HERE IS BACK ON IOS, COMES WITH OFFLINE SUPPORT AND MORE

Remember when Nokia removed its Here Maps for iOS back when Apple was preparing for its iOS 7 update? Back then, Apple made it compulsory for all developers to make their apps compatible with then latest iOS, and Nokia said that they couldn’t because “the changes to iOS 7 harm the user experience”. Well, fast-forward 1.5 years later, they’re back and they’re better than before.

Thanks to the positive reviews of Here for Android, the team behind the navigation app decided to bring it back for iOS user. Built from the ground up, it is a completely different app from the previous version, which was based on HTML 5 and had limited features that weren’t optimised for the operating system.

Available immediately, Here for iOS is a free map that brings offline navigation to users should they travel abroad with limited internet connectivity, or if data is available, it can even provide real-time data such as live traffic, public transit info, and even photos and reviews for places shown on the map.

If you are traveling to a different country with limited data, just make sure you save the country’s map to your phone before departure, and when you arrive, you will be able to navigate around – no data needed; it even works in airplane mode.

When offline, Here maps can still show you relevant data like find out where you are, search for places, and navigate around on foot, by public transport or by car. As for live traffic data, if you’re connected to the internet, you will be able to get information in 44 countries – Malaysia is part of that list, but live traffic is only available for Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru.

Interested to get Here Maps on your iPhone? Download it from the App Store now; yes, the store is back online.

Your Phone's Battery Use Lets Spies Track Your Movements

Spies and cops can use your smartphone to track your movements. That's no mystery—most smartphones come with a GPS chip that makes it pretty damned simple. So if you don't want to be tracked, you just turn off the GPS feature, right? Unfortunately, there is another way prying eyes can follow your movements: through your Android phone's battery.

A team of security researchers from Stanford and the Israeli government just published the details of a technique that lets spies watch you as you move around by monitoring tiny changes in your phone's battery levels. It all comes down to how hard your phone has to work to ping cell towers. The towers that are further away or obscured by a building or hill cause your phone to use a little bit more power. So if—and this is a big "if"—the spies know your normal routine, they can track your movements with 90 percent accuracy. If they don't know your routine, that accuracy drops to about 60 percent.

This is especially concerning because there's not really any way to protect yourself from this kind of surveillance, aside from taking out your phone's battery. Google lets pretty much any app gain access to battery usage data, so a hacker could either build a fake app to monitor that data or pull data from another app.