Oppo is introducing 10x optical zoom camera on January 16

Two years ago, Oppo attended MWC 2017 but didn't showcase a smartphone. Instead, the company chose to go with mobile technologies, announcing the world's first dual camera with 5x zoom. Now the company is ready to go even further and is sending out media invites for its 10x lossless zoom solution. The event will take place in Beijing, China, on January 16. The current 5x setup is essentially a 5P lens, followed by a 90-degree angular prism that directs the light to a vertically positioned camera sensor. The OIS unit is put on the other end, so it would work even when the zoom is...

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Week 2 in review: Redmi Note 7 is here, Galaxy S10 is coming, iPhone 11 leaks

It's week 2 of the year and CES was its main event. There weren't many grand phone announcements at the CES floor though - in fact the most popular news of the week was the announcement of the Redmi Note 7 and Redmi's new life as a separate brand, complete with its own logo. Xiaomi also dropped the AirDots Pro competitor to Apple's AirPods. We can't speak to their design or sound quality, but their $60 price is more than half of the AirPods' $160. In unconfirmed Xiaomi news we saw a Xiaomi Cepheus on Geekbench, packing the next-gen Snapdragon 855 chipset - is it the Xiaomi Mi...

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Top 10 trending phones of week 2

It's still early in the year, but we are already getting an action-packed week in our trending chart including a new leader and 3 new phones in the top 10. The Redmi Note 7 debuted on Thursday and it wasted no time climbing to the top and dethroning its stablemate - the Xiaomi Redmi Note 6 Pro had to settle for second this time around. In third and fourth we have a couple of new phones that are yet to even become official. The Samsung Galaxy M30 and Xiaomi Mi 9 are already getting people excited and their specs pages are among the most searched on our website. In sixth we find the...

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Weekly poll: what will be the best feature of 2019 smartphones?

Carriers are trying to get a 5G hype train going - some quite desperately. 5G networks will offer much higher bandwidth and will deliver better Internet to homes - better than the crummy wired Internet some people are getting, at least. And it's low-latency promises VR/AR and autonomous vehicle applications. But do smartphone users care about 5G? Well, you tell us - what feature are you most looking forward to in 2019? Here are a few major trends we think might be "the next big thing". Motorola Moto Z3 Triple, quad and even penta cameras have become standard on flagships and are...

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Counterclockwise: the rise, death and rebirth of the slider phone

Sliders are experiencing a resurgence as the form factor has found a new use. In the early days it was used to make a phone smaller and protect the keypad from accidental presses (by putting the keypad on a slider), today they are used to maximize the screen-to-body ratio - there's no more keyboards, it's the selfie camera that's on the slider. Sliders hit their peak in the 2007-2009 period. A whopping 109 different slider phones were launched in 2009. However, as the chart below shows they experienced a steep decline soon after. The popularity of the form factor peaked in the same...

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