61 of the best iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus wallpapers we’ve found

One of the most difficult parts about owning a new iPhone is picking out an equally-new wallpaper.

It has to be crisp, beautiful, breath-taking, inspiring, bold, colourful, rich, and preferably all of the above. Thankfully, between Reddit, Flickr, Imgur, as well as other resources, the internet is chock-full of free-to-download wallpapers.

We’ve scoured the web looking for some of the best wallpapers and made sure to only select ones with 750 x 1334, 1080 x 1920, or 1242 x 2208 resolution. So, without further adieu, browse the gallery below to see what we found.

There’s trippy geometric shapes, delicious patterns, silhouetted celebrity portraits, brilliant starry-night shots, etc. We’ve even included flat wallpapers for the minimalists out there. Everyone should be able to find something.

To download a wallpaper, right-click on the image, and then save it to your computer. If you’re using an iPhone and would like to download a wallpaper, press on the image until a menu pops up. From there, select Save Image.

These wallpapers will perfectly fit either 4.7-inch or 5.5-inch screen sizes, meaning they will work for the iPhone 6, iPhone 6S, iPhone 7 and the Plus versions of all three models. Please let us know in the comments below if you’ve seen other gorgeous wallpapers worth including.

Handbrake’s video conversion app update was 13 years in the making

In the fast-moving world of modern app development, users can often wait days or a small number of weeks for an update. However, if you’re the team behind Handbrake — one of the world’s most popular video conversion apps — years can pass before you’re ready to show off what you’ve been working on. Well, 13 years to be exact. After more than a decade in development and available as a beta release, the Handbrake team has released version 1.0.0 of its transcoding software, which delivers a much-needed set of new features.

One of the most welcome additions is the availability of new video presets, which now include settings for the latest smartphones, tablets, consoles and streaming devices. If you’re looking to (legally) back up your movie collection, the app also includes new Matroska presets, offering support for Google’s VP9 video codec and Opus audio. Other noteworthy inclusions are the ability to select specific DVD titles and chapters to rip, improved subtitle support and the option to queue up multiple encodes.

Although Handbrake is easy to use, it does take time to find what settings work for you. With this is mind, the team has released new online documentation for its Windows, Mac and Linux app, which takes you through the best ways to convert video, create advanced workflows and troubleshoot any problems you might come up against.

Via: iClarified

Source: Handbrake

Samsung’s 2016 went up in smoke

Samsung’s year started well, all things considered. The Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge were bona fide hits. The company’s financials looked great. Its position as the global leader in the smartphone market was assured. And then the Galaxy Note 7 happened. After months of success, Samsung’s year started to unravel — quickly.

In hindsight, it’s a little shocking how quickly the situation unfolded. The phone was officially announced on August 2nd, and it launched on August 19th to critical acclaim and commercial success. Toward the end of that month, the first report of a Note 7 explosion emerged from South Korea, triggering a cascade of similar reports from around the world. Samsung’s new phablet was not only flawed but also actively dangerous. After a week, Samsung halted Note 7 shipments to Korean consumers, and just days after that the company issued its first widespread Note 7 recall. As you probably remember, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission helped facilitate a recall in the US shortly after that, which should’ve been the end of it.

It wasn’t. Some of the supposedly safe replacement devices Samsung delivered to customers kept overheating, and there was even one incident that grounded a Southwest Airlines flight. Enough was finally enough. On October 10th, Samsung officially halted global sales and exchanges of the Note 7. The next day, the production lines were stopped entirely. In less than two months, Samsung’s “finest phone yet,” to quote our own review, had become a black mark on the company’s track record.

Perhaps the worst part: We still don’t know what caused all this. At first, it looked like batteries made by Samsung SDI could be to blame. Then devices with batteries sourced from other suppliers, such as Japan’s TDK, began to overheat too. Now a new report from engineering firm Instrumental suggests the Note 7’s failures were due to the fact that the batteries themselves were too big to be squeezed into a smartphone so “aggressively” designed — that is, Samsung should have made allowances for the natural swelling batteries undergo over time. Beyond the potential for explosions, though, Anna Shedletsky, the author of the report, suggests the phone would have been doomed regardless.

“If the Galaxy Note 7 wasn’t recalled for exploding batteries,” the report reads, “I believe that a few years down the road these phones would be slowly pushed apart by mechanical battery swell. A smaller battery using standard manufacturing parameters would have solved the explosion issue and the swell issue. But, a smaller battery would have reduced the system’s battery life below the level of its predecessor, the Note 5, as well as its biggest competitor, the iPhone 7 Plus. Either way, it’s now clear to us that there was no competitive salvageable design.”

Samsung’s woes didn’t end with smartphones. Between March 2011 and April 2016, Samsung produced 34 top-loading washing machine models that, due to failures in design, could quite literally blow their tops. US regulators took notice of the trend and took action in September — great timing for Samsung. The company once again collaborated with the CPSC to get a recall going, but not before some 730 reports of washing machine explosions had rolled in.

Unlike with the Note 7, Samsung has at least explained what was going on with these washing machines. According to company statements, excessively strong vibrations can occur when bedding or other bulky items are washed at high speeds. Those vibrations can dislodge the lid, leading it to shoot off the washing machine and strike people nearby. All told, some 2.8 million top-loading washing machines had to be recalled, and reports of trouble from around the world are still surfacing. Earlier this month, a family in Sydney fled their home when their Samsung washing machine caught fire. Prior to that, nine injuries related to washing machine malfunctions were reported, including a broken jaw in one case. It’s difficult to say what kind of exploding consumer good is more unnerving: the one that we carry in our pocket everywhere we go or the one that sits quietly in a corner of our home until it violently remind us of its existence.

So, yes, Samsung had a bad year. That doesn’t mean the company is doomed. Despite its recent failures, it would take a lot more than this to kill a corporate octopus flush with so much money and influence. Consider the following: The most recent estimates we could find suggested the Note 7 recall would cost at least $5.3 billion. That might sound like a lot (and it is!), but as far as Samsung is concerned, that’s chump change. As laid out in a long-term plan published in late November, the conglomerate wants to keep no more than 70 trillion Korean won in its cash reserves: That works out to just shy of $60 billion. That’s $60 billion Samsung is keeping handy for rough spells (though some of that treasure trove was probably tapped for that Harman acquisition last month).

That’s not to say Samsung was completely unaffected by the events of the past few months. Samsung’s most recent earnings release, from October, showed its mobile division tanking, with operating profit down 96 percent from the year before. No matter, though: Continued growth in the conglomerate’s chip and display business helped absorb the financial blow from the mobile side. We’re not sure how the numbers will shake out the next time earnings are released (especially in light of a potential structural shakeup), but for now Samsung’s money-making machinery still works fine. The bigger question centers on Samsung’s reputation and the trust it built with its customers. The path forward would benefit from clarity and contrition, but the truth is that rich companies can afford to muddle along until consumers forget about their past failures.

Samsung won’t forget about its troubled turn this year, but with luck the company will use it as a sobering reminder to do better in the future. After all, another pivotal moment in Samsung’s history was also forged in fire. It, too, involved phones, coincidentally enough, but none nearly as complex as the Note 7.

In early 1995, Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee gave out cell phones as gifts to celebrate the new year, and for one reason or another they didn’t work. Lee was incensed. The phones’ failure to function properly not only reflected poorly on him personally but also highlighted the slow progress of Lee’s plan to make Samsung synonymous with quality around the world. Two years prior, Lee — fed up with Samsung’s cheap, often slipshod work — bellowed at his senior managers to “change everything except your wife and children.” If Samsung was to achieve its potential, it had to change, and it wasn’t happening fast enough.

In March 1995, Lee had those phones gathered in the courtyard of Samsung’s Gumi factory, in the heart of one of Korea’s many industrial centers. Thousands of devices lay there, surrounded by some 2,000 Samsung workers with headbands that said “quality first” lashed to their foreheads. As Lee and his board of directors looked on, the phones, along with monitors and fax machines, were battered with hammers and heaved into a fire. The message was clear: Poor quality would no longer be tolerated.

Samsung has transcended its humble origins, but the message delivered that day over 20 years ago bears repeating. Company mythology points to the fire in Gumi as an act of cleansing, signaling a new era for a revitalized Samsung. Every company has bad years. What’s more important is how the company carries itself in the weeks, months and years that follow. Samsung turned things around for itself in 1995, and it can rebound now too.

Check out all of Engadget’s year-in-review coverage right here.

Fake news fools Facebook’s Safety Check system in Bangkok

Fake news reports of an explosion in Bangkok, Thailand, triggered Facebook’s Safety Check program in the region, The Independent reports. For an hour beginning at 9PM local time on December 27th, anyone in Thailand’s capital city saw reports of an explosion and a prompt to mark themselves as safe. However, there was no actual bomb scare in Bangkok tonight.

Facebook’s Safety Check system is powered, in part, by an algorithm that pulls from user posts and news sources to determine whether a catastrophic event has occurred. This time around, it appears the algorithm used unreliable and fake news sources to “confirm” the nonexistent explosion.

Channel NewsAsia correspondent Saksith Saiyasombut shared a photo of the news stories Facebook displayed with the Safety Check; the top hit was a news-scraping site, not a source of trusted original reporting, he said.

The “source” of the @Facebook Safety Check for Bangkok: A fake news site that scrapped stuff from elsewhere…! pic.twitter.com/i6Q2k8XBxP

— Saksith Saiyasombut (@SaksithCNA) December 27, 2016

Facebook disabled the safety check at roughly 10PM local time. We’ve reached out to the social networking site for more information on tonight’s false positive in Bangkok and will update this story as we hear back.

Fake news has been a thorn in Facebook’s side for months now. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently rolled out an updated system to fight the propagation of untrue and misleading news articles on the site, working with third-party fact-checkers like Snopes, ABC News and Politifact to flag suspicious stories.

Via: The Independent, The Verge

Hulu will add about 50 Disney movies this year

For a lot of cord-cutters, Hulu is one of the best ways to stay on top of new TV episodes from major networks right after they air. But the service also has a fair share of movies, and that side of the business will keep growing thanks to a just-announced partnership. Hulu now has the rights to some films from Disney, including The Nightmare Before Christmas, Mulan, Pocahontas, Hercules and Sister Act, all of which are available to stream now.

All told, about 50 movies will make their way to Hulu; others coming soon include Con Air, Step Up, Gone in 60 Seconds, Pearl Harbor, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and The Mighty Ducks. The partnership appears to be pretty focused on family movies for the most part, though there’s a smattering of drama and thrillers thrown in there as well. Hopefully, this initial partnership will also lead to more of Disney’s newer, high-profile films hitting Hulu as well — but you have to start somewhere. Sure, Hulu and its big competitors may be focused on original content right now, but having a good back catalog of movies certainly doesn’t hurt.

Sylvania Smart Multicolor LED (HomeKit enabled) Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

CES is just a week away, and we’re sure to see plenty of new gadgets that work with Apple HomeKit, the set of smart home protocols built into the software that runs iPhones and iPads. North American lighting manufacturer Sylvania wanted to get out ahead of the sprawl, so we’re getting an early look at its own HomeKit-compatible offering: a new color-changing smart bulb that doesn’t need any extra hub hardware to connect with your home network.

The Sylvania Smart Multicolor LED.

Sylvania

That last bit will help set Sylvania apart from other HomeKit-compatible smart bulbs, including Philips Hue’s popular color-changing LEDs and the funky-looking LEDs in the Nanoleaf Smarter Kit. Both of those options transmit their signals using the Zigbee protocol, which means you need to plug a hub into your router to act as translator. Sylvania’s bulbs cut out the middle man by using Wi-Fi radios that your router can understand as soon as you screw them in. The company claims that the new bulbs are your very first hub-free option for use with HomeKit.

HomeKit compatibility comes with a couple of key advantages for iOS users. The most notable: Siri voice controls that allow you to tell Apple’s virtual assistant to turn your bulbs on and off, dim them up and down, or change their color.

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You’ll also be able to control the Sylvania bulbs directly from Apple’s Home app alongside other HomeKit-compatible gadgets. With the Home app, you can group the bulbs with those other gadgets to create “scenes” that run automatically whenever you please. For instance you could set your lights to come on and your thermostat to crank up a few degrees whenever you return home from work at the end of the day. You can also pin individual bulbs or groups of bulbs to your iPhone’s Control Center — just swipe up and tap to turn things on and off, no app needed.

Pricing for the new bulb isn’t set yet, but if it follows suit with other color-changing smart bulbs in the Osram/Sylvania family of LEDs, it should likely cost somewhere around $40 a pop. Sylvania’s team tells me that the new bulbs will begin selling on Amazon in early 2017, and they’d be smart to hustle; Lifx, which also makes color-changing smart bulbs that communicate using Wi-Fi, recently announced plans to bring its latest generation of LEDs onto HomeKit’s platform by February.

Samsung teases water resistance for Galaxy A series

Samsung is bringing water resistance to the Galaxy A series.

If Samsung’s previous launch windows were any indication, we’re likely due for new models in the Galaxy A series in the coming weeks. This time around, it looks like the company will unveil the 2017 refresh of the Galaxy A series at CES. Ahead of the launch, Samsung’s Malaysian outfit teased an image that suggests the upcoming phones in the Galaxy A series will be water-resistant:

Samsung will likely introduce the Galaxy A3, A5, and the A7 initially, followed up by the A9 and other country-specific variants. With CES just a week away, we should know more soon. What do you guys want to see in the 2017 refresh of the Galaxy A series?

In 2017, smartwatches need a ‘less is more’ approach

What kind of monster wants me to read CNN on my wrist?

One of the many casualties of 2016 was Pebble — the first “mainstream” smartwatch, if such a category exists. For many of us who live and breathe mobile tech, the original Pebble was a revelatory device — here was a small, relatively stylish wearable computer that freed us from habitual phone-checking.

Just as email in your pocket had been the concept that pushed the first smartphones to early adopters, notifications on your wrist, it was thought, would spawn a whole new class of computer. Such was the impact of that smartwatch that more than 1 million units were sold in its first 18 months. In the tech journo bubble, it seemed like everyone had a Pebble — over half the Mobile Nations team at CES 2014 wore the things. (And it was funny to watch the synchronized wrist-raising that resulted when we all received the same group email or IM.)

The original Pebble was great because of its simplicity — a quality modern smartwatches have completely forgotten.

The original Pebble was great because of its simplicity. It did few things, but it did them well. However it seems the industry at large, seeing the trajectory smartphones had taken, wanted to develop smartwatches along the same lines — more computing power, bigger and better screens, more functionality.

At the dawn of 2017, it’s obvious that that approach has failed — consumers don’t want smartwatches in the way they exist today. That’s reflected in the state of Android Wear right now, where the software hasn’t received a meaningful upgrade in over a year, as Google overhauls the system from top to bottom. Even Motorola, maker of the critically praised Moto 360 series, is getting out of the wearables game, citing poor demand. And yet the future of Android Wear continues to develop it along those same unpopular lines. In Wear 2.0, you’ll get a watch-based app store, a tiny keyboard and a giant wheel of apps to scroll through. Which suggests that the Android smartwatches of the future will continue to chase the phones of today in terms of functionality.

People don’t want to poke and prod at app drawers and tiny buttons and barely-legible text. They don’t want to scrawl out text messages on a keyboard the size of a quarter. If it takes more than 10 seconds to do, they’re just going to take out their phone. And a phone will do all of those things better than a watch.

If it takes more than 10 seconds to do, you’re just going to pull out your phone.

Extra functionality — particularly the LTE connectivity now being shoehorned into high-end wearables — comes at the cost of how a watch looks. More complex functionality powerful processors and cellular connectivity demands bigger batteries and larger screens, making them bulky and unattractive. Yet manufacturers continue to pummel that same stone in the hope of drawing blood. The latest Samsung Gear S3 watches, for instance, go all-in on extra functionality in a larger, more masculine wearable. Samsung has decided, it seems, to go after the lion’s share of people already buying smartwatches, instead of making the category more appealing to the billions of people who own a smartphone but no wrist computer.

To Samsung’s credit, it’s easy to disregard all this extra fluff if you don’t want it — as I do with my Gear S2. But you could go back and forth on the value of “Hey, look at all this stuff we made that you can ignore.”

The success of the Fitbits (and years ago, the Pebbles) of the world shows that the mass market wants something to track their exercise and show them notifications. In the future, you can probably add mobile payments to that list of genuinely useful, convenient, time-saving core features. Anything more than that will, at best, be aimed at tech nerds like us. And as we’ve learned with current wearables, even then the novelty will wear off after a while.

The Apple Watch — surely the most successful “smartwatch” right now — sells not because of its functionality as a wrist-based computer, but because of its design, the Apple brand, and the fashion-plus-fitness angle the company has been pushing for the past year. That’s more in line with general consumers’ thought process when it comes to buying a wearable — or, hell, any fashion product. You buy it because it looks cooler than a Fitbit while addressing those same basic needs. Anything else is a bonus.

So what I’d like to see from smartwatches in the coming year is less feature-chasing and a focus on the core functionality that makes wearables genuinely useful. The likelihood of that happening is debatable — Android Wear seems to be on an opposing trajectory right now, as does Samsung’s Gear platform.

But maybe, with time, manufacturers will start to remember what made smartwatches worth bothering with in the first place. If they do, this niche product category might eventually hit the mainstream.

Latest Nougat beta update for the S7 edge fixes reboot issue

Bug fixes, transparent notifications, and no more errant reboots.

The fifth Nougat beta update is now rolling out to the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge to those enrolled in the Galaxy Beta program in the UK and South Korea. While there aren’t any new feature additions, the update fixes the intermittent reboot issue, and has several stability improvements.

The update comes in at 301MB, and you’ll be able to download it by heading into your phone’s settings. According to SamMobile, the update also increases the transparency for lock screen notificaions.

At this point, Samsung will be looking to further refine the Nougat build before it gets ready for a public rollout. There’s no clear timeline as to when that’ll happen, but we should be hearing more from Samsung sometime next month.

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How to spend that Amazon Gift Card you received this Holiday Season

Amazon Gift Cards make post-Christmas shopping a breeze.

There’s a few different ways to send and receive Amazon Gift Cards — by e-mail, printed out as a card, or a gift card purchased from a store.

Regardless which method you received your Amazon Gift Card this season, we’ll show you how to load it up to your Amazon account — while also pointing you towards some of our picks for the coolest tech and hottest deals you’ll find on Amazon.

• How to load an Amazon Gift Card onto your account
• How to spend your Amazon Gift Card

How to load an Amazon Gift Card onto your account

The main thing you’ll need to redeem your Amazon Gift Card is the 15-digit claim code found on the back of the physical card, or in the email you received. You can add the balance of the gift card to your Amazon account, or spend it immediately by entering into the it during checkout. You’ll see the entry field when you get to the payment methods of the checkout process

If you’ve received your Amazon Gift Card via email, it’s super easy to add your gift to your account right from your phone. Simply open your email, tap the link, enter your Amazon credentials, then add the gift card to your account balance. You’ll also find your claim code in the email if you’d rather enter it during checkout for a bigger purchase.

Go to Amazon’s page for redeeming gift cards

How to spend your Amazon Gift Card

You can find a bunch of great gift recommendations available from Amazon in the Android Central Holiday Gift Guide. Here’s some of the best from our list, along with some other cool deals you might not want to miss out on!

Honor 8

The Honor 8 is one of the best phones released in 2016, and a great option if you’re looking for a new phone for the New Year. The Honor 8 gives you almost everything you expect in a flagship phone, but does it at a dramatically lower price. You get all of the top-end specs, great features and excellent camera performance. It’s a great buy, for you or someone else.

See at Amazon

Nextbit Robin

If you’re looking for something even more affordable and unique, the Nextbit Robin is worth considering. Its cloud-based storage offers 100GB of space, including 32GB onboard, for your apps and data. With a 5.2-inch screen and a very good 13MP camera, it’s a capable device — and it’s also currently on sale via Amazon for under $150.

See at Amazon

UE Boom 2

The UE Boom 2 is a tough and compact Bluetooth speaker that’s even waterproof. It features excellent battery life and delivers incredible sound for its size. You can also pair two of them together to fill an entire room with music.

See at Amazon

Roku Premiere+ Streaming Media Player 4K

The Roku Premiere+ is a capable streaming box available for under $100. You’ll find apps for all your favorite streaming services including Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon Video, Pandora, and many more. The Roku Premiere+ is compatible with 4K televisions and includes a lot of really awesome features, such as an included Wi-Fi remote control with a headphone jack, so you can watch your favorite shows without disturbing anyone else in the room.

See at Amazon

Amazon Echo Dot

Make your home smarter with the power of Alexa. The Amazon Echo Dot comes in a small package, but comes with the power of Amazon’s Alexa. The Dot is so cheap you might as well buy one for your kitchen, one for the living room, and one for the bedroom — all for the cost of the full-size Amazon Echo. Once you get yours set up, there’s a lot you can do with the Amazon Echo.

See at Amazon