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All Posts by Alex Dobie

Nougat rises to 4.9% share in March Android platform numbers

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Posted by Alex Dobie on 7 Apr 2017 6:22 am
Nougat statue
Big gains for Nougat and small drops for all other Android versions in latest figures from Google. Google has published the latest Android platform distribution numbers, showing the share of each OS version across all devices accessing the Play Store last month. Just like the previous month, we're seeing big gains for Nougat, which goes from 2.8% to 4.9%. The jump comes as more devices sold...

Limited edition Galaxy S8 Asiana Airlines version can be bought with miles

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Posted by Alex Dobie on 7 Apr 2017 6:03 am
Asiana GS8
Koreans can use airline miles to bag a cheaper GS8 — as long as they don't mind a bit of extra branding. For a limited time, Asiana Airlines passengers will be able to purchase a limited edition Samsung Galaxy S8 or S8+ using airline miles. The promotion, which follows a similar deal for last year's Galaxy S7 series, offers Samsung's new phones at a discount with 30,000 mileage points.

Where to buy the Huawei P10 + P10 Plus in the UK

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Posted by Alex Dobie on 7 Apr 2017 5:15 am
Huawei P10
Huawei's latest flagship phone is available to pre-order in the UK! The P10 is Huawei's best mainstream flagship yet, available in 5.1- and 5.5-inch flavors. It packs Huawei's latest Kirin 960 processor, up to 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage (in the P10 Plus), and the company's best Leica-branded camera yet. (Check out our review for more on what's great — and not so great — about the phones...

Watch our Honor 8 Pro video review!

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Posted by Alex Dobie on 6 Apr 2017 8:00 am
The 400 euro price point is where we've seen some of the most exciting phones of the past year, bringing about the rise of brands like OnePlus and Honor. 2016's Honor 8 was a decent bet for anyone wanting a lot of phone for not a lot of money — but in many ways it was still a mid-range phone. So what would happen if you took the DNA of the Honor 8 and applied it to a bigger...

Google Home + Google Wifi now available in the UK

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Posted by Alex Dobie on 6 Apr 2017 5:57 am
Google Home
Price starts at £129 for both devices from Google's store and retail partners. As previously announced, today's the day Google Home and Google Wifi go on sale in the UK, as Google begins a broader international push for its connected speaker and wireless router products. Both are listed on Google's own store and retail partners including high street names like Currys, Argos, Maplin and John...

Honor 8 Pro is official: 5.7-inch display, giant-ass battery, Kirin 960

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Posted by Alex Dobie on 5 Apr 2017 6:30 am
Honor 8 Pro
Honor's latest phone for Europe is a beast, and it'll cost £475 in the UK. Huawei's Honor brand has taken the wraps off its latest high-end handset, which just happens to be the biggest, highest-specced Honor phone to date.

Honor 8 Pro review: Killer flagship

79 Comments
Posted by Alex Dobie on 5 Apr 2017 6:30 am
Honor 8 Pro
The quick take Honor's biggest, highest-end handset is a supersized, supercharged version of one of our favorite affordable flagships of the past year, offering a gorgeous design, speedy performance and legendary battery life for less money than you'd expect to pay. The Good Speedy performance Slim, stylish metal chassis Epic battery life Good value at £475 price point The Bad EMUI...

Honor 8 Pro specs

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Posted by Alex Dobie on 5 Apr 2017 6:30 am
Honor 8 Pro
High-end Honor handset has hearty Huawei hardware. Honor has just announced its latest flagship-tier handset for Europe, the Honor 8 Pro. We've got a full review ready for you right now. But if you'd prefer to take a quick glance down the spec sheet so you know what you're in for, look no further than the table below. Behold! Numbers, acronyms and more!

Surprise: Galaxy S8 has the 'best smartphone display'

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Posted by Alex Dobie on 5 Apr 2017 5:58 am
Galaxy S8 Plus
Improved color gamut, smarter always-on display and extremely high peak brightness are among the highlights, according to DisplayMate. I got some face time with the Galaxy S8 and S8+'s screens last week, and I can tell you they look good. What I can't tell you is exactly how good, and that's where DisplayMate, a longstanding expert in display technologies, comes in. The publication has gotten...

Phones with 'foldable' AMOLED displays may not debut until 2019

16 Comments
Posted by Alex Dobie on 4 Apr 2017 5:32 am
Foldable OLED
Samsung Display pours cold water on prospect of a foldable Galaxy anytime soon. Rumors of a foldable Samsung smartphone have been circulating for years, with the name "Galaxy X" doing the rounds recently to refer to a phone that opens like a book to transform into a larger, tablet-sized screen. But comments by a leading engineer at Samsung Display — the arm of the Korean electronics giant...

Watch our HTC U Ultra video review!

6 Comments
Posted by Alex Dobie on 3 Apr 2017 9:32 am
HTC U Ultra
Five or six years ago, HTC was a titan of the smartphone world. But the past half-decade hasn't been kind to the Taiwanese company. It's lost money, market share and several high-profile designers and executives. Nevertheless, HTC's still here, and still making pretty good phones, both under its own brand name and for Google under the Pixel contract. The latest high-ender to come...

The Galaxy S8's new 'Infinity Wallpapers' are awesome — here's how they work

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Posted by Alex Dobie on 29 Mar 2017 6:26 pm
Infinity Wallpapers
On the Galaxy S8, your Always-On Display, lock screen and home screen seamlessly flow into each other. In the various online leaks leading up to the Samsung Galaxy S8 announcement, we got to see glimpses of the phone's new lock screen, home screen and always-on display, and it always seemed like there was something new going on with the way the GS8 handled the interaction between these three...

Galaxy S8's most powerful Bixby feature won't be in Europe at launch

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Posted by Alex Dobie on 29 Mar 2017 3:19 pm
Bixby
Bixby voice recognition will only support U.S. English and Korean later in the year. The Samsung Galaxy S8 arrives in Europe on April 28, but when the phone hits European shores it'll be missing one of the key features in Samsung's Bixby AI platform.

Your Galaxy S8 will remind you to clean finger grease off its camera lens

24 Comments
Posted by Alex Dobie on 29 Mar 2017 2:43 pm
Watch your greasy fingerprints
Once you add a fingerprint, your GS8 will warn you to de-gunk your lens regularly. The Galaxy S8's fingerprint sensor location has been one of the more controversial elements of the phone's design, with concerns being raised over reachability, and the potential for fingerprint smudges to accumulate around that rear camera lens. And it appears Samsung, too, is aware of the potential for picture-...

Google Home and Google Wifi launching in the UK on April 6 for £129

13 Comments
Posted by Alex Dobie on 28 Mar 2017 4:45 am
Google Home
The latest products in Google's hardware family are coming to the UK next week. After a brief teaser last month, Google has today officially announced the launch of Google Home and Google Wifi for the UK. The new devices see the company building out its "made by Google" hardware range internationally, following last October's Pixel phone launch. Home and Wifi represent new frontiers for...

Qualcomm licensing blocked Samsung from selling Exynos chips

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Posted by Alex Dobie on 27 Mar 2017 5:54 am
Exynos
Deal dating back to 1993 is reportedly why we're not seeing more non-Samsung phones running Exynos. South Korea's Fair Trade Commission has claimed that Qualcomm blocked Samsung from selling its own Exynos processors to other manufacturers through a patent licensing deal, ZDNet reports.

From the Editor's Desk: Is Android O a boring release?

59 Comments
Posted by Alex Dobie on 26 Mar 2017 12:16 pm
Android O logo
The lack of new whizbang user-facing features in O is a sign of Android's maturity, but that doesn't mean we won't see big surprises for non-phone devices. The big Android story of the week was Android O. Based on what we know about O so far, it would appear to be one of those Android releases, like KitKat or Marshmallow that tunes things up, adds under-the-hood enhancements and builds on...

High-res Galaxy S8+ leak shows more of Samsung's new software

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Posted by Alex Dobie on 25 Mar 2017 8:06 am
Galaxy S8 Plus
Mexico launch for Samsung's new flagships slated for early May, with prices starting at 17,699 pesos. Ready to kick off the weekend with a fresh Samsung Galaxy S8+ leak? Mexican site AndroidMX has bagged eight new images of the larger S8 model, with its 6.2-inch, "18.5:9" display.

Android O hidden features: The big and small changes for regular users

20 Comments
Posted by Alex Dobie on 24 Mar 2017 12:00 pm
Android O
There's more to Android O than the big new developer features Google's talking about publicly. Any new Android release is a big deal. And new developer preview build, as landed recently for Android O, inevitably has fans scrambling to find new features lurking just below the surface. In addition to big sweeping changes affecting the people who make Android apps, there are dozens of smaller...

HTC U Ultra second opinion: U expect more

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Posted by Alex Dobie on 23 Mar 2017 1:00 pm
HTC U Ultra
HTC's first phablet in years is a perfectly fine phone that feels a little half-baked in places — and for $750... well, you expect more. Five or six years ago, HTC was a titan of the smartphone world. But the past half-decade hasn't been kind to the Taiwanese company. It's lost money, market share and several high-profile designers and executives. Nevertheless, HTC's still here, and still...

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