It feels a little bit surreal to see the Nokia name become relevant again in the smartphone market. Two years ago, I had thought the beloved smartphone brand that I grew up with was hopelessly lost, and yet here we are today, devouring every piece of news to come out of HMD. The Finnish company has been doing an excellent job of reviving the brand by sticking to a few core guidelines: good hardware, competitive prices, pure Android software, and fast updates.

Oppo’s Find X and Vivo’s Nex are the two most recent and exciting Android devices of the year. Why exciting? Well, they bring us closer to the dream of a truly bezel-less phone, and they do it in dramatic style. Instead of putting a notched area at the top of the screen, both of these phones hailing from China give us pop-up selfie camera modules. Vivo’s is like a miniature periscope, while Oppo’s elevates the entire top of the phone.

The Oppo Find X is already a distinctive phone, with nearly bezel-free design and a slide-out camera system that houses a 25MP front-facing camera with 3D face scanning support and a rear dual camera system. But if that’s not special enough for you, Oppo has announced there’s also going to be a special edition model. The Oppo Find X Lamborghini Edition phone was designed in collaboration with the luxury car maker with distinctive design elements and at least one special feature: SuperVOOC fast charging.

Another car manufacturer is partnering up with an Android OEM to make a luxurious device. The Lamborghini Oppo Find X was announced at the same time as the regular Oppo Find X with some clever tricks up its sleeve. The biggest is the inclusion of Super VOOC which is supposedly the fastest charging technology for smartphones. It’s only fitting it would be launched as a result of a partnership with Lamborghini.

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.

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).