Category: Android

LG V30 Arrives. Get all the details.

How does a phone with a 6″ screen sound? How about one with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 CPU and 4GB of RAM? What about the 64GB of storage with a microSD slot? Sounding promising? Welcome, then, the new LG V30, announced just this morning. It’s one that has …

Acer at IFA 2017

Today Acer had a packed press conference at IFA in Berlin where they threw an impressive product portfolio at the market in preparation for the 2017 holiday season shoppers. Acer’s Jason Chen, the CEO and Chairman of the Taiwanese company, was on stage running the show and joined …

Top five ways to store money on your phone

I drive my wife crazy on a weekly basis it seems. It tends to happen when she asks if I’ve got any loose change. I don’t. I very rarely do. At work, the vending machines and the staff restaurant – they’re all “tap to pay”. When I go …

HTC U11 UK pre-orders now live for the 128GB version

If the HTC U11 review sparked your interest, but you want a touch more storage space, today is the day for you. The one we looked at had 64GB, but now you can pre-order the unlocked 128GB version on the HTC website. Now, we should perhaps point out …

Why Sports Betting is suddenly appearing on Google Play

If you’ve spent any time browsing Google Play recently, you may have spotted that something has changed. The Play Store here in the UK, until very recently, not allowed gambling with “real money”  in apps and games. Now though, following an update to the developer policy page, you …

Samsung Note 8 – The deals!

The jury is still out on whether we should actually be calling it the Note8 or the Note 8, but either way you can get all the details here. If you want one, we’ve got you a list of all the offers and deals, courtesy of the various …

Sky Mobile – New £35 deal for bundled Sky TV and a mobile

Sky are pushing hard into the mobile arena, but they’ve now announced a better deal if you want some Sky TV action too. Their newly-announced £35 per-month deal delivers an iPhone SE on a “Swap24” plan. This, along with their appropriately-named “Swap12” offering, lets you upgrade to the …

Samsung Galaxy Note 8 – All the details and the live launch

The Samsung Galaxy Note 7. Yeah. That didn’t go well did it? It became famous for all the wrong reasons – appearing on warning signs at airports and generally becoming the butt of jokes involving explosions or fireballs. Today marks the launch of the Note 8, and the …

First Snapdragon 845 chips bagged by Samsung

At the beginning of this year, Samsung managed to broker a deal with Qualcomm to reserve the first batch of the Snapdragon 835 chips for their latest flagship device – the Galaxy S8. This gave the Korean mobile giant the jump on other OEMs for releasing devices with …

O, O, O. It’s Magic. You know. Never believe it’s not so.

I’ve just got back from the Coolsmartphone canteen, where I’ve high-fived almost everyone because I’ve crow-barred the this song into the title of this article. For the uninitiated, head to the bottom for “Magic” by Pilot, and re-live the 1970’s, baby. But wait, before all that, we’ve had …

Livestream – Watch the Google Android O event

Google has woven their Android O launch into the US solar eclipse – the first to be seen across the country since 1918. Android is educating fans via this site and taking the opportunity to reveal all the Android O goodness too. You can watch the livestream below …

Home, Sweet Home. NAS and WiFi picture backup

At home I have a NAS box. I originally purchased one of these because I’ve somehow used all the storage that my cloud provider had available and the cost to upgrade was nothing short of insane. I’d tried other providers, however the cost, the reliability, and the fact …

What may live may never die – YotaPhone 3

I have no idea what it is about the YotaPhone concept that I like so much. Leigh reviewed the YotaPhone 2 when it was released, so you can check here to see what he thought about it. The TL:DR version is that although he quite liked it, my …

How to unlock your Sony Xperia XZ Premium

Try as I might, I’ve been unable to loan a Sony Xperia handset so that we can give you a review. At the launch during Mobile World Congress I was, however, very impressed by the build quality and the sheer speed of the thing, which in tests could …

Nokia 8 official!

The time has come. Nokia have returned the to flagship party! At least, this is what we are being told. We’ve got details from all the material released during the press event, held yesterday. The more obvious question is, why should we care that Nokia are back in …

LG V30 pictured

The smartphone manufacturer has been keen to let us know certain bits of information about their upcoming V30 device. It’s going to have an F1.6 aperture camera with a glass lens. The dual camera setup also gets laser detection autofocus, optical image stabilization and electronic image stabilization too. …

STK now available in John Lewis too.

Morning, morning all. It’s Thursday already so we’ve nearly made it to the weekend. Remember STK? They were once a distribution company before becoming an accessories brand and then a mobile phone manufacturer selling well-priced feature and smartphones. Designed in London, we last saw the handsets arriving in …

Google Pixel 2 leaps onto the FCC

We reviewed the Google Pixel last year but, by the looks of the FCC, we’ve already got details of the next model. Oh, and it’ll be bringing that squeezy technology that we recently saw in the HTC U11. How so? Well, HTC will be making the Google Pixel …

Bloody OnePlus 5 advert. Actually quite good.

Good morning all. I’m a little tired today due to the fact that only around four Swissport staff decided to bother turning up to work at Birmingham Airport in the last month or so. The knock on result is a completely terrible experience and an airport which just …

Samsung Note 8 out mid-September rumour

After the PR disaster that was the Samsung Note 7 and the exploding batteries, Samsung has had some tough choices to make. It is rumoured that the US will see the new Note 8 released on the 24th August, which is a day after official release. Hopefully the …

On the road with Honor

By now you’ll hopefully be familiar with Honor. Although they’ve chosen to spell their name the American way, they’re becoming a strong player. Huawei are the people building and driving this brand, and they’re really rather good at this whole smartphone thing. Our very own James Pearce ended …

OnePlus 3/3T: No updates after Android O

Those of you that are regular readers of this site know I am a OnePlus fanboy. I have had every device the company has produced; my favourite still is my ceramic OnePlus X. (despite there not being any support for this device, i,e, no more OS updates). My …

Samsung Galaxy Note 8 spotted on Geekbench

With mere days to go until the launch of the next big Samsung device, details of the handset have appeared on Geekbench, the cross-platform benchmark site. According to Telefoon.nl the SM-N950F model number reveals the fact that it’s the Note 8, and although the score isn’t massively high …

LG V30 pushes smartphone cameras

LG announced today that their upcoming LG V30 will incorporate an F1.6 aperture camera and glass lens in the dual camera specification. The new specification means that the lens is larger and clearer, which means the cameras can let in 25% more light than a traditional smartphone camera lens. …

Register and check callers via the Telephone Preference Service

A lot of smartphones now come equipped with a blocking system to let you stop unwanted calls from repeatedly bothering you. On the HTC U11 I’m testing now, you can see that in action below.. However, in the UK we have something called the “Telephone Preference Service”, or …

Huawei – Teasers on the next big announcement?

OK, I’m going to open this one out to the floor as we only have a couple of bits of information. It looks like Huawei are giving us some news about what their next smartphone might contain. Here’s the tweets we’ve spotted, and the first one – posted …

Face Off – Samsung Galaxy S8+ and Huawei P10 Plus

The Huawei Press Team sadly ripped away the Huawei P10 that I’d got slightly attached to recently. I took a liking to it and really didn’t want to give it back. Having a good camera and having a good battery life go a long way with me. The …

OnePlus 5 now in Soft Gold for a limited time

OnePlus are a company who make flagship spec hardware but do not charge sky high prices. A few months ago they announced availability of the OnePlus 5, a brand new dual camera flagship going head to head with the big guns. Grey and Black were the two colours …

Honor 6A now on sale with Three

Just recently Honor announced the new 6A. We covered it in detail here and we mentioned that it would be available on Three UK. Well, today is the day. You can Go Binge with it on Three. Wilkin Lee, who’s a thoroughly nice chap and is the sales …

Keeping an eye on the little ones

With my son getting to a “certain age”, he’s now off on his own. He plays in the local park and goes on his scooter with his friends. Even as a geeky phone guy, I really didn’t want to give him a phone. Like most kids, I knew …

What can we expect from mobile gaming from 2017 and beyond?

I’m a big mobile gamer. Yes, I’ve got a PlayStation at home but, when I’m on the bus, I’m also playing games on my Galaxy S8 too. It’s predicted that the global games business will grow to some $108.9billion this year, with mobile devices helping to generate a …

Say hello to the Honor 6A

The first thing this actually reminded me of was the Honor 5C, however, it’s actually a replacement for the Honor 5A, announced in January last year. This, the Honor 6A, is available to pre-order from vMall and will be on sale this Friday, August 4th, with Three UK. …

It’s Friday, here’s an advert

It’s Friday. Friday at last. Last night, whilst randomly looking for a YouTube video (and I’ll be honest, I was trying to find some Leslie Chow clips because I’m a bit bonkers), an advert appeared before the video. You know the sort, it’s one of the many YouTube …

Sharp Aquos S1 and S2 leakage

It’s definitely been a substantial amount of time since we last wrote about a Sharp smartphone on here. (I think this 2014 post was the last one). Today though, we hear that the Sharp Aquos S1 and S2 have leaked, and yet again we’ve got the phrase “bezel-less”. …

Vodafone Smart V8 Unboxing

Newsflash. I have a problem. Once upon a time we’d get budget, network-branded phones delivered to the Coolsmartphone HQ and they would be.. for want of a better word.. crap. Now they’re not. They’re really not, and when I see someone walking around with a “big name” budget …

RCA/Venturer Mercury 7L tablet – review

Following on from my Venturer Saturn Pro 10 review, I’m now moving on to review the latest budget tablet from RCA/Ventruer the Mercury 7L. As it is currently priced at £49.99, the Mercury 7L is a direct competitor to the Amazon Fire tablet (which I take with me …