Articles tagged "Counterclockwise"

OnePlus will be five years old at the end of the year and it already has eight phones under its belt. Its strategy has (almost) always been “do one thing and do it well”. That’s what Apple did in its early years and it worked out great for them....

Two ears, two speakers is a pretty simple equation. However, in recent times it has become pretty common to see a single speaker – on most phones and even portable Bluetooth speakers often have just one. Looking through our data, we found the...

We’ve looked at the growth of storage and the growth of CPU core count, now let us look at RAM – the intermediary between the processor and the permanent storage. Sometimes we feel that makers are trying to pull the wool over our eyes. With...

Phone makers have converged on one design for premium models – a metal frame sandwiched between two panes of glass. It’s a practical choice, the metal gives rigidity to the thin, long phones while glass lets radio waves and wireless charging...

Last week we reminisced about favorite old brands, but that was just part of the story - while many brands are still around, some of their product lines have been discontinued and we wouldn't mind seeing them come back to life. The Nokia PureView...

Before Andy Rubin started working on Android, he co-founded Danger Inc. - the maker of T-Mobile Sidekick smartphones. Matias Duarte, he who made Material Design, worked with Rubin at Danger and later worked on webOS before joining Google. We were...

The Timex Datalink was co-developed with Microsoft and first launched in 1994. Since then, many astronauts and cosmonauts have used a Datalink. That’s so cool, but it seems that for a long time, smartwatches were more popular in space than they were...

A few days ago, the CEO of Epic Games, maker of the “most successful video game engine”, said that AR glasses will eventually replace smartphones. Now, he could be right (if ever society gets over “glasshole”), but we were reminded of claims that...

Last time we chronicled the rise of Samsung's Galaxy S phones and we reached a critical point in its story - the first disappointing phone in the series. What happened is that Samsung designed the Galaxy S5 in a spreadsheet. It had great features...

Before 2010, Samsung had many phone lines - the Omnia line was the star, a selection of high-powered Symbian or Windows Phone devices. There was the occasional Pixon camera phone or the low-budget Corby and, of course, the Galaxy phones. Then in...

The Mobile World Congress is the biggest gathering of phone makers in the world and the most interesting event of the year as far as phones go. It’s when we see many of the high-profile launches for the year... or do we? Did this year feel a bit...

This week we’ll do something more visual instead of the usual wordy Counterclockwise article. We remember some old phones as having great cameras, but did they, really? Or is this a case of remembering only the good things? So, we picked out...

Did you know that the first Android OS version code name was Petit Four? It means small bite-sized appetizer and served as inspiration for the desert-based names of future versions. That was version 1.1. The first publicly available version was...

A while back, we walked down memory lane to revisit storage milestones on mobile phones. That article focused only on the stand-out devices, today we’re going to take a broader look. We will look at the base storage for all phones added to our...

We’ve looked at smartphone batteries before, but that was just the raw capacity. As you well know, the size of the battery is not the only measure of how long you can go between charges. Our battery test gives a more realistic result so let’s chart...

Did you know that the heaviest phone in our database is the Samsung Galaxy Camera GC100? At a hefty 300g, this is one chunky headset though we should give it props for having an entire point and shoot camera built in. 21x optical zoom with OIS,...

HMD intends to resurrect the Asha series, which brought back some memories. The Asha phones featured more advanced functions than your typical featurephone, which made them attractive for those who couldn't afford a smartphone. Keep in mind that...

In 2016 there was exactly one phone whose screen had an aspect ratio wider than 16:9 – the Xiaomi Mi Mix. In 2017 that number shot up to 40 phones! That’s about 10% of the just over 400 phones we added to our database last year. And they were...

The spec sheet of mobile phones are like a living ecosystem - they evolve and gain new features to adapt to a changing landscape. Others can't adapt and die off. Today's article is dedicated to them, the extinct features. Bluetooth speakers are a...

Phones have been getting heavier. And no, it’s not because they’ve been getting “bigger” - screen size certainly went up, but thickness went down. The average volume of the 50 most popular phones has been pretty stable since around 2006. If you...