iphone tips: How to unlock your Android phone with your face

The latest Android phones have another way to verify that you’re you: by scanning your face.

The idea behind Face Unlock (a feature that requires Android version 4.0 or better, by the way) is simple: the phone’s camera scans your face for a few seconds, then compares it to one or more previously saved head shots.

If it gets a match, then presto! You’ll arrive at your phone’s home page, no PIN required.

You can unlock your phone with a glance once Face Unlock scans your face.

It’s a nifty trick, but it’s not quite foolproof.

Before setting up the feature on your own Android phone, you’ll be warned that Face Unlock isn’t nearly as secure as using a numeric passcode.

Indeed, there’s always the possibility of a false match if someone who looks “similar” to you sneaks a peek at your handset.

In other words, think twice before protecting your phone with Face Unlock if you’ve stored military secrets on it, or if your online banking password is saved in your Android browser.

So, ready to use your face to unlock your Android phone?

How to do it-

• Go to the Settings menu and tap Security, Screen Lock.*

• Tap the Face Unlock option to see the litany of notes and caveats about the feature (including the assurance that your stored profile picture will be “kept private” on your handset). Ready to continue? Tap “Set it up.”

• Next, you should see … well, yourself. Hold the phone until your face fits in the dotted outline; once the camera thinks it has a good shot of your face, it’ll snap a photo automatically. (For the best results, Google advises taking a Face Unlock photo indoors, where it’s not “too bright or too dim.”) Once you’ve made it to the “Face Captured” page, tap “Continue.”

• You’ll also need a backup PIN or a security “pattern” to trace on the phone’s touchscreen, which you’ll be asked to set up once you’re done snapping photos of your face. The backup passcode will come in handy if Face Unlock can’t quite recognize you (which, as I’ve learned, happens on a fairly regular basis).

• Now, time to test. Lock your phone, then press the “sleep/wake” button and hold the handset right in front of your face; the phone should unlock itself within seconds of “seeing” you.

*Note: These steps may vary depending on the make and model of your Android phone. I tested this tip on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running on Android version 4.2.2.

How to make your Face Unlock a bit more secure? 

What to do is below-

• Take multiple Face Unlock photos of yourself in different conditions—say, with your glasses on and off, or both outdoors and indoors—to give the phone a better chance of identifying you correctly. Just go back to the Settings menu, tap Security, then select “Improve face matching.”

• Worried someone might try to unlock your phone with a still photo of you? You can set Face Unlock to unlock your phone only if it sees you blink. Just tap Settings, Security, then enable the “Liveness check” option.

Read More

How to revive a frozen iPhone: iPhone tips

Picture this: you’re happily swiping away on your iPhone when all of a sudden, it goes haywire—an app freezes up, the web browser spins and spins, or the screen simply stops responding to your fingertaps. Now what?

Well, you could try pressing the “home” key to return to the familiar home page, or you could press and hold the “sleep/wake” button (the thin button that sits on the top edge of the handset) to turn your iPhone off and on again.

Press and hold both the “sleep/wake” key (pictured here) and the home key to reset a frozen iPhone.

But what if the home and sleep keys aren’t responding, either?

Luckily, there’s another way to resuscitate a frozen, glitchy, or otherwise unresponsive iPhone: a so-called “hard” reset, which forces the iPhone to stop whatever it’s doing, shut down, and restart.

Think of it as waking your iPhone (or iPad, or iPod Touch) with a cold bucket of water rather than a gentle nudge—crude, but often effective.

Here’s how …

• Press and hold both the “sleep/wake” button (at the top of the iPhone) and the home button (below the screen) at the same time.
• After a few seconds, the screen will go blank; don’t worry, this is normal. Keep pressing and holding those buttons.
• After a few more seconds, the Apple logo should appear. Go ahead and release the buttons.
• Wait a bit longer, and your iPhone’s home screen should appear again. Phew!

Read More

An iPhone 5S motherboard image leaks complete with quad-core A7 processor

It is widely expected that Apple will refresh its iPhone line-up later this year with the introduction of the iPhone 5S. We aren’t expecting much of a change between the iPhone 5 and 5S in terms of how it looks. That’s based on the fact Apple doesn’t seem to be investing much at the moment in new production equipment, meaning not much in the way of new hardware features. With that being the case, Apple will be focused on upgrading the components inside the handset.

The image you see above is thought to be a leaked shot of the motherboard that will ship inside the iPhone 5S. As usual, this has come from an unknown source that website iOSDoc trusts along with a few details of what we can expect with the refresh in terms of software updates.

Apparently, that A7 processor you see in the image is a quad-core chip that will be clocked at 1.2GHz. Although the A6 inside the iPhone 5 runs slightly faster at 1.3GHz, it’s only a dual-core chip so the A7 should offer noticeable performance gains and allow the smartphone to just do more. The GPU is expected to be switched out for the quad-core PowerVR SGX554MP4, which is used in the 4th-gen iPad. There’s also expected to be 2GB of dual-channel LPDDR2-1066 RAM on board instead of the 1GB the iPhone 5 currently uses. Again, that should allow more headroom for the software and apps you want to run on the phone.

With new hardware also comes some software updates and usually a few surprises from Apple. The introduction of the iPhone 5S is expected to include iOS 7 rolled out alongside an updated version of Siri.

All that new hardware means there’s bound to be significantly more draw on the battery. Apple will have to counter that either with a more aggressive battery management system, or by managing to squeeze a larger battery inside the case.

Read More