Phone Reviews

In a year nobody could've predicted, where each day seemed hell-bent on eclipsing the former with fresh horror, surprise, or both, it's been tough to stand out as a category-defining gadget. The fact that the Galaxy Z Fold 2 managed to not only justify its existence as a $1,999 phone, but lay the groundwork for a whole new genre of foldable devices, is a testament to just how much Samsung got right in 2020. Despite what turned out to be largely self-imposed hurdles.

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As anybody who wished for a more eventful 2020 now knows, sweating the details is important. How else to describe the LG Wing, a rotating dual-screen curio that - even in a time of foldable smartphones - still manages to be an outlier. We asked LG for more interesting phone designs, but maybe we should’ve been more specific.

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We've reviewed our fair share of smartphones through more than a decade, most of them conventional while a few outliers to end up in our hands from time to time. Although by no means unusual or rare, rugged smartphones aren't exactly a staple in the consumer market, often reserved for industrial customers, nor do they often spark curiosity beyond their thick, rugged frames. Some do try to stand out from the crowd with some extra feature or utility. The new Doogee S96 Pro definitely fits that bill and we give it a hard look to see there's more to it than meets the eye.

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The next time someone tells you all new smartphones look the same, show them Planet Computers' Cosmo Communicator. Promising the typing convenience of a physical keyboard, the flexibility of dual-booting Android and Linux, and the pure geek-appeal of anything that looks like a laptop but still fits in a (large) pocket, it's a clamshell unlike pretty much anything else on the market.

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The iPhone 12 mini has no right being the cheapest model in Apple's iPhone 12 family. Sure, on paper you're spending the smallest amount on the smallest display, but - like the most engaging gadgets - the spec comparisons simply don't capture the true charm. It may be mini in your hand, but the iPhone 12 mini maxes out on appeal.

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Pictures don't quite prepare you for the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Apple's newest flagship sits at the top of a four phone family for 2020, and you could be forgiven for assuming that distinguishing between them would be tricky. The truth, though, is that the biggest of the iPhone 12 series - and indeed the biggest iPhone ever - stands out clearly, though in the process it forces you to decide just what your priorities are.

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The Nokia 8.3 5G is the perfect smartphone for a certain sort of person. If you're looking for a smartphone that has a modern processor, made by a major label company, runs Android One (so you know it'll get updates from Google), has access to 5G data speed, has a sizeable display, and works with an at-least-usable set of cameras, this is the phone for you. The Nokia 8.3 5G is not the most extravagant phone in the world - it's the best at most of what it aspires to be.

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The iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro are the more sensible half of Apple's new smartphone range for 2020, and that's as it should be. Nestling right at the heart of the mobile market, they replace the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro as the go-to choice for savvy shoppers, and this time around the list of differences between the two is even shorter. Somehow that makes deciding between them simultaneously easier and more difficult.

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2020 is the year of big phone families, and Samsung's Galaxy S20 Series is nearing Brady Bunch numbers. Latest to arrive is the Galaxy S20 FE 5G, described as the "Fan Edition" but also the most affordable of the line-up. As always that means what's absent from the spec sheet is as important to note as what's present, but for once the compromise may all be worth it.

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There's a thing magicians do called misdirection, where they catch your eye with one thing while something more important happens elsewhere. Whether modern smartphones count as magic is probably a little too philosophical for here, but I certainly got the misdirection feeling from the Pixel 4a 5G. The headline feature, its 5G connectivity, is right there in the name, but I'm not sure anybody should buy one simply for its potential for higher-speed data.

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Smartphones have come a long way in just the past few years alone, rapidly changing in design as well as introducing new, sometimes outlandish features. Almost every smartphone has a gimmick these days in an attempt to stand out from the crowd and it gets harder to think of novel ways to differentiate one model from the next. That's true even for "mid-range" tier phones like Vivo's latest selfie-centric phone, the Vivo V20. But does it have enough to actually make it worth noticing? We dig in to find out.

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The Pixel 5 has a lot to prove. Google's 2020 flagship not only needs to convince shoppers to open their wallets in an unusually challenging year, but demonstrate that the sins of last year's Pixel 4 are not to be repeated. If there was anything to give us confidence it could do that, it was the pitch-perfect Pixel 4a: now, the question is how much of that magic can rub off on the Pixel 5.

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