Phone Reviews

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

The smartphone you see before you represents everything good about reading tech news today. It's very easy to get wrapped up in believing the best phones only come from the most visible brands - Samsung, Apple, etcetera - but that's not always true. Imagine there's a phone that's just as good as far more expensive devices but isn't made by a brand you recognize - could such a device exist?

Continue Reading

The Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ should be a tougher sell than it actually is. A $1,100 Android phone, scaled so vast that many will struggle to comfortably hold it, the defining feature of which is a pop-out stylus... and yet here we are, in 2019, with a flagship that boasts such user goodwill that even a history of immolation cannot derail it. As always, Samsung has thrown the kitchen sink at its newest Note, but now more than ever the results are mixed.

Continue Reading

The Red Magic 3 is a gaming phone made by the company Nubia's gaming arm. This phone is a gaming machine first, and a smartphone second. It has a relatively large display with no notch and no camera hole, powerful "4D" haptic feedback, front-facing stereo speakers, and a sizable battery. With an approximately $479 starting price, the Red Magic 3 could be the most spot-on value in a gaming phone released by any company since the gaming phone trend began.

Continue Reading

When it comes to smartphones, it’s easy to get caught up on the “more is best” treadmill. More megapixels, more gigabytes and gigahertz, more camera sensors... and more money, of course. Then along comes the Google Pixel 3a and slams the emergency stop button.

Continue Reading