Category: Phones

Confession: it’s getting harder and harder to write these phone reviews. Either I’m becoming jaded or the phones are now just too darn good. Probably both. The basic requirements of a good phone, once you move up from the entry level, are an up-to-date version of the operating system running on a fast processor in tons of RAM with lots of storage, displaying on a big clear screen. Yes, and a high-resolution camera. Some punters… Now read on…

Honor is the mid-range brand for Huawei, the world’s third-ranking smartphone maker. Huawei owns the largest share of its home market, China, which also happens to be the biggest smartphone market in the world. But China is now stuffed to the gunnels with phones. Growth has slumped. So Huawei is making a huge effort to sell into the outside world. And the odds are stacked against it. The United States government, suspicious of Chinese cyber-stealth,… Now read on…

When the Swift_2 range launched late last year, the improvement over the original Swifts was immediately evident from the slim metal casing and the fingerprint reader on the back. The central processor was now bumped up from quad-core to octa-core, making it over half as fast again according to our benchmark tests. Bumped up, too, was the price. These new Swifts started in the mid-£100s, pushing above £200 with the top of the range Swift_2X… Now read on…

Tested Technology complemented Wileyfox hugely on its initial choice of the Cyanogen operating system. And we don’t take that back, even now that Cyanogen Inc, the operating system provider, has gone to join the Norwegian Blues (the name might have been a clue—it means “Blue Maker”, and also happens to signify a class of poisons). When Wileyfox launched its first phones nearly two years ago, Cyanogen was an improvement on stock Android, and a clear… Now read on…

The smartphone market is slowing down. IDC reports that last year growth in worldwide shipments fell from 28pc to 10.4pc, and will remain on a downward path this year. The biggest dent in the market is at the high end. As Tested Technology predicted over a year ago, those bling phones are being overshadowed by the rise of commodity phones, utility items that deliver what users need—and no more—in a plain package at an affordable… Now read on…

Six years ago when I picked up the first Samsung Galaxy Note, I knew at once that this was the right form-factor for a phone. And it still fits in your shirt pocket. Since then I’ve dallied with smaller phones, because these still abound. But late last year, the Huawei Mate 9 arrived. And it was like coming home. Huawei Mate 9 THERE ARE TWO VERSIONS of the new Huawei Mate 9. The one I’m… Now read on…

The arrival of the Huawei P9 signalled for me a new USB era. As I reported in my review, the phone uses the upcoming USB C standard. This isn’t just a new physical configuration, allowing the plug to be inserted either way round into the socket. The standard is also able to carry currents as high as 3 amps, nearly twice the 1.8 amps that’s the official maximum for the ten-year-old microUSB standard it replaces.… Now read on…