Tag: android

Right, here’s what you need to know. You can pop over to Banggood and get one of these for £155.13. For your money you’re going to get a 5.99″ 1080×2160 Full HD screen (18:9) with a 403 ppi pixel density. You’re also going to get a dual 16 …

We have had something very special arrive at Coolsmartphone Towers today. At least, it’s something that I have been looking forward to for a few weeks. Today we’ve got one of the boldest new phones to come out this year (IMHO). Yes, it’s the Razer Phone! You’re obviously …

Remember the diddy Unihertz Jelly Pro we covered last week? Well, it’s now here in my hand. Yes, it really is tiny. A 2.45″ screen with a 240 x 432 certainly makes data entry a challenge. When you’re initially setting up and putting your Google account details in, …

At this time of year I’m basically just pimping out the Black Friday deals for various companies. This time it’s Mobiles.co.uk, who have 48 deals rolling right now on their website. Not only that, but you can also get £10 off any Pay Monthly and Upgrade plan by …

These days there are so many different smartphones out there it is hard to find things to distinguish them from each other. I genuinely struggle sometimes in finding what makes one phone better than another. That being said, there are things out there that can help to lift one phone above …

A Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaign isn’t normally something we take a great deal of notice of here at Coolsmartphone. Usually it’s a product that rarely becomes reality. However, this one has actually resulted in a full product, and it’s tiny! It’s the smallest 4G smartphone in the world and …

If you’re a long time reader of the site and a long time user of mobile tech, you may remember the Psion series of PDA’s. These were in many ways the forebear of Nokia’s Symbian communicator devices. What made them special was that they used mini thumb style …

Razer is a brand that has been around for a few years now. They advertise themselves as “For Gamers, By Gamers” and they’ve pushed out some glorious high-end laptops over the last few years. I can say with certainty that I have lusted after the Razer Blade laptop …

As you’ll know if you read our HTC U11 review, we do like the HTC handsets. Before the U11 was announced, we got to play with the HTC U Play and the U Ultra but, come on, hands up who actually has either of those two. There lies …

Nokia, currently owned by HMD Global, is trying to make the next breed of handsets relive the glory days of strong battery life. This is something that has not been possible with the current era of smartphones. The new Nokia 2, which is due for release in the UK …

In February next year it’ll be exactly 15 years since this website came into being. I was, for many months before that, writing all this stuff on another domain. A free stick of chewing gum if you remember that far back. If I’m honest, after you’ve seen the …

As you may have realised by the sheer age of this website, I’m old enough to remember when there simply were no phones in school. I grew up in an age when there was a First School, a Middle School and a High School. At no time did …

I review a lot of phones and one trend I’m definitely seeing is the addition of “phone health” apps. On Android they’re designed to keep your phone in shape. To make sure that rogue apps aren’t running in the background, sucking memory, power and space. Space, no matter …

OnePlus have already brought us some exciting new smartphones, and they do this without charging a huge premium. Their previous offerings were popular, and more so with the recent OnePlus 5 which featured a dual camera system, great battery and huge amounts of RAM. However… It seems like …

I’ve been pretty impressed with the XZ Premium ever since I first saw the thing back in March. The build quality is the usual Sony finery and that 5.5″ screen resolution (2160×3840 pixels) is stunning. It also comes with the ultra-fast Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 CPU, 4GB RAM, 64GB …

Now that the madness of the launch event is over and all the tech world has crawled back into their respective offices, it is time to get down to the business of seeing what is beyond the shiny Huawei exterior. Before I get into the unboxing of the …

If you’ve got a Huawei Mate 9 then you may be looking on with envy after the Mate 10 announcement. Don’t worry though, because, if you’re super-quick, you can get in on the Android 8.0 (Oreo) action too. Head to the Huawei beta test area and you can …

Last week I was reviewing a car and this week I’m getting a pitch from an electric scooter company. It’s certainly different to my years of reviewing phones. This one is an electric bike which can get you to nearly 28 mph in just 3.3 seconds. Depending how …

Huawei has always had two mainstream phone lineups, the P series and the Mate Series. We have seen the P series for this year and we were pretty impressed by the offering. The Mate series traditionally launches later in the year and tends to be aimed at the …

ESET researchers have recently revealed a new string of ransomware for Android based mobiles called Double Locker (Android/DoubleLocker.A) which manipulates Android accessibility services to completely locked down your phone. According to ESET the malware doesn’t harvest your sensitive information and forward them on to the criminal underground but it is a …

Earlier on, we covered what we think was the most important part of this year’s Google hardware 2017 event – the new Pixel 2 and Pixel 2XL. Next up, we’re covering Mountain View’s home hardware kit – namely, the Google Home range. This Home range wasn’t so much …

Seriously – Google went in. The best place to start is with what we knew – or thought we knew from the rumour mill (if you want to catch up on what we thought we knew, the best place would be alongside the podcast Jawas helping keep the …

It’s probably fair to say that Android Wear is yet to capture the popular mood in the same way that the Apple Watch has. Although there are a fairly wide variety of watches out there, there is little to differentiate them apart from aesthetics, with manufacturers hardly changing …

At the weekend I had “that call”. I’m sure many of you will have had a similar call from a friend or relative. It happens when you somehow become the “computer guy” and you seemingly have the ability to fix anything relating to tech. In this case, it …

I’m getting in the habit of not carrying cash much now. There’s several benefits to this. For starters, everywhere I go there’s the “tap to pay” machines and I tend to use my phone. Also, there’s the added benefit of using the, “Oh lads, can you get the …

It’s not something I talk about much, but I’ve actually met Bill Gates. He’s a bit shorter in real life and had a lot of bodyguards following him around at the time. We spoke about the Microsoft Smartphone because, way back when, Microsoft was actually pretty successful at …

Right now I’m carrying around the Honor 9. It definitely ticks a lot of boxes for me. The battery life is decent, it takes great photos, it has a great screen, there’s 64GB of on-board storage and it’s pretty nippy too. The blue or grey one is available …

Some of my favourite iOS and Android games I tend to see the same games being played on the bus to college in the morning, but I’m a little different. My choice of apps, and the games I have installed, isn’t always mainstream, but I enjoy them all …

With the Pixelbook leaking, we’ve already seen a bit of what Google will be announcing on October 4th. However, there’s much more.. Leaks suggest a new Pixel, cunningly named the Pixel 2. These pictures have been found on the internet and there’s rumours that the HTC-built phone will …

Many of us will probably be getting numb to the fairly regular security warnings that become inextricably connected to our smartphones. There’s an acceptance of risk when we download apps, and we freely skip past that screen which tells us just how many permissions an app requires. Now …

Recently we covered the fact that Google Play have now allowed real-money gambling apps into their software store. Until recently, you either had to side-load (downloading an APK manually and then installing it with the security permissions reduced) or you would need to just browse to the site …

OK, short version. The BlackBerry is back, albeit with TCL Communications at the helm. In February I took a look at it. It’s a bit heavy and a bit chunky compared to some handsets, but that keyboard has returned and you’ll find a range of BlackBerry apps inside. …

On the 17th August this year, a number of researchers including from Google, Akamai, CloudFlare, Flashpoint and RiskIQ uncovered a botnet called WireX which has been found to be contributing towards DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. The interesting element of this discovery comes from the botnet being …

While the Coolsmartphone Podcast Editing Elves continue their journey of self flagellation, some of us are in Berlin reporting from IFA for you. Here is episode 213 of the Coolsmartpone Podcast. Ready to download from your Podcast client of choice, watch on Youtube and listen to here on …

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 …

We apologise for the delay in the release of this episode of the Coolsmartphone Podcast. The Podcast Editing Elves responsible for this are punishing themselves as we type. https://youtu.be/rWHOFCzupbo As well as the live recording, from July 13th 2017, you can now download the episode in your podcast …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …