Apple Inc quashed any concern of muted demand for its iPhone X on Friday, saying pre-orders for the 10th anniversary phone were “off the charts”. The company’s shares, which have fallen steadily since it announced in early September it would launch two iPhones within two months, rose nearly 3 percent in response. Pre-orders for the much-anticipated 10th anniversary phone started from 12.01 am PT (0701 GMT) on Friday.

What do you do when your phone breaks? If it’s an iPhone, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll go to an Apple store, where a blue-shirted person will offer either a repair under warranty, or at a cost. That’s what Apple wants you to do. They want to be the only option — official, premium, and licensed. Meanwhile, smartphones are harder to fix than ever.

You've spent months stumbling through the miasma of rumors and leaked FCC documents, but we've reached the light at the end of the tunnel. The LG Nexus 5 is official and it's listed in the Play Store. Pricing is exactly as previously leaked – $349 for the 16GB phone and $399 for 32GB. The phone comes in all black and the white/black panda-phone model. As for the specs, they are exactly as leaked, which is to say, killer.

The iPhone X has a weakness for identical twins. It can’t really tell the difference. It's the first Apple device to include Face ID, a face-mapping technology that can be used unlock the phone, verify Apple Pay, and essentially replaces the fingerprint scanner (or Touch ID).

Essential hasn’t been around for too long, but it’s been the subject of a disproportionate number of headlines in the Android world this year — and often not for a good reason. Their first (and so far only) device shipped much, much later than promised. Even after shipping significantly later than promised, the Essential PH-1’s software and camera stumbled out the gate. And then there was that embarrassing e-mail mishap.

The HTC U11 has been one of the best flagship Android phones of 2017, and now it has been upgraded and enhanced as a new U11 Plus model, freshly announced by HTC today. What are the big differences? The display is the most obvious one, moving from 5.5 inches up to 6 inches, though HTC has shrunk the bezels to fit the new phone into a physical footprint that’s only slightly larger.

Close observers of the Android rumor mill will know that Google made an abrupt change to its Pixel phone plans this summer, shelving its original successor to the Pixel XL, which was codenamed “muskie,” in favor of another device bearing the code title of “taimen.” Taimen went on to become the LG-manufactured Google Pixel 2 XL, while muskie seemed to fade into oblivion — however this week the latter name has resurfaced in the latest Android source code drop.

The iPhone X's Super Retina OLED screen offers the best balance of brightness, accuracy and wide viewing angles.

The average Canadian teenager is on track to spend nearly a decade of their life staring at a smartphone, and that’s no accident, according to an industry insider who shared time-sucking secrets of the app design trade.

The evidence for and against a stubborn online conspiracy theory.

I reviewed the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL a couple of weeks ago. After that review was published, we discovered that the 2 XL exhibits more image retention than you'd expect on a flagship (or really any) phone, especially one so early in its lifecycle. Google quickly moved to address the issue as best it could, saying it's confident there's no real burn-in, but also promising software updates to mitigate against it going forward. The company is also extending the warranty to two years.

Google is really proud of the camera prowess on its Pixel smartphone lineup, and for good reason. The Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL are receiving rave reviews from all over for the quality of the pictures these phones can take. Thus, it’s no surprise that Google would want to center many of their software features around the camera app. A few of the gestures available on the Pixel smartphones are aimed at making launching the camera faster, such as the double tap power gesture to launch the camera and double twisting your phone to switch between front and rear cameras.

As we suspected in our review, the iPhone X is not faring well in the first drop and durability tests. Two different drop tests showed immediate damage to the device. Consumer electronics site CNET ran a drop test from a height of three feet. The glass at the corner of the phone cracked on the very first test, which dropped the phone on its side. A second test dropped the phone on its face, leading to even more fractures. CNET concluded that dropping the phone without a case is "out of the question."

The iPhone X smartphone costs $357.50 to make and sells for $999, giving it a gross margin of 64 percent, according to TechInsights, a firm that tears down technology devices and analyzes the parts inside. The iPhone 8 sells for $699 and has a gross margin of 59 percent. The finding is surprising because technology products tend to become more profitable as they age and the parts for them drop in cost.

There's a lot we can say about Samsung's Galaxy Note 8, but one of its hallmark features is its massive 6.3-inch curved AMOLED display. This display is a true beauty for watching movies, playing games, and browsing the web, but as some of our forum users are quickly discovering, it's not necessarily the most practical thing in the world.

With their first attempt at the mobile market, Razer introduced a device that looks at the smartphone differently. Instead of focusing on minimal bezels or an amazing camera, Razer decided to make a phone for gamers. So how could Razer target the growing mobile gaming market, which is projected to generate $40.6 billion in global revenue in 2017? It starts with the IGZO LCD Display.

HTC monthly financial report for October has been released and the result is not something the company will smile over. Its revenue was NT$6.06 billion ($200 million) which represents 6.8% decrease from September it recorded NT$6.51 bn ($215 million). This decrease is a whopping 25.8% Year-over-Year (YoY). Since the beginning of this year, HTC has made a total sale of NT$52.44 billion which is 18.2% lower than the sales over a similar period last year.

After publicizing ways to reduce power consumption on the iPhone X OLED display, AppleInsider has begun to put the methods to the test to get a feel for exactly how much power can be saved. The answer: a lot.

Ambient light may be all you need to charge your phone. Small, thin and flexible panels created with an inkjet printer can harvest energy from artificial light and sunlight. Conventional solar panels typically use silicon to capture the sun’s energy. But Sadok Ben Dkhil from Dracula Technologies and his team have developed a conductive plastic that can capture a wider range of wavelengths. “Our material can capture energy from indoor light, which isn’t possible with silicon,” says Ben Dkhil. The device is lightweight, non-toxic and can even be folded, which is not the case for silicon solar cells.

The Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL are the newest smartphones in Google’s Pixel smartphone series and while the hardware is mostly an incremental improvement over the previous generation Pixel phones, the software has a couple of really nifty new features. There’s the new camera technology used in the phone’s Portrait Mode feature, the always listening music recognition feature called Now Playing, and an Always on Display feature.