Back in the days before multiple cameras, before periscope lenses and NPUs, the only way smartphones knew how to zoom was digitally and usually with poor results since they had small low-resolution...
The division between smartphones and feature phones has often been murky. In the past, it used to be about how well the device ran user-installed apps and games, these days it’s mostly touch screen...
Before it became the zombie OS version that just wouldn’t die, Android 2.3 Gingerbread was a big deal – it brought so many things that we take for granted today, it put a new coat of paint on the UI...
This is a story of rivalry between former partners – Motorola vs. Apple, Verizon vs. AT&T. We’ve already covered the first iTunes phone, the Moto ROKR, Steve Jobs could barely hide his contempt for...
How the mighty have fallen – before it was acquired and snuffed out by HP, Palm was known for popularizing Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), an ancestor to the modern smartphone. And before webOS was...
The Nokia N95 was peak Symbian – the phone came out in early 2007 and did everything. It was a feature rich phone that got even better when the Finns introduced the Nokia N95 8GB (aka N95-2) a few...
The HTC One X was highly regarded, but sales weren't great so the company went back to the drawing board. What it came up with was 2013's HTC One - a phone that tried to change the way consumers...
Huawei was one of the first companies to adopt Android - the U8220 was unveiled just months after the T-Mobile G1. But for this article we wanted to focus on one of the phones that laid the...
The original Redmi Note was popular, but the Redmi Note 3 launched the series into the stratosphere. The sleek aluminum exterior belied the $150 price tag of the phone - less than half what the Mi...
The 3.5mm headphone jack is a dying breed – most smartphone manufacturers are skipping it, especially on higher-end devices. But its story deserves to be told, the jack has been around almost as long...
Last week’s Flashback article focused on the first 1440p screen on a mobile phone. Well, sort of the first. The Oppo Find 7 – the subject of today’s article – was announced first but arrived on the...
The LG G2 showed the world that a screen with thin bezels is a great thing. The LG G3 pushed that design further with a larger and sharper display – the first 1440p panel in the industry. And it came...
This week the SonyMobile.com domain was redirected to Sony.com. This reminded us of eight years ago when a similar move was made and SonyEricsson.com became SonyMobile.com. So, today’s Flashback...
This week Samsung unveiled three Galaxy S20 phones - well, five models actually, as each phone has a 4G and a 5G version, except the Ultra, which is 5G-only. If you think that's a lot of models, then...
BlackBerry was the keyboard king – the company was built on texting. Its first products were two-way pagers (the first of which was released in 1996), telephony wouldn’t be part of the equation until...
In its first 10 years, the iPhone reached 1.2 billion units sold. The iPod managed 300 million units (for comparison, Sony had sold 50 million Walkmans in the first 10 years). Theserevolutionized the...
Sony once held some of the most valuable brand names in tech. The company practically invented the portable music player, the legendary Walkman. Also, its first digital camera came out in 1996, the...
For many years Google maintained a clear division – it makes the OS, other companies make the phones. This all changed when the search giant acquired Motorola’s phone and set-top box business in 2011...
The Siemens SX1 is remembered for its crazy keyboard, but the phone is unique in many ways – some of them could be announced this month and not look old. Instead of the traditional phone keypad...
By 2013 Samsung was one of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world, but it had a reputation of building plastic phones at a time when Apple, HTC, Sony and others were pushing metal as the...
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