You can run most apps just fine, with very little lag, on a five-year-old phone. It's when someone sends you a photo taken on a newer model that you start to notice how old yours has gotten. Smartphone cameras have become remarkably good and are one of the most standout reasons to get a new phone.
If your phone is a few years old, you may just be blown away with just how good our phone cameras have become. Here's what stands out about newer phones.
It's So Easy to Get that Beautiful Background Blur
There's a type of photo that signals to many of us that the photographer is using a good camera. We may not know the name of the effect, but we know the look. It's a crisp subject with a blurry background.
The technical description is that such a photo has a shallow depth of field. Traditionally, you need a DSLR camera with a wide aperture lens to most easily capture such a shot. You also need enough knowledge to know what this means, unless you happen to have someone around who just hands you the right gear.
Now you can achieve this effect with minimal effort on your smartphone. Sometimes you can get the look by simply pointing and shooting. If that doesn't work, switch to portrait mode. This is usually just a swipe away in your default camera app.
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As the name suggests, portrait mode is great for taking a photo of a single person, but it's also good for macro photography in general. Macro photography refers to up-close shots of just about anything, the type of photography you often see you on sites like ours. I use portrait mode on a smartphone to capture many of the images I upload alongside my writing. I sold my old dedicated camera to help me afford a newer phone with a camera good enough for the job.
Each of the photos in the gallery below was captured on a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5, with no additional edits applied.
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Videos Have More Detail, Are Smoother, and Shake Less
Phones have demolished point and shoot cameras. They're increasingly coming after DSLRs. But they don't just stop with photo stills. Smartphones are arguably even better at recording video.
Recording in 4k quality at 60 frames per second is no longer a rare accomplishment. Phones are reaching for 8K instead. At the same time, optical image stabilization has improved by leaps and bounds, making the footage you capture less shaky.
Many of your favorite YouYubers now use smartphone footage in place of their fancy cameras. Sometimes they shoot an entire video on their phone. Other times, they slip in B roll footage captured on a phone, with viewers none the wiser. The overhead shots in the video below were recorded using an iPhone 15 Pro Max, the bigger sibling to the iPhone 15 Pro.
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As the Formula 1 circus heads to Imola this weekend, there’s a mixture of excitement and sombre remembrance. Are Red Bull on the back foot again? Will Ferrari and Mercedes’ upgrade packages slingshot them to the front? And was McLaren’s win last time out a flash in the pan or can they keep fighting for the top step?
One of the most underrated features of PlayStation Plus Premium is the game trials that it offers. Although Sony does not put its AAA games on the service the day they release, it and several other third-party publishers offer up free demos that essentially give players full access to the game for a limited period of time. It’s a great way to test a new game before you buy and it also gives you an excuse to try out a variety of different games this weekend without making the time commitment to beat them all. I looked through the full list of game trials that PlayStation Plus Premium offers and pinpointed three of the demos that are most worth your time.
We're just a few months away from the launch of Google's next flagship phone, the Pixel 9. But if you want a great Google phone, you don't need to wait for the next flagship—you'll be just as happy with the $500 Pixel 8a.
Netflix’s adaptation of Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem and its sequels is coming back for a second season, and potentially more, the streaming service announced on Wednesday. It seems that the renewal is for however many seasons the series needs to wrap up. The announcement came with a quote from the series’ showrunners that’s focused on the end of the series, though they don’t specify how many seasons that might involve.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google on Tuesday rolled out a retooled search engine that will frequently favor responses crafted by artificial intelligence over website links, a shift promising to quicken the quest for information while also potentially disrupting the flow of money-making internet traffic.
may not have been the silver bullet Microsoft hoped for. However, it’s still a way for subscribers to play several free games every month. The second half of May sees the arrival of twelve more games, including a major new release.
Cheese and loyal pets (two important items on Maslow's hierarchy of needs) have been added to the co-op survival crafting game Abiotic Factor. The dairy product manifests as various suspiciously coloured cheese wheels which you can cook and eat, while loyalty comes in the form of freakish pets that can now follow your every move. The pets themselves are technically not new to Abiotic Factor, but their player-tracking behaviour is. "There is, as far as we know, no limit to how many pets can follow you at once," say the devs. Hmmm. I wonder if any scientifically minded folks will test such a hypothesis.
There aren't many ways left to put a twist on Stardew Valley, but suffixing it with "in space!" oughta do it. Little-Known Galaxy is out in a week, and currently has a demo on Steam, where you can sample many of the delights that you're used to from a Stardewlike when you're new in town: meeting the locals, growing potatoes, and tidying up the place. Also, raising alien pets, seeking out new life, and new civilisations... It all takes place on a spaceship, you see, and this has some ramifications to playing the game beyond reskinning everything to be shiny metal instead of picturesque mud. It's an intriguing proposition.
As someone who loves tech and is considering getting a new phone, you know all about reading spec sheets. You check for a faster processor, more RAM, larger storage, and a higher screen resolution. But while these things matter, other smartphone specs can really make a phone go from one you like using to one you truly love.
A Samsung phone comes with two apps that can send text messages: Samsung Messages and Google Messages. It's strange to see two very similarly named apps that do essentially the same thing. Does it matter which one you use? Here's what you need to know to make the decision for yourself.
The now abandoned Redfall had a roadmap of support that was being actively worked on before Microsoft scrapped all development and closed its developer, IGN can reveal.