Author: Leigh Geary
Remember my review of the Rocomo GT-I9500? well, I’ve been on the hunt for cheap Android kit again and this time the 5″ Elephone P6000 has caught my eye. It’s on presale at the moment but will cost you just $169.99, which works out at around £108.60. This …
Seriously? I’ve spent about 12 years writing about smartphones. It all started off with the Microsoft Smartphone, then Windows Mobile, then Windows Phone and now it’s all seemingly going around in a big fat circle with Windows 10 Mobile. That’s not my beef though. I’m not even in …
This is less than £30 my friends, and inside there’s a fat 8000 mAh battery. I say “fat” because of the capacity, not necessarily the size, although it is about as chunky as my wallet used to be before I had a house and child. It’s another one …
Remember out MIPOW PLAYBULB Review? Put simply, it’s a light bulb with a Bluetooth speaker inside. Not only that, but you can also control the brightness of the bulb with your phone. Now MIPOW have gone one further, releasing a new product called PLAYBULB Rainbow. This is another …
Picture the scene. You’ve been held up in traffic for ages. You’ve got sunburn from the brake lights of the car in front. Eventually, after shuffling along on the motorway for what seems like hours, you see the cause of your misery. A truck, on it’s side and …
You really won’t believe it folks, but yes, we managed to actually record a podcast while James was away. I’ve got a little tear in my eye and the pride is pretty overwhelming, I have to say. This week we used Google Hangouts instead of Skype, so the …
A lot of people chose EE and, previously, Orange, because of the Orange Wednesdays offer. It gave you two seats in your local cinema for the price of one and, if you got enough codes, you could take the entire family for half the price. EE continued the …
OK, it’s that time of year already. Your bank account looks like a wasteland, there’s pine needles everywhere and that roll of sticky tape has mysteriously disappeared just when you need it. What apps do you need to ensure things go smoothly? Well, the Google Santa Tracker is …
Look, it’s raining and it’s cold outside. You really don’t want to be out there. Get yourself comfy for the live “as it happens” recording of our 120th podcast. We’ll be going live at 8.30PM tonight and it’ll then be available tomorrow morning after we’ve removed all the …
This morning I walked through driving rain, freezing winds and complete darkness at 6.30AM. It was a delightful walk and just made me smile inside and out. However, if you want to swap this beautiful wind, snow, rain and hail for some horrible sunshine and irritating sandy beaches …
Buying yourself a present this Christmas is going to be a bit of a theme here at Coolsmartphone I think 🙂 The OnePlus One handset, which we handled here, has a 2.5GHz quad-core CPU, Android 4.4 (Cyanogen), Adreno 330 GPI and either 16GB or 64GB of storage. Best …
It’s that time of year again, so we’re on the hunt for deals and bargains on the internet. One that caught my eye, purely as a cheeky gift for myself, was this Hibsan Nano quadcopter. Bigger (and more expensive) versions equipped with cameras have been making the news …
If you’ve already grabbed the WinZip app for Android then you’ll hopefully have noticed a cheeky little addition lately. If not, grab it now and you’ll now find that the app lets you encrypt, squish and share files directly to Dropbox. It basically means that you have one …
Whilst 4G speeds, in theory, are rather insane, the “real world” experience can be a little different. There’s a range of factors that’ll alter your experience. Location, of course, is the major one, but we must also consider the time of day. Trying to “nail” a speed testing …
We don’t know a great deal about Karbonn Mobile just yet, but they are pushing out some relatively cheap Android kit via Amazon. Their Karbonn A5S is SIM free and available in black or white. It has a 5 megapixel rear camera, 1.2GHz dual-core CPU, 4GB ROM, 512MB …
This particular review has taken quite some time because I was kinda confused by the idea to start with. The VBox I have here will basically take the input from your TV aerial or your satellite dish and squirt in onto your tablet, smartphone or smart TV. I …
Back in the year 2000, when I was born (shut it) Captain Picard starred in a film with Wolverine and Halle Berry, who wasn’t Catwoman at the time. Anyhow, the film is called X-Men (the original one) and you can get it for absolutely nothing if you’ve got …
Specs really aren’t what you should be buying this particular device for. I mean yes, it has a 4.5″″ screen (940×560) and runs Android 4.4.2 plus there’s an 8 megapixel shooter. It has the usual WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth 4.0 and there’s space for a microSD card. This, though, …
I’m always the guy who packs a 4-way extension lead in my bag when I travel. If you’re going abroad it means you just need one adaptor plug and it makes things a little tidier and more central. This, the Power Cube (£27 from Littlewoods) takes things a …
It’s been a few days since I told you about ZAGGkeys Universal Bluetooth keyboard. The official site has it on sale for nearly £50 but eBuyer are doing it for £40. Anyhow, I’ve started to use it more and more and I’m currently using it to type this …
My kitchen ceiling is falling in because the bath is leaking. It’s a mess I can tell you and I’m well narked off because it’s about the fourth thing to go wrong this week. But no, I’m not leaving you my friends. I’m hear to tell you about …
If you’re an Aldi shopper then, from Thursday next week, you might well spot a rather cheap Medion 10.1″ tablet. It’s powered by a quad-core Atom CPU and has 32GB of on-board storage. Other specs include a 5 megapixel (rear) and 2 megapixel (front) camera, GPS, WiFi and …
We’ve been all over this phone since an early model appeared in Barcelona. Short version, this is a phone with an always-on rear display. The idea is pretty clever – you use the low-power rear panel for reading text and interacting with your Twitter, your texts, web pages …
Fancy yourself a Nexus 6 dear reader? It seems to be popping up all over the place. Made by Motorola it runs Android Lollipop, has a 2.7GHz Snapdragon 805 quad-core CPU (with an Adreno 420 GPU) 3GB RAM, 13 megapixel rear camera, 2 megapixel front, 6″ 1440×2560 AMOLED …
It’s a few weeks before Christmas, which means I’ve got precisely 15 million emails in my inbox from various people wanting me to pimp things. Send me BEER people. I need BEER. My message doesn’t seem to be getting through, but either way this little gadget looks pretty …
Right. Must focus. Must maintain composure throughout this news post. Got an iPhone? Wanna play with Lara Croft? DOAH! Well, that lasted seconds. DOAH! Yesterday Tomb Raider II launched on iOS devices. It’s $1.99 (£1.49 / €1.79). The lovely press people have sent me information about this, including …
OK, I’m going to talk about it. In London recently I sat at Euston and generally watched the world go by. What was pretty amazing was the amount of people using broken phones. I saw three people with broken iPhones, and they were all cracks or busted glass …
Earlier we posted news on the new Yotaphone 2. It’s just been formally unveiled and we can clarify the price – a whacking £555. You can buy it from yotaphone.com and there’s going to be a pop-up store just off Brick Lane in Shoreditch tonight at 6.30PM. Inside …
Yup. It looks like it’s happened again. Twitter is slowly filling up with messages about the giffgaff data network being down and, if you reboot or switch data off and on, you’re getting a message asking you to sign into the network. After a quick scan of the …
During Mobile World Congress in Barcelona we saw a totally new type of handset. Up front, the usual bright and vivid screen we see on most handsets. On the back though, what you can mistake to be a cover design is actually a fully interactive e-ink screen. We …
If you managed to get the Linx 8 Windows 8.1 tablet from Sainsburys recently then you’ll know just how cheap it was. The 32GB 8″ tablet has an Intel quad core CPU, 1GB RAM and WiFi, Bluetooth, two cameras etc. Trouble is, if you unboxed it and tried …
Using your phone for writing tweets, Facebook updates and brief emails is easy enough. There’s a variety of keyboards available and you can use Swype-style keyboards to improve the speed of your data entry if you wish. You can even use these on-screen keyboards for writing more wordy …
Getting connectivity when you’re in a rural area is a challenge. My weekend of train journeys only served to highlight the fact that beautiful countryside usually means a complete lack of signal. EE are to tackle this with a new idea that doesn’t require cabling, planning permission or …
Everything seems to charge off a USB port doesn’t it? Your phone, your tablet, your fitness band, your smartwatch, your Bluetooth speakers and more. There you are, with chargers cluttering up the place and every socket dedicated to housing one. There is a better way my friends, and …
You’ll have probably noticed the Acer content this past weekend. We were lucky enough to get a hands on with a number of their devices and you’ll no doubt have read our overview of the Liquid Jade and the fitness band, the Liquid Leap. Whilst in Edinburgh I …
There’s a wide variety of handsets around but , as you’ll no doubt know yourself, they all have a very similar design – one big screen up front, a couple of cameras and that’s about your lot. Yes, I’m generalising a little, but my first impressions from the …
I’m still sitting on the fence with smart watches and smart bands if I’m honest. There’s a piece of me that wants a “normal” watch that I don’t have to tap or faff with to check the time and date. However, there’s another part of me that secretly …
Acer have sent us to Edinburgh and have loaned us a number of devices – the Acer Liquid Leap (a fitness band), the Acer Liquid Jade (a shockingly slender smartphone), the Iconia Tab 8 and the device I’m using to type this out – the Aspire Switch 10. …
Acer are sending me up to Scotland at the moment and I’m blogging this from the Scotrail Sleeper to Edinburgh.. I should be brutally honest though, and admit that I’m in the bar. The Scottish staff are giving me beer and I’m not refusing. It’s the way my …
As promised, I’m writing all the Coolsmartphone content this weekend on my phone. It’s part of #acerliveblog2014. There’s a number of challenges facing rail commuters still, even in our modern world of 4G communications, HD video and on-demand content. It’s not always the trains themselves though. On the …
