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From IP ratings to military spec: What do all these phone ruggedness ratings mean?
Just how tough is your phone?
Your phone is an integral part of your daily life, helping with communication, directions, purchases, and more, so you need it to be durable and reliable. That's why the best Android phones feature IP ratings, and some have MIL-STD-810 ratings. A phone with good durability ratings can be the difference between a harmless accident and losing your phone and a large amount of data.
Motorola is creating a splash with its most affordable foldable phone yet, but can the Motorola Razr (2023) handle a splash? Motorola's foldable brings a flagship-grade display, excellent battery life for a foldable, and capable cameras at a price point that might finally take foldable phones mainstream.
App claims to test your phone's water resistance without a plunge
It uses a phone's barometric sensor to test internal IP seals
Android developers are the best. Watch them for long enough, and they'll come up with tools that you didn't even know were possible. For example, this little app claims it can tell you whether the water-resistant seals in your phone are still intact. Water Resistance Tester is a free download in the Play Store.
The OnePlus 8T was announced today, and T-Mobile is the only carrier that will sell it in the US. This time around, T-Mobile's model gets a "+" stuck to the end of the name. It turns out that the T-Mobile model will come with IP68 certification, something that the unlocked model does not boast.
The Pixel 4a is an incredible phone, and not just for the money. With an incredible camera, a new design that feels much more modern, and amazing battery life, Google really did knock it out of the park with its new budget Pixel. Seriously: this is a damn good phone. But we wouldn't be proper phone nerds if we didn't nitpick, and there are a few areas where we think Google could take the Pixel 4a from a 9.5 to a perfect 10 in our book. Here are five additional features we'd have loved to see in the Pixel 4a.
The OnePlus 8 Pro is the company's first IP68 water-resistant smartphone
Not the OnePlus 8 — just the 8 Pro
The evolution of OnePlus's brand has seen it move from strong, cut-price smartphones to full-on flagship phones for only somewhat less than a typical flagship. Along the way, it has been able to afford more of the little things: flourishes in industrial design, global carrier partnerships, even advanced biometric and camera technology. With the OnePlus 8 Pro, the company now has brought another new thing at the table: an official IP rating for dust and water resistance.
Samsung began calling its flagship Galaxy phones "water-proof" or "water-resistant" with the Galaxy S7 series, which received an IP68 rating, meaning it should be okay to submerge it into up to five feet deep water for a maximum of 30 minutes. That hasn't stopped the company from aggressively marketing its phones as great devices to use at the pool or on the beach ever since, without actually covering any water damage under warranty. The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) disapproves of these "misleading advertisements" and is taking the Korean company to court over them.
For years, OnePlus has refused to IP rate its phones, even as its prices creep up. The company has attributed this to a cost-saving measure, telling us that a real IP rating would add $30 to the cost of each handset, even though they are already ostensibly water resistant. In a preemptive move, the company is letting us know that its next device also won't have an IP rating. Instead, OnePlus made a video spiking a phone into a bucket of water — because, of course, marketing is better than a real IP rating.
