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.

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."

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

I still can’t believe this is a $250 phone. The Moto G6 looks and feels like a phone twice its price. It has a great screen, a comfortable design, a clear speaker, and in the few weeks I’ve been using it, no obvious performance issues (despite its budget price and processor). I certainly do have complaints and nitpicks, but I still keep picking it up and thinking, “How on earth is this thing only $250?”

French lawmakers on Monday passed a law banning schoolchildren from having smartphones and other internet-enabled devices at schools. The ban applies to smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and other connected devices, which must be turned off or left at home.

People who know me also know that I'm a fan of Android the way Google builds it on its own phones. Anyone can build Android and is free to add or take away whatever parts they like, but the small additions that Google adds make Android something unique and awesome. But later this year, I may not want to use a phone from Google.

Paying a thousand bucks for a phone is no longer laughable. In fact, with the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 priced at $1,000 and $1,250 (for 128 and 512GB storage sizes) a thousand-dollar high-end phone is probably the new normal. Ahead of the Note 9's launch last week, the head of Samsung's mobile business promised that the company's most powerful phone ever would sell for a "reasonable price".

Samsung’s Galaxy Note phones have always been about more. More screen, more battery, more specs, more power, more features; if you want more of something, the Note is the phone to get. It’s a phone designed and built for the power user who won’t settle for anything less. The new Note 9 gives the most more of any Note phone. It has the biggest screen, the fastest processor, the biggest battery, the largest storage, and the most features.

Renders of Samsung’s next big screened novelty have started to capture the tech news of late, with designs of a folding phone that is said to be Samsung’s next attempt to increase their share of the smartphone market. Now, what I’m about to say is in no way a criticism of Samsung’s tendency to introduce weird and wonderful features into their product line, even though I still might not be fully convinced of the virtues of their curved edge displays that have been part of their mainstream flagship offering since the S8. To my mind, they still serve no desirable purpose and cause unwanted reflections at the sides of my display.

When you’re paying close attention to the maelstrom of tech industry activity, the pace of change can seem logical, methodical, occasionally even a little slow. But look away for even the briefest period of time, and you’ll be shocked by how quickly and radically things have changed when you check back in. The $1,000 price threshold for smartphones is a good example.

Surprise, surprise! Upgrading to new smartphones on AT&T is about to get more expensive. Droid Life this week broke the news that starting on August 1st, AT&T is planning to raise upgrade fees for customers signing new two-year contracts with the carrier to $45, or $5 more than what it currently charges to activate a new device when you sign a two-year deal.

For years, the process of buying a phone remained largely the same. You paid $200 for a flagship, or nothing for a clunker, and in exchange agreed to ride out a two-year contract with the carrier offering the best deal (or service) at the time. All that went away in 2015. People don’t buy phones like they used to. Now they buy them like cars. The key difference between how people bought phones then and now is consumers know what a phone really costs.

We check our phones 221 times a day—an average of every 4.3 minutes—according to a UK study. This number actually may be too low, since people tend to underestimate their own mobile usage. In a 2015 Gallup survey, 61 percent of people said they checked their phones less frequently than others they knew. Our transformation into device people has happened with unprecedented suddenness. By Jacob Weisberg.

In January, British actor Eddie Redmayne made headlines around the world as he became the latest in a growing band of smartphone refuseniks. “It was a reaction against being glued permanently to my iPhone during waking hours,” he explained, turning instead to an old-fashioned “dumb phone” handset that could only make and take calls.

Apple's next event is happening Monday, March 21st, when we're expecting it to unveil a new iPhone, a new iPad, and likely a bit more. The announcements are shaping up to be a sequel to those made at Apple's last event, held six months ago. There, Apple announced the iPhone 6S, iPad Pro, an expansion of Apple Watch designs, and updates to iOS. This month, picture all of that repeated, but smaller. The current speculation is...

It's happened to everyone who owns a powerful smartphone. You wake up in the morning, reach over to your nightstand to pick up your phone, only to realize you forgot to plug in the charging cable. Now, the battery indicator is blinking red. You might as well kiss your productivity on the commute to work goodbye.

If you’ve spent the last few years holding out for a 3D printer that costs under a hundred bucks, then we’ve got good news for you: The printer you’re waiting for is finally here, and it goes by the name of OLO. The device, which first popped up at last year’s Maker Faire in New York, has finally found its way onto Kickstarter — where it obliterated its $80K funding goal in just a few hours.

All chargers are not equal, and I thought a silly mistake meant the end of my HTC 10.

Hollywood stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy were front row at the London launch of a new super-secure Android smart phone Solarin on Tuesday. The top-of-the-range phone promises military-grade encryption technology to protect users' calls and messages and is aimed squarely at business leaders, celebrities, VIPs and the super-rich. Hailed by its makers as "the best smartphone in the world," Solarin has been two and a half years in development and is the first product unveiled by Israeli start-up Sirin Labs.

There’s little question that iPhone users love their smartphones. Regardless of how negative the current news cycle is, Apple’s iPhone lineup is still the best-selling smartphone line in the world by a wide margin. Studies and surveys also consistently show that Apple retains smartphone customers better than any other phone brand, and this has been the case for years. Interestingly, however, a new major study has found that a new smartphone is now the Apple of the American consumer’s eye.

Four. That's how many US dollars the Freedom 251 costs. It's a shockingly low number, especially if you're used to doling out $600 for a flagship phone. And despite raising many eyebrows when it was unveiled by Indian company Ringing Bells back in February -- with some doubting that the phone would materialise at that price -- not only is the Freedom 251 real, it's also surprisingly decent.

Consumer Reports says a Samsung phone that's advertised as being "water resistant" actually isn't. The problem appears limited to the Galaxy S7 Active, a rugged model available only through AT&T in the U.S. The standard S7 and S7 Edge models have the same claims on water resistance and passed tests. Consumer Reports, a non-profit organization that is well respected for its product testing, said Friday that it can't recommend the Active because it doesn't meet Samsung's own claims.

"Wah wah wah. Get over it Ray." That's the response I expect to hear from all the apologists who think that smartphones without headphone jacks are NBD. I'll agree to disagree. The headphone jack and loss of it on the devices we use the most is a very big deal. A massive deal. A deal of epic proportions that will have ramifications on not just phones but the entire consumer electronics world. NBD my butt.

Battery status indicators are being used to track devices, say researchers from Princeton University – meaning warnings of privacy exposure have come to pass. By Alex Hern.

LG is building up to the September 6th launch of its second flagship phone for 2016, the V20, by revealing little snippets and details about it ahead of time. First up is the sound, which this year will be powered by no less than four ESS digital-to-analog converters, all working in concert to produce more refined sound and higher signal-to-noise ratio. This quad-DAC approach is similar to what you’ll find in the Apogee Groove USB DAC and amplifier, and there is indeed merit in the multiplication of internal complexity beyond mere spec bloat.

Steve Wozniak may have left Apple in 1985 but that hasn’t stopped the company’s co-founder from giving his two cents about the latest releases. Like a worried yet slightly distant father, Wozniak just wants Apple to know that even if he can’t be there for it, he cares and wants to help it avoid messing up.

Following reports of exploding batteries in its latest smartphone, Samsung is expected to announce an "unprecedented" recall of the Galaxy 7 Note less than a month after it first debuted. According to South Korea's Yonhap News Agency, an unnamed Samsung official says the company is conducting an investigation and is expected to announce the results this weekend or early next week. Samsung has indeed traced the explosions to the battery of the device and is in talks with Verizon and other U.S. business partners to figure out how to deal with the issue.

Report: Pixel Phones, Google Home, Daydream VR, and a 4K Chromecast will launch on 10/4.

Two weeks ago, Samsung announced that it would recall all 2.5 million units of the Galaxy Note 7 after it found that a defective battery was to blame for 35 devices exploding while on charge globally. However, the Canadian government has now teamed up with Samsung to reveal that more than 70 Galaxy Note 7’s have caught fire in the US alone. That’s almost double the amount of worldwide incidents that were previously reported.

After the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus began arriving to the first round of pre-order customers on Friday, a few users noticed what's become known as a "hissing" sound emanating from the back of the device, where the Apple logo is located. The first reports began on Friday, but the occurrence gained ground when 512 Pixels' Stephen Hackett tweeted about it, posting a video with the "terrible noises" produced by his iPhone clearly audible, which he determined to be caused by heavy performance at the time.