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8 Free Apps to Simplify Your Life

As economy is thrilling with full wings, our lives are getting busier and more complicated - work, study, social gatherings and various kinds of stuffs. There’s a lot awaiting to be taken care of every day. Luckily, technology can be of great help. For example, there is a variety of different apps available to simplify our lives. Listed below are several free and useful apps that help to make our lives less complicated.

1.Calm

It is an absolutely great meditation app which helps to improve your mood. It accompanies your zen sessions with amazing pictures and beautiful music, for maximum namaste time. With the help of this app, you can relax, get rid of anxieties, get good sleep and much more.

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2.Solar

It is a weather forecast app with a simple, sleek and user-friendly interface. As many users claimed “Impressive for not only its sleek user interface, but also its snappy response time and streamlined functionality.”

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3.iRecycle

iRecycle is now available for iOS, iPad & Android. It is a great app that helps you to recycle games, files, batteries, devices and whatsoever you need easily. By using your current location, ZIP code, address or city, you will be directed to the position to recycle nearly anything. Besides, it also allows you to share your enthusiasm for recycling by connecting through Facebook, Twitter and other social network sites.

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4.RedLaser

If you are fond of shopping, this RedLaser is absolutely something that you can never miss. It is a bargain-hunting app that helps you to shop smarter. By scanning the barcodes on items, you will get the information of price comparisons from other stores nearby. In that way, you can see what that same product costs elsewhere, making for quick and practical shopping.

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5.Romantimatic

How long has it been for you to send a romantic message like “I love you” or “I miss you” to the beloved one? Sometimes, the smallest things mean the most. Since we are busy with work and school every day, it will be great to get the external help. Romantimatic is a great app to remind you to say nice things to your significant other when you’re swamped up in your own busy life.

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6.InstaSize

InstaSize is a simple yet useful photo editing app. As the name suggests, it helps to resize photos and add customizable borders freely. Besides, it also has got some cool features such as ilters, colors, fonts and all that to provide a one-stop editing solution.

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7.30/30

30/30 is a great app for getting things done. Actually, it is a dressed-up version of a timer working like this: focus on the task you need to accomplish for 30 minutes and then take a 30-minute break.

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8.Cal

Many people are heavily relying on the calendar of the smart phones. Now, we’ve got another aesthetically pleasing calendar called “Cal”, with which, you can tie in your contacts and social media accounts. Besides, it’s extremely easy to invite the people you care about, and find nice places to meet.

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Feel free to install these sweet babies on your phones without paying one cent, get ready to enjoy your simple life from now on!

Samsung Galaxy S5 VS Apple iPhone 5S

Apparently, the smartphone market is getting more and more crowded. As far as we are concerned, the biggest rivalry will be the two technology giants: Apple iPhone 5S VS Samsung Galaxy S5 - Samsung’s latest flagship. For sure, both tycoons have spared no expense on the marketing with the hope of attracting more consumers to their sides. But as we all know, consumers (whether Android fans or iOS lovers) have a certain degree of loyalty to the platforms and products they love. That said, the performance of the devices matters the most and speaks for themselves.

galaxy s5 vs iphone 5s

Galaxy S5 VS iPhone 5S: Display

Compared to Galaxy S4, the S5 has got a larger screen of 5.1-inch Super AMOLED display. Both the S4 and S5 provide a 1920 x 1080 full HD resolution. But the pixel density of the S5 is slightly down with the S4 having a pixel density of 441 ppi.

Tips: Click to see how to play swf videos on iPhone 5S freely.

As to Apple iPhone 5S, it is delicately designed with a 4-inch Retina screen, much smaller than that of Galaxy S4. In the meanwhile, it provides a 1136 x 640 resolution of 326ppi density only. However, the lower density of iPhone 5S still looks pretty damn sharp. Categorically, the Galaxy S5 does better than the iPhone 5S in terms of display and resolution.

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Galaxy S5 VS iPhone 5S: Processor

Galaxy S5 comes with two different processors: an Exynos chip and a high-end 2.5GHz Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor 805, both of which help to work up the processing speed faster than the S4. Technically, the Qualcomm boosts the performance of the CPU, GPU, digital signal processor, camera sensor, and memory components of the chip while keeping the software and other features compatible with its other processors to speed development for handset vendors.

On the other hand, the iPhone 5S owns an impressive 64-bit A7 processor running at between 12GHz to 1.3GHz. The A7 is actually a dual-core Cyclone processor that paired with 1GB of DDR3 RAM. What on earth is the big deal of the processor? It ensures that the users can have a pleasant experience on using the phone - the iOS 7 to run pretty smoothly, all apps and web pages load very fast, etc.

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Galaxy S5 VS iPhone 5S: Battery

As we can see from the picture below, the brand new Galaxy S5 has a built-in 2800mAh battery, which, according to Samsung Company, can provide enough juice for the phone to last a whole day(21 hours of talk time or 390 hours standby).

Comparatively, the battery life of Apple iPhone 5S is slightly inferior - provides 10 hours of talk time on 3G, and up to 250 hours standby, as Apple claimed. Out of question, Apple needs to make more efforts on extending the battery life. Hopefully, we can get an improved battery on its next-gen iPhone 6.

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Galaxy S5 VS iPhone 5S: Camera

The Galaxy S5 owns a 16-megapixel rear camera which is able to capture HDR(High Dynamic Range) snaps, slow-motion films as well as 4K videos(four times HD resolution). Besides, Samsung has also enhanced the phone’s menu and user interface, making it easier for the consumers to take, edit and share photos captured.

The iPhone 5S sports two cameras - a front-facing FaceTime camera and a rear-facing camera. On paper, both cameras looks more or less the same as those on the iPhone 5, however, Apple has specially made some significant improvements on them. Truly, the cameras does a pretty job in coping in both well-light and low-light conditions - accurate color with enough details.

Galaxy S5 VS iPhone 5S: Key Specs Comparison

Key-specifications of Galaxy S5:

Qualcomm Snapdragon S805 2.5GHz quad-core processor

16/32GB internal memory, microSD slot up to 64GB

Android 4.4.2 (Kitkat)

5.1-inch Super AMOLED screen (1920 x 1080)

16MP rear camera

4K video recording

2MP front camera

Dust and water resistant (IP67)

Finger scanner

Dimension: 142.0 x 72.5 x 8.1mm, 145g

2800mAh Battery

Key-specifications of iPhone 5S:

4.0-inch LCD

4.87×2.31×0.3 inches

A7 chip with 64-bit architecture

M7 motion coprocessor

Fingerprint identity sensor built into the Home button

1080p HD video recording

16/32/64GB storage

1570mAh battery

Differences between H.265 and H.264

H.265 vs H.264

Technically, both HEVC (H.265) and H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) are video compression formats designated to deliver HD resolution videos. To make comparison of these two decodes, we will break it down into several sections as follows :

H.265 Overview

H.265 has been rumored for a very long time. Eventually, it has been proved and would be released in 2014. As a brand new stand code, H.265 is completely strange to lots of people. Before diving into its benefits, it is important for us to have an understanding of “what” H.265 is. Basically, H.265 is a more efficient encoding standard designed to succeed H.264. As a High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), H.265 is able to support video files of 4K and even up to 8K resolutions at half the currently used bitrate. So far, some dominant video streaming services like Netflix has decided to use H.265 to stream HD 1080p and 4K videos with approximately 50% bandwidth savings (at the same video quality). With H.265, we can enjoy HD videos without exceeding the bandwidth cap. Besides, it is no longer a dream to do real 4K video resolution with smart phones without losing massive quality even at low bitrates.

Differences between H.265 and H.264

H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) has been here for quite a long time. It is one of the most popular codecs. It is specially developed for high definition systems such as HDTV, Blu-ray, HD DVD and low resolution media handy devices such as Apple iPod and Sony PSP. The greatest advantage of H.264 is that, it can encode HD video files with approximately 3 times fewer bits than comparable MPEG-2 encoders. However, since consumers’ demand for higher resolution such as 4K and 8K is on the rise day by day, the need for more efficient video streaming methods is more apparent than ever. Unluckily, H.264 is inaptitude for the delivering such high resolution. Thankfully, there’s a new kid on the block - the fresh H.265 codec. When asked what are the differences between H.264 and H.265, we can get the answers by looking into the advantages of H.265 over H.264 as below :

1.It is approximate 2X as effective as H.264

2. Reduces file size up to 50% with the same quality

3. Supports resolution up to 7680 × 4320 (8K)

4. Reduces video noise and increases dynamic range

5. Extend far greater video quality experience compared to H.264 encoded sequence at same bitrate.

To know more about the key differences between H.265 (HEVC) and H.264 (MPEG 4 AVC), please feel free to read through the table as below:

h.265 vs h.264