The change goes into effect globally.

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.