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Best GPS trackers for kids in 2024
Keep a virtual eye on your little monsters even when you can't be there in person
Whether your kids are the light of your life or the rambunctious monsters you tolerate because of shared DNA, you're legally obligated to keep track of them. You could always accept a helping hand by putting something in your own kid's hands by way of the best GPS trackers available, which can help you keep tabs on them at all times (some of which even give you a sense of what exactly they're doing).
How to calibrate Google Maps
When Google Maps is wrong, it might indicate your phone's compass needs recalibration. Here's how to correct Google Maps location data
Google Maps can be a lifesaver when you're in an unfamiliar city or on a lonely highway. Still, even the best digital maps can be misleading if your phone doesn't accurately detect your location. That's why it's important to know how to calibrate Google Maps to pinpoint where you are to get the correct directions to your destination.
Meta humbly suggests we all change the way we tell time
What are we going to do without an extra leap second?
The march of time is inexorable. None among us can escape its ravages nor its whims. Time's also messy, and while we'd love for it to line up cleanly with the physical phenomena we use to keep track of it, that's frustratingly rarely the case. Plenty of efforts have been made to deal with that over the years, and now the latest push is coming from an unlikely source.
Waze's new pre-drive display shows all the crap you want to avoid on your morning commute
Get to your destination just a little bit faster
Whether you're headed out on a road trip or back into the office, knowing the best way to drive from one place to the next is essential to avoid headache-inducing obstacles. Waze is already one of the best alternatives to Google Maps, utilizing crowdsourced data to track speed traps and traffic jams. With a new update, the app wants to ensure drivers know what they'll face well before rubber hits the road.
How to hack a GPS into your DSLR camera using Google Photos
Make sure your camera's clock is set correctly, though
It's almost shocking the extent to which smartphones have replaced dedicated cameras in many of our lives. Between the advanced optics, next-level image processing, and being able to share pics with just a couple taps, who would ever dream about lugging around an old-fashioned point-and-shoot digicam? But for as far we've come, there's still a lot of appeal in larger, more flexible cameras, with their big sensors and interchangeable lenses. As it turns out, you can use your phone to bring a little bit of extra smarts to even a dumb DSLR, helping to modernize your Google Photos pics with GPS info.
How to give apps only your approximate location on Android 12
You'll soon have another decision to make when giving permissions
Apple and Google are each slow-stepping their ways to giving their customers more privacy options up front when they want to interact with apps. For example, Android has been offering users the choice to give specific permissions like access to location data to an app for one time only, while the app is in use, or not at all. With Android 12, users get to control how accurate the location data they give is.
Slopes app comes to Android with powerful tracking for your snowboard and ski adventures
Get more insight into your winter sports
Most of our Winter recreation options are either restricted or entirely off limits due to the pandemic, but most of the ski lifts are staying open this year with only basic rules about social distancing and face covering while standing in lines. If you've ever wanted to keep track of your downhill antics, the Slopes app can take care of all the hard work and feed you all the information you might want. Already popular among iPhone users with a 4.8 rating on the App Store, Slopes has made its way to Android.
GPS has made it possible to always know where you are. Actually, scratch that—not always. GPS can be flaky in dense urban areas, but Google has a solution. The Live View AR feature from walking navigation is now available as an option to calibrate your location and orientation. The option is a bit hidden, though.
Fitbit Charge 4 gets Smart Wake, dynamic GPS, and customizable display timeout
A collection of thoughtful enhancements
The Fitbit Charge 4 is among the better fitness trackers out there, but it's placed awkwardly between the Inspire HR and the Versa 2, overlapping with both in a lot of areas. The lines between the Versa series and the Charge are about to get even blurrier, as the latest firmware update (1.96.29) gives the fitness tracker Smart Wake, dynamic GPS, and a customizable display timeout.
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Dual-band GPS — or, technically, dual-frequency GNSS — should be able to provide a better navigation experience by pulling additional data from navigation satellites. A number of Android devices have the hardware required to use this method, including the newly-announced Pixel 4. And according to Google, the feature is "coming soon."
Samsung Galaxy S20 owners are experiencing GPS lock issues
It looks like only the Snapdragon variants are affected
The Galaxy S20 lineup comes with exceptional hardware and Samsung's familiar high-end design, but just like any tech product, they're not perfect. We were not too impressed by the ratio of the S20 Ultra's capabilities and its price, and now an issue has popped up that affects the whole S20 series: Some people report that they can't get a GPS lock in Google Maps and Waze on their brand-new phones.
The Garmin Speak Plus is an interesting multi-function device. It's a dash cam that also functions as a standalone GPS and takes Alexa commands. If any or all of those things speak to you, now's a great time to pick one up: BuyDig's got a coupon that'll get you a Speak Plus for $99.
Waze helps many commuters avoid traffic and report hazards to other users. Thanks to its community, the service is able to crowdsource a wide array of information, ranging from road conditions to gas prices. Waze is now leveraging its user base to provide more details to drivers, as it's starting to show toll prices along your route.
Facebook has definitely earned its sour reputation, but the company has been scrambling in the last few months to try to regain some of its users' trust. Today, it announced some new location control settings for Android (and iOS), an update which aims to give people more control over just how much information they share with the social network.
Ever since Google bought Waze, we've been waiting for some of its more popular features to worm their way into Maps. A few months back, we got a hint from an APK Teardown that Google was preparing to add incident reports to Maps. Now, this feature seems to be appearing for at least some Maps users.
Keeping track of all your things can be a challenge. You could try just having fewer things, but that's no fun. Instead, why not get more things to keep track of the things you already have? Samsung has announced a device to accomplish precisely that. The SmartThings Tracker uses GPS and LTE to monitor the location of whatever you want, but you'll need to go through a carrier for the LTE service.
When it was announced at CES 2018, Skagen's Falster watch was one of the prettiest and most minimalist Wear OS watches to date. In my review of it, I liked the design but criticized some hardware decisions, like the lack of NFC, GPS, and heart rate monitoring. All three features have been added to the new Falster 2, which has just been announced.
If you think it looks like a miniature Echo Dot for your car, you're basically spot on. The Garmin Speak is a GPS navigation unit with Amazon Alexa built-in. It was announced yesterday and is the first in-car device of its kind to add Alexa capabilities. At just an inch and a half, it's tiny, and yet it offers the same turn-by-turn GPS navigation as Garmin's other products while also including Amazon's smart assistant.Garmin Speak will hook up to your car stereo speakers, giving a voice to the device and allowing you to ask Alexa to stream music, tell you the weather, or read you the news. And to get directions, you just have to say "Alexa, ask Garmin for directions to..." There are also interactive games if you need to entertain the family on a long trip. Another useful application is the control of smart home devices remotely. If you forgot to turn your lights off, no problem, just ask Alexa to turn them off.
It's crazy to think that before smartphones were a thing we had to rely on actual physical maps or our own sense of direction to get around on foot, or our satnavs in our cars. We probably take for granted quite how amazing it is that we can whack an address into Google Maps and it'll plot the ideal route from our current location. This is only possible because of the GPS capabilities of our smartphones, and it's set to get even more accurate in the next generation of smartphones.
We are all familiar with GPS. It has been guiding us to our destinations for years. But what happens when you arrive and you need to find a specific store in the mall or a specific item in a grocery store? Google will have you covered with a new technology it announced today called "Visual Positioning Service" or VPS. This technology builds on the idea of augmented reality tightly coupled with real world information. It will look for distinct visual features in your environment to create a map of the location using only the camera on your phone.