Huawei Freebuds Lipstick review

Huawei brought its nova 9 smartphone to Europe last month and brought a new Watch GT3, and new TWS earphones called Huawei Freebuds Lipstick alongside it. The audio accessory comes with a striking new design that truly resembles lipstick, and we got a pair to test whether there is more to it than cool looks. Cosmetics stores have hundreds of colors of lipstick but Huawei is offering the earphones in only one shade, which is somewhere between Rojo and Cornell (yes, these are real shades of red). On the inside, the earphones are just like the Freebuds 4 - open ear design, a standard...

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Top 10 trending phones of week 44

Week 43 saw little in terms of new hardware announcements, but there are still plenty of changes in our trending chart. The Redmi Note 11 Pro+ and Pro still take the first two spots, but the third placed Sony Xperia Pro-I has lost a lot of steam and has dropped off the chart entirely. In its place we have the Samsung Galaxy A52s, which has gained whopping 6 places. The Google Pixel 6 Pro has climbed to fourth, overtaking the Redmi Note 11, while the upcoming Poco M4 Pro is already the sixth most popular phone in our database. We then have the Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max, followed by...

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Week 44 in review: Galaxy S22 enters mass production, USB-C iPhone on sale

Another week down, let's recap. The Galaxy S22 and S22+ have reportedly entered into mass production and we saw detailed renders of the pair, based on early information. They'll look quite similar to their predecessors, only be smaller in stature, thanks to reduced screens - 6.06-inch and 6.55-inch for the S22 and S22+, respectively. That's down from the 6.1-inch and 6.7-inch of the S21 and S21+. The Galaxy S22 Ultra is also in production and we even saw the first live images of the phone this week. It looks a lot like a Galaxy Note20 Ultra, only with a matte black finish. It has an S Pen...

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Flashback: iPod touch - the almost iPhone

Apple changed the portable music player world in 2001 with the launch of the original iPod. It wasn’t the first portable MP3 player by a long shot – Internet folklore still remembers early criticism like this post on Slashdot (by CmdrTaco himself): “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” “Nomad” refers refers to Creative’s Nomad series of portable MP3 players. The Nomad Jukebox, the latest entry in the series at the time, had just come out in late 2000 and had 6GB of storage – one more than the iPod. Anyway, today’s story isn’t about these two, but about an important Apple product...

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Weekly poll: do you still want depth and macro cameras on your phones?

Back when the HTC One (M8) added a second camera on its back – used to calculate distances using the parallax effect, better known today as a depth camera – it was an innovative new feature. But things quickly turned cynical. We’ve always known that tech companies love to advertise large numbers. Sometimes (quite often, in fact), those large numbers don’t make a lot of sense, but it has been decades and engineers still haven’t been able to get the marketing department under control. This is how we got to today where depth cameras are added as a +1. If a phone has only two cameras, wide...

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Weekly poll results: the Sony Xperia Pro-I is well received, but not everyone needs a professional phone

While the meaning of “Pro” has been watered down over the years, people still believe there is a place for truly professional smartphones like the Sony Xperia Pro-I. It’s not a phone for everyone, that’s clear enough in last week’s poll. But it wasn’t meant to be, it is aimed at a particular subset of professions – vloggers, along with anyone who would benefit from high-quality 4K 120 fps video. You may think that $1,800/€1,800 is pricey, but the Pro-I is meant to slot in between regular smartphones and professional cameras (now those are really pricey). Okay, chances are that...

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