Tag Archives: Smartphone

Over the last year we have seen the smartphone industry switch over to a new design trend, with the goal of doing away with display bezels. The Galaxy S8 kicked things off with the ‘infinity display’ with minimal bezel space at the top and bottom of the screen. This has …

It's a £30 wireless charger from PNY - is it worth the investment?

This week, Chinese smartphone maker ZTE came under fire in both the UK and the US. Here in the UK, the government warned that the company’s devices pose a risk to national security, meanwhile the US Department of Commerce blacklisted the company. Due to the ban in the US, ZTE …

Over the last few years, the smartphone and tablet markets have become quite predictable. Each year every major phone maker will launch a new flagship with a predictable spec upgrade and potentially a few design changes. As innovation has slowed down, consumers have begun getting used to longer upgrade cycles, …

A few months ago, Google announced that it would be acquiring a chunk of HTC’s smartphone business for $1.1 billion. In the deal, most of HTC’s smartphone design team moved over to Google. Now it looks HTC is going to be losing another member of its ranks, the company’s president …

We have been hearing whispers about Samsung’s foldable display smartphone plans for several years now. In 2017, it looked like things were finally coming to fruition but it didn’t end up coming to pass. This year though, things are different, as Samsung confirmed to investors in an earnings call this …

Last year, veteran camera maker RED announced that it would be entering the smartphone arena. However, rather than building an Android flagship comparable to so many other phones on the market, RED’s Hydrogen One boasts a Titanium body and a holographic display among a few other unique features. Pre-orders kicked …

Over the last few years, the idea of modular smartphone add-ons has been explored by a myriad of companies. The latest smartphone to offer modular add-ons is the Essential Phone, from Andy Rubin, the co-founder of Android. Unfortunately, it looks like this feature has landed Essential with a lawsuit, with …

Update (12/10/17): Just last week, we spotted Razer CEO, Min-Liang Tan teasing Razer’s upcoming smartphone, built by Nextbit, a company that Razer acquired earlier this year. Now, it seems that we know when the mysterious Razer Phone will be unveiled, with Razer planning to show it off on the 1st …

Your smartphone is a complex device capable of performing a multitude of functions previously limited to separate devices. It’s a phone, a camera, a computer, a GPS, a game console, a flashlight, a compass, and so much more. Along with the possibilities provided by smartphones come several serious privacy concerns. …

Although the Galaxy Note 8 isn’t even fresh out of the oven yet, many are looking ahead towards Samsung’s Galaxy S9 smartphone. According to one source, the next flagship device from the company could arrive as early as January 2018. Korean publisher The Investor and its parent company The Korea …

The idea of a modular smartphone has been around for a while, with many big name brands trying to tackle the ambitious journey to bring it to life. These projects have always come to an abrupt and disappointing end, but where companies like Google and LG have failed, Facebook plans …

Back in January this year, Razer made a rather interesting acquisition, picking up cloud-powered smartphone maker, Nextbit. At the time, it was said that Nextbit would continue to operate independently of Razer but a new report has come out this week indicating that perhaps that has changed a bit, with …

As someone who reports on the smartphone world regularly, surprises have become increasingly hard to come by. However, I can safely say that I did not expect to come across a KFC-branded smartphone today, this week, or ever. In partnership with Huawei, this week the KFC smartphone launched in China. …

While Europe and the US are still twiddling thumbs waiting for the arrival of the first new Nokia phones – the 3, 5 and 6 – India is already having a go at pre-ordering Nokia’s (thus-far rumoured) flagship, the Nokia 8, on Pricebaba.com. It seems the Nokia 8 is the …

A number of ex-Nokia employees have banded together and licensed the brand name from Microsoft. Not only that, but they’ve secured a manufacturing partnership too and plan to resurrect Nokia smartphones in 2017 – building a brand new Android device around it. The new firm is called HMD Global and …

We have been hearing bits of information about Google’s future smartphone plans for months now, with the recent rumours indicating that the company will be ditching the Nexus branding this year in favour of new ‘Google Pixel’ devices. On top of that, it looks like we won’t have to wait …

The battery status and longevity check built into HTML5 to allow web providers to display low-power versions of their sites to those without much battery left, has been hijacked by tracking APIs to keep an eye on web users. Using battery status and estimated time left as unique identifiers, they …

HTC’s most well received product in a long time was its venture into a new field this year with the HTC Vive. The VR headset has arguably captured imaginations more than even the Oculus Rift, but can it save HTC’s ailing fortunes? The company just posted a catastrophic earnings period, …

Updated: Following on from yesterday’s leaks, HTC has officially announced the HTC 10, the company’s 2016 flagship smartphone. It still looks a bit like a mashup between a Samsung Galaxy and an iPhone 6 but it does pack in some pretty powerful internals, a 5.2-inch QHD display and an all …

Where you buy your smartphone from doesn’t usually matter, but when it comes to the Samsung Galaxy S7, it does. That’s because the UK’s version will come fitted with an Exynos 8890 processor, while U.S. buyers will have the same handset fitted with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820. While that wouldn’t matter …

Over the last year or two smartphone makers have finally started moving away from 16GB storage options, with many newer flagship Android devices offering 32GB as the base option as apps grow in size and users start demanding more space for their media. It looks like smartphone memory sizes could …

With the release earlier this month of the Vulkan API, many have been wondering just how effective it could be in improving in-game performance on current-gen hardware. It turns out quite a lot and not just on high-powered desktops either. In a new demo crafted by Epic Games, we get …

Getting in touch with friends and family is far easier today than ever before, but without Wi-Fi doing so when abroad can be quite costly. Not so with ChatSim. The annual contract SIM-card provider is offering subscribers  unlimited text, with up to a thousand international photos in over 150 countries …

It looks like we are set to gain yet another SIM card standard, this time, courtesy of Microsoft, which wants to build its own SIM for new Windows 10 smartphones and LTE-enabled tablets. While Microsoft’s SIM card may not be a different size to the current Nano SIMs, it is …

Qualcomm has announced the first smartphone to use its brand new Snapdragon 820 chip though it isn’t Samsung as previous rumours may have suggested, instead, it’s a relatively unknown Chinese manufacturer called Letv. The smartphone in question is known as the Letv Le Max Pro and was revealed during Qualcomm’s …

It is getting to the point where smartphone chips are getting so powerful, that they simply can’t stay as cool as they used to at all times. Qualcomm knows this issue all too well, with wide reports of the Snapdragon 810 suffering from heating issues over the past year. However, …

The majority of Nokia may have been s0ld off to Microsoft but the company is still kicking around with ideas for future smartphones. Apparently, Nokia is currently planning a device known as the C1, which in two versions, one with Windows 10 installed and another with Android. This wouldn’t be …

Remember flip-phones? The clamshell design that let you punctuate the end of a conversation with a satisfying snap as the screen and keyboard were sent crashing together? It was analogues of putting down a landline phone and felt sort of right for a device still dominated by calling people. Today …

Apple has a lot of patents, many of which it will never use or even investigate, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting to imagine what it might do with some of them. Take for example a patent recently revealed for an “Electronic Device Housing,” that would allow for the …