Essential Phone is now $200 cheaper in US, going for $499

Essential has given its PH-1 smartphone a $200 price cut in the US, bringing the device's price down to $499. The price cut is on both black and white color variants of the device. Although price cuts are usually due to low sales or for stock clearance prior to arrival of a new-gen device, Essential says the discount will help the company better penetrate into the market, which is currently dominated by the likes of Apple and Samsung. While the price cut is no doubt a good news for those planning the purchase the handset, Essential isn't forgetting its existing customers as well -...

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Week 42 in review: Mate 10 trio and Nokia 7 debut

Week 42 begun on a high note as Huawei unveiled a trio of flagship phablets - the Mate 10, Mate 10 Pro and the Mate 10 Porsche design. HMD global had an announcement of its own - the Nokia 7 debuted, but its availability will be limited to China at least initially. Another device by the Finns - Nokia 9 - keeps appearing in various leaks and gathering a lot of attention. Check out the complete list of the most popular stories from the past week to make sure you haven't missed anything important. .news-item .n-left { float: left; width: 28%; text-align:...

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Counterclockwise: plotting the average camera resolution through the years

The camera megapixel race is dead as most flagships have scaled back and instead chosen to race with wider apertures and secondary snappers. But mid-range and entry-level phones have been catching up in the megapixel count, pushing the average higher and higher. We took the 100 most popular phones from our database for each year. For those we averaged the megapixels of their main camera (for dual camera phones, the higher resolution sensor was used in the calculations). As expected, we see an upwards trend to the average pixel count. Growth accelerates from 2011 to 2015 and then it...

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Top 10 trending phones of week 42

A trio of major announcements happened this week and one of the new phones is already leading the popularity chart. The Nokia 7 might be a China-exclusive at this point but its value-for-money proposition is strong enough to get attention all around the globe. The Mate 10 didn't do quite so well - despite being proper flagships only one of them made the top 10 - the vanilla Mate 10 is sitting in third, right behind last week's leader, the Samsung Galaxy J7 Pro. The Xiaomi Mi A1 has climbed a spot to claim fourth, while the Galaxy Note8 has slid a couple and is now sitting in...

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Weekly poll: Which Huawei Mate 10 is the right one for you?

We've tried to make sense of Huawei's flagship lineup, though we confess we're still not 100% sure which phone we like better - the "vanilla" Mate 10 or the supposedly better Mate 10 Pro. We're fans of the pricing - Huawei's (and Leica's) greatest hardware for €700-€800 sounds great when the competition charges €900+. Benchmark results are solid if not earth-shattering, the storage situation is good, though a tad confusing. The vanilla Mate 10 only comes with 4GB/64GB storage, but there are two good news - there's a microSD slot and the customary €100 memory upgrade actually gets...

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Apple should re-imagine the iPod Shuffle

Indulge me for a moment whilst I give you some context I'm no longer the Apple 'fanboy' that I once was, that shine has long since been rubbed away for reasons that I won't go into here. My wife would disagree with my rationale though, she'd tell you that as I'm older now, the term 'fanboy' simply wouldn't be appropriate! I get the sense I need to introduce the term 'fanman' into our vocabulary. That aside, my family and I are so deeply entrenched into the Apple Eco-system that changing now would require simply too much energy, and off course money. My eclectic music collection was...

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