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by Juan Carlos Bagnell | April 4, 2016 2:43 PMRead OnClassifying the iPhone SE is proving more difficult than we might have imagined. It's Apple's entry level iPhone option, but pricing is mid-pack in North America, and some of the tech on tap is top tier. While the design is a recycle from the iPhone 5S, the SE represents one of the more exciting moves from Apple of late. Instead of relying on older phones to fill in price gaps in the iPhone line up, this phone was purpose built to offer a less expensive, but still premium solution to price conscious shoppers. It also shows that Apple has learned from the abysmal failure which was the ...
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by Joe Levi | October 29, 2015 11:52 AMRead OnWhen talking about phones that carry the Nexus name, we typically consider them to be iterative updates of one another - each building on the success of the one that came before. Google decided to change things up a bit last year by releasing the Nexus 6: a phablet - not a phone. Thankfully, this year Google returned the Nexus to its roots by releasing the Nexus 5X. How does it stack up against the original Nexus 5 from two years back? Let's dive right in! Nexus 5X vs Nexus 5 To begin with, both the original Nexus 5 and the Nexus 5X are remarkably similar in terms of overall dimensions. ...
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by Joe Levi | July 23, 2015 6:13 PMRead OnWhen looking at smartphones and tablets, we often obsess over cores and gigs and screen sizes. While all those are important to weigh when evaluating a device, the component we see the most - that we interact with the most - is the screen. When talking about computers in days gone by, the fight was between LCD (liquid crystal display) and CRT (cathode ray tube) - with CRT eventually becoming all but a footnote in the annals of history. Today, the battle is between LCD and LED (light emitting diode) - more specifically between IPS and AMOLED. IPS LCD IPS (in-plane switching) was ...
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by Joe Levi | November 17, 2014 9:59 AMRead OnIt might be a bit unfair to compare the aluminum unibodied HTC One M8 to virtually anything else not made of the sleek metal, but how can you possibly compare the four Ultra Pixel camera on the M8 to a smartphone sporting a 13MP shooter? Thankfully, HTC makes another variant of its popular One, the HTC One E8. As a refresher, the HTC One E8 includes most of the same specifications as its aluminum-clad big-brother, the One M8. Unlike the M8, the E8 opts for polycarbonate rather than aluminum, and includes a 13MP main camera. Both of these features make the One E8 a much better platform ...
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by Joe Levi | October 29, 2014 12:04 AMRead OnBased on how 2014 is stacking up, I think it's safe to say this year will be remembered as the year of the phablet. We saw Apple's mammoth iPhone 6 Plus, Samsung released its Note 4, Google is set to begin taking pre-orders for the Nexus 6, and others like OnePlus and ZTE even threw their hats in the ring. Now Motorola has thrown another big phone into the race, and it's being called the DROID Turbo. Interestingly enough, it looks like it's pretty much a Nexus 6 for Verizon with a cool carbon fiber back. How do the two compare, and which one should you get? Specs Let's take a look at ...
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by Joe Levi | June 27, 2014 1:48 PMRead OnGoogle recently released a Developer Preview of its latest version of Android: Android L. Though it's not final code by any stretch of the imagination, we wanted to see how it compares to Android 4.4.4 KitKat - the latest official release of the operating system. We headed over to Google's "L Developer Preview" page, downloaded, and installed Android L build LPV79 to our Nexus 5 (there is also a build for the 2013 Nexus 7, though only for the WiFi version). From there we spent half a day using it as our daily driver, hunting through the various screens to try and find differences and ...
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by Joe Levi | June 7, 2014 1:17 AMRead OnHTC makes some great high-end devices, and we gave the One M8 one of the highest scores that we've ever given a device. But that's a "flagship" phone, what about the mid-tier? Luckily HTC has you covered there as well, in more ways that one! When diving to the middle, HTC had a couple ways it could go to keep the price of the device down. One option was to make the device smaller, the other was to drop the specifications - or both. We've already told you what we think of the HTC Desire 816 in our full review: a mid-tier phone with flagship DNA. Similarly, we've given the HTC One mini 2 ...
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by Joe Levi | June 2, 2014 8:05 AMRead On32-bit versus 64-bit: What's the difference? What are the advantages to both? On this episode of Pocketnow Power User we're going to talk about which you're going to want on your next smartphone or tablet. What are bits? When we're talking 32-bit versus 64-bit we have to first talk about "bits". Computers -- even smartphones and tablets -- run on a binary system, one and zero, on and off. Simple, right? As an interesting aside, a byte is 8-bits. Half a byte is 4-bits and is called a nibble. What does 32-bit mean? In this context, a 32-bit system refers to how much "stuff" the system can ...
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by Joe Levi | May 21, 2014 2:00 PMRead OnComparing a mid-level smartphone to a high-end smartphone isn't exactly what you'd call "playing fair" -- then again, it's not supposed to be. Here's how the HTC Desire 816 stacks up against the HTC One M8. Both devices run Android Kitkat 4.4.2 with Sense UI 6, although certain features found on the One M8 are missing in the Desire 816. Tap-to-wake is missing on the 816, as are the quick gestures to launch the camera. UFocus and Zoe are missing, too. Rounding up software, we doubt there will be a Google Play edition of the Desire 816, but thanks to all the refinements in Sense UI 6, ...
