Romdhane Marble

Intro Apple has a well-deserved reputation for helping to define our expectations for what are still, to many shoppers, new product types. The iPhone showed both consumers and other handset manufacturers alike how much untapped potential there was in the burgeoning smartphone market, and the iPad helped tablets move away from their characterization as either under-equipped laptops or blown-up phones to a novel, useful form factor in its own right. After those milestones, it was only understandable that all eyes were on Apple as the smartwatch movement began to take shape. Companies like Pebble started getting that ball rolling, and by early 2014, smartwatches felt like they were on the brink of going mainstream, with Android Wear about to make its debut – so where was Apple's eagerly awaited effort?  We had to be patient, and confirmation of the Apple Watch didn't land until the waning days of summer 2014. Even then, it was still a bit of a tease – Apple may hav...

Competition has become pretty stiff over the past couple of months, largely in part due to Google’s rebranding to Pixel from Nexus. The biggest difference between Pixel and Nexus is that Pixel is Google’s first smartphone “designed and built by Google”, whereas Nexus was known for showcasing various Android manufacturers’ designs each year (for example, the Nexus 4 was created by LG and featured LG branding; the Galaxy Nexus was designed by Samsung and featured Samsung branding). And while it’s true that the Pixel was manufactured by HTC, the reason it doesn’t feature the HTC branding was because Google was the sole designer and overseer of the process; HTC simply manufactured it. With Nexus, the manufacturers were a part of the design process as well. So the main change is that Google basically took over everything regarding Pixel, therefore granting the company the ability to take sole ownership. Pixel is Google’s first Google-branded foray ...

Earlier today, another LG-branded flagship made its presence known to the world – despite the fact it’s a region-locked handset. It’s called the V34 (14 spots higher than the V20!), and it was unveiled by LG Japan for the Japanese, and only the Japanese, market. It’s a device that shares all the right similarities with the V20, but also makes a few key changes that, I would imagine, would be pretty exciting to customers all over the world. Let’s go over the basics first. The V34 boasts the same dual-camera system on the back as the V20, and it also features 4GB of RAM, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor under the hood, and there’s Android 7.0 Nougat on board. Like I said, all of the things that LG would want to copy into another device from the V20 have made their way over to the V34. But there are some changes, including the 3000mAh battery inside the V34 (down from the 3200mAh in the V20), and the V34 is only loaded up with 34GB of built-in storage, while the ...

It’s a console. It’s a handheld. It’s… the Nintendo Switch. The other day I wrote an article about the top 10 mobile games to help you pass the time – basically just 10 games that don’t take much effort or time to play on your tablet or smartphone, which is what the mobile gaming genre has basically become. Here and there you get a decent game with a good story and a little bit of depth, but aside from direct ports of console games or emulators, mobile gaming on smartphones and tablets haven’t had much to offer in the way of substance. But the Nintendo Switch will. It may not be a tablet in the traditional sense, but the Nintendo Switch appears to take cues from the tablet form-factor to create a new gaming console that doubles as a portable gaming system. I wasn’t sure whether to classify the Switch as a mobile gaming console, but truly the “mobile” aspect of the device is its biggest selling point. Nintendo, who has been a household name in the console a...

Chinese smartphones have emerged from a murky past of iPhone clones and shady software to become a new force on the global market. Chinese phones tend to be a lot cheaper than phones sold in the West but often have equally good build quality and features. Here are the best Chinese smartphones. OnePlus 3 The third model in the OnePlus flagship series, the OnePlus 3 was launched on June 14, 2016. It ditched the invite system that generated a lot of buzz for previous models but mostly served to annoy customers. This device ushered in a new era for OnePlus and demonstrated a newfound maturity in the Android market. The thing that stood out the most for us was the performance of the OnePlus 3. It comes with a quad-core Snapdragon 820 backed with 6 GB of RAM. This device outdid every phone we have in the office with an AnTuTu benchmark of 140,573. If you’re looking for a Chinese phone that performs well then this is your best bet. The performance was not the ...