iOS 9 brought out a new feature for iPads called easy text selection which lets you slide two fingers on the screen to turn the keyboard into a trackpad of sorts. While in this mode, you can control cursor movement and select chunks of text with precision.
Thanks to 3D Touch, you can bring up this trackpad-esque functionality on your iPhone 7 or later in order to easily select and manipulate text with great precision, here's how.
Using a grid of 96 sensors that read microscopic changes in the distance between the cover glass and the backlight, your iPhone is able to detect different degrees of pressure. This headline feature, called 3D Touch, is used to reveal content previews and contextual menus within apps and quick actions on app icons on the Home screen.
Do you feel like 3D Touch requires you to press the screen too hard? If so, iOS offers a handy slide to change the amount of pressure you need to activate the feature.
So you got your brand new iPhone and decided that 3D Touch is more of a nuisance than gets in your way than a time-saving feature you'd like to use on an everyday basis. Worry not, for iOS gives you an easy way to disable 3D Touch on a system-wide level with just a few taps.
3D Touch, of course, offers shortcuts to commonly used app-specific actions right from the Home screen and lets you preview content or jump straight into it within supported apps by applying varying degrees of pressure to the screen.
People with disabilities, those with limited motor skills and everyone who would rather do without these handy shortcuts for one reason or another can easily disable 3D Touch on your iPhone.
When Apple says that a redesigned vibrator inside the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, branded as the Taptic Engine, gives you “real-time feedback” in the form of subtle taps, the company is not exaggerating. The new oscillating mechanism, now enclosed with its own aluminum shell, reaches its full power in just one cycle (and stops just as quickly) versus ten or more oscillations for most other smartphones.
This allows for a more precise level of haptic feedback to accompany the new Peek and Pop deep-presses provided by 3D Touch. As part of iFixit's detailed teardown analysis of the new iPhones, the repair wizards have blasted the Taptic Engine with X-rays to show it in action.
Repair wizards over at iFixit have performed their teardown routine by prying open the 4.7-inch iPhone 6s (model A1688/A1633) in an effort to identify its components, analyze their internal layout and calculate the device's repairability score.
While the new phone does feature a slightly smaller battery due to a heavier display with additional capacitive sensors, Apple's new Taptic Engine and a bigger 'A9' system-on-a-chip, the device packs in fewer chips overall and has the same repairability score as last year's iPhone 6.
Answer: far, far less than the previous model. Apple hasn't focused much on a lot stronger body of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus so, naturally, we've been eager to find out just how Bendgate-proof the new devices are. A new non-scientific stress test video from Australia demonstrates that the iPhone 6s Plus is nearly unbendable versus the iPhone 6 Plus.
The new Series 7000 aluminum body can apparently withstand a significant amount of force being applied without bending. But don't take our word for it, watch the embedded video and post your impressions in the comment section.
The new iPhones are upon us and with them comes a headline feature: 3D Touch. Its name might suggest a marketing gimmick though 3D Touch is anything but, thanks to Apple's clever, elegant implementation.
In a word, 3D Touch is fast and instantaneous, unlike the tap-and-hold gesture, and responds to different levels of pressures. It's used to access app-specific shortcuts right from your Home screen.
Within apps, 3D Touch lets you peek something without leaving the context of what you're doing or pop from a content preview into the full view. We've put together a quick list of ten popular third-party applications for your brand spanking new iPhone 6s that have been graced with 3D Touch shortcuts and gestures.
Download them now and start peeking and popping like there's no tomorrow.
Here we go again...
In what could only be described as a continuation of its miserable anti-Apple advertising campaign, Samsung has hired people to wear backpack-mounted banners advertising its Galaxy smartphones to folks who queued up for iPhone 6s launch this morning outside the Apple Store in London’s Regent Street, The Inquirer reported.
The banners promote Samsung’s latest Galaxy S6 edge and S6 edge+ flagships and carry the provocative tagline “The itch to switch just got bigger.” In addition, International Business Times is reporting that Samsung even gave queued customers bright blue pillows and bottles emblazoned with the hashtag #NextIsNew.
But wait, there's more.
Not to be outdone by Google which just released a note-taking iPhone and iPad app called Keep, software giant Microsoft today rolled out a brand new productivity app of its own, Invite for iPhone.
A Microsoft Garage project, Invite was designed to help groups “agree on a time to meet, even when they can’t see each other’s schedules.”
Recognizing that scheduling group meetings is no easy task on desktop, let alone on mobile, Invite keeps things simple enough to help you effectively coordinate multiple people’s schedules on a small screen.
You simply suggest times that work for you, and then invite attendees. After attendees select all the times they can attend, and once everyone has responded through Invite or via the web interface, you simply pick the time that works best for everyone and your group meeting is a go.
Following its Android debut nearly two and a half years ago, Google's note-taking mobile software, called Keep, is now available to download from the App Store.
Featuring Google's Material Design, the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad app offers a nicely rounded set of features commonly found in other note-taking apps but with less bloat and clutter. Needless to say, Keep benefits tremendously from seamless integration with other Google products and technologies.
Notes created in Keep can be accessed, edited and managed on iOS, Android and on the web, via a Keep web app. Google Keep is a free download so give it a try and let us know how you like it in comments.
Siri's Proactive features let you do so much more, and in a more intelligent fashion than ever before. In addition to suggesting apps, people, locations and more when you use Spotlight Search, iOS also lets you ask Siri to actually create context-aware reminders for what you’re looking at on the screen of your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.
Asking to be reminded about things you’re looking at in apps like Safari, Mail and Notes that you want to follow up on later can be a tremendous productivity boost.
The feature is a great time-saver when you cannot currently deal with what you're doing right now, and would like to get reminded about it at a later stage, but are too lazy to create a reminder yourself. Here's how it works.
Moving over your existing Health and Activity data from your old iPhone to a new one can be a tricky business unless you know exactly what you're doing. The problem stems from the fact that Health and Activity data is not stored in regular iTunes backups, which are unencrypted by default, unless you remember to turn on encryption manually. It's a security precaution to prevent malicious users with access to your computer to mine your sensitive medical data from unencrypted iTunes backups.
The approach also poses a major challenge to folks who log their fitness and health data in Apple's Health and Activity apps. Surely you don't want to start from scratch and lose all the Health and Activity data that you'e amassed in the past year or so.
As it turns out, there is a way—actually, two ways—to preserve your complete Health and Activity data logs when you switch to a new iPhone.