The Samsung Galaxy Alpha branches off the Galaxy S line. It brings the same flagship experience but in a more compact and, more importantly, a more premium body. The Galaxy phones (all of them) use practical plastic instead of expensive and heavy metal.

The Galaxy Alpha has a metal frame and still manages to be surprisingly light – just 115g. Read more »

The HTC One (E8) sheds the weight of the aluminum unibody and drops the low-res UltraPixel camera in favor of a 13MP shooter. Neither of those affects battery life compared to the One (M8) and the battery capacity is still at 2,600mAh.

What could affect the battery endurance is the new chipset – the One (M8) we tested used a Qualcomm 8974AB while the One (E8) uses 8975AC. Read more »

The HTC Desire 616 dual sim has a large 5″ screen, eight CPU cores and two SIM cards – add those up and you’d think the phone needs a big, beefy battery. Except HTC decided that 2,000mAh should be enough.

How did that work out? Well, the endurance rating is good enough but that big screen and octa-core CPU really take their toll. Read more »

The time has come for another weekly poll of ours. This time we up the ante and turn the poll rivalry to eleven (minus 5). In the spirit of our recent flagship camera shootout, we’re asking you which out of the mighty six you think is the best in four distinct categories.

The contestants are the Samsung Galaxy S5, LG G3, Sony Xperia Z2, Oppo Find 7, Nokia Lumia 1020 and the Apple iPhone 5s. They’re competing in over four categories – best camera features, daylight image quality, low-light image quality and video recording quality. Read more »

Another Xperia smartphone landed in our office this week. We’ve already met the Xperia T2 Ultra, Xperia Z2 and Xperia M2, but we were also eager to check out what the Xperia T3 has to offer. And now we got the chance to give you a glimpse of what to expect in our in-depth review.

The Sony Xperia T3 packs a 5.3″ IPS display of 720p resolution and is powered by the popular mid-range Snapdragon 400 chipset. Sony has provided the Xperia T3 with an 8MP ExmorRS camera sensor and the phone comes with the Android 4.4.2 KitKat OS out of the box. Read more »

The week is done and so is the last poll we did. It faced probably the best portable tablets on the market currently in the face of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and the Apple iPad mini 2.

You guys gave your votes and now that we’re about to close the subject we can reflect and see what’s what. Some fights were very close the whole week and ended close, others ended with a big difference in scores. The verdict – sorry Apple fans but your portable slate got its digitizer handed to it in a statement win for the Galaxy Tab S 8.4. Read more »

The controversy surrounding the OnePlus One smartphone seems to be a never-ending industry topic. We sat down with Carl Pei, Director of OnePlus Global, in an attempt to clarify some of these burning questions that are setting our editorial mailbox on fire these days.

OnePlus is a young Chinese mobile phone manufacturer who already managed to make a splash even before their first product was out. Thanks to clever online marketing, each one of their product teasers made the headlines across the world with promises for a disruptive smartphone with high-end specs and unseen before pricing.

Of course, with expectations running so high, once the OnePlus One smartphone hit the market there were bound to be disappointed users along with the happy ones.

To make matters worse, the smartphone is still playing hard to get with only the few people who possess the privileged right of an invite being allowed to purchase the device. That certainly played out well as people are always bound to crave something that they can’t readily have.

I first met Carl back when he was hard at work making a name for Oppo – and quite successfully at that. Now he has focused his energy into turning OnePlus into an (at least) equal success.

Carl is composed and outspoken and behind his easy going smile, he’s a creative professional with broad knowledge across various industry subjects and some really sharp thinking. I am more than curious to see how the OnePlus will turn out with his guidance. But I digress. On with the interview… Read more »

The Xiaomi Mi Pad 7.9 is the Chinese company’s first tablet attempt, and we’ve got our hands on the import in our latest hands-on video.

The Mi Pad takes some obvious design cues from the Apple iPad mini 2, but comes in significantly less than the Cupertino offering. But is it worth it? Let’s find out. Read more »

Xiaomi’s Mi 3 has had a long trek westward to our studios, but finally the device has made its way here and we’re ready to give the popular Chinese smartphone our full review treatment.

But before that, we’ll be taking a quick look at the device in front of our camera. The Mi 3 comes in a stylish unibody that houses a robust quad-core 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 chipset alongside Adreno 330 graphics and 2GB of RAM, all at a price that’s significantly lower than most flagships. Read more »

Windows Phone 8.1 has seen its first major update, GDR1, which has just seeded out to developers. Naturally, we can’t let devs have all the fun to themselves so installed it on one of our test devices.

As you can imagine, that gave us access to all the latest on Microsoft’s updated mobile OS. Highlights include folder support, Cortana for additional regions, and the new Apps Corner. Read more »

The Inner World is another one of those popular indie games that was released for the PC and then eventually trickled down to the mobile platform. The game released on iOS late last year but the developers recently ported the game over to Android as well.

The Inner World is a point and click 2D game, along the lines of Machinarium. But although the gameplay might seem familiar, the game has its own story to tell. So let us take a look at the insides of The Inner World. Read more »

We’re taking a little detour from our regular routine with poll making and will be pitting two slates against each other instead of smartphones. Well, maybe not such a big detour after all.

In this weekly poll installment we’re putting the two best-equipped portable slates around – the newly-arrived Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 against the market-leading Apple iPad mini 2. Read more »

The HTC Desire 616 dual sim is like a smaller version of the Desire 816 but it has an attention-grabbing octa-core processor. And the processor has eight Cortex-A7 cores instead of big.LITTLE architecture.

The Desire 616 has a large screen for a mid-ranger but with 720p resolution it won’t be fighting flagships any time soon. This fits the style of smartphone popular in East Asia – screen size takes precedence over resolution, dual-SIM is a must and the more cores the better. Read more »

In our last weekend poll, we pitted the two QHD monsters on the market – the LG G3 and Oppo Find 7. We’d like to thank you for taking the time to vote and now it’s time to share the results.

Let’s see which one of the two 5.5″ smartphones came up on top. Read more »

Recently, we got a chance to spend a tiny bit of quality time with the Amazon Fire Phone at an AT&T press event in New York City. The retail giant’s first ever smartphone is now available in the United States for $199 with a two-year contract or $649 outright.

The Amazon Fire Phone’s specs include Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC, 2GB of RAM, 32GB or 64GB of non-expandable memory, and 4.7” 720p LCD display. Read more »