Top 10 trending phones of week 3

Week 3 saw the yet-to-be-announced Samsung Galaxy S23 series take a firmer grip on our top 10. The trio dominates our news section and its and the phone's specs pages, now filled in courtesy of detailed leaks are gathering a lot of attention. It's the Galaxy S23 Ultra on top ahead of the plus member of the series. Behind them the Galaxy A14 entry-level phone completes the rostrum, before the vanilla Galaxy S23 makes it four Samsung phones in the top 4. The streak continues with the Galaxy S22 Ultra in fifth, making up for the strongest showing by the Korean company in years. In...

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Week 3 in review: Galaxy S23 Ultra's 200MP sensor is official

We're past being surprised by the Galaxy S23 series dominating our news section to which week 3 made no exception. Samsung announced the 200MP ISOCELL HP2 sensor that will be the headline feature of the Galaxy S23 Ultra. The imager is 1/1.3” in size with 0.6μm pixels and can pixel-bin (Tetra2pixel, per Samsung's lingo) 4-to-1 for 1.2μm pixels and 50MP resolution or 16-to-1 for 2.4μm pixels and 12.5MP resolution. The sensor comes with Dual Vertical Transfer Gate (D-VTG) to avoid blown highlights. It claims to increase the full well capacity by more than 33%, meaning that an individual pixel...

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Weekly deals: the best smartphone deals from the US, Germany and the UK

We’re back with another round of offers from around the world. This week we picked out deals from the US, the UK and Germany, use the links below to jump to a specific country: USA Germany The UK USA The Motorola Edge 30 Pro is one controller away from being a fast but fairly affordable gaming phone. The version with 512GB storage sells for $500, giving your room for plenty of games. Games that will run on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset and a 6.7” OLED display with 144Hz refresh rate (and HDR10+ support). The 4,800mAh battery is decently large and the phone...

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Flashback: the Snapdragon 625 efficiently conquered the mid-field in 2016

Some chipsets are remembered more fondly than others - the Snapdragon 810 has quite a story to tell, but today we are feeling in a positive mood so let's look at the Snapdragon 625. The Snapdragon 625 was unveiled in February of 2016 and became the first 600-series chip to be made using the power efficient 14nm node. Its predecessor, the Snapdragon 617, was fabbed on a 28nm node and it showed. The new 625 used 35% less power than its predecessor in typical daily use. To put that in perspective, if a phone with the old chip had just enough battery to last from 6am to 6pm, that same...

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Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite's Wi-Fi model is receiving Android 13-based One UI 5.0 update

Samsung released the Android 13-based One UI 5.0 stable update for the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite's LTE version (SM-P615) recently, which is now rolling out for the Wi-Fi model (SM-P610) as well. The update comes with stability and performance improvements in addition to a new lock screen customization menu, a redesigned Recent Apps screen with better animations, and a new "Connected devices" menu inside the Settings app. However, the One UI 5.0 update comes with the dated November 2022 Android security patch instead of the January 2023 or even the December 2022 security patch. Moreover,...

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Weekly poll: how fast should fast charging be?

In a very rapid succession phones crossed the 100W charging barrier, went up to 210W late last year and at least one maker is already promosing 240W on an upcoming phone. These numbers are quite amazing – or maybe quite insane? The 210W phone we mentioned is the Redmi Note 12 Discovery. It has a relatively small 4,300mAh battery, but it only needs 9 minutes for a full charge. And if you only have 5 minutes to spare, the battery can go from flat to 66% charged in that time. Smartphones are quickly setting and breaking new charge speed records The battery capacity is an important...

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