iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

Learn how to add, customize, and use widgets in iOS 14. Want to add widgets on your iPhone's home screen? We can finally do it. The update to iOS 14 has let iPhones add widgets not just in the Today View, but on the Home screen too. In iOS, Widgets have previously been off to the side, stuck on the Today View which you access by swiping left on the Home screen. While the widgets can offer all kinds of useful data, leaving them buried in a special drawer, all scrunched together, definitely limited their usefulness. With the release of iOS 14, you can add them anywhere you want, set them to one of three sizes, and even customize their contents. This brings a lot more versatility and customization to the iPhone Home screen. 

This article shows the quickest ways to silence the Apple Watch, as well as different ways to mute Apple Watch notifications, including enabling Apple Watch Theater Mode. Here's how to mute the Apple Watch temporarily or for longer durations.

Here we’ll take a look at what this feature does, how to create shared albums, and how to share photo albums on your iPhone in the Photos app. We share a lot of moments with friends, and those moments are best captured by photos and memories. Unfortunately, it’s often hard to consolidate all of the photos taken at an event or gathering, especially if many people took pictures, or you tend to forget like I do. Apple has risen to the occasion by adding the Sharing Suggestions feature to the iPhone Photos app.

Apple claims its newer iPhones are waterproof, and they can indeed support being splashed or sometimes even submerged in water, but my daughter found out the hard way when her iPhone suffered water damage that you cannot use them underwater as if they were a purpose-built waterproof camera. If you truly want to take photos and videos underwater on your iPhone, you have to check out the AxisGo (starting at $149) waterproof iPhone housing case from AquaTech. The company sent me a review unit to try and I cannot convey how well-built and rugged these things are.

During Apple's September event, Apple announced its new fitness subscription service: Fitness+. Apple says Fitness+ will create comprehensive, personalized workouts that include music, metrics, and instructors for all lifestyles and fitness levels. This is a logical offering in a time when many gyms are closed and many people are looking for safe and solitary ways to stay fit, but with so many free fitness programs out there, how will Fitness+ differentiate itself and justify the monthly price tag? One unique feature is that this is the first digital fitness program to synchronize with the Apple Watch, so tracking your activity, heart rate, calories, and more will be easier and more in-depth than if you were using a different program, and workout suggestions promise new levels of personalization. Users will play a workout on their iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV while their Apple Watch tracks and records their activity. And even though the Apple Watch will be collecting and analyzing more data than ever before, Apple promises that all the information, from instructors to calories, will be kept private.

Apple has officially announced the Apple Watch Series 6 and it looks pretty cool. Each new series of the Apple Watch has brought new processors and better features, and with the Series 6, they’re adding a powerful sensor to allow wearers to monitor their blood oxygen levels. Wearers can receive alerts if their blood oxygen levels drop, which among a great many other things, is one metric that could indicate Covid-19 trouble. We'll cover the features, pricing, and our take on this latest of Apple’s innovative smart watches.

In a significant break from routine, Apple's 2020 September Special Event did not include an announcement of the 2020 iPhones. Instead, the event focused on the new Apple Watch and iPad models. While the Apple Watch and iPad announcement times vary year by year, this is the first time since 2011 and only the second time ever that the new iPhones were not announced in the September event. The first time was in 2011 when the 4S was announced October 4 and released ten days later. This year's delay is linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, and while we're still waiting on all the most important information regarding the 2020 iPhone announcement and release, let's take a look at what we do know.