Phone Reviews

In a span of just a few years, OPPO has quickly risen from being just another Chinese brand to one of the more prolific upstarts in the Android market. It quickly moved from boasting about new mobile technologies it has developed to boasting about the new smartphones that showcased those technologies. It's definitely easy enough to give OPPO a pass since it isn't Samsung, but you'd be missing out on what could possibly be the most competitive Android phone this year.

Continue Reading

OPPO has been flooding the smartphone market with one model after another, and that's not even counting its sub-brand like Realme. It's not that hard to get lost in a sea of similar-sounding names but attaching a "Pro" to it does get you to at least take a second look. Of course, the OPPO Reno 3 Pro, which was "relaunched" just this week for the global market, will need more than that to generate not just attention but also sales. We take OPPO mid-range contender for a spin to see if it has more than enough to stand out in an already congested market.

Continue Reading

$1,400 is a huge amount of money for a phone, but the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G gives you a lot in return - figuratively and literally. Siping the rarified air at the very top of Samsung's 2020 phone line-up, the biggest of the S20 trio has the most excessive camera, the largest screen, and the beefiest battery to go with its hefty price tag. The "Ultra" moniker says this is the best you can get; the reality is Samsung's ambition isn't quite matched by the S20 Ultra's abilities.

Continue Reading

There was a time in the past when owning a phone from a Chinese phone meant holding an iPhone clone. These days, you'd be hard-pressed to find such a phone from a reputable brand as these companies started branching out with their own identities and, more importantly, their own innovations. In fact, many of the trends in the mobile market today don't come from Samsung or Apple but from the likes of Xiaomi, Vivo, and OPPO. The latter is particularly known for its fast-charging technologies and the latest OPPO Reno Ace brings all of the company's best parts in one accessible package.

Continue Reading

The Realme X2 Pro was first announced in October of 2019 and features a 6.5-inch Super AMOLED 1080 x 2400 pixel display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ SoC, and a price starting at around $330 USD. They key to understanding how a device of this combination of prices and features could exist lies in the aim of the company and the range of prices at which the device is offered. For its base price, this phone is surprisingly great.

Continue Reading

Not all foldable phones have a crease down the center of the display: some of them, like the LG G8X ThinQ and its LG Dual Screen accessory, have a hinge instead. The South Korean phone-maker's second attempt at a twin-display Android smartphone is also its first try at the US market, with aggressive pricing and a cautious feature-set to test the waters.

Continue Reading

The OPPO Reno 2 (or OPPO Reno2 if you like) is an interesting piece of hardware. It's a smartphone thats part of a very, very similar set of associated handsets, all under the same "Reno" branding name. OPPO's not failed to deliver impressive smartphone hardware to our review bench since we first started reviewing their devices. But here's the thing - if a phone has good hardware but less-than-great software, is the overall experience still good enough for the price?

Continue Reading

I wanted to love the Pixel 4, but instead I can only bring myself to like it, and if it sounds like I'm being demanding then you may not have been keeping up with smartphones in 2019. Apple's iPhones are the best they have been in years, there are numerous affordable Android phones that don't sacrifice top-tier photographic talents, and expectations from whatever device we entrust our SIM to are rightfully high. Into that fray arrives the Pixel 4, Google demonstrating that it can still innovate - and still shoot itself in the foot.

Continue Reading

For years, Honor has been carving out an identity separate yet connected to parent company Huawei. On the one hand, it naturally uses Huawei's technologies and resources, particularly the silicon and Android UX that runs on it. On the other hand, Honor has risen up as a mighty name that even managed to outperform Huawei's phones when it came to sales numbers by offering nearly the same or equivalent smartphones at half Huawei's price tags. The Honor 9X Pro announced just last July has the makings of a great mid-range device but, unfortunately, its fate lies in forces beyond Honor's direct control.

Continue Reading

Don't think of the iPhone 11 as a compromise: think of it as the phone equivalent of Apple's Greatest Hits album. Replacing the iPhone XR - and, at $699, an aggressive $50 cheaper to begin with - the iPhone 11 takes some of the best technologies of recent phones and combines them into one compelling handset.

Continue Reading

The OnePlus 7T is essentially the OnePlus 7 Pro with a few key details changed, just a smidgen. Today we're taking a peek at how well the OnePlus 7T stands up to the OnePlus 7 Pro as well as the rest of the market. This phone launches for approximately $600 (around $50 more than the base cost of its predecessor, the OnePlus 6T released one year ago.) We'll see where those extra few ten-dollar-bills went, and we'll give a final verdict before this whole thing is through.

Continue Reading

Tell someone you write about tech, and the question you're almost guaranteed to get is "should I buy the new iPhone?" With the iPhone 11 Pro and the iPhone 11 Pro Max freshly on the scene, that's a question a whole lot of people - whether considering their first smartphone, weighing an upgrade, or even thinking about jumping ship from another platform like Android - are now mulling over.

Continue Reading