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For years, fans and analysts alike have clamored for Apple to release a proper "mid-range" iPhone. Today, they finally got what they wanted - sort of. The new iPhone Xr represents an entirely new direction for the iPhone lineup, and one that poses a serious threat to "flagship" tier Android phones that lurk anywhere above its $749 MSRP.
The Pixel 3 XL may be the most reliably leaked smartphone of 2018. It's been seen on a train, it's been accidentally left in a car, appeared in about a half dozen hotels and airports, and it's even been reviewed by a Russian blog that managed to get one of a handful of stolen units that showed up in Ukraine. So much has leaked about the phone that essentially all of that wonderful pre-launch mystery has been sapped, and a sobering (if predictable) reality has set in: Google's next phone is not really all that different from any other phone released in 2018. Also, it has a big, fat notch cut out of the screen.
Rumors that Google will be launching a second-generation Pixelbook device this fall have recently begun to converge in a convincing way. Evan Blass - along with Kevin Tofel over at About Chromebooks - have provided the most compelling evidence yet. Blass, a very reliable leaker, says that Google will launch the device before the end of the year (he's usually right). Tofel, looking at commits for a device in the Chrome repositories codenamed 'Atlas,' discovered it is the only ChromeOS device aside from the current Pixelbook without an SD card slot. Finally, Chrome Unboxed spotted a commit showing that Atlas is booting on an image from the current Pixelbook. The stars, then, would seem to be aligned - we're getting a new Google Pixelbook this year, far more likely than not. So, what do we know about it?
If you follow smartphone news closely, chances are you've read about handsets “designed” specifically for gaming (or gamers). There's the ASUS ROG phone, the Xiaomi-backed Black Shark, one from ZTE sub-brand Nubia, and this really weird thing from a Chinese company called Doogee. There have been others in the past as well, including the recent Razer Phone and the long-forgotten Sony Xperia Play. While they've all taken slightly different approaches in defining what exactly a gaming smartphone is, all but the Sony have squarely targeted the PC gamer demographic - and for good reason.
Speaking to Android Police, a source familiar with the company's plans has revealed that Samsung will launch an enormous 17" Android tablet known as the Galaxy View 2.
Spending $1000 on a smartphone is something we'd all probably have balked at just five years ago. How times have changed.
The Galaxy Note9 is the most expensive Galaxy smartphone ever launched in the United States (there have been more expensive Samsung phones sold abroad). It's also easily the best. I've been using it the past five days, and I am left with the same basic impressions I had with the Galaxy S9+, but better. And that's exactly what the Note 9 should deliver.Of course, with every smartphone release comes the question of whether this generation is the one to buy, or if a rival manufacturer is simply going to release something better a month or two from now. With the Note9, I believe you can rest assured that a purchase today is unlikely to be one you'll regret tomorrow.
Sitting through Samsung's Unpacked press conference in Brooklyn yesterday, I wasn't struck with a barrage of technical specifications, comparisons to the competition, or endless feature demos. Samsung didn't even really attempt to sell the new Note as revolutionary, or to convince its audience that they were getting a great product for the money. Instead, it appealed to something more human, more base: emotion.
What you're seeing above is the first Palm smartphone since the Pre 3 was announced in 2011. Currently codenamed 'Pepito,' this new handset is headed for Verizon, and it's possibly the weirdest Android phone of 2018. Sporting a tiny 3.3-inch 720p LCD screen, Pepito is easily the smallest Android device in years to be sold in the USA, and probably one of the smallest in the world. The diminutive size doesn't end at the display - this phone will have a tiny 800mAh battery, we've been able to confirm. That probably doesn't make this phone much of an all-day device, and it really is a bit of a head-scratcher.
As the number of big smartphones with big batteries grows in Asia, Samsung has generally been reluctant to follow the trend with its popular Note series. While the Note9 features a host of changes, I think the enlarged battery is easily the most significant, and the one that will set it apart from rivals. At 4000mAh, this new Note has a full 20% more battery capacity than its predecessor. And while that may not sound crazy, it amounts to 700mAh, which should easily make the Note9 an all-day-and-then-some device for even heavy users. That's a big upgrade, and one that smartphone enthusiasts have been asking manufacturers to provide in their high-end handsets for years.
If you've searched for an Android tablet in recent years, especially one in the premium segment, you've probably noticed that there are precious few options available. No Android manufacturer comes close to matching Apple's portfolio, and the one OEM that has dared to challenge the iPad's supremacy - Samsung - has generally done a pretty unremarkable job.
A new processor, a new camera, a new screen, and better-faster-stronger everything are annual givens for our smartphones, and it seems people are starting to notice - and are increasingly becoming indifferent to it all. But are smartphones actually getting more boring? Or is it just that we have become so spoiled by mobile technology that its seemingly inevitable march forward is no longer interesting? It's a bit of a navel-gazing exercise, I must admit, but I think it's something worth talking about - especially with a look to the smartphone's larger history.
Samsung announced the Galaxy Tab S4 this morning, a new 10.5" Android-powered tablet that seeks, first and foremost, to be seen as a laptop replacement (at a cost of another $150 for the keyboard dock). With the company's DeX UI first introduced via its desktop accessory for Galaxy smartphones last year, the Tab S4 can be used in a traditional, windowed operating system layout for productivity. This would seem to squarely aim the Tab S4 to do battle with the array of Chromebook tablets and detachables likely to hit the market in the next year.
The situation at MoviePass is bad. Very bad. With the value of the company having plummeted tremendously after a disastrous reverse stock split last week, MoviePass's owners are doing anything they can to stem the bleeding at the popular all-you-can-eat theater subscription service, and it looks like "anything" means making the service much, much worse.
It was recently pointed out to us that Android P lacks support for the Wi-Fi Protected Setup authentication mode. WPS, as its known, is a protocol that allows a client Wi-Fi device to connect to a router using a PIN or a push-button and is widely regarded as being deeply insecure. In short, the PIN-based method for authentication is inherently crackable with a brute force attack, and the PIN mode is required to be enabled by default on routers with WPS support, making using WPS at all a Very Bad Idea.
If you feel like Chrome's been using more RAM on the desktop client since the v67 release a month back, good news: you're not going crazy! Bad news: it definitely is using more RAM (again, on the desktop).
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Google Pay's feature set has long lagged behind Apple's Wallet in terms of support for virtual tickets and boarding passes, but that finally appears to be changing (as we recently spotted in teardowns). Today, Google announced on its blog that the Pay app will be getting support for virtual boarding passes, event tickets, and peer to peer money transfers. Boarding passes and tickets have been in soft launch for some time, but that last bit was previously - and quite strangely - relegated to an entirely different app called Google Pay Send, likely a result of it having previously been the Google Wallet app. This should make Pay Send functionally obsolete.
Back in April, Google began experimenting with a new, alternate version of its Material UI for the Chrome browser - but it was as an experimental flag, not a mainline feature. That appears to be changing. With the latest builds of Chrome on the Canary channel for Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS, the Material 2 UI is now the default theme (on Mac you'll still need to enable it manually).
Ever wish you could use the YouTube app to watch a video without it showing up in your watch history or tainting your personal suggestions? Basically, Chrome's Incognito Mode, but for YouTube? Now you can. While it's been in testing for some months, Google is now rolling out Incognito Mode for YouTube widely, and it works just as you'd expect: nothing you watch goes into your search or viewing history, and you can easily pop in and out of Incognito viewing. Here's how to use it (and why you might want to).
A little under a month ago, Samsung launched a renewed version of its classic device customization app Good Lock. We took a much closer look, and we liked what we saw - Good Lock is easily the most powerful and capable tool for tweaking and tuning your Samsung smartphone this side of a custom ROM. And it seems Samsung is taking development of the app pretty seriously, because today it released a massive update that fixes and improves upon the application in dozens of ways. The changelog in the long scrolling screenshot below (courtesy of Sammobile) is absolutely gigantic.