You’d be surprised to know, battery life tests are the most time consuming and the most criticized articles that we do. And in the same time, they are of high interest to the readers. The previous iteration of our battery test required that we have the phone around for at least a week after the reviewing routine is over. It included many different tasks, which took quite a lot of time and meant that the tested devices couldn’t be used for anything else for days in a row (so that the test is as controlled as possible).

And with so many tasks involved, many of you found it hard to compare our testing scenario to their typical usage. It was hard to persuade those of you that never give their smartphones a rest that it’s possible to use a phone for two days without recharging it. Read more »

The Samsung Focus Flash is part of the first wave of handsets from Korea, sporting Windows Phone 7.5 out of the box. The device is the budget oriented sibling of the Samsung Focus S.

Budget however, Read more »

The original Samsung I9000 Galaxy S is almost two years old and, yet, its incarnations keep coming. Today, we have the latest one to visit our office – the slide-out QWERTY equipped, LTE enabled Samsung Stratosphere, exclusive to Verizon Wireless in the US.

The Samsung Stratosphere is powered by the familiar Read more »

HTC’s Radar and Titan arrived as the flag bearers for their first Windows Phone Mango handsets, aiming to offer the best media experience possible from a Windows Phone device.

Following on from the Radar’s visit last week, its bigger brother, the HTC Titan now takes center stage for further inspection. Read more »

The HTC Radar decided to drop by for a visit today and we thought we’d shoot it on video. It’s a sleek aluminum unibody device, running on the latest version of Windows Phone – Mango.

We’ll get started with the Radar to bring you a full review. In the meantime you can check out the video below. Read more »

With all the hot features of the Samsung Galaxy Note you may have forgotten that the phoneblet comes with a nifty little accessory called the S Pen. Unfortunate choice of naming aside, the S Pen might turn out to be one of the hottest features of the Galaxy Note as it adds quite a lot of extra functionality.

Samsung has included cool gesture controls that you can use with the S Pen, like making a screenshot and making notes on top of it and launching the notepad from anywhere in the interface, opening contexts menus and whatnot. The fancy stylus seems to offer pretty good response time and allows for the kind of accuracy that lets you create some pretty impressive sketches right on the Note’s 5.3″ HD Super AMOLED screen. Read more »

When the Samsung Galaxy Nexus was announced last week, giving us the first taste of Android Ice Cream Sandwich, many of you wanted to know if the smartphone uses its entire screen, or if the menu navigation keys are always there, taking up a part of precious screen real estate.

Well, tonight we got the chance to play with a Galaxy Nexus version that’s closer to the retail one, and we can give you the answer. Read more »

We conclude our coverage of the second day of Nokia World 2011 with a portion of benchmarks of the newly announced WP smartphones. The Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 were both present so we could check out how those 1.4Ghz Snapdragon chipsets fare.

To put their performance into perspective we threw in the HTC Radar and an HTC 7 Mozart running the Mango update into the mix. The Radar has a chipset very similar to the two Lumia smartphones, but its Scorpion CPU is clocked at 1GHz. It should show us what kind of an advantage the extra 400MHz of clock speeds actually bring. The 7 Mozart not only has a slower CPU than the two Nokia smartphones, but also a weaker GPU (Adreno 200, instead of Adreno 205) so we’ll see how much of a difference that makes. Read more »

What we have here is something unheard of before. Two phones with the same body, but extremely different personalities. On the left side we have the freshly announced Nokia Lumia 800, the company’s first Windows Phone 7-running smartphone, and on the right, we have the Nokia N9 – the first, and unfortunately, probably the last MeeGo-running device for the Finnish phone manufacturer.

Now, these two are quite alike on the outside with their unique polycarbonate unibodies (which I’m extremely fond of, I admit) but the hardware on the inside couldn’t be more different. Read more »

Stephen Elop announced today the new family of Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 7.5 Mango-running devices, the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710.

And now we are going to briefly answer the question you all are asking right now: which one should I go for? And here is the answer. Read more »

During our hands-on time with the Nokia Lumia 800 at the Nokia World event we managed to put its camera to a test, as well. We returned with a bunch of photos, which we are now about to present for your viewing pleasure.

The image quality is a story of two parts here with the Lumia 800. At pixel level they might not be the most impressive around as the amount of detail and the noise levels are only average. However when downsized for viewing on a computer screen or the phone itself they are really impressive. Read more »

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman came around our office a few days ago, but refused to get its clever user interface shot on camera. Now, though, it gave us permission to get its UI on video using nothing but iPhone 4S’ camera.

This gave us the perfect opportunity to test the iPhone 4S’ auto-exposure lock and auto-focus lock and show you what they can do for you. Read more »

It would appear that newly announced Samsung Galaxy Nexus, with its Ice Cream Sandwich goodness will also be making an appearance in LTE form.

But just the other day, Samsung and Google’s Unpacked Event in Hong Kong brought the next evolutionary step of Android to the fore. Read more »

As you probably know, despite the 720p resolution, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus isn’t packing a Super AMOLED Plus, but a regular Super AMOLED screen. Those of you that have been paying more attention would even know what the main difference between the two is that the “Plus” AMOLED uses a conventional 3-subpixel-per-pixel RGB matrix, while the regular one goes by with 2-subpixel-per-pixel RGBG PenTile matrix.

So the Samsung Galaxy Nexus should come with one of those PenTile matrices, right? Well, as our macro shots showed – yes. The question remains if that really matters here. Read more »

The Xperia active has kindly dropped by for a visit here at GSMArena’s headquarters in all of its IP67 certified glory. It’s water-proof up to a meter depth, it’s splash resistant too and can withstand some dirt in its face just in case.

We’ll get started with this bad boy but in the mean time we thought we could put together a UI demo and an unboxing for your viewing pleasure. Read more »