iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

If you have an Apple device, like an iPhone or iPad, you have access to iCloud, whether you know it or not. You can back up your iPhone to iCloud and sync your data across all your devices. Knowing this, why would you need an external hard drive for your iPhone? Well, even with iCloud Backup, there are a few reasons why you might consider investing in an external hard drive. We’ll go over them in this article.

Improve Your iPhone with These MagSafe Accessories

(Sponsored Post) By Olena Kagui on Tue, 01/11/2022

If you have any iPhone 12 or 13, you have MagSafe, Apple's magnetic technology that can help you do more with your phone. STM Goods creates a unique lineup of MagSafe-compatible accessories that can make your life easier. Keep reading to learn more about the MagArm, MagLoop, and MagPod!

Game Centered features roundups and reviews of the best in iOS games and gaming related news. Among the App Store’s myriad games, it’s all too easy to overlook some of the great new releases. Each installment of Game Centered will take a closer look at a select few iOS games that are worthy of special recognition. As we near the end of 2015, we enter one of my favorite times of year as an iOS gamer. Every year around this time we start to see an influx of new games in the App Store as developers hustle to get their best games to market in time for the holiday shopping season. Here are some of the best games from Apple's own Best New Games section of the App Store.

I've been a fan of Martian Watches for years... long before Apple hinted at a smart watch of its own. Martian Watches offered some distinct features that were unmatched by competitors, and with its latest set of watches, including the Martian Alpha Watch ($279), those advantages still hold up today. I had the opportunity to try one and it addresses many of the concerns I had with earlier versions.


With iOS 8 came iCloud Drive; and now, there's an app for that. iCloud Drive is, simply put, Apple's Dropbox. When you're logged into iCloud, you can easily save files to the drive, which are then accessible across all iOS devices and work in conjunction with OS X and Windows. With iOS 9, Apple has added an iCloud Drive app that makes it easy to view, edit, and manage the documents saved to your drive. The app is automatically included in the new update; however, the option to display the iCloud Drive app is hidden in your Settings.


An interesting new feature of iOS 9 is auto email event suggestions for your Calendar. The software scans your emails to see if there are any events you haven't added to your schedule. This can be very helpful, especially if a lot of your emails contain pertinent events. However, if you find yourself with a cluttered calendar, you can easily turn off the automatic addition.

Well, I just got my hands on iOS 9 (not being one to have adopted the iOS 9 beta) and right off the bat, I've got three favorite new features that I've already put to good use. Sure, split-screen multitasking for my iPad is much appreciated—and long overdue—and the upgrades to Notes have made what was an average (at best) note-taking app and turned it into a much-improved compositional tool. Nonetheless, the following features are the ones I've found myself most excited about.

The Capti Narrator (free), developed by Charmtech Labs LLC, can read your iPhone screen to you, or at least from most apps that support sharing within iOS. The app also provides its own browser interface, and queues up your content into a track playlist. The coolness does not end there. You can sync up your devices to include desktop PC, iPhone, or iPad, and seamlessly switch between them without a pause in your content. Capti is for anyone who wants an audio-enabled mobile content experience hands free in the car, the gym, the office, or practically anywhere.

I had the opportunity to try the i-FlashDrive MAX (starting at $79.99). PhotoFast gave me the accessory to try and it saved me a lot of trouble. My daughter had a lot of photos and videos on her iPhone that needed to be backed up. I was able to treat the i-FlashDrive like a USB drive and copy the files to it from her iPhone and then plug the drive into my Mac and use it as a normal Flash Drive. You do need to use PhotoFast's free app to access files within iOS, but that's true for all of these types of drives.

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