Category: Android
With Mobile World Congress just around the corner and a raft of new handsets about to be announced, it’s a good time to check for deals on the handsets that are out there now. Tesco Mobile have just been in touch and they’re offering a pretty good deal …
Yeah, Yeah. A couple of Chromebooks, but who cares, they’re for the education market. Why is this a thing? You’re probably right in your thinking. If you were going to get a Chromebook and money was no object, you might decide to grab the Chromebook Pixel, or even …
We’re all aware of drones. They float around and, based on my experience, seem to fly off into neighbours gardens so that I have to sheepishly ask for it back. Here we have a new idea. It’s a smartphone case which houses a drone. Just snap it out …
New figures released by the Gambling Commission show that the amount of bets placed in the traditional local bookmaker is on the wane. Now 33% of all gambling is done online and, despite what the high street in your local town might look like, the report shows that …
We’ve received another Android TV box to test today so I thought I’d give you a quick overview as it’s an improved version of an already very popular box. This is from EntertainmentBox – it’s the EBox T8 V and is powered by an Amlogic S912 64bit octa-core …
Wait, I know what you’re going to say.. Of course it’s not a grey area! If you’re selling a “Fully Loaded Kodi Box” then it’s going to be illegal, end of. Well no, not necessarily, and I’ll tell you why. For most of us, “Fully Loaded” means that …
It’s not that often that a device comes along that is truly a game changer. That is until now. Today I had the pleasure of unboxing an item that in my opinion is truly groundbreaking, and could potentially change the game in its field. I am, of course, …
Just recently I had to admit to something. Somebody asked me to scan a document at work and email it. I was confronted by a very hi-tech printer, plumbed into our network and equipped with a keypad to navigate around the control panel. After a lot of random …
The grand-master of the phone leakers, Evan Blass, has just dropped this little nugget on Twitter. It’s the new Galaxy S8 from Samsung.. When I say “it”, there’s actually going to be two phones. Gone are the navigation buttons you’ve grown used to in previous Samsung Galaxy handsets …
Remember some time ago we brought you the news that finally, Netflix was allowing customers to download some of their content and store it to the device? The good news is that the latest update to the media streaming app allows content to be stored on the SD …
If you want to bag yourself a great smartphone for less cash, you’ll probably know that O2 do their “Like New” handsets. They’re fully checked and you get an accurate description of the condition before you buy the thing. Now O2’s owners, Telefónica, are their other network – …
Somebody recently asked what my main phone was. To be honest I have two – an iPhone 6s and an LG G5. The Android handset tends to win in the daily battle for my trouser pocket, and even though I’ve not made any use of the modular G5 …
Apps. The ones I download are mostly free because, deep down in my heart, I’m tighter than a gnats backside. How do these apps make money then? How do the developers get paid? How do those big TV advertisements appear on TV if we never actually click “Buy” …
OK. Slightly off-topic today, but the regular readers will no doubt be aware that I film a lot of our product reviews in my car. As an example, my SanDisk iXpand overview or this FM transmitter review. I was even doing this some 10 years ago in glorious …
If you follow us on Twitter then you may have seen me mention the fact that Kodi is riding high in the Google Play apps charts. It’s not overly surprising though, especially when you consider how many people are buying Android TV boxes or attempting to get around …
I know there’s quite a few of you out there who work in on concession stores, in retail stores and network shops. I don’t envy you, I really don’t. This weekend I popped into a local EE store just to have a mooch around and there seemed to …
The Samsung Galaxy Ace line of handsets has had quite a success since it launched a few years ago, and the brand has been seen on a few models in its time. The latest device to carry the Ace brand is the Samsung Galaxy J2 Ace which was …
In my opinion it’s one of the best phones to have been announced last year. Now it’s available on the high street for the buying public. Three and Huawei have just announced that the Mate 9 is going on sale in some of the Three stores and also …
My wife has the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge and, quite frankly, I’m surprised that it’s still in one piece. You may remember what happened with her Samsung Galaxy S5, and the plastic construction seemed to cope with the constant drops very well. So, if you’ve had a look …
Fancy a handset that will help you through your day? With artificial intelligence and voice assistants becoming a big thing in tech, HTC have chosen to deliver a new helper in their two new handsets. Called “Sense Companion”, it can advise you to charge up if you’ve got …
Back in the day, when we used to have nightclubs and you’d go outside to meet other people instead of “swiping” them, I always wanted to be the DJ. The nearest I got was doing the lights in a local nightclub, and I made the mistake of leaving …
With Mobile World Congress happening next month, the very last thing we expected to see was a new handset from HTC in early January. That, though, is what we have – the Desire 650. There’s a bit of a backstory to this one. It appeared on the Taiwanese …
Right, first up I should mention that this phone doesn’t have Band 20 on LTE, so no 800MHz 4G. Oh, and it also doesn’t have NFC, so no “tap to pay” magic. However, what it does have is a 2.1GHz Helio X20 deca-core CPU with a Mali T880 …
Khellan and I opened 2017 with a cracking episode of the Coolsmartphone Podcast: Coolsmartphone Podcast 192 You might as well drop 5 stars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOoX1EuYtiM We discussed CES, Samsung’s A range, Cyanogen and Lineage, Chromebooks and the Honor 6X. Matteo – @Todoleo Khellan – @Wubanger5 As usual feel free …
In 2011, Nokia took the now-fateful decision to abandon the “burning platform” of Symbian and moved over to Windows Phone. This decision was close one; in those days the smartphone market was very different with multiple OS’s having a reasonable foothold (as opposed to the duopoly of today …
In a way I’m not overly happy that a service like this exists, or has to exist. The NHS here in the UK is crumbling. There’s many reasons for it, and we could argue about them all day, but fact is – it’s broken. We’re now in a …
First impressions matter. Or so we are led to believe. My Honor 6X arrived today and I’ve wasted no time taking it out of its box and popping my SIM and a memory card into it. The things I do for Coolsmartphone.com and you readers. The Honor 6X …
I think I’ve started to reach an age where I don’t always recognise some of the celebrities in magazines and on TV. Especially on “I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here” where they now seem to run a full intro detailing why a person is apparently “famous”. …
The Honor 6X was announced and has been available in China since October 2016. Honor have ramped things up and the device will be available to pre-order in Europe and the USA as of later today. The Honor 6X is a mid-range 5.5″ device which will replace the …
Samsung didn’t get much good press in the second half of 2016, mainly related to the Note 7 issues. We’re just a few days into 2017 and the Korean smartphone giant has just officially announced the A3 (2017) and A5 (2017) for European markets. The Samsung A7 (2017) …
“Happy New Year Everyone!” That seems to be what Amazon.co.uk and Honor are saying to us today. With an Honor 8 Deal. In Blue. Whether you are still slightly tipsy from last night or under the weather of some seasonal bug, this is a deal you won’t want …
It seems that there’s no love lost between Cyanogen Inc and CyanogenMod. The CyanogenMod.org website is now dead. It comes just hours after this blog post from the developers behind it. When the CyanogenMod team announced that they were going to fork the source code yesterday we simply …
Well, we didn’t want this to come (especially so late on Christmas Eve when we’re all full of mince pies) but it has. Following our earlier news that Cyanogen OS is to be retired, it now looks like CyanogenMod in its current form is toast too. However, there’s …
At the beginning of November, Huawei released something a little bit exciting – the Huawei Mate 9. I was lucky enough to be given one of these devices for review and as such have been using it for the past few weeks. It is now time for me to …
A short time ago we reported that Cyanogen as a company would be shedding considerable staff. They were also closing buildings with some of the team moving to a single location. The new CEO, Lior Tal, announced the company would cutting ties with co-founder Steve Kondik too. Now Cyanogen …
Enjoy Twitter? Or are you a Facebook fan? I’m definitely more of a Twitter person myself, and have the official app installed on my Android phone. I have a bit of a love / hate relationship with the app because it tends to conveniently “forget” my settings every …
No, I’d never heard of Hebron before writing this either. It’s in Northumberland and there’s less than a couple of hundred houses in the entire parish. However, despite BT digging stuff up and putting a nice green street cabinet for “Superfast Broadband”, residents are still stuck in the …
Filling an entire news item with conjecture and rumour about an upcoming launch? Well, I’ve seen it quite a bit across the web today. Many are trying to decide what exactly the new “HTC U” or “HTC for U” launch, which we’ve just received an invite for, actually …
Some time ago I decided to cancel my current satellite TV subscription. To be honest I thought the monthly fee was extortionate and decided to go along the “cable cutters route”. I found that I could get nearly all, if not all of the content I wished to …
The Coolsmartphone Podcast, Podcast 189, for the week of December 12th 2016 is now ready for download through your podcast client of choice. Whether you are watching the Youtube video of the live recording, or using a client to download the edited audio, we’re here to inform and …
