Smartphones
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
TCL P80 Ultra Puts NXTPAPER on an AMOLED Screen for the First Time
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Displays,
Take any phone outside on a sunny day and the screen turns into a mirror. TCL has been working on that problem for years with NXTPAPER, its matte, paper-like screen treatment, and the catch was always that you had to take it on an LCD. The new P80 Ultra and P80 Pro, both announced at IFA this week, are the first phones where you don't have to make that swap.
Both use a 6.83-inch 1.5K AMOLED running at 120Hz and peaking at 3,200 nits, with the NXTPAPER layer built into the panel. The Ultra starts at 549 euros for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, or 599 euros for 512GB. The Pro is 429 euros. A third phone, the plain P80, comes in at 349 euros and skips the NXTPAPER treatment entirely. European sales started September 3, Latin America follows in October, and TCL says the US gets them later without saying when or for how much.
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Gurman Says Apple Has 14 Products Coming by Early 2027, Starting Next Week
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Rumors,
Fourteen products between now and early 2027. That is the roadmap Bloomberg's Mark Gurman sketched out this week in Power On, rounded up Friday by MacRumors, and it would make the next five months one of the heaviest release runs Apple has ever attempted. None of it is confirmed. Gurman has a good record on Apple's plans, but a roadmap is a report, not a product page.
What Apple has actually said is small. There is an event on Wednesday, September 9, at 10am Pacific and 1pm Eastern at Apple Park, and marketing chief Greg Joswiak posted the tagline, "Surprise and shine." That is the whole official story. Everything below comes from reporting, and where the reports disagree, we say so.
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Apple Reportedly Built an Apple Pencil for the Foldable iPhone, Then Backed Away
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Rumors,
Apple built an Apple Pencil for its folding iPhone, and then appears to have talked itself out of it. That comes from Mark Gurman's Power On newsletter for Bloomberg, published Sunday. He describes a stubbier Pencil, sized for a phone rather than an iPad, that snaps magnetically onto the side of the device to sit and charge there. Apple tested it. Gurman says it probably will not be announced next month, and probably is not going on sale at all.
Apple has confirmed none of this, and none of it is a product. It is one reporter's account of an internal prototype, and killing prototypes is a normal part of how hardware gets made. The reasons he gives describe why a stylus on a folding phone is hard before anyone gets near the software.
The Galaxy S26 FE Costs $50 More, and Only the Chip Really Changed
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Features,
The Fan Edition pitch has never been complicated. Samsung takes a flagship, shaves off the parts most people won't miss, and sells it for a few hundred dollars less. The Galaxy S26 FE, official as of August 27, keeps that pitch intact. It also raises the entry fee to $699.99, up $50 from where the S25 FE started last year.
For that you get a 6.7-inch FHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X running at 120Hz and rated for 1,900 nits, a 4,900mAh battery, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB or 256GB of storage. It arrives September 3 at select carriers and September 4 at Samsung.com and everywhere else, in Pistachio, Blueberry, and Graphite. Nearly all of that carried over from the S25 FE unchanged.
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The iPhone 18 Pro Might Start at $1,399, and Even the Optimists Are Giving Up
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Rumors,
Two months ago the case for staying calm went like this: yes, memory prices have gone insane, but Apple runs the best supply chain on earth and has a long history of quietly eating costs to protect a price point. Analyst Jeff Pu of GF Securities was making exactly that argument in May, saying Apple could still price the iPhone 18 Pro aggressively. This week he changed his mind.
In a new research note, Pu now expects the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max to land $250 to $300 above their predecessors. That works out to roughly $1,349 to $1,399 for the iPhone 18 Pro and $1,449 to $1,499 for the Pro Max. The iPhone 17 Pro starts at $1,099 today. The 17 Pro Max starts at $1,199. Do that math on a Pro Max with any storage upgrade at all and you're staring at a phone that costs more than a decent laptop.
Apple Just Raised Trade-In Values, and It’s Taking Android Phones Now
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Hot Deals,
Apple raising trade-in values is normally a footnote. Apple raising trade-in values roughly a month before its biggest launch of the year, with some devices jumping close to 30 percent, is a strategy.
The company updated its U.S. trade-in estimates today, lifting the numbers for most iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch models compared to the last revision in May. It also added several Android phones to the list for the first time.
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Samsung Sold More Phones Than Ever and Still Lost Money
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Corporate News,
Here's a sentence that shouldn't make sense. Samsung sold plenty of phones last quarter, grew its mobile revenue year over year, and still managed to lose money doing it.
The number is 800 billion won, roughly $544 million, and it's the first operating loss Samsung's DX division has ever posted. DX is the half of the company that makes things you actually buy: phones, TVs, appliances. The loss came almost entirely from the mobile side. And the reason is the one everybody in tech has been bracing for since last year. Memory got expensive.
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Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Hands-On: The Foldable Finally Got the Shape Right
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Design, Product Reviews,
For six years, Samsung's big foldable has been shaped a little like a TV remote. Tall, skinny, and a bit awkward to hold shut. The Galaxy Z Fold 8 finally does something about that, and the fix is almost embarrassingly simple. It got wider.
That one change reshapes the entire phone. Closed, the new Fold looks and feels like a passport, with a 5.5-inch cover screen at a 10:16 aspect ratio that you can actually type on with two thumbs without popping the thing open. Samsung is calling this the biggest redesign since the original 2019 Z Fold, and after a few minutes in the hand, that reads as more than marketing. It borrows the squat, wide silhouette the first Pixel Fold pioneered, and it turns out that shape was right all along.
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Samsung Put Google’s Research Brain on Your New Foldable. Does It Belong There?
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Google, Artificial Intelligence,
NotebookLM has quietly become the app that power users swear by, the thing you open on a laptop that already has thirty tabs fighting for space. It reads your sources, connects the dots, and answers questions about them. So here is the odd part of Samsung's latest Galaxy Unpacked pitch: that tool, now rebranded Gemini Notebook, comes preloaded on phones you fold in half.
The Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, Z Fold 8, and Z Flip 8 all ship with it built in. On paper that sounds like a real upgrade over yet another chatbot shortcut. In practice, it raises a simple question worth asking before you get excited: is a deep-research desk tool something you actually want to reach for on a phone?
The Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra Is Samsung’s Best Foldable, and Its Own Worst Enemy
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Product Reviews,
Ultra is supposed to be the word that ends the argument. It's the phone you reach for once you've decided money is no longer the point, the one with the biggest battery, the longest zoom, the most of everything. So here's the strange thing about the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra: after a couple of hours holding it, the device that kept nagging at me was the cheaper one sitting right next to it on the table.
Don't get me wrong, the Z Fold 8 Ultra is a genuinely lovely piece of hardware. But Samsung has quietly built itself a problem. For the first time there's a standard Z Fold 8 and an Ultra sitting side by side, and the roughly $200 you pay to move up buys you less than you'd expect. Working out whether that gap is worth it is the whole story of this phone.