Trending about Smartphones

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

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 this week, according to The Verge and Tech Advisor. XDA Developers describes it as Motorola's "ultra-premium" entry, positioned as one of the first phones anywhere to run this chip.

The sources reviewed here trace the phone's reported specifications to one Gagadget article, and the phone hasn't launched yet. Gagadget reported this week that the Magic 9 Pro Max pairs dual 200MP cameras developed with ARRI, a mechanical gimbal, and support for ARRI's LogC3 color format, with a China launch planned for September 28 starting at 6,999 yuan, roughly £855/$875.

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.

Leave a phone on the dashboard of a parked car on an 80°F day, and the cabin around it will hit 114°F within 30 minutes. Give it an hour, and that number climbs past 130°F, according to Meqtor. Most phones are rated to operate only up to 95°F (Meqtor). Past that point, a phone isn't just uncomfortable, it's running well outside the range it was built for.

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...

Motorola is scheduled to unveil the Signature 27 on September 22, timed to Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, according to Tech Advisor. The phone follows Motorola's slimline Signature flagship.

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.

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.

The Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 both start at roughly $1,900, putting them in unusually direct competition. At that price, the more useful question isn't which is cheaper, but what each gives you for flagship-foldable money.

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.

Ask why smartphones are cheaper in the US than their sticker prices suggest, and the answer usually comes down to one mechanism: carrier installment credits attached to postpaid plans.

How to Charge Your Phone Without a Charger: Full Guide

The most common mistake people make when a phone breaks is comparing the repair quote to the price of a brand-new phone instead of a realistic used or refurbished replacement. That comparison almost always makes replacing look better than it actually is, according to The Repair Plus. Once that comparison is fixed, the answer to "should I repair or replace my phone" usually comes down to three things: whether the fault is isolated, whether the phone still has real software-support life left, and...

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.

Type "use phone as a tape measure" into a search bar and dozens of apps promise to do exactly that. Android Authority decided to test the appetite behind that search: it asked readers which of four sensor-based toolbox jobs they'd actually hand to their phone.

Reviewed by: Y. Garcia

Ahead of its September 23 China launch, Xiaomi confirmed the Xiaomi 18 Pro privacy screen will work as a hardware feature built into the display panel itself, and the teaser details the company released this week suggest it does a few things Samsung hasn't publicly demonstrated in the same way on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, according to Android Central.

Apple's iPhone Duo starts at $1,999 for 256GB, and pricing is expected to climb to roughly $3,000 at the top storage tier, according to Gurman's reporting (Apple, this week; MacRumors, this week). Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 8 sits close behind at a reported $1,900 (9to5Google, 6 weeks ago). At that price, "it's a foldable" stops being an excuse for missing features on either side, which raises the obvious question: which iPhone Duo features Android foldables should copy, and which Apple claims...

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.

Flagship launches often foregrounded the processor: bigger cores, faster benchmarks, a new chip name printed across the marketing slide. In 2026, the component actually straining a flagship's budget isn't the chip doing the thinking. It's the chip doing the remembering.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

The OnePlus 13R and Google Pixel 11 are no longer a comparison between a phone you can buy and one that exists only in leaks. Google unveiled the Pixel 11 on August 12 and released it on August 20, giving buyers confirmed prices, battery specifications, cameras, and software support to weigh against the older OnePlus.

RugOne unveiled the Xsnap 7 Pro at IFA 2026 in Berlin this week, a rugged Android phone with a rear camera module that physically detaches and works as a standalone action camera. The RugOne Xsnap 7 Pro detachable action camera phone isn't shipping yet. Its Kickstarter campaign opens September 7 with a €799 super early-bird tier, roughly $930.

Motorola's Swarovski Razr goes on sale September 10 for $899.99, a $100 premium over the standard Razr 2026, The Verge reported. The phone isn't shipping yet.

Huawei's Pura X View now has official China pricing and a full spec sheet, and it's a non-folding phone that borrows the wide-screen proportions foldables made popular, minus the hinge, according to Gagadget. The phone packs a 6.39-inch, 16:9.5 OLED display into a conventional slab body, noticeably wider than the 19.5:9 ratio most phones use. China retail sales begin September 9, with pricing starting around $845 for the base configuration, and Huawei has not announced a US or UK launch.

Search for the best $100 smartphone in 2026 and the results won't cooperate: every phone reviewers have actually tested this year costs more than that. Samsung's Galaxy A17 5G lists at $174.99, and Motorola's cheapest 2026 model, the Moto G Play, runs $169, with the standard Moto G at $199 (Android Authority, 3 months ago). Even PCMag's "cheap phone" roundup skips $100 entirely; its budget category starts under $300 (PCMag, seven weeks ago).

Global foldable smartphone shipments are projected to rise 20% year-over-year in 2026, and industry sources point to Apple's expected entry into the category as one factor behind that growth, according to industry sources cited by DigiTimes this week. Counterpoint Research puts the figure slightly higher, forecasting 21% growth and tying the increase to Apple intensifying competition in the premium book-style foldable segment, the category of phones that open outward like a book to reveal a...

TSA counted 15 states with a mobile driver's license that worked at its airport checkpoints as of February 2025, a list that ran from California and Puerto Rico all the way to Louisiana and New York (TSA). More states have added the option since then, and checking TSA's Digital ID page is the only reliable way to know if yours is one of them today. This guide walks through how to add your driver's license to your phone: confirming your state and device qualify, completing enrollment, and...

Ask a phone maker what costs the most to build a handset in 2026, and the answer isn't the chip anymore. DRAM, the memory that runs a phone's software in real time, has overtaken the system-on-chip as the single most expensive component in a smartphone, according to Counterpoint Research, 2 weeks ago. That single fact reshapes how brands think about every other line item in the bill of materials, and it's the starting point for understanding how the RAM shortage affects smartphone audio...

WhatsApp has started activating usernames for a small number of accounts on Android and iOS, letting the first wave of users share a handle instead of a phone number when contacting someone new. The WhatsApp username feature rollout is live now, though only for a very limited cohort activated users see a banner at the top of their chat list confirming their handle is ready, WABetaInfo reported yesterday.

Every foldable phone complaint worth reading traces back to the same two design facts: the screen has to bend, and something mechanical has to make that happen. Those two requirements create engineering tensions that no manufacturer has resolved. The common foldable phone problems owners report most consistently screen failure, hinge contamination, steep repair bills, and contested warranty claims aren't random. They're downstream consequences of the same underlying tradeoff.