one of Fitbit’s entry-level fitness trackers in the past will know what to expect from the Fitbit Alta HR. Simply put: this is the Fitbit Alta, plus heart rate monitor.
What that means is that you’re getting a device that is great for passive users and that will reliably track steps taken, sleep quality, and basic activities.
One of the most exciting features on the Pixel 4 is its radar. Positioned just to the right of the earpiece speaker, the Soli radar creates a kind of field around the Pixel 4 that can detect movement. Depending on what’s happening at the time, your Pixel 4 can then predict what you want to do and help you do it. Let’s go through the various Motion Sense features the radar enables in more detail and explain exactly what they do.
Apex Legends Mobile has some of the better virtual controls we’ve seen in a shooter. They’re fairly easy to use, support multiple types of playstyles, and translate well in both third-person and first-person views. They also change depending on what type of weapon you’re holding and what Legend you use. That said, nothing is perfect and the developers know that. They give you the option to change your controls and we’ll show you how to do that here.
Qualcomm lifted the lid on its next-generation premium smartphone processor platform this week in Maui, Hawaii — the Snapdragon 855. The chip will undoubtedly end up powering a number of 2019’s highest profile smartphone releases, improving processing power, multimedia, and streaming data speeds, plus much more. The company already confirmed this is its first 7nm chip, matching Huawei’s Kirin 980, but there are a host of other improvements.
Top of the bill is a major uplift to Qualcomm’s AI and machine learning processing capabilities, an area other companies have been pushing performance in as well.
One of the coolest features announced at Google’s October 4 event was the ability to broadcast with your Google Home. With this feature, you should be able to use a Google Home or Assistant on your phone to broadcast a message to the other Google Homes in your household. This could be helpful, for example, if you’re cooking in the kitchen and want to call everyone to the table.
We’ve been patiently waiting for Google to roll this feature out and it looks like it now has.
Ryan Haines / Android Authority
Apple launched its iPad family to new heights back in 2015 with the advent of the iPad Pro. It added a keyboard and stylus to the large 12.9-inch display, and it followed up with a smaller version. The iPad Pro 9.7 took over where the iPad Air 2 left off and aimed squarely at Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4. Let’s put the two against each other and see which “pro” tablet is worth your money.
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The CuBox-i is certainly an interesting mini PC. It offers a lot of flexibility since its support for Android and Linux is excellent, and it excels at running Kodi. One of the most important commercial uses of a Single Board Computer (SBC) is as a prototyping and rapid development platform. Recently I reviewed the HummingBoard-i2eX, a SBC from SolidRun that is compatible with Android and Linux.