Week 32 in review: the busiest Galaxy Unpacked event ever

Week 32 served us a proper storm of announcements, but none bigger than those at Samsung's Unpacked event. A couple new Note20 phones, a Galaxy Z Fold2 early look, two flagship tablets, a smartwatch and ANC-packing TWS earphones - it was the busiest single event in many a year. Google unveiled its long delayed Pixel 4a mid-ranger, which looks rather dated on paper, but the company has often delivered smartphones that offer experience beyond what their hardware suggests. HMD gave us the Nokia C3 entry level phone, as Realme and Oppo had announcements of their own - the V5 and the K7 5G,...

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RHA TrueConnect 2 truly wireless earphones review

The TrueConnect 2 are the successor to the acclaimed TrueConnect from the Glasgow-based audio brand RHA. The new model may look identical to the previous one but RHA claims several improvements under the hood, including a much longer battery life, better ingress protection, more microphones, redesigned buttons, and more robust connectivity. At $150, the TrueConnect 2 are priced similar to popular offerings from other major brands. This means they need to be competitive with some of the industry heavyweights while also rising above the increasingly common low-priced alternatives...

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Top 10 trending phones of week 32

The big shifts in our trending chart continue with major announcements by Samsung and the long delayed Google mid-ranger storming the chart. The Galaxy Note20 Ultra is certainly the more interesting member of the newly announced S Pen duo - so much so that its 5G and 4G versions occupied the first two spots. In contrast, the vanilla Note20 didn't even manage to crack the top 10. The Pixel 4a may have underwhelming hardware, but its aggressive price, decent base storage and Google's ability to extract better image quality than the camera hardware suggests helped it secure third...

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Flashback: the Samsung Galaxy Note II writes an even better story than the first one

The original Galaxy Note changed the shape – or rather the size – of smartphones. It was the first to make huge displays cool. The sequel, the Samsung Galaxy Note II, went even bigger and stretched the new Super AMOLED panel from 5.3” to 5.5”. This new panel had a full RGB stripe, like the one used on the Galaxy S II and unlike the PenTile arrangement of most other Super AMOLEDs. This helped improve image quality even though resolution was actually slightly reduced – 720 x 1,280 px vs. 800 x 1,280 px of the original. Super AMOLED up close: full RGB on Galaxy Note II • PenTile on...

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Weekly poll: Did the Galaxy Note20, Note20 Ultra and Z Fold2 live up to expectations?

It would be a cliche to call the Galaxy Note20 Ultra “the best Samsung smartphone ever” even if it’s probably true. But it’s strange that we can’t call the vanilla Note20 “the second best”, it’s not even close. The Ultra costs an arm and a leg – $1,300/€1,266 – and yet it is a bit cheaper than the S20 Ultra despite having double the storage. And the faster Snapdragon 865+ too. Well, sort of. Europe, India, Brazil and Australia are getting the old Exynos 990 chipset, so there’s no performance upgrade for them. The Note20 Ultra also brings the second iteration of Samsung’s best camera...

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Weekly poll results: the Oppo Reno4 Pro fails to impress

The Oppo Reno4 Pro has landed – with a thud. Last week’s poll shows that the phone cannot lure buyers away from similarly priced competitors. What went wrong? The short answer would be “the Nord happened”. For the same price, it offers the better chipset (S765), a closer to stock OS and 5G connectivity (for those who care). It's behind on charging speed, however. Still, while 65 W charging is rare in this price range, it wasn’t enough to keep the Reno4 Pro afloat. We saw something similar in the Poco M2 Pro poll – people like fast charging, but it’s a secondary concern to having a good...

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