iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

Apple is launching a new program that allows you to trade-in old iPhones with broken or cracked screens. The new retail initiative will make it possible to trade in an iPhone 5s or iPhone 6/6 Plus with damaged screens, cameras, or buttons for credit towards a new iPhone. The company also plans to start offering the option to install screen protectors on devices in Apple Retail stores.

The folks from Dog & Bone have expanded beyond cases and now offer the LockSmart ($89.95) Bluetooth-enabled padlock. I had the chance to see it at CES and try it at home. The LockSmart has some serious heft and should provide serious competition to traditional padlocks like MasterLock. Of course it has a "smart" advantage, namely the ability to unlock it using the free, simple, and easy to use app I liked that it is "shareable" so you can allow authorized users the ability to unlock it. It's not just for one person and their phone. And you can choose to unlock by Touch ID, tapping the icon or entering a passcode in the app.

Last September, Apple released iOS 9 with a slew of upgrades to the software. From the long-awaited iPad multitasking capabilities to the smarter-than-ever Siri to a host of new and reimagined apps like iCloud Drive, News, Notes, and Maps, our iPhones and iPads saw some huge improvements. Yet all the changes, wonderful as they are, can be overwhelming to navigate. There are lots of new ways to utilize your iPhone, and we cover them all in our Ultimate Guide to iOS 9. Here's a sneak peak inside the guide, including an overview of everything it includes plus two full lessons covering iCloud Drive and Apple Pay. 

Despite being a small accessory itself, the Apple Watch’s release created a full market of gear to go with it. From docking stations to tiny watch cases, there’s some really beautiful and functional products available for Apple Watch users. Here’s seven of the best and most useful accessories you can buy for your Apple Watch.

For years now, many smartphone brands have sported some kind of inductive charging capability, so it's welcome news to hear that Apple is planning to bake some cable-free power technology into an upcoming iPhone; but of course, the Apple flavor will likely aim to one-up the current paradigms. Great news, but you can give Qi wireless charging your iPhone a go without the wait. The Maxfield M1 wireless charging pad ($47.49) and adapter ($23.99) brings Qi wireless charging to iPhone, and without the requirement of buying a weird or bulky case.

Apple has made Force Touch, 3D Touch, and Touch ID big parts of its product offering, and now Apple might unite the features in a Force-Touch-enabled Touch ID. A patent that was recently uncovered by AppleInsider shows the merging of Apple's Touch ID fingerprint sensor with their pressure sensitive mechanism known as Force Touch on the Apple Watch and 3D Touch on the iPhone 6s line.

Well that didn’t last long. After Google released its Q4 earnings this week, its parent company Alphabet saw stock prices surge to over $800 due to the strong results. This sequence of events caused Alphabet’s market capitalization to reach $540 billion, surpassing Apple as the world’s most valuable company. But the 8% increase in Alphabet’s stock value didn’t last and as the market closed yesterday evening, Apple found itself back on top.

The day before Valentine’s, February 13, is the beloved holiday started by Parks & Recreation to celebrate our best women friends. If you live in the same place as your best girlfriends, bring everybody together for brunch or a movie. Galentine’s is all about appreciating your closest friends. If you and your best friends are spread across the country, here’s five apps to make sending gifts easy for this unofficial but glorious holiday.

Surely, whether you’re Apple’s biggest fan or not, we can all agree the company’s marketing likes to buoy its own innovation and epic-ness. From the iPhone 6s tagline, “The only thing that’s changed is everything,” to the Apple Watch copy, “To wear it is to love it,” Apple is great at declaring the significance of its own products. That’s why Buzzfeed’s “If McDonald’s Advertised Like Apple” remains to be fantastically hilarious and deserves a throwback nod of appreciation.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet just passed Apple as the most valuable company in the world. After Alphabet released its Q4 earnings last night, stock prices shot up 8% causing the company’s combined share classes to reach $554 billion, surpassing Apple’s $534 billion. This is the first time a company has surpassed Apple in four years since Apple vaulted Exxon Mobile in 2012.

iPhone reminders are an easy way to keep your life on schedule. You can set them via the Reminders app or simply tell Siri when and what you need to be reminded of. However, I don't use the reminders app very often; therefore, it's buried in a folder on my third Home Screen and is annoying to access. But, did you know that you don't have to unlock your phone to mark a reminder as complete? You can even Snooze the reminder from Lock Screen as though it were any other alarm. Once you've set a reminder in the native app, the reminder will be set to go off. Here's how to mark it complete from Lock Screen. 

It’s time to pick our elected candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties. Some states hold primaries while other states hold caucus’. Either way, the voting has officially begun and Super Tuesday is almost here. So far we've had one state vote at a time, but on Super Tuesday, a whole slew of states will take to the polls. We wanted to bring you the best apps for finding a candidate that aligns with your values, apps for keeping up to date on current news, separating the fact from the fiction, and, of course, watching the votes come in. Here’s the best six apps for following the 2016 US Presidential Election.

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