News and Updates from Gadget Hacks: Page 29

The ride-sharing company Lyft has managed to secure $500 million in funding, which will certainly help its ongoing competition with Uber. According to recent reports, the cab firm is currently valued somewhere between $6.9 billion and $7.5 billion, but this still pales in comparison to Uber's estimated $70 billion valuation.

It looks like Samsung is stronger than ever, as evidenced by their quarterly forecast, which suggests a global profit of $8.8 billion, the company's highest mark in three years. Impressive, considering the spectacular failure of the Note7, Samsung's last flagship prior to the new Galaxy S8.

It appears a privacy lawsuit that began five years ago is about to come to an end, and you might get some money out of it.

The Samsung Galaxy S8+ isn't yet available for consumers to buy, but that isn't stopping tech reviewers from discovering what the phone is capable of. Turns out, the S8+ has a good battery—just not as good as the iPhone 7 Plus.

Apple's music streaming service just got a major update on Android devices.

Signal, the encrypted messaging app, has seen 1.4 million downloads in just the first quarter of 2017—roughly twice the downloads it received in the same period last year. Rani Molla at Recode attributes this to Donald Trump's inauguration, as the private messaging service saw a 40% increase in US downloads between Election Day and the end of the first quarter of 2017.

Google and eight top Android partners have just signed the Android Networked Cross-License, nicknamed PAX. On the surface, this looks to be a peace treaty of sorts that could end several patent wars.

We have some bad news for BlackBerry fans: It looks like the upcoming KeyOne flagship won't be shipped in April after all.

Apple just pushed out the iOS 10.3 update to everyone on March 27, so if you haven't installed it yet, make sure to do so by going to Settings -> General -> Software Update. Trust us, you'll want to.

Samsung's new Galaxy S8 can turn into a PC with its DeX dock, but while that may sound like the future of mobile computing on the surface, there are definitely a few issues with the entire setup.

Headphone drama has been all the rage in the past year, with Apple killing off the headphone jack and trying to force AirPods upon its users (Apple, stop trying to make tiny, expensive, easy-to-lose earbuds happen. It's not going to work).

Google's Pixel smartphone is striking up some heated competition between phone makers HTC, LG, TCL, and Coolpad, as the Pixel 3 gets ready to release in 2018. Yep, you heard that right—not the Pixel, not the Pixel 2, but the Pixel 3—which shows that Google is really committed to the future of its new flagship line.

For a long time, Apple has kept the upper hand on Android as far as app revenue is concerned. However, this tradition looks likely to change this year, as Android's app sales are expected to surpass Apple's.

Don't ignore the update sitting in your Settings app; you'd be leaving your iPhone's security vulnerable.

All the news and rumors regarding the Galaxy S8 have finally coalesced and brought us to this moment, and it couldn't come soon enough. Samsung's flagships are making their official debut live on Wednesday, March 29. The stakes are especially high for the South Korean tech giant, following the Note7 debacle and the political scandals that plagued its highest echelons. Simply put, Samsung's fortunes are now riding on the Galaxy S8 and S8+.

Earlier last week, there were a number of fake five-star WhatsApp reviews to be found on the Google Play Store. Now, Gmail, Chrome, Messenger, and Firefox are all the latest victims to be saturated in five-star spam that wrongly refers to the word "game" in reference to non-game apps.

Monday has been a big update day for Apple. Alongside the release of iOS 10.3, iWork has been updated across both iOS and macOS. The biggest change is the ability to unlock password-protected files with Touch ID, either on iPhone and iPad, or on the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.

Oh, Mario. The guy that's been a part of our lives since as long as we can all remember. Well, Adam Ringwood and his friends did something pretty cool with one of Mario's most exciting games at the HackIllinois event in February 2016—they hacked a Chevrolet Volt's steering wheel into one big Nintendo 64 controller for Mario Kart.

T-Mobile just unveiled two new services—Scam ID and Scam Block—which specifically target those pestering robo-calls that reach out to 2.4 million Americans every month.

Google Assistant has introduced tappable shortcuts on the Google app for Android, iOS, and Google.com this week.