Touch ID on an iOS device is a convenient method for unlocking apps and the device itself, and now you can use it to unlock your Mac.
KeyTouch waiting to unlock a Mac.Jason Cipriani/CNET
With the launch of iOS 8, Apple introduced a new feature called Handoff. The feature connects your nearby iOS and OS X devices to each other, making it possible to seamlessly switch between devices while not having to worry about losing your place or work.
One feature missing from Handoff is the ability to share Touch ID from an iOS device to a Mac. A pair of developers are trying to bring Touch ID capabilities to OS X with a new app called KeyTouch.
In its current form, KeyTouch will use Touch ID on a nearby iPad or iPhone lock and unlock your Mac, along with enter your password when prompted. There's two parts to the making this work, an iOS app($0.99) and a free Mac app.
Various screens of KeyTouch on iOS.Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET
After installing both apps, you go through a quick setup process and a few minutes later you'll have Touch ID linked to your Mac. Admittedly, the process to use the service is a bit cumbersome right now. In lieu of typing in your password, you unlock your iOS device, launch the app, tap the screen, then place your finger on the home button.
The developers, however, are aware of the issue and are working on spending up the process. Additionally, the team is also working on an API for website developers to implement. This would allow KeyTouch users to potentially log into sites and services on a Mac using Touch ID from iOS.
For the die-hard Windows user, Microsoft will be releasing a preview version of Windows 10.
Microsoft
Editors' Note, January 21, 2014: Information from the second Windows 10 event has been added.
Microsoft recently held a small event where the company revisited improvements coming to Windows 10 later this year. In addition to the features that were already known, the company revealed some new ones. The most notable additions are in the form of Cortana on a PC, and a new browser, codenamed Spartan.
The update will be free (for the first year of availability) to existing Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 users when it launches later this year. But for those looking to live on the bleeding edge and get a feel for the new features, you can sign up to become a member of the Insider program and put the Windows 10 Technical Preview through its paces.
Google discloses three severe vulnerabilities in Apple OS X
Researchers with Google's Project Zero security team say they've found three flaws with high severity that have yet to be patched.
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Apple's OS X could be successfully attacked, according to Google security researchers.Jason Cipriani/CNET
Google's Project Zero security team revealed the existence this week of three vulnerabilities with high severity that have yet to be fixed in Apple's OS X operating system.
Although each of the flaws requires an attacker to have access to a targeted Mac, they could all contribute to a successful attempt to elevate privilege levels and take over a machine.
The first flaw, "OS X networkd "effective_audit_token" XPC type confusion sandbox escape," involves circumvention of commands in the network system and may be mitigated in OS X Yosemite, but there is no clear explanation of whether this is the case. Thesecond vulnerability documents "OS X IOKit kernel code execution due to NULL pointer dereference in IntelAccelerator." The third one, "OS X IOKit kernel memory corruption due to bad bzero in IOBluetoothDevice." includes an exploit related to OS X's kernel structure.
Each vulnerability, as with any disclosed by the Project Zero team, includes a proof-of-concept exploit.
The vulnerabilities were reported to Apple back in October but the flaws have not been fixed. After 90 days, details of vulnerabilities found by Project Zero are automatically released to the public -- which is what happened this week.
Project Zero, which Google officially launched in mid-2014, tasks researchers with uncovering any software flaws that have the potential of leading to targeted attacks on people's computers.
On Apple's product security page, the company states: "For the protection of our customers, Apple does not disclose, discuss or confirm security issues until a full investigation has occurred and any necessary patches or releases are available."
This isn't the first time Google's Project Zero has published vulnerabilities that are yet to be fixed. In the past several weeks, the tech giant's security team has published information about three separate, unpatched security flaws in Microsoft's Windows operating system
Dominate Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with automated tasks.
The secret to winning at social media is being, or at least appearing to be, constantly present. As in, never sleeping, never eating (unless you're Instagramming that food, I suppose), never taking a bad selfie, and never doing anything except Tweeting every second of your life.
The easiest way to cultivate a flawless online presence is to hire someone else to do it for you. But if you're not a Kardashian, you probably don't have the funds to pay a PR person, so instead there's IFTTT -- a handy little automation tool that can help you stay on top of the eight different social networks you manage on a daily basis.
IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That, is a tool that automates tasks using triggers and actions. IFTTT connects two services, and then triggers an action on one service when you perform an action on the other service. It works with all of the major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and YouTube.
The key to successfully using IFTTT with social media is to avoid overusing it. If you use IFTTT to automate every single thing you post to social media, you will quickly start looking like a spambot. I like to avoid any IFTTT recipes that trigger automatic replies -- for example, there's a recipe thatautomatically tweets a thank you message every time you get a new Twitter follower. To me, this kind of automatic thanking reads as disingenuous, and it also has the potential to backfire.
But so long as you don't think of IFTTT as a full-time human personal assistant, you should be fine. Here are five of my favorite IFTTT hacks for social media:
Post Instagram photos as native Twitter photos
Instagram and Twitter don't play too well together -- when you share an Instagram photo to Twitter from the Instagram app, your meticulously-edited photo shows up as a link in your Twitter stream, not as an image card. With this recipe, your Instagram photos will be automatically posted to Twitter as native photos (just remember to uncheck the "share to Twitter" box in Instagram, or you'll end up sharing the photo twice).
Update your Twitter profile pic when you update your Facebook profile pic
Keeping profile pics up-to-date is a hassle, unless you're using this recipe, which automatically updates your Twitter profile pic whenever it detects a change to your Facebook profile pic.
Photos added to a specific album in iOS automatically upload to Facebook
Instead of tediously uploading pictures to Facebook one-by-one, just add them to a specific iOS album on your phone and they'll magically appear on your Facebook page. To add a photo to an album in iOS, go to open up an album, hit Select, select the photos you want to add, hit Add To at the bottom of the screen, and choose the album you want to add the photos to.
Save your wedding's Instagram hashtag photos to Dropbox
Is it just me, or have weddings gotten super socially-connected these days? This IFTTT recipe works for any custom hashtag you've created (Pro-tip: search for your hashtag before you give it out to people, just to make sure it's unique), and will automatically download any Instagram photos it finds with that hashtag to your Dropbox account.
Automatically wish people happy birthday on Facebook
I don't usually like IFTTT recipes that automatically post without an active trigger, but this is an exception -- after all, you can't really mess up a simple "happy birthday" message on Facebook, right? This recipe actually connects to your Google Calendar and uses any birthdays you have marked there as triggers. This way, you're not constantly wishing your 5,000 Facebook friends happy birthday, and hopefully your real friends are in your Google Calendar.
Eradicate your egg followers on Twitter with a simple Google Script
With a clever yet simple Google Script, you can identify and remove any Twitter bots that are following you by the default egg profile image they use.
Matt Elliott/CNET
If you'd like to cull your flock of Twitter followers by removing any fake accounts, bots or inactive accounts, have a look at this Digital Inspiration post from Amit Agarwal. He has written a Google Script that scans your Twitter followers and finds those who use the default egg profile picture. The thinking being that any real user on Twitter will have replaced the default egg with a real profile picture.
After the script runs, it will then email you a report in the form of a Google Spreadsheet that shows all of your egg followers with a few columns of useful information, including when they joined Twitter, how many times they've tweeted and how long it's been since their last tweet. Each egg follower on the report features a linked username, which you can click to open their Twitter page, at which point you can block them from following you.
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
On Agarwal's post, he provides a link to his Google Script and outlines the four simple steps needed to run the script and generate your egg report. If you have a large Twitter following, it may take some time for the report to show up in your inbox. You'll get an email immediately confirming the report is being generated, followed some time later by the actual report. In my case, it took 13 minutes to scan my roughly 1,500 Twitter followers and identify the 135 eggs that follow me.
How to hunt down people -- even if they don't want to be found.
Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET
I think everyone should have decent online stalking skills. Not because I condone stalking, but because knowledge is power -- if you don't know how to find people online, how do you know what people can find about you online?
Googling yourself is like checking your credit report for inaccuracies: it's only effective as a preventative measure if you do it thoroughly and routinely. Whether you're looking for yourself or a friend (no judgment), here are five tips for finding out anything, about anyone, online:
Plug everything you know into Google.
It doesn't matter how little you know about the person you're looking for, your search is going to start with Google. And it should, because Google is a powerful tool (especially when you know how to use it). But if you don't know anything particularly identifying about the person you're looking for (such as their email address), it's better to skip the fancy search hacks and go straight to plugging in keywords. Open up Google and type in everything you know about the person in keyword format; for example, "sarah los angeles writer tech." Even if you only know their first name, keywords related to their job, marital status, location and school will likely bring up social networks or other identifiable results.
Use Facebook's People Search.
If no social networks pop up in your initial Google search, you may need to go into the social networks themselves. Facebook is the most popular social network, and it has the most robust search engine, so you should probably start there. Facebook's People Search lets you search for people by filling in one or more search boxes: Name, hometown, current city, high school, mutual friend, college or university, employer, and graduate school. If you know one or two of these things about your subject, you can narrow down your search and then browse through the photo results.
If your subject has no social media presence, try to find their friends and family members; it's possible they're hiding their account behind a fake name. If you have no idea who their friends and family members are, and you know their full name, use a free people search like Intelius to look up relatives...and then hunt down those relatives.
Make connections.
Individual data points don't mean anything unless they can be connected to other data points to make up a person's online presence. Once you have several facts about your subject, you'll need to use your brain to make connections and fill in the blanks. For example, if you know your subject's name, job title, and location, you can probably find their LinkedIn profile. On their LinkedIn profile, they've probably listed their undergraduate degree and when they graduated from college, which means you can work backward to figure out approximately how old they are.
Remember people are not very creative.
If you can find someone's username, Twitter account, personal email address or YouTube profile, you may have hit gold. People, for the most part, aren't very creative when it comes to mixing up usernames (or passwords), so they've likely recycled that username many times over. Start by plugging their username into Google, but also look through social networks, forums such as Reddit, and blogs for old comments or posts.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
People recycle usernames, passwords, and social media profile pictures. Grab their profile pic from their Facebook or Twitter account and plug it into a reverse image lookup such as TinEye. TinEye will scan the image and then spit back all other instances of that image that it finds on the web -- this is a great way to find now-defunct social media profiles, old LiveJournals, and online dating profiles. You can also use Google Images to do a reverse image search by going to Google Images, clicking the camera icon in the search box, and uploading the image you want to search.
The Internet will vanish, says Google's Eric Schmidt
Technically Incorrect: Speaking at Davos, Google's executive chairman explains that we'll all be experiencing our digital connections as a seamless part of our everyday world.
Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
The Internet? It's like a horse-drawn carriage.ZeitgeistMinds/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET
Digitally speaking, we're not even plodding along yet.
Why, AT&T is throttling my data this month and my phone still won't work too well in half of California's Wine Country.
However, Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, is very well connected to the future. And he'd like you to know that the pesky Internet thing will soon be a digital dodo.
I know this because today he said: "The Internet will disappear." As the Hollywood Reporter offers, Schmidt was schmoozing and strategizing with the hive mind of world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
He made a few more brushstrokes to contribute to his picture of Futureworld: "There will be so many IP addresses (...) so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won't even sense it."
Surely you will sense it, because you'll find this magical at-oneness with the digital world far more interesting than, say, the humans in a room who are also finding their own magical at-oneness with the digital world.
Schmidt explained: "It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room."
Permit me a dynamic guffaw at the mention of permission. Humanity has long ago bared its chest and dropped its trousers, merely for the opportunity to post images of its tanned toenails and to buy some strawberry-flavored toothpaste.
Just to underline this, the Davos forum also heard from Harvard professor of computer science, Margo Seltzer. The AFP reported two of her more charming statements.
First: "We live in a surveillance state today." Second: "We are at the dawn of the age of genetic McCarthyism."
This latter thought portends a world, she said, where tiny drones are flying through the air checking you for a pox of one kind or another. On behalf of, say, your health insurance company.
All for the greater good, you understand.
Yesterday, with its HoloLens, Microsoft showed one small step toward walking into its version of a dynamic room. Most who saw it found it exciting.
For Schmidt, the idea of a dynamic world represents "a highly personalized, highly interactive and very, very interesting world."
How to get notified when BioShock for iOS has a price drop
Not keen to spend $15 on the mobile version of the desktop classic? Wait for it to go on sale. Here's how to keep tabs on BioShock's price.
The real shock is the price!Photo by Rick Broida/CNET
In case you missed the news, BioShock just arrived in the App Store for iPhone and iPad.
Actually, that's the good news. The bad news is that it's priced at $14.99 (AU$18.99 and £10.49), making it one of the most expensive iOS games around.
Is it worth it? As a longtime fan of the game, I definitely think BioShock is worth playing. However, the desktop version sells for just $5 more, and routinely goes on sale for under $10. (I've seen it as low as $4.99.) So $15 for the mobile version feels a little steep.
But I guarantee you it won't be that steep forever -- and maybe not even for long. Historically speaking, other "premium" iOS games that have debuted with higher-than-average prices have gone on sale -- or seen outright price drops -- within a couple months. Dragon Quest VIII, for example, debuted in May with a $19.99 price tag, but it's currently on sale for $14.99. Once the dust settles on BioShock, I'm sure it'll come down.
OK, but short of visiting the App Store every day, how will you know when that happens? As it happens, there are a couple ways to let bots do the work for you.
For starters, check out Jason Cipriani's recent tutorial on discovering when apps go on sale. It relies on two services, AppZapp and If This Then That (IFTTT), to deliver alerts when top App Store apps go free or on sale.
Use AppShopper to track BioShock price drops.Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET
That's a handy option, to be sure, but it's not specific to BioShock. For that, head to AppShopper, sign up for an account, then search for BioShock. (Needless to say, you could do this for any other game or app as well.) In the search results (making sure to zero in on the "iOS Universal" version), click Want It to add the game to your wish list.
Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET
Now, click the Wish List tab up top and then look for the Price Drop Notifications box on the right. Enable "Notify me of price drops via e-mail" and you're all done! Now, as soon as BioShock's price drops, you'll know about it.
That leads to the following question: How low does the price need to go before you'll pull the trigger?
Meet Surface Hub: Microsoft's fresh take on videoconferencing
Two years after acquiring touchscreen maker Perceptive Pixel, Microsoft has an 84-inch display it hopes will transform workplace productivity and teleconferencing.
The evolution of Microsoft's Perceptive Pixel acquisition, the Surface Hub is an 84-inch 4K touchscreen for the workplace.Microsoft
LAS VEGAS -- Nestled between two false walls in a lavish suite at the Venetian hotel and casino is what I think is an enormous television. Here, during the chaos of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in early January, too-large TVs are par for the course.
What gives this particular display away is the word Microsoft emblazoned below the bottom bezel. When Jeff Han, a multitouch researcher who's now a general manager at Microsoft, approaches the device he taps the screen to bring it to life.
The device is called the Surface Hub and it's essentially a gigantic tablet running Windows 10. In fact, it's an 84-inch "ultrahigh-definition" touchscreen display. But it's more than that: packed on top, bottom and to the side of the screen, as well as inside the device itself, are several of Microsoft's Kinect motion sensors.
The company is going to great lengths to get the Surface Hub in the spotlight. Microsoft featured the device during its "Windows 10: The Next Chapter" event at its Redmond, Wash,. campus on Wednesday. It did so stealthily, putting the device front and center with a Windows 10 logo and nothing else,choosing to unveil it later on in the presentation.
The device can notice people in the room and can pick up audio from anyone in its vicinity. It can also run any Windows app, and it can do that through Skype from any connected device, regardless of whether that tablet, laptop or desktop is running Windows 10. For instance, the Surface Hub will let even iPad users connect to it and share files, as long as the iPad is running Windows software like Word or PowerPoint.
Ultimately, Microsoft wanted to create something that could withstand an infinite number of inputs, a device for serious work. "You're not going to use Google, Apple or Samsung," said Mike Angiulo, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Devices Group. "We had to create machinery that didn't exist."
Microsoft
It may seem like a strange, meandering return to the original Surface, those coffee-table-like touchscreen gadgets that the company first unveiled in 2007. A few companies used it -- retailers such as AT&T had a few in their stores help customers understand the differences between various products placed on its surface -- but it ultimately didn't catch on. In 2012, the company unveiled a tablet called the Surface, and renamed the table PixelSense.
Still, the company has ambitions beyond a computer, smartphone or video game console. Microsoft is one of several companies attempting to build devices for several users to interact with at once. Lenovo, for example, unveiled a 27-inch tablet computer in 2013.
To Microsoft, the Surface Hub isn't just a way for several people to interact with a computer at once. It also replaces projectors, teleconference technology, team video chatting and scores of other activities. The Surface Pro Hub is both an attempt to get Microsoft products on the walls of every business, and a way to further push Microsoft software into the workplace, even as the company opens its arms to other companies' devices running its applications.
The Surface Hub is the fruits of a 2-year-old acquisition of touchscreen maker Perceptive Pixel. That brought Han, the startup's founder, to lead the project. Before that, Perceptive Pixel sold $80,000 touchscreens to TV media organizations like CNN and Fox News, which rely on those types of mammoth devices for election coverage and other events.
But who else needs, or let alone wants, an 84-inch touchscreen? Microsoft's answer -- and its hope -- is any company or team that uses a conference room at all.
Microsoft's Hayete Gallot demoing the Surface Hub onstage at Microsoft's "Windows 10: The Next Chapter" event at its Redmond, Wash. headquarters on Wednesday, January 21.CNET
Microsoft won't say what the device will cost. Perceptive Pixel's $80,000 devices eventually plummeted in price, down to $7,500 for a 55-inch version. Microsoft plans on offering a 55-inch Surface Hub as well as an 84-inch version. Still, at $15,000 to $20,000 for the flagship model, the displays are not casual purchases and won't be finding their way to small businesses any time soon.
More important than cost, however, is whether other companies will buy into Microsoft's vision for multi-touch, multi-person productivity.
Teleconference systems cost upwards of six figures, and many large corporations use legacy software and industry standard equipment to conduct audio and video meetings with employees around the globe. Companies such as Cisco and Polycom have worked for years to build "telepresence rooms" with multiple HD displays and well-placed audio microphones.
The Surface Hub wants to accomplish with one gadget what many devices accomplish in tandem.
"There are no cables dangling, no projectors, no phones," says Angiulo. Because the device is running on the same base of code as other Windows 10 machines, developers will be able to customize productivity apps for the 55-inch and 84-inch screens and take into account how the software can be shared among dozens of participants.
In my time using the device, the Surface Hub proved unlike any other gadget I've ever used before. The touch interface is as responsive as any smartphone, and writing and operating with multiple hands is flawless. Intuitively, I was able to pull up Bing Maps, zoom out to space and spin a virtual Earth to find the location of the CNET offices in downtown San Francisco.
Jokingly, I wondered how long before we'll be playing the popular military shooter Call of Duty on the 84-inch 4K monitor. Han says the Surface Hub has been used any way imaginable inside Microsoft's offices, including hooking up an Xbox One game console to it.
Yet it's still unclear how the Surface Hub will be used to enhance the productivity of large groups of people beyond Microsoft's whiteboard brainstorming and Skype video conferencing examples. With a presumably high price point, little evidence of how companies will use it and questions about how developers will treat it as part of the Windows ecosystem, the device still feels like a gimmick waiting for a cause.
But Microsoft's intention is to convince businesses that thinking, communicating and collaborating in the workplace will in fact improve with the presence of these colossal screens, even if they marvel only with hardware for the time being.
"Our intention," Han says, "is to make this ubiquitous."
Microsoft gives us a look at Project SpartanPhoto by Nate Ralph/CNET
At Microsoft's event today in Redmond, the company unveiled a new concept Web browser it calls Project Spartan. Joe Belfiore, VP of the operating systems group, gave a brief tour of some of the new features and how it would work on all Windows devices.
He started by talking about an all new rendering engine and by showing off real-time annotation features that let him use his finger to draw directly on a Web page to call out certain areas for someone else. He noted that the comments would all be saved to the cloud via OneDrive so you can share your comments with collaborators.
Spartan also has a reading mode, similar to Apple's Safari, that formats articles in a way that's easier to read. It also has a reading list, another favorite of other modern browsers. Content in the reading list will save offline and syncs to your account using Spartan on other devices like phones and tablets.
Cortana will be built right into Spartan. The assistant will pop into Spartan at the right moment to be helpful in both simple situations and in other nuanced ways. For example, Belfiore demonstrated how Cortana autofills a search for the airline Delta with Belfiore's wife's flight information pulled from his other apps.
Cortana will give you more details about what you're looking at in a sidebar on the right.Photo by Nate Ralph/CNET
After spending years as the world's top browser maker with Internet Explorer, other browsers such as Google Chrome have made inroads into the market. Even though Internet Explorer still holds more than half of all users, Microsoft unveiling a new browser eliminates the challenge of redesigning Internet Explorer to work across multiple devices. Also, creating a single browsing experience for Windows computers, tablets and phones helps promote Microsoft's new unified experience.
Microsoft wouldn't say when Project Spartan would be released, but pointed out many of the technologies announced today will come out at different times later this year.
Microsoft shows off new features that indicate soon, your Xbox won't be just a game console, but a TV-connected Windows PC, too.
The Xbox One has always been a big black box full of promise. Would it be more than a game console? With Microsoft's Windows 10, it looks like the Xbox One's big convergence moment is finally here. Microsoft wants your Xbox to be your Everybox.
For one, universal Windows apps will work on Xbox One. That was just announced during Microsoft's Windows 10 event Wednesday by Terry Myerson, Microsoft's executive vice president of operating systems.
Universal apps are specific cross-platform apps: Skype is one of them. These apps will offer a sort of follow-you-anywhere computing experience across phones, tablets, PCs, and -- it looks like -- Xbox One. There are specifically optimized versions of Office apps, which look somewhat like Google's cloud apps. Microsoft demonstrated a variety of universal apps across phone and PC: a mobile version of Microsoft's Inbox app for email, using Outlook, Calendar, a Photos app, a People app, Maps, and more. Basically, they're core apps that cover the bases for everyday communication. And there's also a new browser, too, still codenamed Project Spartan.
CNETXbox app on Windows 10: also, Windows apps will run on Xbox One.
Yes, Windows 10 is coming to Xbox One, but it sounds like it might be a more limited experience than what was largely demoed on phones and tablets and PCs. Those who want to move their application over to the TV screen will be able to do so, but Xbox head Phil Spencer admitted that this may not be an area where Office apps are envisioned per se.
How they work with Xbox One hasn't been fully detailed yet, but stay tuned.
Part of Xbox will also work its way onto Windows 10: Phil Spencer also unveiled an Xbox app for Windows 10, which will finally aim to knit Xbox Live users more deeply into Microsoft's newest OS. It looks to combine gaming activity feeds from your Xbox Live friends with other game-specific interactions.
Microsoft is also pushing cross-play, once again, across Windows and Xbox games. Fable Legends is one of the games that will work via a "cross-play" mode on Xbox One and PC. This has been something Microsoft has attempted for years, going back to the Xbox 360 version of Shadowrun. Cross-play hasn't been a great success yet, but this new effort might be a different story.
Windows 10 PCs will also allow game streaming of Xbox One games later in 2015. This technical trick sounds a lot like what Sony has been allowing between the PlayStation 4 and mobile phones and tablets via Remote Play, but in this case it's limited to tablets and PCs -- no phones, yet. A game was demoed, and of course, game play looked smooth, but in actual practice these types of local-streaming games can be a mixed bag.
Off-TV play is already a trend in play everywhere from the Nintendo Wii U, to PlayStation, to Nvidia's latest tablet, Apple's phones and iPads, Chrome/Google devices, and Razer's latest Android TV microconsole. Microsoft's play to unite its devices makes sense, and feels overdue. How it performs, of course, remains to be seen.
Stay tuned for more, but it sounds like the Xbox will soon be not just a game console, but a TV-connected Windows PC, too. And it sounds like Microsoft is hoping that its PC, tablet, and console hardware will work together to spark more interest, and more sales.
Five ways to lower your smartphone data consumption
Which apps and services are the worst offenders when it comes to chewing through your data plan?
Data usage on a smartphone.James Martin/CNET
In the early days of cell phones, it was all about the minutes -- voice minutes, that is, because people used their phones to call each other. (Weird, right?) You had to limit your conversations or suffer the horrors of overage charges.
Today, it's all about the data. Even if your plan is "unlimited," there's almost always an asterisk. After you burn through the first couple gigabytes, your high-speed connection throttles back to something closer to dial-up. (Talk about horrors!) And if you're with a pay-as-you-go service like Ting, unchecked data consumption could leave you in a higher-priced tier when the bill comes due.
Whatever your plan, it makes sense to conserve data. And what's the easiest way to do that? Connect to Wi-Fi wherever and whenever possible. Sure, it takes a few extra taps to connect to a network in, say, a coffee shop or airport lounge, and you make feel like it's not worth the hassle if you've got five 4G bars showing.
Depending on what you're planning to do with your phone, however, it may absolutely be worth it. Here are five of the biggest data hogs you want to avoid (or at least reduce) when there's no Wi-Fi available:
1. YouTube uploads
Just can't wait to share that epic video of your friend wiping out on his skateboard? Or your totally legit Bigfoot sighting? Upload at your own risk: Depending on settings and various other factors, each minute of HD video you shot can be as large as 200MB.
So if you upload just five 1-minute videos per month, that would eat a full gigabyte of your data allotment. Wait till there's Wi-Fi!
2. Video chats
Stop the Skyping! And the FaceTiming. And all the other video calling -- if you want to save data. Though the rate of consumption varies depending on the app you use and resolution of your chat, a Jetsons-style phone call can cost you up to 3MB per minute.
3. Online gaming
Don't worry, Trivia Crack addicts, turn-based games like this and Words With Friends aren't heavy data-users. However, real-time action games like Asphalt 8 and Modern Combat 5: Blackout are a different story, with some estimates pegging their data use at 1MB per minute of play.
4. Music streaming
It's so easy (and awesome) to plug into Pandora or Spotify when you're, say, riding the train home from work, you might not realize what it's doing to your data plan.
What it's doing is killing your cap. If a music service streams at a 320Kbps bit rate, that's 2.4MB of dataper minute, or a whopping 115MB per hour. Even if you tune in only a couple times per week, it's easy to rack up big data numbers. Fortunately, a lot of mobile apps let you downshift to a lower bit rate, a very advisable move if you must listen on the go.
Pandora, it's worth noting, never streams at more than 64Kbps on mobile devices, even if you're a Pandora One subscriber.
One other option: if your music service allows it (and most do nowadays), download your tunes (via Wi-Fi, of course) for offline listening.
5. Video streaming
If music streaming is bad, video trumps it by an order of magnitude. Awesome though it may be to binge on episodes of "Black Mirror" or trending YouTube vids when you're on the treadmill at the gym, streaming can swallow as much as 50MB per minute.
That's according to Netflix, which estimates 3GB per hour for HD video. Of course, those numbers can and will vary across different services (Hulu, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, etc.), but there's no question that video does the most damage to your data plan.
Fortunately, with a little advance planning, you can watch on the go without using any data at all. Consider a service like PlayLater, which allows you to "record" streaming video from the likes of Hulu and Netflix for offline viewing on mobile devices. Likewise, a smattering of YouTube apps let you save videos right to your phone so you can rewatch them later -- no connection required.
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