Caught by surprise as many tuned in to see the much-rumored foldable smartphone, Samsung revealed that it has been working on redefining the look of its interface for the Galaxy products and the One UI interface will accompany the Android Pie update.

As rumored, Samsung showed off a prototype of a folding display today. Folded, it’s a smartphone. Unfolded, it’s a tablet. Neat! Less neat: The company sort of went out of its way to not really show very much. A prototype was onstage for about 45 seconds, and it was deliberately backlit to be intensely silhouetted. They “disguised the elements of the design” to keep secret whatever secret sauce they have.

Futuristic-looking bendable tablets and smartphones have captured our imagination for years. Whether it’s the folding tablets found in Westworld or the many book-like slates with foldable pages in Microsoft’s future vision videos, a phone that folds out into a much larger device is dreamlike. Samsung is now trying to make these wild concepts a reality.

Display notches are definitely "a thing" in modern smartphones, particularly at the high end. If you're looking to buy a new phone, it's probably going to have some sort of display notch — tall, short, wide, narrow, curved or angular ... it'll be there. That is, unless you buy a Samsung phone; the company has been staunchly anti-notch, sticking with the virtues of its curved "infinity display" as the rest of the industry pushed the bezels to their limits and took the notch as a compromise.

Essential Products, the company behind the Essential Phone, has laid off around a third of its employees. The hardware and sales departments were reportedly hit hardest by the cuts. "This has been a difficult decision to make. We are very sorry for the impact on our colleagues who are leaving the company and are doing everything we can to help them with their future careers," an Essential spokeswoman told Bloomberg. "We are confident that our sharpened product focus will help us deliver a truly game-changing consumer product."

Earlier today we reported that Google's latest Pixels had some low audio quality when recording videos, but that isn't the only issue to have appeared since the pair of phones launched. There are also widespread reports that the Pixel 3 XL's two stereo front-facing speakers have drastically different volumes. According to a statement made by Google on Reddit, this profound difference in sound balance is intentional.

Video teardown of the Google Pixel 3, performed in October, 2018.

After months of waiting, the Asus ROG Phone finally received its stateside launch last night in New York City. The latest entry into the burgeoning gaming phone market is available for pre-order now from several U.S. retailers, including Amazon. There are two storage variants of the Asus ROG Phone, both of which have the same specs otherwise. The entry model features 128GB of storage and is priced at $899, while the higher-end 512GB variant will sell for $1,099.

UL Benchmarks revealed this info on October 18, saying that the two Oppo phones were designed to know when 3DMark was running and then crank themselves into high-gear to get the best possible results. When a private version of 3DMark was used on the phones, results came in at 41% lower. The Oppo Find X was previously listed as the #4 fastest phone in one of UL Benchmarks' tests, but following this new evidence, both it and the F7 have been delisted from the site.

Samsung was one of the first phone makers to embrace big screens, making display real estate a focal point in its Galaxy Note lineup. It's a move that smartphone shoppers have also embraced, and one that competitors have tried to ape with phablets of their own.

Samsung is planning to revolutionise the smartphone industry - and notched displays could be first on the chopping block. The company recently unveiled a cavalcade of new technologies in development, including "under-screen" sensors and cameras. Yes, cameras. This changes everything....

When my Google Pixel 2’s display went suddenly blank on October 11, I was certain it had powered off due to low battery. Only after charging it for some time did I realize that its screen had stopped working completely. I say only the display, since the fingerprint scanner was still giving me haptic feedback and the phone was still buzzing for calls and notifications. By next morning though, the phone had stopped working completely.

When Razer debuted the original Razer Phone, the gaming specialist focused on creating a phone for mobile gamers, largely succeeding. Razer's original phone was the first to feature a smartphone display with a 120-Hertz refresh rate and audio that sounded better than that from most laptops. True, there were some bugs to work out, but it was an admirable first effort.

A top-tier phone for a top-tier price. Huawei swings for the fences with its powerful, full-featured flagship – and it's worth the cost, if you can stomach a four-figure pricetag. In a year where every new phone raises the bar a bit higher its predecessor, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro has just enough premium features to stand out from the crowd. It’s a powerful smartphone with three rear cameras and a modicum of distinctive style...

Xiaomi has announced the Mi Mix 3, the latest entry in its series of full-screen flagship phones. It’s yet another high-end Chinese device with a huge screen-to-body ratio achieved by hiding the front-facing cameras on a sliding mechanism — no notch required. Unlike the Vivo Nex or Oppo Find X, however, the slider isn’t powered by motors. CEO Lei Jun compares the design to older sliding phones and suggests that it’ll be relaxing just to play with.

Samsung is planning big things for its next round of phones, that much has been made clear by rumors and on-the-record interviews from executives. A new report today adds additional clarity into what we can expect from the Galaxy S10 when it arrives in 2019, but Samsung’s years-in-the-making foldable Galaxy phone sure sounds like it’s still in limbo or that Samsung isn’t sure what to do with it.

Tinkerers will now have an easier time modifying and repairing electronic devices. On Thursday, the US Copyright Office made some big changes to the legal exemptions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The changes will enable the repair community to legally fix, hack or modify people's electronic devices. The new rules go into effect Sunday.

The location: Causeway Point. The time: 6am. The situation: A 500m-queue made up of more than a thousand people by 11am. What is it about smartphone launches that get Singaporeans out of the door on an early Saturday morning to stand outside a shopping mall? As it turns out, the Huawei Mate 20 series exclusive launch at Causeway Point.

Samsung’s Galaxy S and Galaxy Note continue to be the de facto Android experience for millions of people around the globe, remaining the best selling phones among casual crowds and a preferred option among enthusiasts as well. While the devices have been a bit predictable for a while, there’s no arguing that they’re incredibly competent products and certainly two of the most important Android flagships around.

For years we've been hearing rumors and small announcements about Samsung's first foldable phone, but now we've had the first official word that it will be launching at some point in 2018. Samsung mobile division CEO DJ Koh confirmed that the company will be launching the phone before the end of the year, but there's no guarantee you'll be able to buy it before 2019. Koh suggested the company may unveil the device at the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco this November.

You'd think smartphone manufacturers would have learned their lesson after being caught cheating multiple times, but that's apparently not the case. UL Benchmarks (aka the Futuremark team) has delisted Huawei's P20 Pro, P20, Nova 3 and Honor Play from 3DMark's charts after internal testing and an AnandTech exposé showed the devices ramping up performance whenever they detected the public versions of benchmarking apps.

A refurbished electronics seller is trolling Apple with a parody ad that argues that, if the Cupertino company said it was an amazing phone back in 2015 it still has to be amazing three years later — and they are making a very good point.

On Wednesday, Apple introduced not one but three new phone models to the world: the iPhone Xs, Xs Max, and Xr. They all seem fine. But take note of what Apple took away. As of this week, it no longer sells the iPhone SE. Which in turn means the age of small smartphones has officially come to an end.

Apple’s annual events are a time and cause of reflection for Android purists. It’s a single day, once a year—unless you count Apple’s tablet events—which Android has continuously failed to compete against. It’s a day when Apple arguably has the most to lose but also has the most excess to throw around, showing the world what they feel the public will want in the coming year.

OnePlus is working on a followup to the OnePlus 6, the OnePlus 6T. The company's latest smartphone should launch sometime in October, and until then we're getting a slow, continual drip of information on the device. The latest news is not so great. The company has revealed that it's dumping the headphone jack on the OnePlus 6T.

Apple CEO Tim Cook defended the highest-priced new iPhones, telling ABC's "Good Morning America" that "it's the most advanced iPhone we've ever done" and replaces every other gadget consumers might need. "The phone has replaced your digital camera. You don't have a separate one anymore. It's replaced your video camera. It's replaced your music player. It's replaced all of these different devices," Cook said. "And so arguably the product is really important. And we've found that people want to have the most innovative product available and with that, it's not cheap to do."

As we head towards the release of the iPhone XS, the first speed tests are teasing what we can expect when it comes to LTE speeds across the major carriers. According to results from SpeedSmart.net, iPhone XS and XS Max will boast quite the improvement from last year's iPhone X. Of the three major carriers — AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile — AT&T looks to be the fastest with average download speeds of 72.24Mbps. That figure compares to average recorded iPhone X speeds of 27.67Mbps.

Essential has confirmed that PH-1 devices will receive Android Q, the next version of Google’s mobile operating system, which is likely to be released next summer. The company, which is led by Andy Rubin, one of the original creators of Android, broke the news in the latest edition of the company’s monthly Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMA).

Going into this series, I hoped I’d get back to the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream and be able to romantically wax about where Android came from. How the G1, though dated, still held up the promises made by Google's first Android effort back in 2008. Analytically, it's all true, but time has not been kind to the phone, and using it has made for a pretty rough week, even by my recent standards.

HMD Global is starting to gain momentum in India following the launch of the Nokia 6.1 Plus. The phone introduced a notched design and improvements on the hardware front, but more than that it signaled HMD's intent to become more aggressive in the Indian market. Retailing for just ₹15,999 ($220, the Nokia 6.1 Plus goes up against of the likes of the Redmi Note 5 Pro and the ZenFone Max Pro M1 in the country.

While there isn’t much we don’t know about the Google Pixel 3 and Google Pixel 3 XL, those two devices aren’t the only things Google will launch at its hardware event on October 9. Today, we get our first real look at one of those items, the so-called “Pixelstand.”

More than 70 new emoji will be coming soon to iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac, including new characters with red hair, gray hair and curly hair, a new emoji for bald people, more emotive smiley faces and additional emoji representing animals, sports and food. The new emoji are available in today’s developer and public beta previews of iOS 12.1, and will be available in upcoming software updates for iOS, macOS and watchOS.

Apple’s brand-new iPhone XS Max features the company’s largest smartphone display ever — a 6.5-inch Super AMOLED variant — but otherwise comes with camera specs that on the surface look pretty much identical to last year’s iPhone X. A closer look reveals important changes, however.

LG Mobile CEO Hwang Jeong-hwan has confirmed the company is working on a foldable phone. Speaking at the press conference for the release of the LG V40 ThinQ (via Yonhap), Hwang explained that LG is working with its partners to prepare the phone. However, it seems unlikely that LG will release the phone any time soon. In the same statement, the CEO said the company isn’t focused on being the first company to release a foldable device. Instead...

Just say, "Hey Siri, I'm getting pulled over." One of the latest apps to hit the iOS 12 mobile highway is Shortcuts. With it, users can plot out a series of actions and trigger them by signaling the voice-assistant. One savvy user created an add-on called Police that can give drivers added security during traffic stops.