Inhoudsopgave van 113 - Android Advisor

REVIEWS Price: £1,749 from fave.co/3D5LiR3 Google's folding phone has been a long time coming. Rumours that the company was developing one began several years back and in a surprise revelation during a recent Made by Google podcast episode, the world found out that the Pixel Fold wasn't the first. A previous design hadn't made the grade and was cancelled because it wasn't good enough. The Pixel Fold, then, must have passed muster and it's taking the fight to various rivals but mainly Samsung. The South Korean company has a big lead on Google, having released its first Galaxy Fold in 2019 and is on track to launch its fifthgeneration foldable phone soon. The history lesson is relevant here because the Pixel Fold doesn't exist in a vacuum. And while there's…

REVIEWS Price: £449 from fave.co/44hCXFS Back when it was a subsidiary of Huawei, Honor was always best at its cut-price flagship killers – phones that offered high-end features without the hefty price tag. Now independent, Honor has started to carve out a flagship niche of its own with the likes of the Magic 5 Pro and Magic Vs foldable, but the Honor 90 sees the company stick to what it's always done best. With a slender build and a dazzling display, the Honor 90 outperforms its affordable price, and the capable main camera is Instagramworthy too. You'll have to put up with an unpleasantly plasticky design, and there are no niceties like wireless charging or waterproofing, but the value here remains decent. DESIGN The Honor 90 is slim and sleek,…

AUDIO Price: £289 from fave.co/447Caao Final Audio has delivered one of the best-sounding noise-cancelling earbuds you can buy: the ZE8000. Buy a set and you'll also get one of the more outrageous designs in the earphone market, a look that will enchant some and completely turn off others. Final is based in Japan, a country that embraced the Brutalist architectural movement that seems to have inspired the sharp corners and concrete-textured finish of the ZE8000. They've created an earphone that has no real parallels in the consumer audio world, so buyers will stand out from the white earbud hordes. AUDIO QUALITY The ZE8000 have an impressive soundstage and excellent detail, comparing favourably to the Astell&Kern AK UW100 and Campfire Audio Orbit earbuds, two models that ditch active noise cancellation in…

FEATURE For Android users there's an elephant in the room right now, and that elephant is Apple's new StandBy mode for phones. StandBy mode, if you haven't heard, is a fancy new feature in Apple's latest) iOS update. In short, the system brings an interactive, info-filled interface onto an iPhone's screen anytime it's charging. It's kind of like turning it into a Smart Display, and it's something Android users could benefit from as well. Well, have I got good news for you: Android's had something similar for ages now. Here's what you need to do. FINDING YOUR ANDROID STANDBY-STYLE SET-UP First things first: it's worth reminding ourselves that Android has a few different options for a StandBy-like setup on any idle phone. Specifically: 1. If you've got a Google-made Pixel…

REVIEWS Price: £1,049 from fave.co/44B4P7t The Motorola Razr 40 Ultra is more than just yet another flip phone. For one thing, it up-ends the form factor with its over-sized exterior display, vastly increasing how much you can do with the phone without ever opening it up. More than that though, the company's fourth attempt at a foldable phone is the first to feel like it captures the charm and cool factor of the original noughties flip phone. Best of all? It also happens to be really, really good. DESIGN It's hard to talk about the design of the Razr 40 Ultra without addressing that eye-catching cover display. I'll cover how it works later, but what you need to know is that it stretches from near the top of the phone…

REVIEWS Price: £599 from fave.co/3NEBzHv Google's first tablet since 2018's Pixel Slate has finally arrived, but the Pixel Tablet is a move in a completely new direction. It comes bundled with a Charging Speaker Dock which makes it just as much a smart display as it is a regular Android tablet. Android tablets have had their ups and downs over the years, from the highs of the Nexus 7 which Google built with Asus to the lows of appalling efforts from the likes of Alcatel. They still have a place in the market, but with iPads still being the quality go-to choice, has Google come up with a nifty way to stand out? The Pixel Tablet is undeniably interesting, even though we've seen docking tablets like the Lenovo Smart Tab…

AUDIO Price: £79 from fave.co/3CYCQD3 Pardon me while I stand and salute EarFun's new flagship noise-cancelling earbuds, the Air Pro 3. These feature-filled mighty mites deliver dynamic, detailed, and full-bodied sound. While they're just a bit shy in bass articulation, they deliver much of what you'll get from buds with much higher price tags. Comfort level is good – I can wear them for hours – and the active noise cancellation (ANC) is improved compared to the company's earlier efforts, wiping away a goodly amount of plane, train, and bus noise as well as walk-about wind noise. I'm happy to report that the Air Pro 3's noise-cancelling has been upgraded. What really sets the Air Pro 3 apart from its mid-priced competition is a futuristic feature set that could grow…

REVIEWS Price: £749 from fave.co/3O2nELr Asus is best known for its laptops and gaming gear, but each year it also releases a premium-spec smartphone under the Zenfone name. The Zenfone 10 is the latest iteration, and it's much like 2022's Zenfone 9: an Android phone marketed as a small, compact device with an eye catching design, top-end specs, and thoughtful software. For the most part, the Zenfone 10 is all those things, though it's not the smallest phone around. It's taller than the iPhone 13 mini and SE and is roughly the same dimensions as an iPhone 14 but with a smaller screen. Don't get me wrong, Asus has a good phone on its hands here – it ticks practically every possible box on the spec sheet. In doing so…

BUYING GUIDE Smartphones are more expensive than ever but as the high-end gets better, so do the cheap phones. If you don't want to spend hundreds or even thousands on your next phone then you have come to the right article! We fully test and review loads of budget phones at Android Advisor, and here you'll find an up to the minute list of our ten favourite cheap smartphones that cost £250 or under. We look out for things like battery life, performance, camera quality, and software support as these are often the things that can suffer when a phone doesn't cost that much. The best cheap phone right now is the Samsung Galaxy A14 because it ticks all those boxes. But the other nine phones here offer different combinations…

FEATURE If there's one question I get asked more than any other, it's how to boost a phone's battery life. While the notion of achieving better Android battery life may sometimes seem like rocket science, it's actually just regular science – and the secret to making it happen isn't all that difficult. In fact, all it requires is some careful planning. THE ANDROID BATTERY LIFE MECHANICS The main thing to know about your phone's physical battery is that it's a limited resource that loses capacity over time. That's an inherent quality of that type of technology, unfortunately, and the same is true no matter what type of mobile device you're using: the more you use it – and, specifically, the more you stress it via ongoing charging – the less…