Honor 20i arrives for pre-order two days ahead of announcement

The Honor 20i will be announced on Wednesday, but as expected, the phone is up for pre-order starting today. People can put in as low as CNY100 or CNY150 for the variant with 64 GB before the official shipments begin on April 17. Honor 20i official images The Honor 20i is the first phone of the 20 series of the Huawei subsidiary. It is likely the same phone as the Honor 10i and Honor 20 Lite, both of which leaked previously. We expect a 6.21" LCD panel with a notch for the 32 MP selfie camera with AI features. The chipset will be Kirin 710, coupled with 6/64 GB, 4/128 GB,...

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Week 15 in review: Galaxy A80, A20e, Oppo Reno are here

Last week focused on the rumors, this week we got the announcements. Oppo and Samsung both launched new phones on April 10 while a day earlier, Qualcomm launched two new chipsets - the 11nm Snapdragon 665 and the 8nm Snapdragon 730 (and the 730G with better graphics). Starting with the last one - the Qualcomm 665 will see the biggest improvement over the 660 in graphics performance while the 730/730G promises a CPU performance boost of 35%. Oppo settled all the leaks by unveiling two Reno smartphones - the Reno 10x zoom with a Snapdragon 855 and a periscope 5x optical zoom camera and...

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Top 10 trending phones of week 15

Samsung's Galaxy A series event stirred things up in our top 10 trending chart this week. The newly unveiled top dog Galaxy A80 shot straight to the top, dethroning its Galaxy A50 sibling. The Samsung Galaxy A70 retained the fourth spot, while the Galaxy A30 climbed to eight. The solitary Samsung phone outside the A series to make the chart is Galaxy S10+, which got the final available spot. Meanwhile Huawei's P30 series had mixed fortunes - the Pro version is down a spot to third, the vanilla lost two positions and is now ninth, while the lite version gained three to get sixth....

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Samsung Galaxy A50 in for review

Samsung's new A series is so good that even the S10 lineup might lose some sleep. This week we checked-in with the Galaxy A40, which could easily divert some of the Galaxy S10e potential buyers and today we're looking at the Galaxy A50 - a good cheaper alternative to the Galaxy S10+. Now before you jump to the flagship's defense, check out these numbers. The Galaxy A50 has the same size 6.4-inch Super AMOLED screen of perfectly fine 1080p resolution, it too has an on-display fingerprint scanner and a triple camera with an ultra-wide unit, ample 64GB or 128GB of storage, a 10nm octa-core...

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Weekly poll: Samsung Galaxy A80 vs. Oppo Reno 10x zoom

This week we saw the unveiling of two phones with unique pop-up cameras - the Samsung Galaxy A80 and the Oppo Reno 10x zoom. They have other similarities too, like a large full view display and 48MP cameras on the back. The Galaxy A80's dual action mechanism manages to rotate the main camera to face forward. Samsung designed this phone to produce the best quality selfie photos and videos. Just think, some flagships don't even have autofocus on their selfie cameras, let alone large 48MP sensors or ToF modules that create real time bokeh for videos. The Oppo Reno 10x zoom also has a...

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Counterclockwise: old tech repurposed

The infrared port was one of the first ways for a phone to share data locally with other devices. For example, you could sync the calendar from your PC to your PDA over IrDA. It fell out of favor after the bugs and compatibility issues of Bluetooth were ironed out, but IR lived on. It was repurposed as a remote control feature, allowing phones to command TVs, air conditioners, anything with an IR remote, really. Infrared communication is so simple that it never suffered from the compatibility woes of Bluetooth. If anything, today's smart devices are a crapshoot - can your smart speaker...

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Weekly poll results: Nokia X71 earns the fans' love

The Nokia X71 is a great mid-ranger - most people who voted in last week's poll agree. However, it's not perfect, it's certainly not going to challenge the Nokia 9 PureView as the top HMD phone. And since the X71 is expected to go global as the Nokia 8.1 Plus, some questions were raised if it is indeed better than the Nokia 8.1. The chipset is a downgrade, going from Snapdragon 710 to 660. You do get more RAM and storage as standard, though. The camera has also been called into question - the 48MP sensor has the resolution (and with binning, potentially larger pixels), but there's no...

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