Weekly poll: do flagship chipsets still matter?

Next year’s flagship chipsets have all been revealed – Apple and Google launched theirs already (Apple A17 with the iPhone 15 Pros and the Tensor G3 with the Pixel 8s), Samsung detailed the Exynos 2400, Qualcomm revealed the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and this week MediaTek brought its Dimensity 9300. The Dimensity is the big surprise this year – can a CPU will all big cores succeed? Four Cortex-X4 and four A720 is a lot of power in more ways that one. But it’s too early to talk about benchmarks and we’re yet to see most of the phones that will be equipped with the 9300 and the other...

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Farewell to our old battery test: a look back at 12 years of testing

After 12 years it was finally time to retire our original battery test – the smartphone world had evolved so much over that time that we felt it no longer produced relevant results. This is why we introduced the new Active Use Score. But as we welcome the new protocol, we also want to throw a retirement party for the old-timer. In the span of over a decade we had tested 1,058 phones. The first was the Nokia N9, the last was the Realme GT5 240W. 240 watts! That really puts things in perspective, the Nokia N9 charger only output 5W – 5 volts, 1 amp was just fine back then. But we’re not here...

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Resident Evil Village for iPhone review

Resident Evil Village, or RE8 as it is colloquially known, is the latest major installment in the long-running Resident Evil franchise. It would be a disservice to say that the games simply belong to the survival horror genre as they essentially created it. The series has spanned two and a half decades and graced nearly every major gaming platform. Now, the latest mainline entry in the series is coming to iOS. Resident Evil Village for iOS is largely a port of the Mac version, which itself was a port of the PC version. It is a native ARM version of the game, as you would expect it to be...

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Get the Samsung Galaxy S23 FE, Galaxy Buds FE and other deals in the US

Prices of flagship phones blew past the $1,000 mark a few years ago and unlike, say, the Asian market, the US doesn’t have a wide selection of “flagship killers”. But the right model at the right discount could be a great deal. The new Samsung Galaxy S23 FE is down to $600 and you get a $100 Amazon Gift Card with that. When we say “new”, we should mention that it uses last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset. On the plus side, you get Samsung’s long term software support (4 OS updates so it will get Android 17 and will get security patches until late 2028). There’s also DeX, the desktop...

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