Phones

Up until last year, Sony seemed to have taken more of a devil may care attitude towards its smartphone business. The old management saw these devices merely as portals to the rest of its connected products rather than stars in their own right. That has been changing recently, with Sony seemingly taking its smartphones seriously again. You might not have guessed that with its silence at CES last week but come February it will finally be revealing its new direction. Sadly, it will be making that journey without one of its popular phone models.

Continue Reading

Wireless charging has become more known and more common thanks in part to Apple’s support for the technology in recent iPhones. It has also become easier for manufacturers to include due to the trend of using glass backs instead of metal. But despite that, at least two popular OEMs have refused to jump on the bandwagon, namely OPPO and distant cousin OnePlus. That may soon be changing now that OPPO has joined the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), the organization that develops the widely-used Qi wireless charging standard.

Continue Reading

The last year has seen Android manufacturer OnePlus rapidly advancing its phone designs. From the me-too notch on the OnePlus 6, the company then introduced the OnePlus 6T (above) with its tiny teardrop camera notch, a design that's already being adopted by other smartphones. Now, with 6T having been out for just over two months, it seems it's already time for details on its successor, the presumed OnePlus 7, to start leaking.

Continue Reading

Today we're getting up close and personal with the HTC Vive Cosmos, a VR headset made for the masses. The device itself doesn't power on - not for the press at the moment, anyway. Instead we're forced to only look at the most basic elements at play - the industrial design, and the details we've been given by HTC on its near future.

Continue Reading

Cat, maker of durable smartphones, has teamed up with Verizon to offer its S48c, a rugged handset designed for use in tough environments. The phone is being offered to Verizon customers under a two-year contract or for outright purchase, the ideal customer being one who spends time in places where smartphones fear to tread. Construction workers, park rangers, and others in similar professions would benefit from the device's features.

Continue Reading

We're still many months out from the reveal of Apple's 2019 iPhones, but when that group of devices is finally announced, they might end up looking very similar to the three phones we received in 2018. A new report claims that Apple will release three more iPhones in 2019, and that one of them will be a follow up to the LCD-sporting iPhone XR. This comes despite various reports that sales of all three of 2018's iPhones are slower than Apple was hoping.

Continue Reading

It seems that Alcatel or its licensee TCL haven’t yet learned their lessons, perhaps waiting for that “big bad” that will tear down whatever credibility their brands might have in the mobile market. Last year, the French brand found itself in the middle of controversy for having adware apps pre-installed on its phones. Now it might have done slightly worse with yet another pre-installed app that contained malware that not only collected phone data, in some cases, it also subscribed users’ phone numbers to premium paid services without their knowledge, much less their consent.

Continue Reading

It seems that Vivo is really into pushing the boundaries of smartphone design that you have to wonder if it’s making any profits from them. The Vivo NEX S was an interesting oddity at best and while the NEX Dual Display Edition is arguably more practical, it is also more expensive. The Chinese company doesn’t seem to be stopping there either because based on one of the most prominent leaksters on the Internet, Vivo is working on a “Waterdrop” phone that will “subvert people’s past perception of smartphones.”

Continue Reading

BLU Products was one of the more prolific makers of wallet-friendly Android phones but the Miami-based company has recently fallen eerily silent. One reason was its self-imposed reduction of smartphones to focus on quality over quantity. The other may have been to let its privacy and software scandals cool down a bit before making big splashes again. It’s not a big splash but it could be a step in the right direction as BLU announces an Android 9.0 Pie Beta Program for its most recent flagship, the VIVO XI+.

Continue Reading

It’s still more than a month from now but Samsung’s next flagship phones are all but completely known at this point. While some specific details remain under wraps, most of the large strokes like features and designs have already been leaked to death. But while those leaks have come from usually reliable sources, they are still leaks. Fortunately, it seems that Samsung itself has confirmed the design of at least the Galaxy S10 and its punch-hole screen, though, of course, it has tried to remove evidence of such.

Continue Reading

The next big Samsung event is official - revealed by Samsung itself! Now's time to speak about what they'll almost certainly be revealing at this event, set for the 20th of February. Today we've got as many details as possible, including specs on four phones and one mistake. One retraction, that is, from previous full list of smartphones coming from Samsung in the Galaxy S10 lineup in 2019. The one retraction is more of a switch - there'll still be a device, it just won't be a phone.

Continue Reading

The Redmi Note 7 was launched today as the company's first phone as a slightly more independent brand, Redmi. Before now they were part of Xiaomi, creating the most affordable line of smartphones for the Xiaomi phone collection - now they've been spun off into their own entity. Xiaomi also runs Pocophone, another company that's absolutely dashing the rest of the competition in the price vs specs race.

Continue Reading