I bought a dumb phone for my grandma, but ended up using it myself | Digital Trends

My grandma is 87 years old, and it goes without saying that she has a hard time around technology. So, when the battery inside her 10-year-old Nokia 110 breathed its last breath recently, I, as the IT guy of the family, decided to get her yet another feature phone instead of a smartphone. Except this time, I decided to go with slightly more advanced features than the last one. After weighing a few options, I chose a feature phone from a lesser-known brand, but one with promising specs, a guarantee of a secure build, and, above all, Wi-Fi.

However, when the phone arrived, I was so thoroughly impressed with the aspects beyond the ones I mentioned above that I ended up snagging that one and made my Nan wait for the second one to arrive. The phone in question is the Blackview N1000, and there are plenty of reasons why you, a most likely non-elderly adult, might be intrigued by this rather unusual phone, just like I was.

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Google Pixel 9 vs. Pixel 8: Do you really need to upgrade? | Digital Trends

Google has unveiled its 2024 smartphone lineup, including the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL, and Pixel 9 Pro Fold. Google has really pulled out all the stops this year, producing a big stable of phones with gorgeous designs, much improved battery lives, and the customarily amazing cameras we’ve come to expect from Google’s phones. They really are the top Google phones for this year.

But while they may have exceeded last year’s Pixels, are they a must-upgrade? If you currently have a Pixel 8, you might be considering upgrading to the Pixel 9 — but should you? We have the answers for you, so you can make the best choice. Read on below.

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iPhone 14 Pro design leak shows bizarre hole and pill cutout | Digital Trends

Is that a circular hole punch? Or a pill-shaped cutout? Wait, it’s both. As per a fresh leak, the iPhone 14 Pro and its Max sibling will ditch the notch in favor of a weird arrangement that includes both a circular and a pill-shaped cutout arranged neatly in a line. Whether it looks appealing is debatable, but it definitely hasn’t been attempted before by a smartphone maker.

Display supply chain expert Ross Young, who has a fairly accurate track record with display-related Apple predictions, tweeted what appears to be an engineering template for an iPhone 14 Pro model. There are two separate cutouts, a design that we are yet to see on a phone so far. Samsung offers a bucket load of phones with a single circular cutout, Motorola has a phone with two separate camera dots, and Huawei has been loyal to the pill-shaped design for the past few years. But never have the two elements been blended together like this.

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Apps and Services you Should Consider Ditching in 2022 | Digital Trends

The new year can be a great time to rethink our relationship with technology. Nearly 50% of Americans spend 5-6 hours on their smartphone daily, so if you’re planning to improve your life, doing an “app cleanse” can be a good place to start.

Ask yourself: Is your smartphone filled with apps you never use? Is social media becoming a time-suck? Are some apps making you feel bad about yourself and your life? Then maybe it’s time to say goodbye.

Remember, you’re not alone in this. Here are the most common apps people are leaving behind before 2022 gets underway.

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What Are Location-Based Services? | businessnewsdaily.com

Location-based services use real-time geodata from a smartphone to provide information, entertainment or security.

  • Location-based services rely on consumers’ smartphones to provide interactive opportunities and targeted advertisements.
  • Location tracking is conducted with GPS data, Wi-Fi data, cellular tower pings, QR codes and RFID technology.
  • Location-based services include ridesharing service Uber and popular mobile game Pokemon Go.
  • This article is for business owners who want to learn more about location-based services and how they can use local user data for their businesses.

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Uber, Facebook, Instagram and other apps that are slowly killing your smartphone | Entrepreneur

What is the first thing you do when you launch a new smartphone ? Download all the apps you need, of course. After a few hours (or days) downloading applications, your entry menu ends up covered in colorful squares, giving you the satisfaction that you have everything: apps for social networks, transport, dating, online commerce, for video conferencing and fitness, for name the most popular. However, recent research found that many of them are slowly killing your smartphone.

The pCloud company, which offers cloud storage services, conducted a study to discover which applications are most demanding for our mobile devices.

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Smartphone cameras can now detect diabetes with 80 percent accuracy | New Atlas

A team from University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has demonstrated promising potential in using a smartphone camera to diagnose type 2 diabetes. The innovative research demonstrates a technique that needs no additional hardware other than a functional smartphone camera, and currently is more than 80 percent accurate in detecting diabetes.

“Diabetes can be asymptomatic for a long period of time, making it much harder to diagnose,” says lead author on the new study, Robert Avram. “To date, noninvasive and widely-scalable tools to detect diabetes have been lacking, motivating us to develop this algorithm.”

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Polaroid Now | CoolBusinessIdeas.com

In an age where instant photography means whipping out a smartphone and immediately sharing the digital image with friends online, a boxy camera that produces self-developing prints seems like a huge backward step. But that’s exactly what instant film cameras provide, and a revamped Polaroid has announced a new model called the Now.

The Polaroid Corporation was founded by Edwin Land in 1937, a company that originally sold polarized sunglasses. But Land went on to develop a “magic camera” that produced instant prints, which was described in a 1973 issue of Popular Science as “perhaps the most fiendishly clever invention in the history of photography.”

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Study Finds Optimization Gap on Mobile Channels | Business News Daily

Mobile shopping is on the rise, according to a new study of 22,000 shoppers from around the world, as 78% said they’ve shopped via smartphone in the past six months.

Though mobile commerce is trending upward, 63% of the 4,600 business owners polled said they were able to accept mobile payments through their own channels.

Researchers found that women were more likely to shop through their smartphones than men, with 48% of women preferring that method, while 39% of men said the same.

Sleek, fast and powerful, today’s smartphones can instantly close the gap between far-flung relatives or broadcast pictures of your cat on the ‘gram. In recent years, these miniscule machines have also become a handheld portal to your favorite retailers, allowing users to shop to their heart’s content wherever they are. According to a recent study commissioned by PayPal, mobile commerce is not only growing at a global scale, but also transcends generational and platform divides.

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