Articles by Adam Doud

Some of the best Android phones also have the best battery life. What good is your phone if the battery dies too soon? If you use your phone hard and don’t have the option to charge throughout the day, battery life is your number one priority when shopping for your next phone. Thankfully, several great options focus on battery life and won’t give up halfway through the day — including the Galaxy S21 Ultra as our top overall pick.

Our pick

Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G – Smartphone

Staff Pick

Samsung took a modest step forward in 2021, except when it comes to the Galaxy S21 Ultra. Samsung pulled out all the stops on its S21 superphone with a 10x optical Zoom, QHD+ 120 Hz screen, and 4,500 mAh battery. Of course, if you want this phone to be a battery champ, you can ratchet down the refresh rate to 60Hz and FHD+ resolution. But overall, it’s hard to go wrong with the best of the best Samsung has to offer.

From $800 at Amazon From $1,000 at Best Buy

Is it a phone?

Asus ROG Phon…

Earlier this year, Samsung announced it would be shutting down some Samsung Cloud services, including photo backups. The cutoff date got pushed back, but naturally, if you’re using Samsung Cloud, you’re going to want to move your photos to another cloud service as soon as possible. Fortunately, you can probably do this all in one fell swoop, with a bit of preparation ahead of time.

Most cloud services, including OneDrive (the one Samsung recommends #kickbacks), Google Drive, and Dropbox, among others, have apps you can install on your PC that automatically syncs files to and from the cloud on the file as changes happen. So the first thing you’ll want to do is download and install the PC app for the service you want to use. If you’d like to use Google Drive, we have instructions for that. Once that’s all set up, you can start downloading the photos from your Samsung cloud account. The beautiful part is, as they’re downloaded, assuming you download them to a synced folder for another …

The best Android phones are communication tools first and foremost. Whether they be used for phone calls, video chats, or direct messaging, these devices are perfect for starting conversations with contacts, friends, and family, and keeping them going. One of the best new features in Android 12 is a way to stay on top of the conversations that are most important to you. The new Conversations widget allows you to pin a conversation you’re having to a home screen so you can quickly access it (or multiple conversations, as the case may be). We’ll show you how to set up this new Conversations widget, and give you a few other notes that we discovered along the way.

How to use conversation widgets in Android 12

You can easily pin a conversation to your home screen by using the Conversations widget.

Long press on an empty space on your home screen.
Tap Widgets.
Tap Conversations to expand the category.
Tap and hold the Conversation widget. Drag it to an open place on your home screen.
P…

One of the things we like about the best Android phones is the quick settings. Android 12 really emphasized those tiles, making them significantly larger and easier to manage on your phone. They’re also easy to edit and customize in terms of layout and order.

Quick settings can give you access to system functions, like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, or they can access phone functionality like flashlight or screen recording. From toggling do not disturb to airplane mode to focus mode (and other digital well-being modes), quick settings make it quick and easy to settle into your rhythm or to change your phone settings for the moment. Whatever the case, the layout will be important, so we’ll show you how to set that up.

How to customize quick settings tiles in Android 12

It’s easy to organize your quick settings tiles.

Swipe down your notification panel twice, so it’s fully open.
Tap the pencil icon in the bottom left corner
Tap and hold on to any quick setting tile you want to move and drag…

Gaze Detection is a new feature built into Voice Access on your Android phone that debuted over the summer at Google I/O. When enabled, it uses the front-facing camera to determine if you’re looking at the phone before allowing you to control your phone’s actions with your voice. Gaze Detection prevents you from triggering events on your phone when you did not intend them to launch, such as when talking with others or in loud environments.

How Gaze Detection works and other test notes

When Gaze Detection thinks you’re looking at your phone, it will show you a face icon in the upper left corner of the screen. When you’re not looking at your phone, the face will have a line through it.

It’s important to remember that the video captured for Gaze Detection stays on your device. It’s never sent to Google. Also, wearing glasses and environments with dim lighting can trip up this feature, which is still in beta.

You need to first install Voice Access before you can use Gaze Detection….

Android 12 is bringing a pretty big change to users and developers with approximate location for individual apps on your Android phone. Previously, when granting location access, you could only allow a system-wide setting. From there, you could change the setting on an individual basis, but it required digging into the phone’s settings.

Generally, the difference is a precise location that puts you within a few meters of your actual location, while a coarse location is more like within a few hundred meters. We have an explainer for the difference between a coarse location setting and a precise location here. It also gives you a little more technical detail about what’s happening and what’s being used.

The ability to set your location precision is important because not all apps need to know where you are down to the meter. Apps like Google Maps, Geocaching, and Pokemon Go require a precise location to tell you where you are and where to go. Others like weather or shopping apps don’t …

If you have a workflow that requires a second monitor, getting things done on a laptop can be challenging. Lenovo seeks to address that with tablets like the Lenovo Yoga Tab 13 which doubles as a second monitor when not in use. But if you have any old Android tablet handy, it’s pretty easy to turn that tablet into a functional second monitor. We’ll show you how.

For this article, we took a look at a few software solutions to make this work before settling on an app called Spacedesk. Spacedesk is a pair of free apps that runs on your PC, and the other runs on your tablet. They connect via Wi-Fi, making it super simple to use (as long as you have Wi-Fi). We’ll discuss this more at the end of the article, but let’s get into installing it for now. There are two sets of instructions here, first for your PC, followed by your phone or tablet. Let’s get into it.

Download Spacedesk for Windows

Download Spacedesk from the spacedesk website. Choose the appropriate version for your PC (32-bi…

Bedtime Mode is part of Google’s Digital Wellbeing toolset, and it’s available on most Android phones running Android 10 or higher. Bedtime mode is designed to help you fall asleep better and sleep better through the night. To do this, Bedtime Mode silences notifications and turns your screen to black and white. Alarms and important calls can still get through, but everything else can wait until morning. If that all sounds great, here’s how to set it up.

How to use the bedtime feature on your Google Pixel phone

Go to Settings > Digital Wellbeing > Bedtime mode.
The first time you tap bedtime mode, you’ll go through a setup wizard. First choose the options you want to enable when bedtime mode is active. Tap Next.

Set the times that are best for you. You can either choose a hard start time, or choose the option to start it while charging after a certain time. You can change either the start time or the end time by tapping on them and taping the clocks to set the time you pr…

Recording calls can be handy for several reasons, from taking notes afterward to personal security. You can manually record calls on Android phones. Still, Google dialer allows you to automatically record calls from numbers not in your contacts and selected numbers in your contacts. Unfortunately, these features are not available everywhere, but if you can record calls in your region, we’ll show you how to do it, but first, a word about recording calls.

It’s imperative to check your local regulations and laws to determine how legal call recording can be. Laws vary from state to state and from country to country, but it usually boils down to single-party consent or two-party consent. One-party consent means that you can record your calls because you are the one party giving consent. Two-party consent actually requires the consent of everyone on the call, whether it’s two or more. Regardless, it’s considered polite to inform others that the call is being recorded. Indeed, automatic ca…

Google Calendar is one of the most understated products in the Google Suite. If you live and die by your calendar, Google made an improvement that could change your life. You can finally snooze notifications that you get from Google Calendar on your desktop PC or Chromebook. There are a couple of caveats, however. First, you have to have Google Calendar open in a tab. Second, you have to allow Google Calendar to send notifications to your PC. If both of those conditions are met, you can snooze the notifications you get as events come up. We’ll show you exactly how to do that.

How to snooze notifications in Chrome

First, you have to make sure you have allowed notifications to be sent.

Go to Settings in Chrome.

Click Privacy and security.
Click Site settings

Scroll down and click Notifications

Scroll down to Allow and make sure calendar.google.com is in there.
If it is not, click Add.

Type https://calendar.google.com:443 and click **Add.

That should do it. You’ll get no…