Trending about Smartphones

WhatsApp says it is introducing guest calling, a feature that lets people without a WhatsApp account join a voice or video call through a shared link, the company announced yesterday. Guests open the link in a computer browser, type in a name, and wait for the host to let them in. No app install, no sign-up.

Apple and Xiaomi introduced their first passport-style foldables within two days of each other, and anyone running an iPhone Duo vs Xiaomi 18 Fold comparison right now will notice how closely the hardware converges.

Motorola has become the first phone maker to announce a device built around Qualcomm's new flagship chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. The company unveiled the Motorola Signature 27 at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, with Qualcomm and Motorola both confirming the new platform inside the phone.

A new leak claims the standard Xiaomi 18, not the Pro or Pro Max, could ship with a 200MP main and 200MP telephoto Leica camera system, a 7,200mAh battery, and a 6.4-inch display, according to Trusted Reviews. That would give the base model a notably high-end spec sheet, well ahead of anything Xiaomi has confirmed about the standard phone directly.

Foldable phones survive drops and folds better than most people expect. In lab testing last year, Which? ran 59 foldable models through 30,000 open-close cycles on a folding machine, and 58 of them came through without a single fault. Every foldable Which? tested also survived 100 drops onto a hard surface. That's a strong result for folding and drop mechanics under one standardized test, though it doesn't measure years of hinge wear, debris exposure, or accidental misuse.

OPPO is reportedly developing a 16:9 wide-format flagship smartphone with a body wider than any mainstream Android phone currently sold, according to a Weibo post from tipster Digital Chat Station, cited by Android Authority this week. The leak describes LIPO display technology capable of symmetrical 1mm bezels on all four sides, with the chassis measuring roughly 81mm wide.

Hold a phone to your ear during a call, and the display should go dark almost right away. If it doesn't, a cheek pressed against the glass can mute the microphone, hang up the call, or open a menu without anyone meaning to touch anything. That small failure is usually the first time most people stop to wonder what a phone proximity sensor does: it's a tiny component near the earpiece that tells the phone something, usually a face, has gotten close to the screen, so the system can shut the...

Sony has officially canceled the Android 17 update for the Xperia 10 VI, abandoning a software commitment it made when the midrange smartphone launched in 2024. The device was originally promised three major Android upgrades, but it will now stop at Android 16 after receiving just two.

Xiaomi is taking a different approach to the book-style foldable with the Xiaomi 18 Fold, a shorter, wider flagship that starts at ¥10,999, or roughly $1,640, in mainland China. Xiaomi unveiled the phone and opened preorders on Sept. 7, with general sales scheduled to begin Sept. 10 at 10 a.m. local time.

Two phones, same price, different stickers: one says "pre-owned," the other says "refurbished," and a third might claim "certified pre-owned." None of those words alone tells you which phone is the smarter buy (Engadget, this week). The short version: pre-owned describes a phone's ownership history, while refurbished describes a process the phone went through before resale. All refurbished phones are used, but not every used phone has been refurbished (Engadget, this week).

Phones with 8,000mAh to 10,000mAh batteries used to be a trade-show curiosity. Not anymore. The vivo T5 Pro shipped with a 9,020mAh cell, and the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max has already been confirmed at 10,000mAh, Gadgets Now reports. Batteries that size used to demand a phone thick enough to double as a doorstop, but the same chemistry now lets manufacturers fit 7,000mAh or more into bodies under 8.5mm, per Gadgets Now.

Talk to enough app developers about platform strategy and someone will eventually repeat a version of the same claim: foldable phone users spend more on apps, so building foldable-specific features is worth the engineering cost. It's a tidy story, and it fits with what everyone already assumes about early adopters of expensive hardware. It also isn't backed by any published dataset. No research reviewed for this article measures in-app spending, subscription conversion, or revenue per user by...

At roughly $1,300 apiece, the iPhone 18 Pro Max and Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra make price almost irrelevant at the starting line. The real choice comes down to how differently the two phones approach cameras, battery life, software, design, and the features you'll use long after the novelty wears off.

Starting tomorrow, Thursday, August 6, T-Mobile customers will be able to spread the cost of a new phone, including taxes and activation fees, across 36 months instead of the previously available 24-month term, with well-qualified buyers paying nothing at checkout, according to WebProNews. The T-Mobile 36-month phone financing plan actually comes in two distinct versions, and the gap between them decides whether a customer walks out paying $0 or simply pays less than before.

Should you restart your phone regularly? The honest answer is: probably less often than you think, and for different reasons than you've been told. Your phone is not a 2003 Windows PC. It doesn't need a Sunday-night reboot to stay functional. Modern smartphones are built to run for weeks at a time without issue, and the idea that routine restarts keep a phone healthy is, at best, weakly supported by the evidence.

Oukitel is heading into IFA 2026 with three rugged phones that don't just carry bigger batteries. They build in a night-vision camera, a fire starter, and a gaming cooling rig, treating the phone itself as a chassis for gear you'd normally pack separately. The headline device, the Oukitel WP70 Ultra rugged phone, packs a 16,000mAh silicon-carbon battery that Oukitel calls the slimmest in its class, Gadgets 360 reports.

A single Galaxy Z Fold 7 wearing a Temdan MagSafe Kickstand Case went through repeated pocket-height drops onto concrete, and it came away with no damage. The reviewer at Tech with Jerad reported the phone survived the drops intact and the case itself showed only minimal wear (Tech with Jerad). That's a strong result for one case built around impact and scuff resistance. It says nothing about a major durability concern with foldables: dust working its way into the hinge and scratching the inner...

Android phones carry a set of safety tools built for exactly this moment, but learning how to use Android Emergency SOS after a car accident really starts with setting it up long before any crash happens. The system can call for help and share a live location without anyone unlocking the phone or dialing a number, triggered by pressing the power button five or more times (Android, earlier this year). As Android Police put it last year, "these tools help only if you set them up beforehand." Even...

The phrase "military-grade" shows up on phone cases that have almost nothing in common. One brand slaps it on a case without listing a single drop or impact figure. Another, Poetic, claims 20-foot drop protection, five times the 4-foot benchmark described in Android Central's testing (Android Central, last month). If you're trying to figure out what to look for in a protective phone case, the label on the box turns out to be the least useful place to start.

Vivo officially unveiled the X500 Pro Max on September 21, and the Vivo X500 Pro Max camera phone is shaping up as the company's most aggressive imaging flagship yet.

A data plan can disappear in a single evening of streaming.

Oppo officially launched the Find X10 Pro Max in China today, and the headline spec is hard to miss: three separate 200MP sensors on the back, one each for ultrawide, main, and telephoto. The configuration is confirmed by GSMArena and FoneArena, both reporting on today's launch.

Sony may be preparing a camera upgrade for the Xperia 1 IX that swaps out the flagship's main sensor for a larger one, which would be the first change to that specific component since the Xperia 1 V launched in 2023. The claim traces to Japanese blog Sumahu Digest and was reported today by PhoneArena.

A viral claim swept through social media this year: starting in February 2027, EU law will force Apple, Samsung, and every other smartphone maker to bring back pop-off battery covers. It's not true, but the real story is more interesting than the myth (Annie Lab, 2 months ago).

What people want in a new phone depends almost entirely on why they're shopping for one. Someone whose screen just cracked wants whatever's in stock that works today. Someone whose two-year-old flagship still runs fine wants to know whether a new camera or a smarter assistant is worth paying for.

Flip phones spent years asking buyers to accept a smaller, weaker phone in exchange for a fun shape to unfold. That compromise mostly doesn't exist anymore. Are modern flip phones worth it in 2026? Based on two current US flagships, Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip8 and Motorola's Razr Ultra 2026, the answer is yes for a specific kind of buyer, and no for another.

Motorola posted a short teaser video from its official X account this week, timed to land alongside Apple's iPhone Duo launch. The clip ends with a brief silhouette of an unnamed foldable phone that looks shorter and wider than Motorola's current Razr Fold, according to GSMArena and ChannelNews. The phone appears on screen for about five seconds, near the end of the clip, per Android Police. The Motorola wide Razr Fold teaser confirms one thing: the company is building a new form factor. The...

The iPhone 18 Pro Max and Galaxy S26 Ultra have now been through the same controlled drop test, giving buyers a much cleaner comparison than the separate durability tests available immediately after Apple's phone launched.

Apple has finally unveiled its first foldable phone, and the shape looks strangely familiar. The book-style design, 7.6-inch inner display, and 3,000-nit peak brightness Apple announced this week land close to where Samsung already sits with the Galaxy Z Fold 8, a phone The Verge put through a week of testing. That overlap is the starting point for any iPhone Duo vs Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 comparison: Apple has arrived at a form factor Samsung has already priced and had independently reviewed.

The iPhone vs Samsung Galaxy bloatware debate usually turns into a scoreboard argument: which phone maker crams in more junk you'll never open. Apple's own support documentation and Samsung's own support page tell a more useful story than any scoreboard could.

HONOR shared its first official camera samples from the upcoming Magic 9 Pro Max this week, and anyone searching for a HONOR Magic 9 Pro Max leaked video should know upfront: the supplied reports describe official still samples, not a leaked video. The images show shots captured at 85mm, 500mm, and 1,000mm (Gizchina, 2 days ago).

Apple and Google have landed surprisingly close together with their latest Pro phones. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro both have 6.3-inch 120Hz OLED displays, triple-camera systems, 256GB of base storage, and an increasingly heavy emphasis on AI.

When researchers swabbed 178 healthcare workers' phones in a Peruvian hospital in 2023, 90.5% turned up some kind of microbial contamination. That number is a clinical-setting data point, not a diagnosis of the phone in your pocket: a hospital ward is a different exposure environment than a coffee shop counter or a train seat. Still, the question of how to clean your phone safely deserves a real answer, and two hospital studies tested the same disinfectant.

Scroll through enough short-form video, and it starts to look like a documented cultural pivot: teenagers ditching smartphones for flip phones, treating a five-minute conversation without checking a screen like a personal achievement, filming themselves making prolonged eye contact as if it were a rediscovered skill.

How to Charge Your Phone Without a Charger: Full Guide

Battery damage from heat doesn't announce itself. It builds quietly through July and August, and by the time September's heat waves roll in, a phone that used to coast to bedtime can barely make it past lunch. Summer is the season when phones take their biggest annual hit to battery health, and most of that damage happens in ways that don't feel serious in the moment, according to CNET. Knowing how to protect your phone battery from summer heat means understanding what's actually happening...