iPhone and Samsung have always been head to head rivals when it comes to their different cell phones. With both of them being huge in the market, it’s not unheard of to compare the two cell phone options. And with around 85% of 18 to 29 year old Americans owning a smartphone, you want to be sure you’re getting the right one for you. Here are the differences side by side:

The Look
iPhones have always had a rather classy and stylish look and the iPhone 7 is no different. While maintaining most of the qualities of the previous iPhone 6, one notable update is the removal of the 3.5mm audio jack from its design. Many people do not know how to feel about this, now that wireless headphones are becoming more common.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 also didn’t see that much of a design change. It is a little bit heavier than the iPhone 7, but not so heavy that it can’t be used one-handed with ease. The Samsung Galaxy S7 has kept the 3.5 mm audio jack.

The Features
It is essential to know what features each phone has. The iPhone has waterproofing of up to three feet for 30 minutes. The phone has dual sound speakers to replace the fact that it no longer has an audio jack.

The Samsung Galaxy S6’s waterproofing is a little stronger. It allows the phone to be submerged in water up to six feet for thirty minutes, which is twice as deep as the iPhone. However, the Samsung only has one speaker at the bottom, compared to the iPhone’s top and bottom speaker.

The Battery
Something that always drives people nuts is when your phone won’t charge and you have to take it to your cell phone provider for a fix. Apple claims to have given a huge boost to this phone’s battery life, stating it can last around two hours longer than Samsung’s. This has yet to be fully tested.

Tests show that the Samsung Galaxy S7’s battery lasted nine hours during a full-streaming, max-brightness video. This is reportedly one of the highest battery feats recorded.

So, at the end of the day, neither phone is totally better. It all really depends on personal preference. When you compare the two next to each other, you should be able to decide which phone is right for you.

Have you ever felt overwhelmed with the amount of reading you have to do for work? Or maybe you don’t have a job that requires reading, but you just haven’t found the time to finish reading that novel on your shelf. Many students, educators, and people with literature-intensive careers have massive numbers of pages to read each day, and can struggle to get through them all in a reasonable time frame. Even people with jobs that don’t rely on reading sometimes have a long list of pleasure reading, but not enough free time to make a dent in it.

Enter Spritz, a speed-reading app for smartphones and tablets that, when it is released, promises to more than triple typical reading speeds. It may sound overly ambitious, but the people at Spritz maintain that it is doable. And in fact, the principles that the app works on are based firmly on factual evidence.

As you read, your eyes move horizontally across the page from left to right, identifying a word and processing it before moving on to the next. Because the process happens so quickly, you aren’t conscious of each step, merely the end result: comprehension. But when the people at Spritz broke the process down, they discovered that you spend the majority of your reading time moving your eyes instead of receiving information. In fact, the ratio between the two is approximately four to one.

In the process of identifying a word, your eyes automatically focus on a single letter in that word, which the people at Spritz call the Optimal Recognition Point (ORP). Once the ORP is found, you identify the word and your brain accesses its meaning and context before moving on to the next. This process repeats until you reach punctuation, at which point your brain compiles all of the words it has identified since at least the last piece of punctuation and attempts to arrange them into a coherent idea or ideas.

The Spritz app physically rearranges your reading space, providing a relatively small window. The individual words from what you are reading appear in order, with each word’s ORP appearing in the exact same place as the last word’s. This eliminates the need for your eyes to move at all, which reduces the amount of time you spend on each word significantly. In addition, the ORP is highlighted, keeping your focus on it and accelerating your processing speed even more.

Without all of that time and energy spent moving between words and identifying each word’s ORP, you can read much faster. In fact, the developers of Spritz claim that it can double your normal reading speed in fewer than five minutes and quadruple it with enough practice. They also express the belief that by spending a few minutes a day with Spritz, your reading speed will increase even with traditional, paragraph-oriented type.

The founders of Spritz have said that they “honestly believe that Spritz will change the world.” Go to www.spritz.com and see for yourself what the technology can do!

In the fall of 2013, a very large movement came into the media’s awareness. The movement, called Phonebloks, was an attempt to revolutionize the concept of the cellular phone by redesigning it so that the phones function for longer, and are more customizable. Its principal goals, to make a more consumer-friendly phone and to reduce the volume of electronic waste, are ambitious, and could indeed be revolutionary.

If the goals were feasible, that is.

The genesis of Phonebloks came when its eventual founder, Dave Hakkens, decided to try to do something about the fact that cellular phones are often replaced because of the failure of only a single, small part, such as a damaged processor or a faulty graphics chip. The old phones are almost always disposed of as waste, which contributes a very large volume to landfills. In addition to being detrimental to the environment, the frequent replacement tends to be costly for consumers.

Hakkens’ idea was that a cell phone be composed of three essential components: a display screen, a base, and a number of blocks of varying sizes that connect to the base. Each block contains one piece of the phone’s hardware, from the graphics engine to the battery to the circuitry that allows a user to access their carrier’s wifi. If cell phones were designed this way, Hakkens claims, whenever one portion of a phone breaks it can be easily replaced with relatively little cost and without the need to dispose of the entire phone.

The idea is very powerful in theory, but there are a few core problems with it.

Speed
A phone’s components have to communicate with each other for the phone to be able to function. Currently, cell phones are integrated, which means most of their components occupy a single chip. This allows the pieces to transmit data back and forth at relatively high speed. In a phone designed with Phonebloks, each block is separate, so it is forced to rely on the motherboard to connect them. The transition from micrometers in a standard phone to millimeters in a Phonebloks phone is very significant for electronic signals, and would slow phones down significantly.

Size
Because people need the ability to manually manipulate the blocks, as well as because the components must be inherently larger given that they are segregated, the phone’s size will inevitably grow. That isn’t all bad, seeing as the screen will be larger, but it could make it difficult for many consumers to comfortably fit the phone in their pocket.

Energy
With the decrease in speed and increase in size, the phone would consume much more battery power to perform similar functions to a current standard cell phone because it needs to transmit a signal for a larger distance. This increases its energy footprint significantly as well as raising electricity costs for consumers, and there is even a question as to it holding its charge for more than a couple of hours at a time.

Overall, Phonebloks is an impressive idea, but barring multiple major technological breakthroughs that’s all it will be for the foreseeable future.

Many people find it difficult to keep up with rapid advancements and constant changes in the personal technology industry. However, the future of personal technology involves technology keeping up with us. The future is mobile.

First cell phones, then tablets, these are devices we’re all familiar with, devices that are actually projected to overtake the personal computer market in the coming years. Still, these are the most basic of modern technological trends. Pretty soon, almost every essential and non-essential element of our lives will be able to fit into our pockets, slide onto our wrists, or wear around our heads. Below is a list of some of these emerging trends in mobile technology.

Wearable Tech
The biggest buzz in the past few months surrounding the rising wearable technology market is the long-awaited release of Google Glass. Essentially, this device is simply a smartphone that you wear like a pair of glasses and can interact hands free via verbal commands preceded by addressing the device with the words, “Ok, Glass.” Google Glass has not been released to the general market, but is currently being tested by a variety of industries and individuals lucky enough to snag an exclusive invite to purchase the beta version.

Some other consumer-friendly wearable tech trends have come out of the personal healthcare market. The most prolific of these are fitness and activity monitoring gear, generally in the form of wristbands. One of the most popular, called Jawbone, comes with an app that syncs wirelessly with your smartphone or tablet and helps you track your exercise, food consumption, and even monitors your sleep patterns. Additional features include mood tracking, and an alarm function that makes the band vibrate at the optimal time during your sleep cycle to wake you. You can typically find Jawbone and similar products, such as the Nike Fuel Band, for between $100-$150.

Curved Glass
While many people may be under the impression that curved glass is simply an aesthetic trend designed to fuel our consumption centric society, there are actually a variety of benefits to the use of curved glass. Corning, the makers of Gorilla Glass, which, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, is most likely the durable glass used on the smart phone you own, has created the “new Gorilla Glass”. This new product is not only highly durable, but can bend as much as 75 to 80 degrees without breaking. This is great news for those of us who suffer from the chronic condition known as “butterfingers.” Not only is this a major breakthrough in physical resilience, but a concave screen also makes mobile devices more readable in ambient light, less likely to capture reflections, improves battery life by around 5% (not sure how, but we’ll take it), and slightly magnifies the screen to make reading on smaller devices easier. Now that pretty much encapsulates all of the most common complaints about your smartphone or tablet, right? Not to mention, gone are the days of boring rectangles. LG has already released a concave smartphone, and we can probably expect to see this technology out of Apple in the form of an iPhone 6 later this year.

Digital Wallets
Our wallets are no exception to the digital age. Gone are the days of carrying around five separate debit or credit cards. Today, there are a variety of apps into which an individual can upload credit cards, debit cards, boarding passes, gift cards, pretty much anything you might need readily accessible in your wallet. These apps include Passbook, already preloaded on the iPhone, or Lemon Wallet, both of which store your debit, credit, ID, insurance numbers, and loyalty cards and turns each into a unique barcode to be scanned by merchants. With Lemon, you can also connect to your bank account allowing you to check your balance and transactions within the app. If you’re looking for something separate from your phone, particularly for things like restaurant dining where you must physically part with your form of payment for a brief period of time and you’d rather not put your phone (read: life) in the hands of a stranger, the device Coin is currently in development. This is the same size and shape of a typical credit card, but allows users to upload all of their plastic forms of payment, and then gives them the ability to choose which one they want to use for each transaction. Coin can be preordered for $50, and is due for release this summer.

Overall, there are some exciting mobile trends to look forward to in the coming year. As we all know, technology changes almost faster than a person can say, “Ok, Glass,” but these are some developments we expect to stick around for a while in one form or another. Here’s to upward mobility in at least one facet of our lives.

For years, airplane passengers have heard the same mantra over their plane’s loudspeakers: “We are closing the cabin doors. Please close your tray tables, return all seat backs to the full upright and locked position, and make sure all cell phones and portable electronic devices are turned off.” And although for the most part the passengers comply with those regulations, few of them seem to know exactly why the regulations were put in place and if they are still relevant today.

The restriction of cellular phones on airplanes was initially a safeguard against the phones’ electromagnetic signals affecting the plane’s instruments and its communication with the tower. Incidentally, the latter is why airlines require all portable electronic devices, not just phones, to be turned off during takeoff and landing.

The major worry about the electromagnetic signals emitted by cell phones is that they will interfere with the plane’s avionics. Avionics, a combination of the words “aviation” and “electronics”, are electrical systems within a plane that govern things such as navigation, monitoring, and communication with airport control towers. If a phone disrupted a plane’s avionics, a number of very dangerous things could happen, so until recently airlines have restricted cell phone use.

Airplanes have changed since the no-phone policy was made, however. Just four months ago, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stated that “airlines can safely expand passenger use of Portable Electronic Devices during all phases of fight.” The avionic systems in airplanes have evolved to a point where they are extremely unlikely to be disrupted by the use of cellular phones, even to make or receive phone calls. Following the FAA’s statement, Tom Wheeler, president of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), said, “modern technologies can deliver mobile services in the air safely and reliably, and the time is right to review our outdated and restrictive rules.”

But although its technologically is feasible for airplane passengers to make phone calls, this may not be desirable. Because an airplane is an enclosed space, passengers may not want the person next to them, or even a few rows down from them, to be talking for a long period of time. And, if a large number of people talk on their phones at the same time, the noise might be very unpleasant for the rest of the passengers.

The obvious solution, then, would seem to be to allow all mobile phone use except for voice calls. Texting and internet use such as email would be permitted, but passengers would be forbidden from using their cell phones in ways that had the potential to irritate others. There’s an issue with this solution, however: what if passengers, once they know that talking on the phone won’t endanger themselves or others, decide to simply ignore the rule and make calls anyway? It would be the crew’s job to police that, but doing so would take them away from their other duties and could cause some difficult situations that the airline would most likely rather avoid.

The technology that used to be vulnerable to the electromagnetic signals used by cellular phones has been updated, but there are worries about phone calls being disruptive. Airlines are now forced to decide whether to limit phone use in the same way they have been doing, to allow passengers free reign, or to allow them to text and email but not place or receive calls. Should the regulations be changed? Time will surely tell.

When the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 was released in September of last year, it impressed consumers quite a bit. There is an ongoing strong market for tablet/cell phone hybrids, affectionately dubbed “phablets” by consumers and reviewers. The Galaxy Note 3 is a crossbreed featuring the best of both worlds; the relatively small size of a smart phone with the screen of the Galaxy Note 3 being just under six inches wide, combined with many of the improved capabilities of a tablet such as improved internet browsing and word processing capabilities, and the ability to incorporate a stylus. The hybrid style of the phablet makes the new Galaxy Note 3 more powerful than a smart phone and more portable than a tablet. Phablets have only come into the limelight in the past few years, but their sudden rise in popularity was cemented with the release of the Galaxy Note 3. In fact, the Note 3 has been so well-received in the three months it has been on the market that there are rumors Apple is trying to compete by developing an iPhone with limited tablet functionality.

Rumors of the planned Samsung Galaxy Note 4 were recently confirmed by Samsung, and the majority of consumers and experts suspect that the Note 4 will be released sometime this fall. Little information is known for certain, however, and so there is a lot of speculation as people wonder how it will be different, and hopefully better, than the Note 3. Speculation may be more likely to be accurate than not, however. Unlike Apple, which is currently the only other profitable cell phone company in the world, Samsung gets “most of [its] ideas from the market” according to one of its executive vice presidents.

What does this mean for the Note 4? Well, if Samsung bases its development on what consumers want, then it is likely to fix anything about the Note 3 that consumers were dissatisfied with and also try to improve accessibility and add features that provide for an easier use experience. Also, the Galaxy S5 has been announced for next month, so the Note 4 might try to improve upon both the Note 3 and the S5 technologies.

There are a number of likely speculations regarding the Note 4 on the technology blogs, starting with the physical appearance. The Note 3 had a 5.7 inch screen, which makes for easy viewing but isn’t that convenient for carrying the phablet around in one’s pocket. Galaxy S5 is due to reduce the screen size to 5.25 inches while increasing resolution as a way to make it easier to transport without decreasing display quality. The Note 4 will most likely have a display smaller than 5.7 inches, and possibly below 5.25, with better resolution than either the Note 3 or the S5. In addition, there is some suggestion that the Note 4 might have an unusually shaped screen, such as a curve or arch, to enhance the viewer’s visual experience.

The S5 seeks to improve upon another feature of the Note 3, which is the chassis of the phone. The Note 3 had a plastic chassis, which was poorly received by consumers and reviewers alike, and it has been announced that the S5 will have a new metal chassis. The Note 4 will most likely not be plastic, but there is no way to be certain whether it will be metal like the S5 or something entirely different.

The Galaxy Note 3 has stylus capabilities, and the Galaxy S5 most likely will as well. This suggests that the Note 4 should continue the trend, and the touch screen will probably have enhanced sensitivity to make it more user-friendly. There may also be a concurrent improvement to the stylus, narrowing the tip and increasing sensitivity to allow for more precise handwriting compared to the Note 3.

Samsung has shown that as a company it is very receptive to the market’s views, and as such no matter what changes they decide to make to the Note 4, one thing is certain: it will take the consumers’ opinions into account. Introducing the Samsung Galaxy Note 4—part phone, part tablet, all consumer-friendly.