Oppo A1k arrives in India

Oppo A1k was made official last week in Russia. The phone with Helio P22 chipset was launched for the equivalent of $150, but now it arrives in India with a lower price tag. The phone is currently available at offline retailers and we're yet to hear if it will be available at the official online store of Oppo. The A1k offers some basic specs like an 8 MP f/2.2 main shooter and 5 MP front-facing camera. The screen is 6.1" LCD with HD+ resolution and tall 19.5:9 ratio with a waterdrop notch on top. There is only one memory option - 2 GB RAM and 32 GB storage. There is no fingerprint...

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nubia Red Magic 3 arrives with 8K video recording and monster specs

Nowadays smartphone companies are offering a batch of nice specs, but compromising over others in order to have a lower price tag. ZTE decided to go the other way and threw everything it had to make a monster of a phone, called nubia Red Magic 3. The new gaming device offers flagship chipset and 12 GB RAM, but it stands out with a huge battery, two types of internal cooling, 8K and 1920 fps slow-mo video recording. Everywhere you look, the nubia Red Magic 3 has an impressive set of features. The 6.65" AMOLED display has 90 Hz refresh rate and 240 Hz touch refresh rate. The panel...

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Top 10 trending phones of week 17

A bunch of new phones debuted this week, but none of them managed to gain enough traction to seriously stir up our most popular phones' ranking. In fact, only two made the chart and they only took the final two spots - the Lenovo Z6 Pro is ninth, while the Redmi Y3 is tenth. On top we get the Samsung Galaxy A50, which has a comfortable gap to the Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 in second and the Galaxy A70 in third. The Huawei P30 Pro slid to fourth, while last week's runner-up Samsung Galaxy A80 is down in fifth. The Huawei P30 lite and the Redmi Note 7 Pro retain sixth and seventh for the...

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Counterclockwise: wireless charging came first, but fast wired charging is more popular

The Palm Pre was ahead of its time - it introduced the mobile world to wireless charging. Unfortunately, for all its innovation, the phone didn't catch up. In fact, manufacturers would ignore wireless charging up until 2013 when they started pushing it more actively. "Fast" wired charging was born relatively late in the game - 2014. There's no firm definition of the term, so we're counting phones that can go above the 10W provided by plain USB. We've chronicled the fight between wireless charging standards before. Spoiler: eventually Qi by the Wireless Power Consortium emerged as the...

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Week 17 in review: Samsung delays the Galaxy Fold, OnePlus 7/7 Pro are coming

Week 17 was circled on many a calendar because it was the week when you could pre-order a foldable phone for the first time (while in the US you could even have received one). Samsung's Galaxy Fold was finally coming but sadly due to some issues with the early devices Samsung decided to delay the release of the foldable phone until those issues are dealt with. It's a smart move, despite the outcry it faced. Samsung doesn't want another recall like the infamous Galaxy Note7 one so it's pulling back the Galaxy Fold before it gets into consumer hands. Hopefully it will be released soon and...

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Weekly poll: will you buy a 5G phone this year?

EE announced that it will run a trial 5G network at the Glastonbury festival - a record 200,000 people are expected to attend, which might have been a great stress test that will show off the increased capacity over 4G. Except how many attendees will actually have a phone that can connect to a 5G network? A couple of weeks ago, Swisscom launched its 5G network in Zurich. Verizon and AT&T are operating 5G networks in the US. Telstra and Optus in Australia already have 5G networks too. SingTel in Singapore is running tests. 5G networks are here (or at least near), but are there any phones to...

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Huawei P30 Lite in for review

This year with its P series smartphones Huawei did things differently. Whereas before the Huawei P20 Lite and P10 Lite preceded their more capable counterparts by a month, the P30 Lite comes a month after the P30 and P30 Pro. And unlike the Lites of old, this Lite is sits closer to its regular and Pro siblings. But before we compare them, let's take a look in the box. The Huawei P30 Lite comes with earbuds (3.5mm ones, as the Lite has an audio jack), USB-C cable and an 18W wall charger. Interestingly there's no complimentary case in the box, though it looks like there is an empty space...

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Weekly poll results: the rear camera is all that counts, front cams get little love

Last week's poll produced one of the most definitive answers we've had in a while - rear cameras are more important then selfie cameras, the vote was nearly 10:1 in their favor. However, we went through the comments to get a feel for how people use their phones and found that the world is not ready for a world without front-facing cameras. Some use them for video calls - not shooting video, just video calls. Others like the option of face unlock. And, yes, some people do take selfies, but by the sound of it, they wouldn't be too mad if there was a way to just use the rear camera for...

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