iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

Crush Your 2025 Health Goals with the Withings Body Scan

(Sponsored Post) By Amy Spitzfaden Both on Thu, 01/09/2025

Your 2025 health goals deserve so much more than just a number on a scale. Withings is here to support all your body resolutions with a revolutionary health analysis. The Withings Body Scan revolutionizes home health checkups in a powerful, incredibly simple experience, directly from your home, in just 90 seconds.

Young, old, or in-between, safety should come first and that's the idea behind the Silent Beacon Panic Button ($99.99) that the company Silent Beacon showed off at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and gave me a review unit to try. Like many iPhone owners, I already have an Apple Watch and so do my family members. But the watch does so many things and the Emergency SOS feature is just one of them. The Silent Beacon is meant to do one thing, call for help, and it does it well, better than the Apple Watch in fact.

Scosche has come a long way since I originally began reviewing its audio products nearly a dozen years ago. Since then, the company has branched out to a variety of mobile lifestyle accessories including a variety of chargers, fitness monitors, phone mounts and even dashcams. One of the company's more recent entries into its catalog is the MagicGrip Window/Dash Mount ($69.95) that can be affixed to a car dashboard or window. What makes it unique is not just that it can wirelessly charge your iPhone while seated in the mount, but it also has a neat almost sci-fi approach to gripping your iPhone in the process. Read on to find out if this standout feature is worth the mount's nearly seventy dollar price tag.

Like many Americans, I have a dog and I want to train and reward her, and keep her fit. While I can work from home, that's not the case for everyone, so I was intrigued by the Pet Fitness Robot ($149) from Varram. I saw their booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year and they gave me the review unit to try with my dog. My seven-pound Shih-Tzu Yorkie mix is usually distrusting of robotic toys, like my Sphero BB-8, but once she saw that this toy also distributes snacks, she came around.

In the 139th episode, Donna invites Video Producer Nicholas Naioti to compare notes on their experiences with the iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 public betas. Along with sharing their favorite features big and small, Donna and Nicholas will help you decide whether to download the public beta on your phone or wait for September for the shipping version to arrive.  

I have reviewed stylus after stylus from Adonit, but it makes more than styluses as I discovered when the company sent me a review unit of its V-Grip ($34.99). This is not a stylus, but a selfie stick with something more. Yes, it expands to over two feet, using a telescoping metal rod. And it has a squeeze grip that secures your iPhone in place. But Adonit added a Bluetooth shutter button that, when paired with your iPhone, can act as a remote control trigger.

Apple is making the iPad Pro look like a regular computer more and more every day. But if you are still using a computer and wish you could share your computer's accessories with your iPad Pro, you might need an accessory like the Access Pro ($199.95) from IOGear, I tried a review unit and it does what it promises. It acts as a KVM (keyboard, video, monitor) Switch, letting you share a keyboard, mouse and 4K UHD 3840x2160 at 30 Hz monitor among two devices. The Access Pro supports Windows, Mac or iPad Pro with USB-C.

If you're like me and depend on your Notes app to organize your life, it can be frustrating to realize there's no tab key to indent on iPad or iPhone keyboards. Nested lists in the Notes app make navigation easier and let you mark tasks as partially done, and indenting blocks of text can draw attention to quotes or important items. But without an obvious option on the keyboard, how does one indent text in the Notes app? It's easier than you think.

I’ve been covering the World Wide Developers Conference, Apple’s annual developer's conference, for a decade, and no year has felt as simultaneously surreal yet comfortingly familiar as when Tim Cook presented the Apple keynote address to an empty conference hall in June. Cook served up the usual healthy dose of dad jokes and self-congratulatory statements. Most importantly, WWDC was jam-packed with updates for all of Apple’s major operating systems., including iOS 14, iPadOS, WatchOS 7, and Big Sur, the latest MacOS. Here are my top four takeaways from WWDC.

Are you looking for a way to support people of color and the Black Lives Matter movement? One easy thing you can do is support black app developers by downloading and using their apps. Here's a collection of apps from black developers to try out, including kids' apps, community apps, free game apps, a reading app, a restaurant app, a money management app, and more. Enjoy!

The Reminders app, Apple's free to-do list app, allows users to stay organized by creating to-do list on the iPhone. Reminders can also be edited to include subtasks, nested tasks that will help you break down jobs into smaller components. Learn how to use Reminders on the iPhone to add subtasks to your to-do lists, three different ways. 

It's wise to have a screen protector, and they days, an anti-microbial option is ideal. The folks at Zagg, under their InvisibleShield brand, sent me a review unit of the Glass Elite Screen Protectors (starting at $39.99). They actually have several screen protector options, depending on your needs, including Anti-Glare, Privacy, VisionGuard (Blue Light Filter) and, as mentioned, Anti-Microbial, all with tempered glass for shatter and scratch protection.

I have a special place in my heart for Jabra, as the company made the first Bluetooth earpiece I ever owned about a decade ago. So I'm always interested in their latest model. I saw them at CES and was able to pick up a review unit of the Elite Active 75t ($199.99). First, it looks great, and is sold in assorted colors including black, black with copper, navy blue, mint green, and sienna. If you want to stand apart from the boring, white-AirPod-wearing crowd, these will help. They fit snuggly in the ear and have adjustable tips to help stay in during workouts for active users, hence the name.

Like many readers, working from home is my new norm. And that means acquiring the right teleconferencing equipment. Additionally, podcasters, hardcore gamers, streamers, and YouTube influencers all need a quality microphone. That means a USB-based digital microphone and not analog. And you might want one that accommodates different type of conversations (conference room, one-on-one interviews, and solo broadcasting.) For years, I've been using the microphones from Blue, like the Snowball and Yeti. Recently, Logitech, which owns Blue, let me try its higher-end model, the Yeti X ($169.99). 

As popular as Apple's AirPods are, there are openings where other vendors can fill in the gaps. For starters, enough with the white plastic. I had the opportunity to try ATH-CK3TW In-Ear Wireless Headphones ($99) by Audio Technica at the Consumer Electronics Show. Immediately, you see the dark teal blue color and know these are not your standard earbuds. They are also sold in black or white for those who prefer more mundane color choices.

I've reviewed several game controllers from GameSir, but the latest one is a sharp departure from previous models. The company sent me the F4 Falcon Mobile Gaming Controller ($35.99). While most of GameSir's other iPhone game controllers are large and enclose or prop-up the entire iPhone, the Falcon is quite compact and folds into itself to be smaller than a computer mouse. The wings expand, like a falcon, and it can clamp on to an iPhone.

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