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OnePlus Nord 4 review: an iterative update with welcome additions but a few bugs

6:39 pm | August 8, 2024

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets OnePlus Phones Phones | Tags: AI, AU, UK, US | Comments: Off

OnePlus Nord 4 two-minute review

There’s a comfort in knowing exactly what you’re getting with a phone before you’ve even picked it up, and that’s certainly the case with the OnePlus Nord 4. Given the brand, you know you're getting an Android phone with a focus on performance; given the sub-brand you know it’ll have some competitive features for its mid-range price; and given the '4' you know that the company has been doing this for long enough now to nail the concept.

Chinese company OnePlus created the Nord line as an affordable counterpart to its feature-packed but pricey main series of phones, the most recent of which is the OnePlus 12, and it’s grown into a bustling family of varyingly-priced mobiles.

A brief glance at the OnePlus Nord 4’s specs sheet shows that this is an iterative upgrade over 2023’s OnePlus Nord 3; it takes the same basic design and feature set, improves some of the aspects a little, and throws in a few extra features for good measure.

So you’re getting many of the OnePlus Nord 3 features we liked, including its big, bold, high-res screen and fine camera array. But then there are a few spec improvements: the battery is slightly bigger, the charging is a bit faster, the chipset is newer and quicker, the software is a more recent Android build, and the screen goes quite a bit brighter.

These all bring welcome, even if not especially needed, improvements, and I particularly appreciated the brighter screen and quicker charging during my testing period.

But my favorite part is the new features. OnePlus has made a song and dance about the AI additions to OxygenOS, which let you read auto-summaries of voice recordings or online articles, but I particularly loved a new screen addition called Aqua Touch, which means you can carry on using the display even if your hands are wet. No more annoying mis-touches here.

It’s also worth bearing in mind two things: the OnePlus Nord 4’s base model costs less than the Nord 3 did. And while that 2023 mobile only saw a limited release due to shipping issues, the Nord 4 is a lot easier to buy in most countries.

These considerations make it easier to look past the unchanged screen and the near-identical camera array, which has gained features but lost a lens.

I found it hard to think of ‘cons’ for this OnePlus Nord 4 review; that’s not to say it’s perfect, just that its flaws can be overlooked when you consider its competitive price. Sure, you can ask for better cameras or a more interesting design or wired charging, but it’s unrealistic to expect too much in a phone like this.

A few software problems did detract from my experience using the phone, as did the fact that the high-storage model is quite a bit pricier than the standard one, and the pre-installed bloatware; however, for the price, it’s easy to overlook these.

So the OnePlus Nord 4 continues the Nord-ic tradition of offering lots of power at a low price, and the discount over last year’s model, plus some tweaks across the board, ensure that the newer model is the preferable one to buy.

OnePlus Nord 4 review: price and availability

The OnePlus Nord 4 before a leafy backdrop. — (Image credit: Future)

Released in UK in July 2024; AU launch possible, US unlikely
£429 (roughly $550, AU$820) gets you 12GB RAM, 256GB storage
£529 (roughly $680, AU$1,000) gets you 16GB RAM, 512GB storage

The OnePlus Nord 4 was announced at a launch event in mid-July 2024 ahead of a release in mid-August, alongside the OnePlus Pad 2, OnePlus Watch 2R, and OnePlus Nord Buds 3 Pro.

The phone hasn’t been announced for the US, and there’s a chance that it won’t be given that OnePlus markets different Nord models in different areas. The phone is listed on the OnePlus Australia website, so it’ll likely be available there, but there’s no pricing yet.

In the UK, two versions of the phone are on sale. The base model comes with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage, and you can pick it up for £429 (roughly $550, AU$820), while if you want more power there’s a 16GB and 512GB alternative for £529 (roughly $680, AU$1,000), which is the model I tested.

Those prices puts this phone in the ‘mid-range’ bracket, where it goes up against rivals including the Google Pixel 8a, Samsung Galaxy A55 and Oppo Reno 12 Pro – particularly the latter, which comes from OnePlus' parent company and has quite a few specs in common with the Nord 4 (more on that at the end of this review).

OnePlus Nord 4 review: specs

The OnePlus Nord 4 is a mid-ranged mobile with specs to match. Here's the spec sheet in full:

OnePlus Nord 4 review: design

Two-tone body
IP65 rating and metal frame for protection
Camera bumps stick out a fair way

The OnePlus Nord 4 offers a small design twist on the generic Android phone.

Its flagship silver edition comes with a two-tone body: the lower three-fifths has a striped ridged-looking pattern (the effect is just optical, as it feels totally flat to touch) while the top two-thirds that surrounds the camera bumps has the flat look of a typical phone. It's a small touch that makes the Nord look distinct.

Other than that, though, this is barely different to any other phone on the market. It’s pretty big, measuring 162.6 x 75 x 7.9mm, and bang-average in terms of weight, tipping the scales at 199.5g.

Typical for modern-day Androids, it has a USB-C port on the bottom and a power button and volume rocker on the right edge; I’d say the power button is well within reach for hands of varying sizes, although those with smaller mitts might struggle to adjust the volume one-handed. Breaking the norm somewhat, the Nord also has an alert slider (yes, like old OnePlus phones – throwback!) which lets you easily switch between silent, vibrate and full-volume modes. It’s an easy way to ensure that your phone is muted in important meetings or moments, though I found it hard to easily set the slider into the middle position (vibrate), as it tended to jump all the way to the left or right.

The metal frame and rear make the OnePlus Nord 4 feel well-protected from drops and knocks, as does the IP65 rating against dust and beads of water.

With two big camera bumps on the rear for the two lenses, the Nord doesn’t sit flat against a table, but these two protrusions weren’t as distinct as those on many of the phone's rivals; I never caught the camera lenses while sliding the phone into my pocket, for example.

My review unit was the silver model, which seems to be the one shown in promotional materials. There are also black and green options, and these have the same two-tone rear, although the lower part isn’t striped, instead having a matted look.

Design score: 3.5 / 5

OnePlus Nord 4 review: display

6.74-inch, 1240 x 2772 resolution
Bold colors thanks to AMOLED display
Aqua Touch feature lets you use display with wet hands

When you look at the OnePlus Nord 4, you can instantly tell it has a big screen: clocking in at 6.74 inches diagonally, this is certainly a beast. What might surprise you though is the resolution: at 1240 x 2772 (roughly 2.5K) you’re getting more pixels here than on the majority of similarly-priced Android phones.

The display looks good – it's an AMOLED panel with nice vibrant colors that supports HDR10+. The max brightness is apparently 2150 nits, which is very high, although during testing the phone’s display never seemed that bright to me, and I wouldn’t have minded some extra illumination in well-lit conditions.

The refresh rate is 120Hz, which means the screen image updates 120 times per second, which in turn ensures smooth motion when you’re navigating through menus, playing games or watching supported videos.

The display is broken up by a very small punch-hole gap for the front-facing camera; it’s so small that it barely takes any space away from the screen.

A feature OnePlus mentioned in its promotional material for the Nord 4 is Aqua Touch, which means that the display will still pick up your touch well when your hands are wet. I tested this in a few situations that’d normally cause me grief with my normal phone like after a shower, in a mild drizzle of rain and when doing the washing-up, and it always worked perfectly – Aqua Touch is a really impressive addition.

Display score: 4 / 5

OnePlus Nord 4 review: software

Android 14 with OxygenOS 14.1, and four updates
Good-looking UI and some extra features
Some software bloatware and bugs

Like most of its contemporaries, the OnePlus Nord 4 comes with Android 14 pre-installed, and as a OnePlus phone it has the company’s OxygenOS 14.1 user interface layered over the top.

The company has promised that the phone will see “up to” four updates too, bringing you to at most Android 18, which is a decent amount given that not all rivals at this price point guarantee you even one update.

OnePlus fans love OxygenOS, and it’s not hard to see why. The user interface and menus are attractive, with bold colors and punchy icons, but with enough restraint that your eyes aren’t being overwhelmed with colors and shapes. The quick settings menu is a great example with this, as it makes it easy for you to swipe down and toggle a feature, increase the brightness or turn on Bluetooth.

OxygenOS also brings some unique features. One I always use on OnePlus phones is Zen Space, which lets you soft-lock your mobile while you work so you can concentrate. Some relatively newer ones are available on the Nord 4 too, including a tool which summarizes online articles you’re reading, or audio notes into bullet-list agendas.

The Nord does have some bloatware, with pre-installed games, online retailers and social media platforms already present when you boot up the phone. It’s not nearly as bad as on some other phones at this price I’ve tested, but there’s no such thing as ‘good bloatware’, just ‘not-as-bad bloatware’.

During testing, I faced a few issues that affected my experience of using the phone; I don’t know whether these are limited to my review unit, or the current build of OxygenOS or come from another source, but I encountered them often enough that they bear flagging.

Minor issues include that auto-rotate wouldn’t always work properly, infrequently marooning the device in a horizontal orientation, and that sometimes I’d unlock the phone only for it to think I was trying to turn on the lock screen magazine feature.

An extra that I’m adding to this review at the eleventh hour is that the device struggled to connect to either of the PCs I tried to download its photos to using USB: sometimes my PC wouldn’t recognize any of the images, sometimes it would see a few but not let me download them, and sometimes my computer just wouldn’t detect that the phone was connected to it at all. On a few occasions, trying to open the Nord’s storage through my PC caused Windows to freeze for a little bit.

I go through this process of downloading photos from every phone I test, and I’ve never faced such inexplicable connection issues before. The camera samples you see below were therefore transferred via the cloud and have been compressed a little.

One final issue that I faced was that the phone would frequently lock without me pressing the lock button; it happened a lot during gameplay, and I’d need to hurriedly punch in the pass code when mid-way through a game.

Software score: 3 / 5

OnePlus Nord 4 review: cameras

50MP main and 8MP ultra-wide cameras, 16MP for selfies
AI scene optimization saves some shots
Magic eraser AI tool has okay results

You get two rear cameras on the OnePlus Nord 4, and one on the front, and they’re clearly not the important bits of this phone.

In terms of the rear array there’s a 50MP f/1.8 main camera joined by an 8MP f/2.2 ultra-wide one with a 112-degree field of view. If you’re a big OnePlus fan you might notice that that's one fewer rear camera than on the Nord 3, but the lack of a 2MP auxiliary camera here is no great loss; the other two cameras are the same.

Hardware-wise, these snappers are fine; they do the job but you’re not going to be uttering ‘wow’ too often at any of the results. Pictures are sufficiently bright and detailed, though they don't have a huge amount of dynamic range.

However I occasionally took a picture that looked distinctly better, and it seemed to be when the scene optimization jumped in to make some tweaks. I’ve included two pictures of flowers which show this well: the stark contrasts between the bright flowers and the shadows in the image really pull out the flora’s vibrancy.

On the topic of AI, OnePlus has included the same AI eraser tool that most phone brands have adopted, so you can remove unwanted objects from snaps. The mode was good at removing people from a scene, but not as good at actually identifying people to remove in the first place, and often I’d circle people or objects to be removed only for the phone to think I still wanted to keep their legs or hairstyles, or one part of the furniture they were seated on.

On the front you’re looking at a 16MP f/2.4 main camera – it’s nothing to write home about but it’s fit for purpose, letting you take bold selfies (thanks to some ample post-processing). Portrait mode is pretty light-touch, which I appreciate, giving gentle beauty tweaks and a soft bokeh that looks lovely and natural.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a mid-range phone, you’re not getting any unique camera modes here, but the long list of expected ones show up: portrait, panorama, time-lapse, slow-mo, night, pro, pro video (here called Film) and so on. Video recording goes up to 4K at 60fps and down to 720p at 240fps or 1080p at 120fps.

OnePlus Nord 4 camera samples

Camera score: 3 / 5

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OnePlus Nord 4 camera sample — (Image credit: Future)

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OnePlus Nord 4: performance and audio

Really powerful thanks to Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 3 chipset
Two models: 12GB/256GB or 16GB/512GB
Bluetooth 5.4 or USB-C port for audio

Phone fans might see that the OnePlus Nord 4 totes a Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 3 chipset, and turn their nose up at the ‘7’ part, which denotes that this is a mid-range processor. I would have been the same if I didn’t begin my testing process with a benchmark test.

In the Geekbench 6 benchmark test, the OnePlus Nord 4 returned a surprisingly powerful multi-core score of 3863, which puts it above most of its same-priced contemporaries and comparable to the top-end powerhouse of yesteryear.

That’s a lot of power for a mid-range phone, and my day-to-day testing matches the high hopes that score instilled in me. The Nord is a beast for gaming, smashing through game after game of Call of Duty Mobile with little problem, even with graphics turned all the way up. I got a bit too into the gaming part of testing the phone as a result…

I was using the 16GB RAM model of phone, which comes with an indulgent 512GB memory, and people using the 12GB / 256GB might have a slightly slower experience when gaming. But I don’t imagine that lower-powered model will offer a drastically different experience for most mobile titles.

Moving on to audio, you may have noticed in the ‘design’ section that I didn’t mention a 3.5mm headphone jack, and that’s because OnePlus has ig-Nord this for its latest phone. Instead you can use the USB-C port with an adaptor for wired audio, the mobile’s Bluetooth 5.4 connection for wireless headphones, earbuds or speakers on the built-in stereo speakers to play out loud. I found the latter fine for mobile gaming and video calls but if you want high-quality sound for streaming TV shows or music, it won’t impress you.

Performance score: 4 / 5

OnePlus Nord 4 review: battery life

Phone easily lasts into second day of use
Blistering 100W charging
No wireless powering

OnePlus has outfitted the Nord 4 with a giant 5,500mAh battery, which serves its big screen well. The phone easily smashes through a day of use without breaking a sweat, and it works well into day two before you’ll need to charge it up.

This proved true even in the middle of my ‘games testing’ phase, showing that the mobile is a reliable blower for people who need a long-lasting device.

Charging the phone up is incredibly quick, too, with the mobile boasting 100W wired charging. This gets the device from empty to full in less than half an hour (if you have a compatible charger, of course). Incredibly quick.

Battery score: 4 / 5

OnePlus Nord 4 review: value

If you’re considering the lower-storage version of the OnePlus Nord, I’d say you’re getting great value for money: the processing power, charging speed and good-looking display are all offered for a relatively low cost.

Jump up to 16GB/512GB and there’s quite a price hike, and that muddles the value proposition somewhat; I can see people being skeptical buying the phone for this higher price.

Saying that, if you need lots of storage it’s your only real option (other than cloud storage) so you can justify the price increase that way.

Value score: 4 / 5

Should you buy the OnePlus Nord 4?

Buy it if...

You are a gamer on a budget
The Nord offers a lot of power compared to its same-priced rivals, and its attractive display and fast charging are just extra perks to make it a gaming powerhouse.

You often have wet hands
The Aqua Touch display is a game-changer in loads of different settings, and if you text in the bath, live somewhere rainy or just spill your Pimm's all the time, you'll notice the difference.

You want a big streaming mobile
Not too many cheap phones like this have screens that are both big and attractive, so if you're a Netflix fiend you might find this a great option.

Don't buy it if...

You own the Nord 3
As an iterative update, you really don't need to buy the Nord 4 if you own last year's model, and possibly even the previous Nord flagships unless they're ailing. It's not that huge of an upgrade.

You're a photography fan
If you spend ages trying to find the perfect shot with your phone, I don't think the Nord 4 will impress you. It's fine for QR codes, document scanning and snaps to send via WhatsApp though.

OnePlus Nord 4 review: Also consider

While largely positive, this OnePlus Nord 4 review should make it clear that the phone has issues. So here are some other options you may want to consider:

How I tested the OnePlus Nord 4

Review test period = 2.5 weeks
Testing included = Everyday usage, including web browsing, social media, photography, video calling, gaming, streaming video, music playback
Tools used = Geekbench 6, Geekbench ML, GFXBench, native Android stats

I tested the OnePlus Nord 4 for just shy of three weeks, so I had ample time to put it through its paces.

To test it I used it as though it was my own smartphone: I used it for texting, calling, taking photos, playing games, watching TV shows, checking my hair do and everything else you'd hope your phone would do.

As you can tell by my software gripes, this testing is rigorous, and it also involves some benchmark tests and tools so that we can compare phones against themselves in an objective way.

I've been reviewing smartphones for TechRadar since early 2019, and in that time have used plenty of mobiles from OnePlus, as well as other devices in the price segment. In fact I recently reviewed one of the competitors mentioned above, and moved straight from the Nord 4 onto another OnePlus blower.

Read more about how we test

First reviewed July 2024

Xiaomi 14 Ultra review: the king of the camera phones

11:00 am | August 5, 2024

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Phones Xiaomi Phones | Tags: GPU, OS, Qualcomm Snapdragon, US | Comments: Off

Xiaomi 14 Ultra: Two-minute review

The past few years have seen the temperature quickly rise in the camera phone market. For many months in 2023, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra ruled the roost, until the Xiaomi 13 Ultra, with its Leica-powered camera technology, came along to shake things up. The latter phone was usurped by the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra earlier this year, but now Xiaomi is back with the Xiaomi 14 Ultra, a handset that proves Xiaomi's commitment to producing the best camera phone.

With four rear cameras and a front camera, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra has everything you need, from super telephoto to ultra-wide.

Images are captured on a new 1-inch sensor that delivers a truly step-less variable aperture with intermediate stops between f/1.6 and f/4.0. This guarantees incredible results in low light and produces a level of detail that has never before been possible on a smartphone. The phone's sensor handles highlights equally well, with detail maintained even when you'd expect it to be blown out.

The quality continues with the phone's design. A high-strength aluminum frame and Xiaomi Shield Glass provide all the strength and protection required to stand up to day-to-day wear. The softness of nano-tech vegan leather on the rear helps to give a nice tactile experience, too.

The Xiaomi 14 Ultra's 6.73-inch LTPO AMOLED display with Xiaomi Shield Glass continues this thread of quality, offering a 3200 x 1440 pixel resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate that's fantastic for watching videos and gaming.

One of my only gripes with this phone's design is that the weight of the rear camera notch makes it impossible to hold and operate with one hand. Annoyingly, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra kept tipping out of the top of my hand.

The performance of the Xiaomi 14 Ultra is another one of its strengths. The phone's Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset is an impressive CPU with very few limitations, and enables apps to keep running with very little downtime.

All in all, then, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra is a fantastic phone. Whether it's worth the money will depend on how much you intend to use your phone for camera and video work. Considering some of the best beginner DSLRs can be picked up for a similar price, potential customers will need to weigh up whether they want their phone and camera in one package. If the answer is 'yes', then the Xiaomi 14 Ultra is hard to beat.

Xiaomi 14 Ultra review: Price and availability

Priced from £1,299
Released in the UK February 2024
Not available in US

The Xiaomi 14 Ultra is available in the UK for a price of £1,299. This will give you storage of 16GB + 512GB, with no other options to choose from. This incredible camera phone is yet to be released in the US or Australia.

One of the 14 Ultra's direct rivals is the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra 512GB, which is currently retailing in the UK for £1,349 so Xiaomi's price is a little cheaper. A 25GB version of the S24 Ultra can be picked up for £1,249, which means the Xiaomi 14 Ultra sits squarely in the middle in terms of price.

This phone is very much for photography enthusiasts. If you don't need the next best camera phone but rather need a great everyday phone, then check out one of our best phones of 2024.

Value score: 4 / 5

Xiaomi 14 Ultra review: Specs

Xiaomi 14 Ultra review: Design

High-strength aluminium frame
Xiaomi Shield Glass
Nano-tech vegan leather

The Xiaomi 14 Ultra is beautifully designed and engineered with some of the best materials seen on any flagship phone at the moment. The case is dominated by a sizable circular notch that protrudes out of the back. Inside are four amazing Leica cameras alongside a flash, with everything protected by strengthened glass.

There's no denying that it looks great but I have a couple of problems with it. The first is that I was scared of breaking it. The 7 or 8 mm protrusion means that every time you put your phone down, you're in danger of scratching the glass. This is not something you want to be concerned about, especially when the cameras are the main selling point of the phone.

The second problem I have with it is that it makes the top half of the phone significantly heavier than the bottom half. This wouldn't be a problem, save for the fact that it's almost impossible to hold the phone in one hand and type with that same hand. Every time I tried, the phone just flopped out of the top of my hand. Not great at all. I appreciate they will have wanted to keep the overall weight down but some extra weight towards the bottom would have helped to counter the issue.

Aside from the problematic notch, the overall design is actually incredibly nice. It's beautiful to look at and masterfully engineered. The phone is made from a brand-new 6M42 high-strength aluminium frame, Xiaomi Shield Glass, and next-generation Xiaomi nano-tech vegan leather.

It sounds impressive, and believe me, it is. I tried bending the phone, and it didn't budge a bit. The material choices not only keep everything safe but also increase durability. The strength represents a doubling of rigidity compared to the Xiaomi 13 Pro.

The back of the device is covered in a new material developed by Xiaomi called nano-tech vegan leather. It is resistant to both wear and dirt, increasing overall durability. At the end of my tests, which took around a month, there were no visible marks on it at all. Now, I think if you took a fingernail to it, you'd quickly scratch it but that's the payoff with a textured surface like this.

The power button and volume rocker are located on the right-hand side of the phone and are nicely positioned for easy access. The power button has a textured finish, which is a nice touch and helps users identify it without looking.

The device lacks a range of different colours to customise the user experience. Xiaomi has instead opted to only ship it in either black or white.

Design score: 4 / 5

Xiaomi 14 Ultra review: Display

6.73-inch LTPO AMOLED with Xiaomi Shield Glass
3200 x 1440 px resolution (20:9 aspect ratio)
120Hz Refresh rate

The Xiaomi 14 Ultra boasts a gorgeous 6.73-inch LTPO AMOLED, which absolutely looks the part. The display is almost edge to edge, with pixels running right up to the point when the glass starts to curve off towards the aluminium edges. This is achieved by stacking multiple layers and thereby introducing the required flexibility at the edges. It works really well, and it blends seamlessly into the frame.

The display has 522 PPI and a 3200 x 1440 pixel resolution, which works out at a 20:9 aspect ratio. This is noticeably larger than the 2670 x 1200 resolution on the Xiaomi 14. I would love to have seen the resolution pushed up to 4K, especially for a phone that is labelled 'Ultra'.

The inclusion of an LTPO panel with a variable refresh rate significantly improves light efficiency and power consumption. The technology allows for refresh rates of anything between 1 and 120 Hz. The top end is perfect for gamers needing the quickest refresh speeds. It performs really well and delivers buttery smooth graphics, whatever you're using the phone for.

At 3,000 peak nits, the 14 Ultra delivers higher brightness even than the iPhone 15's Super Retina XDR OLED panel. At this brightness, the display is still visible in the brightest of environments.

All of this next-level technology is protected by Xiaomi Shield Glass. Xiaomi developed technology results in an interlocking structure through high-temperature sintering. This provides not only the necessary transparency but also superior strength and drop resistance. I had no concerns and was glad to see the glass survive a few knocks.

Display score: 4.5 / 5

Xiaomi 14 Ultra review: Software

HyperOS out of the box
Runs on top of Android 14
4 years of OS + 5 years of security updates

As with all of the Xiaomi 14 Series, the 14 Ultra takes on HyperOS. This is Xioami's new interface, which looks very much the same as its old OS, MIUI. To be fair, they have rebuilt it from the ground up, resulting in significantly more fluid and responsive transitions. These changes are most welcome, as MIUI was beginning to struggle on recent new phone releases.

The adoption of HyperOS is not all uneventful, though. One of the primary benefits is that it helps integrate the 14 Ultra into the wider Xiaomi ecosystem, including wearables, tablets, and now even their debut car.

The user experience is very different from almost all other Android phones, with Xiaomi ditching the long-established app drawer. This isn't particularly a problem, though, and if anything, it helps to simplify what can oftentimes be an over cluttered interface. One of the other big changes is that Xiaomi has followed swipe-down gestures found on iOS devices, with the top left and right corners delivering different results. I love that usability on my iPhone and it's great to see other phone manufacturers taking note.

As is the case with almost all Android phones, the 14 Ultra and its HyperOS include a lot of apps that could be considered bloatware. Unfortunately, this is not just the case for third-party apps; it has seeped into Xiaomi's homegrown apps too. I like to get rid of as many of these straight after setting up a new phone but Xiaomi doesn't allow for some to be removed, which is frustrating.

Before you think this is all going to be a big HyperOS bashing, there are some things that I love about it. One of the most significant ones is its gallery app, which integrates natively with Google Photos. This helps to keep your photos backed up without requiring much human intervention.

If you're interested in digging deep into everything that HyperOS offers, then Xiaomi has a dedicated page for all things HyperOS.

Software score: 4 / 5

Xiaomi 14 Ultra review: Cameras

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Main 50MP f/1.63-f/4.0 23mm focal length
Floating telephoto 50MP f/1.8 75mm focal length
Periscope 50MP f/2.5 120mm focal length
Ultra-wide 50MP f/1.8 12mm focal length
Front 32MP f/2.0 90° FOV

The Xiaomi 14 Ultra is pretty impressive in most areas but here's where it gets really special. Quite simply, this is the best camera on any phone, ever. Let's take a look at why.

It all begins with an all-new Leica 1-inch sensor for the main camera. The 2023 model already had a very capable 1-inch sensor but the newer one provides a truly stepless variable aperture with intermediate stops between F1.63 and F4.0. Leica continues to dominate this area of the market and the results are stunning, with fantastic low-light performance and unrivalled image quality.

Above all, I was most impressed by the sensor's ability to handle such a wide dynamic range. Rather than blowing out highlights, it was able to sensitively control them and retain the necessary detail. It was the same story with the darker areas. Noise is also kept to a minimum in low-light areas.

Images were noticeably crisper and more vibrant compared to the Galaxy S24 Ultra, which I was using for comparison shots. The latter were much flatter, which might be preferable to photographers wanting more colour grading control in post. The Xiaomi defaults to a Leica Vibrant profile but this can be swapped out for Leica Authentic. This seemed equally vibrant in my estimations.

Moving from inside to outside, the main camera system is located in a circular notch that protrudes out from the rear. This provides four different lenses, ranging from a 120mm periscope down to a 12mm ultra-wide. In between, there is a 75mm telephoto and a 23mm main.

All of these produce outstanding results but I was most impressed by the bokeh that all four lenses were able to generate. All of this is thanks to the next-level engineering that Leica has put into their lenses. The Bokeh is clean, predictable, and all generated in-camera.

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The telephoto and periscope cameras provide an almost unbelievable level of zoom, something that is rarely seen in mobile phone cameras. Having become accustomed to digital zooms that reduce detail and introduce noise, it's a breath of fresh air to be able to access such long focal lengths at the press of a button.

Pro mode on the rear camera makes it possible to change all the settings that you would expect to find on any DSLR, including aperture, ISO, shutter speed, and white balance. Providing this level of fine control could have led to an overwhelming interface but Xiaomi has done a fantastic job of making settings and dials incredibly user-friendly and intuitive.

The front selfie camera offers a lower but still impressive 32MP and is fixed at f/2.0. There is little to distinguish between the rear and front cameras, which is testament to what Leica and Xiaomi have achieved. Images from the front camera are as sharp as a pin and auto-focus is bang on every time.

Video quality is equally good, with 4K resolution possible up to 120 fps. Being able to slow footage down up to 4 times gives an impressive amount of flexibility when video editing in post. It is possible to increase the resolution to 8K but that does result in a drop in frame rate to 30 fps. Even though the Xiaomi 14 Ultra is primarily targeted at stills photographers, there is still plenty to attract amateur or indie videographers.

Camera score: 5 / 5

Xiaomi 14 Ultra review: Performance

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Mobile Platform
GPU: Qualcomm® Adreno™ GPU
8GB of LPDDR5X RAM

The 14 Ultra follows in the footsteps of the Xiaomi 14 with the inclusion of Qualcomm's flagship mobile silicon Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. This is an identical CPU to what is found in almost every flagship phone of 2024 including the Galaxy S24 Ultra, the Find X7 Ultra, and the Magic6 Pro.

The CPU is boosted by a Qualcomm® Adreno™ GPU to help with graphics processing. As a result, this is one of the most powerful phones on the market. Everything about this phone is quick, from the fingerprint scanner to app loading and switching.

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HyperOS manages performance like a pro, with power profiles that keep all your favourite apps under control. There is a dedicated 'performance mode' but I never came across a need for it.

With its 120 Hz display and powerful processors, the 14 Ultra is also sure to appeal to gamers. I didn't experience any performance drop outs and loading bars were few and far between. Game Turbo helps increase performance with the ability to prioritise networking latency, touch response input, and, of course, boost performance at the expense of power consumption.

Performance score: 4.5 / 5

Xiaomi 14 Ultra review: Battery

5000mAh (typ) battery
90W HyperCharge
80W wireless HyperCharge

The battery of the 14 Ultra is slightly beefier than the Xiaomi 14, with a 5000mAh chosen instead of the 4,610mAh. Wireless charging is also possible up to 80W, rather than only 50W. Wired charging still tops out at 90W but that was to be expected.

Advertised charging speeds are 33 minutes for wired and 46 minutes for wireless. I wasn't able to test the latter but the wired charging time is relatively accurate. Such quick charging times are incredible and will help ensure you're never out of juice for long. To get these speeds, you'll need to make sure 'boost charging speed' is activated in the phone's settings menu.

The phone offers four different battery modes, including performance, balanced, battery saver, and ultra battery saver. You can expect to enjoy two or even three days of average use from the battery. If you are regularly gaming or streaming videos, then this will naturally reduce in time.

There's also a really nice 'Battery check-up' feature that will not only tell you what can be done to increase battery life but also how much time you'll gain for each individual item. I found this incredibly helpful, especially when I had a low battery but couldn't get to a charging point.

Battery score: 4.5 / 5

Should you buy the Xiaomi 14 Ultra?

Buy it if...

You want an incredible camera
The Leica-developed quad camera system is second to none at the moment, even outperforming Samsung's Galaxy S24 Ultra. It's 1-inch sensor is capable of handling low light and wide dynamic range like a pro.

You like premium build quality
High-strength aluminium frame, Xiaomi Shield Glass, and nano-tech vegan leather all contribute to a strong and gorgeous looking phone.

You like Xiaomi's latest OS, HyperOS
The Xiaomi 14 Ultra's hardware and software offer near-endless degrees of customisation and functionality. If you are happy putting in the time to fine-tune the settings, then you can benefit from a truly personal experience.

Don't buy it if...

You want a well-balanced phone
The quad camera Leica notch on the rear of the phone is so heavy that it makes it very difficult to hold the phone and operate it with one hand. This is a significant design issue.

You like a lightweight set of apps
As is the case with most Android phones, HyperOS comes with a fair amount of bloatware across both third-party and first party apps. Unfortunately some of these are considered essential and therefore can't be uninstalled.

You want an affordable phone
At £1,299, this is one of the most expensive phones around. If you're not interested in phone camera photography then there are a lot of other better and cheaper alternatives out there.

Xiaomi 14 Ultra review: Also consider

The Xiaomi 14 Ultra has some clear strengths, but also some clearly-defined shortcomings. If you've got this far and think something else might be more your thing, why not consider one of these alternatives.

Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max
If you want the absolute best phone but the Xiaomi 14 Ultra isn't what you're looking for, then check out Apple's biggest and best iPhone.

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra
The only camera to rival the Xiaomi 14 Ultra in the camera category is the Galaxy S25 Ultra. Alongside great optics, it also has great battery life, top-notch performance, and new AI features.

How I tested the Xiaomi 14 Ultra

Review test period: four weeks
Testing included: everyday use including web browsing, social media, photography, video calling, gaming, streaming video, music playback

I used the Xiaomi Ultra 14 as my primary phone for a number of weeks and was therefore able to get fully to grips with all of its features. My use extended to a number of apps and included web browsing and gaming.

With the camera being the standout feature, I also took it out on several trips, putting the cameras through their paces to see how they stacked up. I took a Galaxy S24 Ultra out on these trips, enabling me to make side-by-side comparisons of identical photos.

During my tests, I also paid careful attention to how the phone felt to use. Considering how much time we spend handling our phones, this is a vital part of any phone review. Using the phone for a variety of different tasks and scenarios has enabled me to build up a fuller picture of a typical user experience.

Read more about how we test

First reviewed June 2024

Xiaomi 14 Ultra deals

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: playing fast and loose with the term ‘new’

5:00 pm | July 27, 2024

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Phones | Tags: Gorilla Glass, OIS, UI, USD | Comments: Off

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro: Two-minute review

The title of ‘Best gaming phone’ has arguably never been more up for grabs than it is in 2024. While Asus turned out a solid pair of smartphones with its ROG Phone 8 series, it also took several steps towards the mainstream that arguably diluted the appeal of those devices to gamers.

As the only other company regularly turning out gaming phones, Nubia is best poised to take advantage of this change in priorities from the category leader. The Nubia Red Magic 9 Pro, which was released earlier this year, was something of a bargain, offering top-end performance, built-in fan cooling, and physical controls in a mid-priced package.

Now the Red Magic 9S Pro is here, offering incremental improvements over the 9 Pro for the same price. We could probably just copy and paste our Red Magic 9 Pro review in at this point, and most of what we said about that phone would still be accurate.

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro — (Image credit: Future / Jon Mundy)

There’s a strong argument to be made that this is a needless update, with a nigh-on identical flat-edged design (complete with mappable capacitive trigger buttons), the same 6500mAh battery with 80W wired charging, and the same dual 50MP camera system backed by a 2MP macro sensor.

Even the chip that runs the show is pretty much the same, albeit this ‘Leading Version’ of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is clocked slightly higher than before. There’s either 12GB or 16GB of RAM, depending on the variant you opt for.

To accompany this slightly overclocked component, Nubia has stuck in an upgraded ICE 13.5 cooling system, which adds a new frost cooling gel into the equation.

Unfortunately, Nubia’s decision to stick with the same basic design means the Red Magic 9S Pro has the same flaws as its predecessor. While it’s nice to have an unimpeded 6.8-inch FHD+ AMOLED display, Nubia’s implementation still means that you get a terrible in-display selfie camera.

You also have to put up with Nubia’s less-than-brilliant custom Android UI. It’s much better than it was only a couple of years ago, but if you’re after an elegant day-to-day experience, you’re better served spending similar money on one of the best mid-range phones on the market.

Despite the lack of anything really new, however, the Red Magic 9S Pro somehow finds itself in a straight shootout with the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro as the best gaming phone on the market. Given its clearer focus on gaming, as well as its superior value proposition, it might just scrape the win.

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: price and availability

From $649 / £579 / Australian customers can buy from Red Magic’s global store in USD
Early-bird offer from July 23 to July 30, 2024

The international version of the Red Magic 9S Pro will be available from July 23, 2024. For its first week on sale, an early-bird offer will be running that enables purchasers to secure a $30 / £30 discount.

There will eventually be four color/storage variants on offer, starting with the entry-level Sleet model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $649 / £579. The Cyclone and Snowfall models – both of which ship with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage – cost $799 / £709.

The fourth Frost model won’t hit shops until mid-September 2024, and will be another entry-level option, with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $649 / £579.

That pricing is identical to the Red Magic 9 Pro – all that’s different is the addition of the extra entry-level Frost option.

Value score: 5/5

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: specs

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: design

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Gorilla Glass 5 front and back, aluminum frame
Dead-flat shape
520Hz capacitive shoulder buttons
Dedicated gaming mode switch

With this being an S-series device, the Red Magic 9S Pro looks and feels nigh-on identical to the Red Magic 9 Pro before it. It’s exactly the same size (164 x 76.4 x 8.9mm) and weight (229g), which means you’re dealing with a phone that hits Galaxy S24 Ultra levels of unwieldiness.

This is one of the most angular phones you’re likely to find, with flat surfaces all around. Even the camera module is integrated into the Gorilla Glass 5 back, while the Gorilla Glass 5-coated front doesn’t exhibit so much as the slightest hint of curvature.

The thick, flat frame is formed of aluminum, which gives the phone a solid feel, and this vast rim houses more points of interest than you might be accustomed to. Most of these are located on the right edge, where you’ll find a pair of 520Hz capacitive buttons (with integrated LED lights) that can be mapped to controls in many games.

These buttons flank one of two vents for the integrated cooling fan, a long volume rocker, a nicely tactile circular power button, and a dedicated gaming mode switch that boots the phone into Nubia’s gaming UI.

The top edge of the phone, meanwhile, houses a 3.5mm headphone jack, which I’d suggest is an essential inclusion in any serious gaming phone. The opposite edge houses a USB-C port, but there’s no secondary charging port on the longer side, as we’ve seen on older ROG models (but not, alas, the ROG Phone 8).

Those two shorter edges also house the phone’s stereo speakers, which isn’t the most gaming-friendly of decisions. It’s generally better to have these be front-firing, as it’s too easy to block them with your hands when you’re holding the phone. The output is extremely loud and clear, but it lacks the controlled nuance and depth of more expensive phones.

The rear of the phone adopts the same kind-of-transparent design as the 9 Pro. I say ‘kind-of-transparent’ because if you look closely, precious little of the phone’s inner workings are actually exposed here – there’s a symbol depicting the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 ‘Leading Version’ chip and some vaguely circuit board-evoking sections, but only a window showing the cooling fan seems genuine.

The most impressive part of the Red Magic 9S Pro design is on the front, where minimal bezels and the lack of a notch result in a 93.7% screen-to-body ratio. Admittedly, that doesn’t necessarily make for the best gaming experience – we’ve already discussed the benefits of front-firing speakers, and it’s always handy to have something to hold onto as well – but it certainly looks impressive.

Design score: 3.5/5

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: display

Large 6.8-inch screen
FHD+ resolution, 120Hz refresh rate
BOE Q9+ luminescent material
Under-display selfie camera

Without wishing to sound like a stuck record so early in the review (believe me, there’s more to come), the Red Magic 9S Pro display is identical to that of the Red Magic 9 Pro. That is, it’s a large 6.8-inch OLED screen with a 2480 x 1116 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate.

That’s not the fastest screen on a gaming phone – the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro hits 165Hz – but given that relatively few mobile games will even support frame rates of up to 120fps, this is verging on being a non-issue.

Nubia stepped up the vibrancy with the 9 Pro screen, and the 9S Pro benefits from the same BOE Q9+ luminescent material. Translation: the colors are particularly punchy, and those concerned about a faithful video playback experience will want to dial things back to the more muted ‘Soft’ mode.

In peak conditions, this screen is capable of hitting 1600 nits. With auto brightness turned off and the brightness cranked up to the max, I recorded a top brightness of 447 nits – again, very much in keeping with the 9 Pro.

As already mentioned, one of the most striking things about this display is that it’s completely unimpeded by a front-facing camera. Aside from the likes of the Sony Xperia 1 VI, most modern phones lump you with a notch of some kind, but the Red Magic 9S Pro has an in-display selfie camera to preserve that pristine canvas.

Display score: 4/5

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: cameras

50MP main with OIS this time
50MP ultra-wide, 2MP macro
16MP in-display selfie camera still terrible
Up to 8K video

Guess what? Nubia hasn’t changed the Red Magic 9S Pro camera set-up one jot. Which means it remains a secondary concern, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s owned a gaming phone before.

You get the same 50MP Samsung GN5 as we’ve seen in the past few models, which is actually a decent enough component – if not a particularly fresh one. It was the sensor that led the way back in the Galaxy S22 days. This is backed by OIS and a 7P lens, meaning there are seven plastic elements.

The Red Magic 9S Pro turns out reasonably sharp and vibrant shots in good lighting, although Nubia’s color science does punch colors up somewhat. The night mode shots I took didn’t turn out particularly great though, with a weird grainy texture to the skies that suggests a processing issue.

Indeed, these night shots didn’t look as good as the ones I took with the Red Magic 9 Pro earlier in the year, which perhaps points to a software issue. Hopefully, an update will clear this up.

There’s also a 50MP Samsung JN1 ultra-wide sensor here, but it doesn’t turn out particularly good results. There was often a massive disparity in the clarity and tone between these two main sensors, with the ultra-wide turning out much dimmer, murkier snaps.

The video specs are pretty solid, with the phone’s flagship processor enabling up to 8K/30fps, 4K/60fps, or 1080p/240fps. The footage I captured seemed steady enough, though panning around 180 degrees on a sunny day led to some slightly clunky exposure adjustments.

If there’s one big casualty of Nubia’s decision to go with an all-screen front, it’s the 9S Pro’s 16MP under-display selfie camera. Selfie shots are truly abysmal, as they were in previous models. Detail, exposure, and dynamic range are worse than even a modern affordable phone with a regular front-facing camera.

Camera score: 3/5

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: camera samples

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Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro camera samples — (Image credit: Future / Jon Mundy)

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Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: performance

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Slightly faster Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip ‘Leading Version’
12GB or 16GB RAM of LPDDR5X RAM
256GB or 512GB UFS 4.0 storage
Some concerning throttling issues

Nubia finds itself in a bit of a tricky position with the 9S Pro, because Qualcomm hasn’t released its customary ‘Plus’ chip update. This means that the fastest chip available remains the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which already powered the Red Magic 9 Pro. Awkward.

The solution, it seems, is to effectively ‘do a Samsung’ and use a slightly overclocked version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Nubia calls it the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip ‘Leading Version’, but it’s essentially the same chip with a performance core that runs to 3.4GHz (rather than 3.3GHz) and a GPU that runs to 1GHz (rather than 900Hz).

If that sounds like a minimal upgrade, well, it is. Indeed, with the same 12 or 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM as before, the regular range of CPU and GPU benchmark results I obtained turned out broadly the same as the 9 Pro.

Of course, that still means that the Red Magic 9S Pro is one of the fastest phones on the market. It’s more than capable of running even the most advanced games on top graphical settings at fluid frame rates, though so is any other flagship Android phone or iPhone from the past couple of years.

There is one point of concern here, and it relates to sustained performance. Nubia claims to have improved the 9S Pro’s cooling system, with an ICE 13.5 set-up that renders the phone 1.5 degrees cooler than before.

In practice, however, the Red Magic 9S Pro seems less stable than its predecessor. Running a couple of the 3D Mark Stress Tests (Wild Life and Solar Bay), which are 20 consecutive minute-long intensive GPU workouts, the results were surprisingly variable. They never got much higher than 80%, suggesting a fair degree of throttling is in play.

That’s a decent enough score for a regular phone with only passive cooling, but it’s well short of the high–90s scores I was getting with the 9 Pro. Even the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro can hit the low-’90s, and that phone doesn’t have a built-in cooling fan.

Given the nature of the hardware, this would seem to be either a software issue or a problem with that higher-clocked chip. Hopefully a swift update can fix it, as this isn’t something you want to see in a gaming phone.

Performance score: 4.5/5

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: software

Red Magic OS 9.5 on Android 14
Ugly UI, but it works
Powerful Game Space dedicated gaming UI

The Red Magic 9S Pro gets Red Magic OS 9.5 layered on top of Android 14, and it offers a broadly familiar experience. From a pretty sticky start, Nubia’s Red Magic OS UI has worked its way to being half way passable. It’s no longer the mess of oversized fan widgets and poorly translated text that it used to be.

Let’s not be in any doubt, though, that this isn’t a particularly appealing UI. The wallpapers have that tiresome ‘gamer’ aesthetic about them – all neon flourishes, metallic surfaces, and sharp angles, like a close-up shot of a Transformer’s clenched bicep.

There’s still a charmless Browser app, which also doubles as a charmless news feed app, and the Booking.com app still comes preinstalled for some reason. Still, none of these tedious elements is exclusive to Nubia’s custom UI these days.

In general use, Red Magic OS 9.5 is just fine to use. The home screen isn’t flooded with too many pointless apps. Even the home-brewed Goper app is justifiable if you’ve invested in one of Nubia’s accessories.

Everything runs smoothly, app switching is snappy, and unlocking the phone is a swift and relatively painless process. I didn’t get any of the sort of glitches that can occasionally be seen in Red Magic UIs, including the previous version.

As always, Nubia’s Game Space UI is a big feature here. Activated by a physical hardware switch on the side of the phone, it serves as a launching point for installed games, as well as a means for customizing fan, CPU, and GPU settings. You can also tweak screen sensitivity settings here, as well as adjusting screen ratios on a game by game basis.

Another aspect of this is an in-game UI, accessible with a drag from the side of the screen, which lets you do things like map those air triggers to particular controls. Being able to assign aim and shoot to specific buttons makes games like Warzone Mobile way better to play.

The Red Magic 9S Pro also supports up to 120fps wireless PC projection, now given the name ‘Z-SmartCast’, though I was unable to put this to the test.

In short, the Red Magic 9S Pro’s software is as clean, stable, and powerful as we’ve seen from Nubia, though there’s still loads of room for improvement. I still far prefer the elegant Asus approach as seen in the ROG Phone 8 Pro, which offers users the choice of a more custom UI or one that’s closer to stock Android.

Software score: 3.5/5

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: battery life

6,500mAh battery
Clears a full day of intensive use with ease
Fast 80W wired charging

Nubia is stuck with a 6,500mAh dual-cell battery for the Red Magic 9S Pro, which is just peachy. That’s way larger than your average non-gaming phone battery, and is even more capacious than the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro’s.

Like the Red Magic 9 Pro, this phone has the potential to last two days when used moderately. On one typical day of fairly intensive usage, with 5 hours 30 minutes of screen on time, I was still left with 44% left in the tank.

Naturally, given the phone’s gaming focus, this extra capacity is really intended to get you through a full day even when you indulge in an intensive gaming session or two. The Red Magic 9S Pro is more than up to the task here.

You still get 80W charging straight out of the box, which is another area that hasn’t improved from the 9 Pro. It’s not quite as swift as it might seem, thanks to that larger-than-average battery. I was able to get a full charge in a little over 45 minutes, which is broadly in line with the Asus ROG Phone 8 family.

Unlike the Asus ROG Phone 8, you don’t get wireless charging here. That’s not typically a feature that hardcore gamers are looking for, however. They’re more likely to be pleased by the 9S Pro’s ability to run directly off the wall charger when plugged in, without going through the battery. That’s potentially better for the battery, not to mention mitigating potential heat buildup while gaming.

It would have been nice to have also had that secondary USB-C port on the opposite edge to the Air Triggers, though, which would have made for a more comfortable charge-while-you-play experience.

Battery score: 5/5

Should I buy the Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro review: also consider

The Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro is a great-value gaming phone, but there are still some excellent alternatives to consider.

Asus ROG Phone 8
The Asus ROG Phone 8 isn’t as cheap as the Red Magic 9S Pro, but it’s far nicer to use as a phone day-to-day. Besides a more mature design, it’s got wireless charging and a reasonable camera.

Poco F6 Pro
Do you want to pay even less money for your gaming-ready phone? The Poco F6 Pro can run all the latest games very well indeed, but costs about £80 less than the Red Magic 9S Pro, and is more pleasant to use day to day. Mind you, we haven't reviewed it yet.

How I tested the Nubia Red Magic 9S Pro

Review test period = 1 week
Testing included = Everyday usage, including web browsing, social media, photography, video calling, gaming, streaming video, music playback
Tools used = Geekbench 6, GFXBench, 3DMark, native Android stats, bundled Nubia 80W power adapter

First reviewed: July 2024

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: it takes on the Google Pixel 8a with gusto

2:25 pm | July 22, 2024

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Oppo Phones Phones | Tags: AMOLED, AU, Google Pixel, UK | Comments: Off

Oppo Reno 12 Pro two-minute review

With its latest mid-range Android phone, Oppo seems to be going after Google’s latest affordable camera phone the Pixel 8a with a similar range of smart AI photography features. And it’s a great attempt, with some solid magic eraser action and a few other cool tools, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro is the latest entry in Oppo’s middle tier of smartphones, the Reno range, which sits below the top-end Find mobiles and above the A line. The Reno family offer mobiles at middling prices with some impressive features but with corners cut, and generally only the even-numbered options launch in the West.

I tested the Oppo Reno 10 when that came out just under a year prior to the 12 series, and the newest member of the line comes on leaps and bounds thanks to its improved camera sensors (and faster charging). It’s a shame that Oppo has ditched the curved-edge look of the Reno 10 series though, which makes the phones much more comfortable to hold.

Sitting just above the Oppo Reno 12, the Pro distinguishes itself from its sibling and from many other mid-rangers in one key way: it has a telephoto camera lens for zoom photography.

This camera hardware brings huge benefits to the photography potential of the Reno; you can take better portrait, macro and long-distance pictures than on any similar-priced rival thanks to the presence of a zoom camera.

If you want a great camera phone that doesn’t cost as much as the iPhone 15 Pro, Samsung Galaxy S24 or OnePlus 12, the Reno 12 Pro will be a blessing. Even the Pixel 8a doesn't have a telephoto lens.

The signature selling points here, though, are the AI photography features. While top-end mobiles have had these for a while, it’s taking time for them to trickle down to mid-rangers in any serious way, but the Reno performs admirably in this department. It’s great at removing background people from your photos, whether it’s vanishing a lone wanderer or bigger crowds, and replacing them with a background so realistic you’ll forget which image is real.

It’s slower to use than the Pixel alternative, but that’s not the end of the world. And I’d say this is one of the best Pixel 8a rivals for people who don’t want a Google phone or want a zoom camera on their mobile.

The Oppo charges quickly, lasts for ages, and feels pretty snappy for gaming. Its display is big and attractive, while being fairly easy to use one-handed. Best of all, you’re getting all these features at a really competitive price.

It’s not the perfect phone though, showing some signs of its mid-range positioning. I was frustrated by how many pre-installed apps (bloatware) clutter up the phone when you first turn it on, making your first 15 minutes a game of ‘weird-knock-off-app-whack-a-mole’ as you try to delete them all. The design also feels a little cheap, even though it emulates the two-texture Pixel back on certain color options.

Even with those issues I can recommend the Reno 12 Pro as one of the best mobiles at its price, especially if you’re looking for an affordable camera phone that won’t break the bank. And with the possibility of software updates bringing improvements to the AI, the handset could prove to be a real rival of the Pixel 8a in the future.

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: price and availability

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro on a gray and white background. — (Image credit: Future)

Released in UK and AU in June 2024
Costs £499 / AU$999 (roughly $640) for sole variant
Different versions of mobile in different regions

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro has seen a few different releases in different parts of the world, and of slightly different phones too. The western version of the mobile, which I tested, was announced in mid-June 2024.

You can buy the phone for £499 / AU$999 (roughly $640) cementing this firmly in the mid-range phone bracket. Oppo generally doesn’t sell its smartphones in the US and evidently, that’s unchanged with the Reno.

There’s only one version of the phone available in the UK, with 12GB RAM and 512GB storage, though a reduced-storage model is available in other regions. Oppo’s website also sells one color, even though it offers a different one on Amazon.

At that price, you can see why I compared this mobile to the Google Pixel 8a – that costs $499 / £499 / AU$849, so it’s a really close rival. Other mobiles at this rough price point include the iPhone SE, Samsung Galaxy A55 and Xiaomi 13T.

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: specs

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro has roughly mid-range specs, and here's what we're playing with:

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: design

Big but thin and light
Plastic body feels cheap
Three color options but depends on region

If you were to pick up the Oppo Reno 12 Pro without knowing what it was, you might confuse it with a Moto or Nokia phone — it gives off budget ‘vibes’. This is mostly down to the plastic frame and back of the body, the latter of which has a two-texture partition that closely resembles a Google Pixel a phone of yore.

Measuring 161.5 x 74.8 x 7.4mm it’s wider than a Pixel, though it’s nice and thin so it won’t weigh you down like a really big phone will. On that topic it weighs 180g which isn’t much for its size – the first time I picked it up I was surprised as I expected it to be heavier.

No 3.5mm headphone jack in sight — there’s a USB-C port for all your connectivity needs instead. The power button and volume rocker are both on the right edge of the device, well within reach for people with average-sized hands.

On the back of the phone, the camera bump protrudes slightly from the panel; it doesn’t stick out so far that I’ll get caught on the side of your pocket as you slip it in.

The screen houses an under-display fingerprint scanner and it worked reliably, although if I’d last used the phone on an app that requires a horizontal orientation (for example, a game), the scanner would appear at 90 degrees to where it should, oddly.

The phone is available Space Brown (black), Sunset Gold (rose) or Nebula Silver (pinkish silver) hues, though depending on your region not all options may be available. I tested the former which is why I know it’s black and not brown.

An IP65 rating ensures that the phone is protected from dust and fine particles, as well as water splashes like rain or an accidental hit from the garden hose. It won’t stand up to immersion in water though, so don’t drop it in, say, a bath.

Design score: 3 / 5

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: display

6.7-inches with 1080 x 2412 resolution
AMOLED display shows punchy colors
120Hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro screen clocks in at 6.7 inches diagonally, so it’s a nice big phone — a hand-stretcher for sure, but big too for your Netflix or gaming needs.

The resolution is 1080 x 2412, or FHD+, the same as you’ll see in almost every phone save for the cheapest or priciest rivals. It’s the resolution that most apps output at, so you don’t really need more pixels anyway.

The display refresh rate hits 120Hz, which again is pretty standard for most smartphone in this day and age. It ensures that motion feels nice and smooth when you’re scrolling around the menu, and on supported apps it has the same effect.

A few extra specs make sure that the screen displays vibrant colors: it uses AMOLED tech and supports HDR10+, with a color gamut spanning a billion colors and a fairly high max brightness of 1,200 nits.

Display score: 4 / 5

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: software

Android 14 with Oppo's ColorOS laid over the top
No confirmed number of software updates
A huge number of pre-installed apps

And here I was thinking the bloatware infestation on Chinese Android phones was going away: when you boot up the Oppo Reno 12 Pro it’s chock-full of pre-installed apps. There are big names like Netflix, Facebook and TikTok, games I’d never heard of in a folder titled ’Must Play’, countless Oppo-made apps that don’t have an obvious function and even apps titled in Chinese characters that I just don’t understand.

It’s hard to feel like a phone is ‘yours’ when, upon first booting it up, you’re met with an array quite like this.

It’s a shame, too, because under the layers of tacky bloatware ColorOS (Oppo’s own Android fork) is decent. With the Reno 12 Pro you’re getting ColorOS 13.1 by default, laid over Android 14, though Oppo has been quiet about how many Android updates the phone will get.

There’s a wide range of customization options for things like font, always-on display, the layout of the quick settings menu (the swipe-down one) and the edge lighting when you get a notification.

This quick settings menu has a pretty easy-to-understand layout, more so than on most Android forks, so you can easily toggle whatever function you want quickly. The phone also has an app drawer so by default, your phone’s main menu pages look relatively clean.

Software score: 2.5 / 5

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: cameras

50MP main, 50MP telephoto and 8MP ultra-wide cameras
50MP selfie camera rounds out the suite
Magic eraser AI tool is useful for spritzing up pictures

Oppo named one of its first Reno phones the ‘Reno 10x Zoom’ before promptly dropping telephoto cameras from the series; well zooming is back and better than ever in the Reno 12 Pro.

I’m getting ahead of myself; the main snapper is a 50MP f/1.8 unit with a few bells and whistles like PDAF (for quick focusing) and OIS (which compensates for your shaky hands).

Pictures taken on the main camera are nice and bold and bright. Maybe they lose a little more detail in darker areas than I’d like but the vibrancy of colors more than makes up for it. Focusing was a little more scattershot than I’m used to with PDAF though and I found myself jumping into the Pro app once or twice just to have better control over it. Overall, though, this is a nice camera that returns pleasing social media-ready pics.

Its 50MP companion is the f/2.0 telephoto lens, which supports 2x optical zoom — that’s not quite the 5x of the optical zoom but it’s still a breath of fresh air given how few mid-range mobiles include zoom cameras at all.

When analysing my camera samples to write this section, I kept needing to refer to the metadata to remember which were the zoomed-in snaps – this is to say that they look great, missing on loads of the tell-tale signs of other phone camera zooms like grain, washed-out colors, a lack of dynamic range or a different color profile than the comparable 1x image.

While 2x zoom is the optical limit you can go up to 5x hybrid or 20x digital zoom, and pictures taken on the latter actually look decent. You could easily use some of the 20x snaps I took on social media – I know because I did.

The third rear camera drops the resolution considerably. It’s an 8MP f/2.2 ultra-wide camera with a 112-degree field of view — as you can imagine pictures are a little lower-res than on the main camera, so you’re missing some quality, and they are a little less vibrant too. This lens can be used sparingly and situationally and ignored most of the rest of the time.

We jump back up to 50MP for the f/2.0 front camera, so you can expect high-res selfies.

Selfies look bright and detailed, with fairly realistic-looking color replication. Jump into Portrait mode and there’s mostly (though not always totally) accurate bokeh background blur (sometimes I lost some hairs). However the default beautification is very zealous about smoothing over your skin so I’d recommend playing around with it a bit.

Oppo has been putting the Reno 12 Pro’s AI photo features at the forefront of its marketing, in a clear attempt to rival the offerings Google includes with its Pixel phones. According to the marketing, it has tools to remove unwanted background elements of photos, save aspects of a snap as stickers, open closed eyes in selfies, add clarity and upscaling to objects or completely change a selfie into a different art style or location.

I say ‘according to the marketing’ because the current version of the software as of my testing of the mobile (July 2024) only has the first two… at least, as far as I could find. Maybe they’re hidden deep in menus but I did a lot of searching to find them.

The smart features present are pretty smart, though, as long as you’ll forgive them being a little slow to use in certain circumstances. Magic eraser is easy to use and you can select individual objects to delete or a ‘mass erasure’ option that identifies all humans in the background. It’s really accurate too.

Equally accurate is the replication part, so when you remove a person from your picture, the phone is great at identifying what should be there and filling in the blanks. Even if a person straddles different backgrounds, there’s no problem.

Beyond the smart features, you’re getting the same features that most modern mobiles have: Pro, Portrait, Night, Full-Res, Slow-Mo, Time-Lapse round out what you’re used to.

In terms of video, you can record up to 4K at 30fps or 1080p at 60fps on the front or rear cameras; don’t expect 8K recording here.

Oppo Reno 12 Pro camera samples

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A selfie with the Oppo Reno 12 Pro — A selfie taken on the Oppo Reno 12 Pro with standard mode (Image credit: Future)

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A selfie in portrait mode with the Oppo Reno 12 Pro — A selfie taken on the Oppo Reno 12 Pro with Portrait mode (Image credit: Future)

Camera score: 4 / 5

Oppo Reno 12 Pro: performance and audio

Dimensity 7300 Energy provides middling power
12GB RAM and an impressive 512GB storage
Stereo speakers plus Bluetooth 5.4

The power in the Oppo Reno 12 Pro comes from the MediaTek chipset it uses, called the Dimensity 7300 Energy, which as the name suggests focuses on energy efficiency. Alongside the non-Pro model, this is the first phone to use the chipset.

In the Geekbench 6 benchmark tests, the Reno returned an average multi-core score of 2,005, which is the kind of lower mid-range score that you’d expect to be associated with a phone at this price point – it’s not exactly blazing power but it’s enough for normal tasks.

That score is reflected in the gaming power of the phone – it could handle most normal titles like Call of Duty: Mobile and PUBG Mobile quite well, but there were the occasional bouts of lagging or slow loading that gives away that this isn’t a top-power phone.

The mobile comes with 12GB RAM which handles your everyday tasks, and I never found the phone slow when using social media apps, playing around with the camera app or scrolling through menus. That’s paired with 512GB storage, which is a huge amount for a phone at this price point. There’s no expandable storage but with 512GB space at your fingertips, you might not need it.

On the audio front, there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack, so you’ll have to use the USB-C port and an adaptor for wired audio. Wirelessly, you can use the Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity to pair headphones or earbuds, and there are also stereo speakers on the top and bottom of the mobile. These are positioned well enough that I didn’t find myself covering them when holding the device landscape.

Performance score: 3.5 / 5

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: battery life

Long-lasting 5,000mAh battery
Phone lasts at least a day and a half
80W wired charging is pretty fast

On paper, the Oppo Reno 12 Pro’s 5,000mAh is big but also pretty standard for phones at this price; it’s rare to see mid-range mobiles with any other size of battery.

However in the field (ie, in testing), I was pretty surprised by the Reno’s lasting power. I’m used to phones like this having battery life’s of roughly a day and half, but the Reno comes closer than most at turning that ‘half’ into something like ‘two thirds’ through normal use.

In more handy terms, it meant that I could indulge in long gaming sessions without having to worry about the battery running too low for me to use the handset for the rest of the day.

Charging is fast too, at 80W, which will top you up in no time. Oppo says that it’ll power the phone to full in just under 50 minutes, but I had enough charge to last me a full day of use in about half an hour of charging.

The Reno 12 Pro also offers reverse wired charging, so you can plug a cable into the phone’s USB-C port and then into another gadget to power it up. It’s not fast, but it’s a useful way to keep your smartwatch or headphones powered on the go.

Battery score: 4 / 5

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: value

The Oppo Reno 12 Pro has a few rough edges, but they’re all in the areas where it tries to outstep its bounds. Looking at what you’re getting for the price, the Reno offers great value for money.

For a distinctly price you’re getting a display, camera array, battery and charging department and design that feels better than you’d expect at the cost.

None of the Reno 12 Pro’s weaker areas are any worse than you’d expect for the price either; bloatware is annoying but the Oppo is far from the only mobile to have it, and while the design is uninspired, you have to pay twice as much for a really good-looking mobile.

Value score: 4 / 5

Should you buy the Oppo Reno 12 Pro?

Buy it if...

You want an affordable camera phone
A zoom camera? AI smart features? Vibrant scene optimization? The Oppo has it all, making it one of the best cheap camera phones I've tested.

You need a long-lasting battery
The Oppo Reno 12 Pro lasts longer than most other 5,000mAh battery phones I've tested, probably thanks to the efficient chipset, which is a blessing for people who aren't always near a charger.

You need lots of storage
With a default storage space of 512GB, the Oppo Reno 12 Pro ensures you won't need to buy an SD card for extra space.

Don't buy it if...

You need blazing-fast processing speeds
The Dimensity 7300 Energy is fine for most tasks, but passionate gamers or people who need blazing-fast power will find it's not enough.

Bloatware annoys you
Even compared to other low-budget Android mobiles, the Oppo Reno 12 Pro has loads of pre-installed apps that you'll need to delete.

Oppo Reno 12 Pro review: Also consider

If you're split on whether or not to buy the Oppo Reno 12 Pro, here are some other mobiles you might want to consider.

How I tested the Oppo Reno 12 Pro

Review test period = 2 week
Testing included = Everyday usage, including web browsing, social media, photography, video calling, gaming, streaming video, music playback
Tools used = Geekbench 6, Geekbench ML, GFXBench, native Android stats

The testing period for the Oppo Reno 12 Pro was two weeks, which began with product testing (hence there not being many of my apps).

Over the testing period I used the Reno like my normal phone: taking pictures, streaming music and videos, contacting people on social media, and playing lots of games. The testing period fell across a holiday so I got to take the phone out and about on a few trips.

I've been reviewing smartphones for TechRadar for over five years now, including using the original series of Reno mobiles and plenty more since then, as well as rivals across the mobile market.

Read more about how we test

First reviewed July 2024

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 review – an excellent foldable makes another leap ahead

4:00 pm | July 10, 2024

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Phones Samsung Galaxy Phones | Comments: Off

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6: One-minute hands-on

Bit by bit Samsung’s foldables have become practical, powerful, and elegant devices that you might reasonably choose over a flagship that doesn't bend in the middle. The new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is no exception, and it’s a testament to how far Samsung has come since introducing its first foldable Galaxy in 2019. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 bears almost no resemblance to the original Fold, and the changes are all for the good, in the areas that matter.

Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Z Fold 6 at Samsung Galaxy Unpacked in Paris on July 10 alongside the new but perhaps less-altered Galaxy Z Flip 6 and a host of other new Galaxy hardware, including watches, earbuds, and the eagerly-anticipated Galaxy Ring.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 hands-on: price and specs

The Galaxy Z Fold 6 starts at $1,899.99 / £1,799 / AU$2,749, which is $100 more than the previous model. That model comes with 256GB of storage and an ample 12GB of RAM. I’ll have more to say on the price hike later. It’s on preorder as of today, July 10, and will ship on July 27. There are multiple color options, including Pink, and a few online exclusives including white and Crafted Black, though I think the Navy Blue may be my favorite.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 hands-on: design

While Samsung didn't completely throw out the previous Fold aesthetic, it’s substantially different in the Galaxy Fold 6. The handset is thinner and lighter than the previous model; in fact it's so light at 239 grams that it’s only seven grams heavier than the single-screened Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. That itself is quite a feat (granted, there may be some material differences, like Armor Aluminum on the Galaxy Z Fold 6 versus the S24 Ultra’s Titanium body), and the Galaxy Z Fold 6 feels noticeably lighter than the Z Fold 5 that I brought with me to Paris for the sake of comparison.

The chrome edging is gone, and I do not miss it at all. Even though the button placement is unchanged and the fingerprint reader (power/sleep button) is the same, all the buttons look and feel better.

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Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 HANDS ON — (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)

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Unfolded, the Fold 6 is thinner than the Fold 5, and it’s also slightly shorter and slightly wider than the last foldable flagship. In a quick comparison with the Google Pixel Fold, though, the Fold 6 maintains the height advantage. The newly squared corners and visibly thinner bezels give the tablet-sized screen a more expansive and cleaner feel.

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The main screen crease is still visible, but less so than it was on the Z Fold 5. It’s impressive how year over year Samsung moves the art of this technology a little closer to perfect. The crease-free Fold is coming – someday.

Samsung told me it's strengthened the hinge by adding more steel to the dual-rail system. That system by the way is more or less sealed, which means it doesn't need tiny brushes inside the hinge to push out debris. Still, while the phone is rated to survive 30 minutes in a meter of water, its ability to withstand a dust storm might be a bit less certain, which is why it has an IP8X rating and not IP68.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 hands-on: display

Both the main and the cover screens look bigger and better than ever. The cover screen benefits from a shrinking bezel that adds a tiny bit of screen real estate without making the phone much wider. The inside display, which is still AMOLED, does get some important updates. It’s now, at 2,600 nits, much brighter than the one on the Z Fold 5 (1,700 nits), and includes adaptive refresh up to 120Hz. There are also more software controls, including vibrancy (adopted from the S24 line).

However, the most notable folding screen update may be one you can't see (though you might say you can feel it). Samsung execs told me they added a new layer made of neodymium to the folding screen panel. The material has Newtonian qualities, which means it can act like cornstarch and water, which when mixed are soft if you're pressing gently, but harden when you hit it harder. It’s designed to be pliable, but if you were to hit the Fold 6 screen with a hard object, the layer would automatically meet it with stiff resistance. Naturally, we won't know the effectiveness of all this until I test the foldable fully.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6: cameras

Samsung redesigned the camera housing to make it look, I believe, a bit more 'pro' and in line with the phone's more elegant overall appearance. However, it’s in this area where I worry Samsung didn’t go far enough.

It has retained last year’s 50MP main wide and 10MP 3x optical zoom cameras, and only upgraded the 12MP ultrawide, adding a sensor that's better equipped to handle low-light situations (it's adopted from the S24, and it can also help with focusing speed). Any other photographic improvements are due to upgrades in Samsung’s ProVision software.

In my limited hands-on time, I could see that the cameras work as well as what I experienced using the Galaxy Z Fold 5. The 3x zoom is useful, and you can go all the way up to a 30x space zoom, though I wouldn’t recommend it, mainly because space zoom relies a little too much AI image enhancement for my tastes.

What I was hoping for here was the adoption of the flagship-class S24 Ultra cameras. That handset’s 200MP main camera and better 5x optical zoom are the least we should expect from a smartphone costing nearly $2,000 (even one with two displays). That said there’s nothing wrong with this camera array, and it should please most casual photographers. The cover screen features a cutout 10MP selfie camera that I tried and liked, and there's also a 4MP main display camera (usually hidden by pixels) that you’ll mainly use for video calls.

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I shot some test images both with the Z Fold 6 unfolded, in which orientation the main screen becomes a giant viewfinder, and with the handset closed, using the smaller cover screen as my viewfinder. The nice thing about using the large screen is that you can have a view that shows both the live camera feed, and a film strip of your most recent shots next to it.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 hands-on: Galaxy AI

Like most recent Galaxy phones, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is bursting with Galaxy AI. It’s evident in, among other things, photography, image and video editing, and cross-language conversation.

One of my favorite integrations is in Notes, where I used the new Sketch to Image feature to turn rough doodles into fully-fledged pieces of art.

I drew a terrible crocodile, and it was transformed into a magazine-worthy illustration. The process is simple: you sketch in the app using either the Galaxy Fold 6-specific S Pen or your finger. You then select the image, and ask Galaxy AI to generate a more polished image based on it. It’s a cloud-based operation, so it takes 20 or so seconds, and most of the time I got not just one great illustration but a few to choose from. It’s the kind of technology that makes me worry for human illustrators.

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If it’s any solace to those illustrators, the tool wasn’t foolproof. It didn't appear to like when I put too much detail in my sketches, but I could usually overcome this by marqueeing only part of my original sketch.

The same tool can also be used to add additional design flourishes to original images. In this case, you can poorly sketch something on top of a photo – say you want to make an image of your dog wearing glasses, you can sketch the glasses and Sketch to Image will make a realistic pair of spectacles for the dog.

The Fold 6 has also adopted Galaxy AI features that first appeared with the Samsung Galaxy S24. For example, I shot a short video with the Galaxy Fold 6 of our social editor Viktoria Shilets tossing her hair at normal speed. During playback on the phone, I held my finger on the screen and it automatically turned that portion of the video into a commercial-worthy slow-motion. It’s a fun little feature, and one that works even more effortlessly on the Fold 6 thanks to the slow-mo output now being downloadable right after creation – S24 users had to dig for that option.

Samsung told me that features like Generative Fill, which you can use to move a subject within a photo or remove a subject from a photo, also work on the Z Fold 6, though I didn’t have time to test them.

Circle to Search is now live on the Z Fold 5 and it worked equally well on a pot of flowers as it did on table decorations. In each case, I pointed the camera at my subject, held down the virtual home button for a second, and then circled the on-screen object in question. A second later, I had Google images and descriptions that made sense of the original. I’m not sure the long-press on home is the most obvious way to activate this, and some might forget it exists, but if you use it a few times I bet you’ll be hooked.

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The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 also has substantial on-device translation capabilities. I tried out Conversation mode and Listening mode. In the latter, you can set the phone to listen to a foreign language speaker and it will quickly display the transcription in the language of your choice. In Conversation mode, we set the phone in Flex mode, which means having the phone opened to 90 degrees so that someone speaking Russian could see the cover screen on which our English-spoken words were displayed in their native Russian. On the main screen facing us, we saw their Russian phrases displayed in English.

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The translations, which happen locally and can be exported (otherwise they disappear) were good but not perfect – the system would usually get the meaning right but not always match the precise phrasing.

I also noticed that the only indication to the other speaker that it’s okay for them to speak is that a small microphone icon turns blue, so if you already have a language barrier, explaining to someone how to use this feature might be a problem.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 hands-on: under the hood

Samsung has made a few changes inside the phone. It now has a larger vapor chamber, which should help with heat dissipation, especially during intense activities like gaming. I didn’t get to game on the Galaxy Z Fold 6, but I confess that gaming is one of my favorite activities on the big-screen Galaxy Z Fold 5.

The phone should have some extra oomph thanks to the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy chip – and that 'Galaxy' at the end is more than just lip service for a favored partner. These chips have slightly faster main CPUs (3.39GHz vs 3.3GHz) and a faster GPU, and that this is backed by 12GB of RAM is even better news. The 256GB base storage, which is the same as last year, is also good news, and if you feel the need for more you can pay for up to 1TB of storage.

This is, naturally, a 5G phone, and Samsung told me that it supports WiFi 6e – there's no word on WiFi 7 though.

There are still stereo speakers, which I did not get time to test, but I noted how the chassis design has transformed them from grilles to thin slots, which is similar to the design on the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra – Samsung execs insisted that this is not less safe for the internals.

There's a 4,400mAH dual battery, which is unchanged from the Galaxy Fold 5.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 hands-on: early verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 seems better than its predecessor, the Galaxy Z Fold 5, in almost every way and should join our list of best foldable phones. Design-wise, I think this is a big leap forward – this now feels like a normal phone that just happens to split open to reveal a big main-screen wonder, and it’s a lovely screen even with that visible crease.

All the built-in AI isn't just fun, it has the potential to be genuinely useful for many people, assuming they can discover it (Samsung hides too many of these features under menus or non-obvious actions).

The cameras are good, though I would love a bigger zoom and more megapixels on the main camera.

My main criticism comes down to price. The foldable market remains tiny, and I think consumers will more quickly gravitate towards affordable foldables than they will full-featured ones (go figure). Asking for yet another $100 – even for a better device –seems like a mistake and, as I noted recently, probably won't help Samsung grow the tiny foldable market. Of course, there’s a good chance that you’ll pay less than $1,899.99 / £1,799 for the Z Fold 6 – I have yet to see a Galaxy phone launch that doesn't include significant deals and discounts.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 review – tougher, smarter, snappier

4:00 pm |

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Phones Samsung Galaxy Phones | Comments: Off

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6: Two-minute hands-on

The best foldable phones are no longer considered the overly expensive, impractical cousins of the best phones around, but the number of clamshell foldables on the market continues to be dwarfed by the number of tablet-style foldables on offer in 2024.

Samsung, for its part, has long played both sides of the foldable field, with only Motorola for company in the flip-phone space (the Oppo Find N2 Flip proved a worthy foil to the Galaxy Z Flip 4, but the limited global availability of its successor, the Oppo Find N3 Flip, meant that last year’s Galaxy Z Flip 5 went up against the Motorola Razr Plus 2023 and little else).

The story is similar for the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6, which arrives with limited competition beyond Motorola’s new Motorola Razr Plus 2024. That’s not to say Samsung has been complacent with its latest clamshell foldable – the Galaxy Z Flip 6 brings plenty of worthwhile upgrades over the Galaxy Z Flip 5 – but it certainly has a lower bar to clear than the Galaxy Z Fold 6, which finds itself in competition with the Google Pixel Fold, OnePlus Open, Honor Magic V2 and Xiaomi Mix Fold 3 (not to mention their respective imminent successors).

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I bore this context in mind when handling the Galaxy Z Flip 6 for the first time ahead of Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2024. Visually, it’s exactly the same phone as the Galaxy Z Flip 5 – save for some color-matched rings around the rear camera lenses and a nice satin finish for the frame – with most of this year’s upgrades coming either under the hood or in the durability department. The Galaxy Z Fold 6, by contrast, looks a lot more premium than the Galaxy Z Fold 5, but Samsung clearly hasn’t felt the same pressure to drastically overhaul the appearance of the Galaxy Z Flip 6 given its current position atop the clamshell market.

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The good news is that this tried-and-tested design still very much works. The Galaxy Z Flip 6 boasts the same 3.4-inch, 60Hz AMOLED cover display (720 x 748) and 6.7-inch, Full HD+ AMOLED main display (2640 x 1080) as its predecessor, with the larger of these two screens boasting an adaptive 1-120Hz refresh rate. The phone itself measures 72 x 85 x 15mm when folded and 72 x 165 x 7mm when unfolded, and it weighs just 187g, which again is the same as the Galaxy Z Flip 5.

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The functionality of the 'Flex Window' (i.e., the cover display), as Samsung calls it, has been further expanded with interactive wallpapers and ambient weather animations, but you’ll still get the usual smorgasbord of clock, calendar and timer widgets to choose from.

As with the Galaxy Z Flip 5, the Flex Window on the Galaxy Z Flip 6 skirts around the phone’s rear cameras, which leaves a bigger bezel than you’ll find on either of Motorola’s latest flip devices. For me, though, this dented square shape brings a nice retro vibe to the Galaxy Z Flip 6, especially now that the rear camera lenses have been made more eye-catching with color-matched rings. The combination results in a cute, retro robot-like look, which works particularly well with the phone’s (mostly) new colors: yellow, blue, mint and silver.

So far, so similar; but as mentioned, the meaningful upgrades come under the hood. For starters, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 boasts a 4,000mAh battery, where the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 4 both use a 3,700mAh cell. Samsung has also squeezed a vapor cooling chamber – the first ever in a flip phone – into the Galaxy Z Flip 6, so the new foldable should offer improved heat dissipation as well as longer battery life (we haven’t yet been able to test either metric). These upgrades are made more impressive when you consider the phone’s unchanged 187g weight. So, where did Samsung shed the pounds?

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One answer could be in the materials protecting the Galaxy Z Flip 6. According to Samsung, the Armor Aluminum frame encasing its latest foldable is 10% stronger than before, while the hinge and edges have been toughened up, too.

Most welcome of all is a new IP48 dust- and water-resistance rating, which betters the water-only IPX8 rating of the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Motorola Razr 2024, but falls just short of the Galaxy S24’s totally dust-proof IP68 rating. In layman’s terms, this means the Galaxy Z Flip 6 is protected against particles over 1mm in size (i.e., large bits of dust).

On paper, at least, this combination of durability features makes the Galaxy Z Fold 6 the most practical flip phone of the lot, and I certainly felt more comfortable about repeatedly opening, closing and repositioning the device as I photographed it for this hands-on review.

The Galaxy Z Flip 6 is powered by Qualcomm’s top-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset (i.e., the chipset inside almost all of the current best Android phones) and 12GB RAM instead of 8GB, so I highly doubt that you’ll be left wanting for performance with this phone.

The 8 Gen 3 brings the Galaxy S24’s impressive ProVisual photography engine to Samsung’s latest foldable, too, and you’re also getting the same main and ultra-wide cameras as on the Galaxy S24 Plus – specifically a 50MP main lens and a 12MP ultra-wide lens. That’s a marked improvement over the Galaxy Z Flip 5’s 12MP primary and ultra-wide combination. On the front, the phone’s 10MP selfie snapper is unchanged.

Given my short handling time, I wasn’t able to do much testing with either rear lens – and I wasn’t permitted to extract any camera samples, either – but I can tell you about a handful of new camera-focused features that make the process of actually taking photos much easier.

The first is Auto Zoom, which automatically adjusts the camera’s zoom length when you’re not operating the phone manually. Say, for instance, you’re out at the park and want to capture a picture of you and your surroundings; you can now set up the Galaxy Z Flip 6 on a perch, trigger a timed photo, and let the phone do the framing for you. This is a nice example of Samsung optimizing its software for foldable phones, specifically, and it’s far from the only one.

Another is the improved Camcorder Mode on the Galaxy Z Flip 6, which has been optimized to feature an old-school, thumb-based zoom toggle. I took it for a spin during my hands-on session, and it really does make the new phone feel like a 90s video camera.

Samsung has added foldable-specific optimizations to certain Galaxy AI features, too. Interpreter, for instance, now lets you conduct live, two-way translated conversations using the internal and external displays. This meant I was able to ask, in English, a Korean-speaking Samsung representative about a particular regional dish, and they were able to view and answer my question, in Korean, via the Galaxy Z Flip 6’s cover display. It’s a truly impressive – and, crucially, useful – upgrade to an already impressive feature.

As for Samsung's update commitment to the Galaxy Z Flip 6, you'll get seven years of software updates and seven years of security updates, which should ensure Apple-level longevity.

One note I would add about all this great Galaxy Z Flip 6 software is that I don’t think these optimizations will remain exclusive to the Galaxy Z Flip 6 for long. I highly doubt that they’re dependent on the power of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and if they aren’t, then I expect Samsung to roll out similar optimizations for the Galaxy Z Flip 5 – and potentially even the Galaxy Z Flip 4 – in the months following the Galaxy Z Flip 6’s launch.

Samsung took a similar approach with the first set of Galaxy AI features, which launched as temporarily exclusive to the Galaxy S24 before becoming available at a later date on selected older-generation Samsung phones. And while this is by no means a bad thing (quite the opposite – good on Samsung!), it may be hard to recommend the Galaxy Z Flip 6 on the basis of excellent software alone. By the time we publish our full review of the device, perhaps we’ll know more about Samsung’s plans for the future rollout of these features.

All told, then, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 represents an iterative but welcome upgrade over the Galaxy Z Flip 5. It isn’t likely to be a must-own device for anyone who’s already using a relatively recent Galaxy Flip phone, but if you’ve been hesitant to try a foldable due to concerns over practicality, then the Galaxy Z Flip 6 could be the perfect place to start.

Specs comparison

Here's how the Galaxy Z Flip 6 stacks up against the Galaxy Z Flip 5 in terms of specs.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6: Should you pre-order?

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 pre-orders are now open, with the phone set to begin shipping on July 24. In Australia, shipping will begin on July 31.

The Galaxy Z Flip 6 starts at $1,099.99 / £1,049 / AU$1,799 for the model with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage, rising to $1219.99 / £1,149 / AU$1,999 for the model with 512GB of storage.

For context, that starting price is $100 / AU$150 higher than that of the Galaxy Z Flip 5, though you do get 12GB RAM instead of 8GB with the Galaxy Z Flip 5. UK pricing remains unchanged across both storage variants.

So, should you pre-order the Galaxy Z Flip 6? Well, that depends on what phone you're currently using, as well as how much you value mobile photography.

In a straight shootout between Samsung's newest foldable and the Galaxy Z Flip 5, the former wins out – on paper, at least – in several departments. It's got a better main camera, a faster Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, a bigger batter, improved durability and, in my opinion, a slightly more premium-looking design.

That said, I don't think any of these new features will warrant a direct generational upgrade, unless you're particularly disappointed with the Galaxy Z Flip 5's 12MP main camera, and are clamouring for a more powerful 50MP snapper.

Mind you, if you're not reading this hands-on review as an existing Galaxy Z Flip owner, and are considering whether to dive into foldable phones for the first time, then the Galaxy Z Flip 6 looks certain to rank alongside the best foldable phones (and indeed the best Samsung phones) we've ever tested.

Asus ROG Phone 8 review: drops the ball on key gaming features

5:00 pm | June 30, 2024

Author: admin | Category: Asus Phones Computers Gadgets Phones | Tags: AI | Comments: Off

Asus ROG Phone 8 two-minute review

The gaming phone market used to be an exciting and competitive niche, with companies innovating with newer and weirder ways to make their handsets great for mobile gaming. My use of the past tense there is intentional, as the Asus ROG Phone 8 is a sign of the times.

With Lenovo giving up its short-lived Legion Duel line in 2021, and my personal favorites, Black Shark, not having released a device since 2022, Asus doesn’t have much competition when it comes to producing the best gaming phone, and as a result, it doesn’t seem to be trying.

On paper, the Asus ROG Phone 8 looks like a decent gaming phone. It has a high refresh rate display, the newest and fastest chipset, and extra gaming features that you don’t find on most Android mobiles. And, to an extent, it is good for playing mobile games.

The ROG had no problem loading up the top graphical settings on any game I tested, and it easily ran higher refresh modes in the few games that offer it. Plus, it gives you lots of customization over the power allotment, so you can focus on latency, graphics, battery management and more – really useful tools for gamers on the go.

Asus’ Android fork is also one of the easiest to use I’ve seen in a gaming phone – it’s nice and clean, but with a few added extra features for gamers like customization modes. There’s no bloatware either, which isn’t something you can say about many Android phones.

While I'm listing positives, I also want to commend the camera. It's not quite iPhone-level, but it's definitely the best I've seen on a gaming phone, given that manufacturers working in this niche rarely spare a thought for photography. It even has a zoom camera, which is quite the rarity these days!

However, I came out of my time with the Asus ROG Phone 8 not quite sold on its gaming chops beyond all that power. Gaming tech companies don’t seem to want to acknowledge the fact that there’s a lot more to making a good gaming phone than performance; case in point, the ROG Phone 8.

Instead of physical triggers, the ROG Phone 8 has ‘Air Triggers’, or haptic areas that you can tap to pre-mapped functions. These are finickity to use, requiring pronounced motions that take more time and attention than simply pressing on-screen buttons. Plus they’re quite buggy, sometimes not triggering and other times getting stuck.

Asus has also made the mistake of placing the side-mounted speakers right where your hand will be when you’re holding the mobile horizontally to game. I kept blocking sound when playing games, which was infuriating.

I imagine Asus hopes gamers will use the ROG phone alongside one of its peripherals, but expecting consumers to buy extra tech brings into view another issue with the ROG Phone 8 – it’s really expensive! Costing $1,099 / £949 (roughly AU$1,600), it’ll set you back more than many top-end flagships including the OnePlus 12, Google Pixel 8 or Xiaomi 14.

More importantly, the ROG Phone 8 costs a lot more than the Nubia Red Magic 9 Pro, which is its big rival in the gaming space, and I don’t think you’re getting your money’s worth with the price hike.

If the gaming phone space was more competitive, this price tag would get Asus laughed out of the room. As it stands, the high cost of the ROG Phone 8 and the lack of refinement in its gaming chops make it hard to recommend.

Asus ROG Phone 8 review: price and availability

Released in January 2024
Costs $1,099 / £949 (roughly AU$1,600)
Has two more premium alternatives: Pro and Pro Edition

The Asus ROG Phone 8 was announced and released alongside the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro and Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition (yes, it's confusing) in January 2024, as the newest update in this long-running line of mobiles.

The ROG Phone 8 costs $1,099 / £949 (roughly AU$1,600), so it’s by no means a cheap phone; it’s barely more affordable than the Pro model, which starts at $1,199 / £1,099 (roughly AU$1,750) but gets you more power and storage. The aforementioned Pro Edition goes for an even higher $1,499 / £1,299 (around AU$2,200).

These prices put the ROG Phone 8 family as basically the most expensive gaming-focused phones you can buy right now; the Red Magic 9 Pro costs $649 / £579 (around AU$1,100) and offers similar specs, and with Black Shark seemingly out of the market, you’ll have to look outside the gaming phone realm for other competitors.

The ROG Phone 8 isn't exactly offering value for money either. While it’s certainly got impressive internal specs that make gaming a breeze, so do other phones that cost much less money. This phone’s asking price is especially egregious when taking into consideration many of the issues we'll get to later.

In the 'Also consider' section of this review, you’ll find recommendations for other gaming phones that offer better value for money, at different price tiers.

Value score: 2.5 / 5

Asus ROG Phone 8 review: specs

Let's check out what we're working with before we dive into the phone, section by section.

Asus ROG Phone 8 review: design

Big phone which stretches the hand
Black and gray options
Two USB-C ports as well as Air Triggers and 3.5mm jack

Asus’ ROG Phones have never indulged in the garish design excesses of other gaming phones, but even for its own standards the ROG Phone 8 looks a lot like a ‘normal’ Android phone. No bold ridges, no angular blocks, no big triggers or nozzles.

It’s big for sure, with its 163.8 x 76.8 x 8.9mm body sure to stretch your hand. But at 225g it’s no heavier than it looks – you can game for long amounts of time, but it won’t replace your gym weights routine. Your fingers, though, might need the occasional rest.

You can pick the phone up in black or gray, and we tested the former. There’s an LED panel on the back, but I didn’t actually realize until I came to write this review – you have to find the option to turn it on buried deep in a menu. More on that in the software section later.

The camera bump on the back of the ROG sticks out a fair way, so the phone doesn’t sit flat on a table – that’s par for the course in many phones though. It’s prone to scuffing too, as you might notice in some of the review pictures.

A bit more interesting is the fact that the phone has two USB-C ports, which is something you see occasionally in gaming phones. This is so that you can charge the ROG Phone 8 while gaming, without a cable poking out at an inopportune angle. One of these ports is on the left edge of the mobile, and the other is on the bottom edge, joined by a 3.5mm headphone jack.

On the right edge of the phone are a power button and volume rocker, as well as two ‘Air Triggers’ as Asus calls them. These are basically haptic spots that you can tap to enact a certain function when gaming, so you can map them to, say, aiming and shooting a gun.

Triggers are nothing new for gaming phones, but I wasn’t a fan of the Rog Phone 8’s. They need a firm press to select, with these pronounced gestures taking more time and requiring more effort than other gaming mobile triggers I’ve tested – in fact, I think it slowed down my reaction time in gaming, rather than speeding it up. In addition, the triggers sometimes wouldn’t function, and other times would stay held down when I pressed them once, causing me to repeatedly shoot my gun. For obvious reasons, this was annoying, and I slowly stopped using the triggers.

The ROG Phone 8 has an IP68 rating – this means it’s protected against dust and brief submersion in water, in case you decide to game in the bathtub. The phone has a glass front and back, though, so it might not survive a big drop.

Design score: 3.5 / 5

Asus Rog Phone 8 review: display

Giant 6.78-inch screen
Super fast 165Hz refresh rate
FHD+ resolution

With its 6.78-inch display, the ROG Phone 8 is a chunky boy, but that’s no surprise given that all of its predecessors since the ROG Phone 5 have been this exact same size (the ROG Phone 8 Pro, too).

The resolution is 1080 x 2400, or FHD+ – that’s the standard for most Android phones, and while it’s not the 2K or 4K of select rivals on the market, it’s the resolution that most games output at, so we’re not subtracting points for that.

It’s a good-looking display, with an AMOLED panel providing punchy colors, HDR10 boosting the contrast of images, and 2500 nits max brightness lighting up the dark side of the moon, it looks great for video streaming or gaming.

On the topic of gaming, the phone's 165Hz refresh rate is great for the select games that support high refresh rates. Not many do, but 120Hz is a lovely extra perk nonetheless.

Display score: 4 / 5

Asus Rog Phone 8 review: software

Android 14 with lots of Asus twists
Clean software with customization options
AI wallpaper generator may prove divisive

The Asus ROG Phone 8 comes with Android 14, and a home-brewed user interface laid over the top. It’s lathered with ‘gamer aesthetics’ – expect darker tones, minimalist icon designs (check out the camera icon in the review images!) and app icons with an irregular hexagonal shape.

Beyond the looks, this software feels quite similar to stock Android, so it’s pretty clean. Apps are stored in an app drawer, and you can swipe down to get access to quick settings.

Asus has added a few of its own apps and functions that are tailored to gamers. These include a tutorial in how the gaming features work when you first boot up the phone (which is cool but makes the set-up processes incredibly time-consuming), Armory Crate, which gives you quick access to all your games, and an in-game swipe-up system that lets you fiddle with loads of pertinent settings. All of these features are handy extras to gamers, though I stopped using Armory Crate when I realized that it was creating an extra step between me and a game.

The ROG Phone 8 has a fair few customization options to personalize the always-on display, icon shapes, various animations and the font. You can also customize the LED panel on the back; to do so, you have to find the AniMe Vision feature buried in the settings menu (or Armory Crate). This lets you choose conditions for the screen to light up: on an incoming call, when you’re taking a picture, a camera countdown, a charging indicator and so on, with select graphics to indicate what’s happening. It’s definitely less garish than many gaming phone LED panels.

One feature of the Asus ROG Phone 8 that’ll either drive you crazy with glee or rage, depending on your views on the ethical dilemma of generative AI, is the AI Wallpaper feature. The phone has a built-in AI image generator, so you can create a wallpaper based on one of a few set themes including ‘Space’, ‘Cyberpunk’ and ‘Sci-Fi’ – you may be noticing a theme here.

I used this feature to make a few different wallpapers, and they were all suitably distinct, but they also had all the issues common to AI-generated images that you’ve seen and laughed at in the past. The phone does not, as I initially thought, generate you a new wallpaper each day. That’d be a cool feature, but no. The ROG Phone 8 just makes you one, and if you want a new one, you’ll need to go into the settings of the phone and re-generate it.

Software score: 3.5 / 5

Asus Rog Phone 8: cameras

50MP main, 32MP telephoto, 13MP ultra-wide cameras
32MP selfie camera on the front
Standard array of phone camera modes

Given that the focus of the Asus ROG Phone 8 is gaming and performance, I didn't expect great things from the device's camera, but I was pleasantly surprised. It's not going to replace your top-end iPhone, but it'll hold its own.

The main camera is a 50MP f/1.9 snapper with OIS that uses a gimbal, something that's not common in smartphones. Standard (1x zoom) pictures taken on the phone are quite bright and colorful, particularly in well-lit environments, but don't discount them in dimmer places either.

When you take a picture, its resolution is only 12.5MP, with the camera employing pixel-binning from the 50MP. Unlike in most phones, I couldn't find a way to turn on full-res mode, so if you blow up the below camera samples, you'll see them losing quality quickly.

If you want a wider scope, you can jump to the second camera, a 13MP f/2.2 snapper with a 120-degree ultrawide lens. This offered a surprising amount of consistency in terms of color and quality compared to pictures taken on the main camera, so you can widen your shot without worrying about contending with a different color profile. In the camera section below, you can see a shot of London's Canary Wharf at different zoom levels to show this.

Going the other way, you can get closer to a subject with the 32MP f/2.4 snapper with a 3x zoom telephoto lens. Zoom lenses like this are disappointingly rare in all mobiles nowadays, so I was really surprised to see one in a gaming phone of all things, but it really elevates the photography experience.

As with the ultra-wide camera, the color profile consistency continues on this lens (something you can't guarantee in smartphones) and it has a decent amount of quality at higher zoom levels.

You can exceed 3x with digital zoom, which is basically cropping of the zoomed-in picture, up to 30x. Results for digital zoom pictures can vary wildly, but it was decent on the ROG, with far landmarks fairly easy to make out, as you can see below.

One thing about the telephoto camera is that it isn't as great for close-up pictures, so you can't use it like a macro camera to give great depth of field to snaps. If you look at the sixth camera sample below, you'll see a lack of dynamic range and low photo quality. I'm a big fan of using zoom snappers for detailed nature photography, but I don't think the ROG has the chops for it.

On the front of the phone is a 32MP f/2.5 selfie camera. I found that pictures taken in low-light environments had an odd yellow hue, but when I was taking selfies out and about, there was no such issue.

Portrait mode doesn't have as dramatic an effect as it does on most smartphones, with the bokeh quite light-touch and few beauty features applied to the face, but it's not the end of the world.

If you want to shoot video, you can shoot at up to 8K resolution at 24fps or 4K at 60fps. Or, slowing things down, you can get FHD at 240fps or 4K at 120fps.

There are a few extra modes on the phone, including the standards like Pro, time-lapse, panorama and night mode, as well as a light trails feature for ersatz shutter speed adjustments. There's nothing hugely out of the ordinary, but if you want wild camera modes, you probably want to look for one of the best camera phones.

Camera score: 3 / 5

Asus Rog Phone 8 camera samples

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A photo taken on the Asus ROG Phone 8. — A standard picture taken of a single flower (Image credit: Future)

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Asus Rog Phone 8: performance and audio

Snappy Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor
12GB RAM and 256GB storage
Speakers poorly placed for gaming

Since the Asus ROG Phone 8 is a gaming phone, you’d think that performance is an area where it aces the test. Well… you’d hope so. The phone has the new top-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, paired with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage.

In terms of straight-up speed, the ROG is undeniably fantastic – I never encountered any stutters or issues during gameplay, and it could render the highest graphical settings and fastest refresh rates in titles like COD Mobile with no issue.

That performance was reflected in benchmarks. In a Geekbench 6 multi-core test, the phone returned a score of 6,524 – I tested it again after half an hour of gaming, to see if overheating could cause an issue, and the resultant score of 6,459 proves that it doesn't.

Notably, our tester for the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition got a score of 7,200, so the extra RAM of the highest-end versions will get you more power. But given that most mobile games are optimized to run well on any device, even low-end ones, that extra power won’t really improve your gaming experience all that much.

While the phone's performance is great on paper, I found gaming a little tiring. I’ve already discussed my issues with the ROG Phone 8's temperamental Air Triggers, but there were more problems. Notably, when you’re holding the phone horizontally, your hand blocks the speakers, so you need to use headphones to properly hear. The big size of the phone also meant I got hand ache when gaming for too long, and I'd also sometimes accidentally press the side of the device when reaching for buttons in the middle.

Oh, and gamers might like to know that you can play certain titles without having to unlock the phone – my go-to testing title, COD: Mobile, is one of these. However, features like Air Triggers don’t work unless you’ve unlocked the phone, which is a problem I kept running into.

None of these hiccups would be issues… in a non-gaming phone. However, in the ROG Phone 8, they detracted from the overall gaming experience for me. Damningly, I enjoyed my time gaming on the Samsung Galaxy A35, which I tested before this, more than I did on the ROG Phone.

Performance score: 4 / 5

Asus Rog Phone 8 review: battery life

Huge 5,500mAh battery
Two charging ports for 65W speed
Wireless and reverse wireless charging too

Keeping the lights on for the ROG Phone 8 is a 5,500mAh battery, which is as chunky as you’d hope for in a gaming phone like this.

If you’re planning on using the ROG Phone 8 like your average phone, then this battery is easily big enough to keep things ticking over for a whole day. Don’t worry about those extended video calls – this beast will keep you going.

When it comes to gaming, you’ll definitely get a good few hours of time out of the ROG, but I did notice that the battery was sapped quicker that on the non-gaming phones I tested prior to it – even when gaming on lower refresh rates and graphical options. That’s why the double charging ports are in play: to make sure you can charge nice and quickly. Powering is at 65W, which is lovely and fast, and you can get from empty to full in just under 45 minutes if you have a compatible charger.

There’s also 15W wireless charging, which obviously won’t be useful for powering while you’re gaming, but it's a useful addition. The same can be said for the 10W reverse wireless charging, so the 5,500mAh power pack is playing double duty as a portable power bank if you have wirelessly-charging gadgets.

Battery score: 3.5 / 5

Should you buy the Asus ROG Phone 8?

Buy it if...

You need a future-proof gaming phone
Few games go higher than 120Hz or require top-end chipsets, but that'll change over time, and this handset will handle new games for years to come.

You're going to buy a mobile gaming controller
While I was critical of certain gaming features of the ROG, they'll all be redundant if you're also planning to buy a gaming controller to go with your phone.

The AI wallpaper feature appeals to you
If you're a fan of generative AI then you might find the AI wallpaper feature really cool, with it generating artificial new backgrounds whenever you want it to.

Don't buy it if...

You're on a budget
This is an incredibly pricey gaming phone, and I can't recommend it to people who don't want to break the bank on their new mobile.

You find phone LEDs embarrassing
People can love or hate smartphone LED panels; if you've got a strong opposition, you'll hate the ROG's, even if it's more minimal than on some other gaming phones.

You want a small phone
I have fairly average-sized hands, and using the ROG gave me aches, so if you want a nice compact device, you won't enjoy using this Asus phone.

Asus Rog Phone 8 review: Also consider

If you're looking for another Android phone to play games on, here are some other picks worth considering:

Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro
Offering more power and more storage than the non-Pro model, the 8 Pro is reserved for super-serious gamers, though it costs more, too.
Read our full Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro review

OnePlus 12
If you want a non-gaming phone that can still handle all the top titles, then the OnePlus 12 ticks all the boxes. Plus, it's more affordable than the ROG.
Read our full OnePlus 12 review

How I tested the Asus Rog Phone 8

Review test period = 3 weeks
Testing included = Everyday usage, including web browsing, social media, photography, video calling, gaming, streaming video, music playback
Tools used = Geekbench 5, Geekbench 6, Geekbench ML, GFXBench, native Android stats

My Asus ROG Phone 8 testing process involved a lot of gaming. That's why the test period was three weeks instead of the usual two – I got a bit distracted!

For the main testing period, though, I used the phone as though it was a regular mobile – texting, streaming movies, listening to music, spending time on social media, taking pictures and playing lots of games.

I've been testing smartphones at TechRadar for over five years, after spending time as a writer then editor of the phones section, and as such I've used plenty of other handsets. These include many gaming phones and rivals to the Asus.

Read more about how we test

First reviewed July 2024

Motorola Razr Plus 2024 review: taking cool just a bit too far

1:13 am | June 26, 2024

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Motorola Phones Phones | Tags: AI, Motorola Razr, UK, US | Comments: Off

Motorola Razr Plus 2024: Two-minute review

Motorola Razr Plus 2024 showing Hello Moto screen on cover display — (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

Motorola has done it. If you’re sick of the same old smartphone, the Motorola Razr Plus 2024 is your cure. The Razr Plus is the flip phone that should be the envy of boring slab phone owners everywhere. It’s bright and colorful in every way, inside and out, screens and shell. This Razr is completely different in (mostly) the best ways.

I didn’t think last year’s Motorola Razr Plus needed much improvement, but Motorola has improved it anyway. The best flip-phone cover display, larger and more versatile than the file-folder window on Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 6, is even bigger and brighter this year than before. It fills the phone and gives you a miniature window into all of your apps. Apps become more useful than ever when you use them on this palm-sized marvel.

The Razr Plus 2024 also gets a welcome durability upgrade, and it’s now water resistant enough to take a dunk. Motorola’s vegan leather, with a new suede feel, replaces the glass on the back of the Razr Plus. The result is a colorful finish that feels great to hold, giving the Razr a unique look all its own. It also won’t slip off your desk.

Motorola Razr Plus 2024 in green closed and showing the spine — No branding on the spine, unlike Samsung's Z Flip (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

Has Motorola avoided the latest smartphone AI fads? Or has it crammed AI onto the new Razr 2024 phones? Unfortunately, it’s the latter. Motorola has run with the crowd and pushed half-baked AI onto its new Razr Plus, with predictably bad results that may only get worse.

The Razr Plus 2024 has Moto AI tools that highlight the worst stereotyping tendencies of generative AI. Moto AI produces results that seem racist, misogynist, ageist, and anti-Semitic. The AI tools on the Razr Plus 2024 show how AI is not ready for retail. Tools like this should not be part of a consumer device, especially an expensive smartphone. It’s embarrassing, and the Moto AI image generator needs to go.

Kind of a bummer, right? I was excited for the new Motorola Razr Plus 2024, with its new colors and bigger cover display, but the offensive AI quelled my excitement. Even worse, Motorola promises that even more intrusive AI features are coming. Right now, the bigotry is confined to the wallpapers, but soon Moto AI will be listening to all of your phone calls and conversations. Ugh.

Frankly, you can ignore these new AI features on the Razr Plus 2024. This phone is still very good without the AI gimmicks. The improved hinge on the Razr Plus 2024 snaps open and shut with more aplomb. You can take a group photo and watch people smile when they see themselves on the cover screen.

Motorola Razr and Razr Plus 2024 folded and open in various colors — All of the Motorola Plus 2024 color options (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

Nasty AI can’t make this phone less cool, right? It comes in Hot Pink! Can AI ruin Hot Pink? No, nothing can ruin Hot Pink.

For now, I’d take a wait-and-see approach to buying the Motorola Razr Plus 2024. If the price drops, or if Motorola cleans up its AI act a little bit, this will be an easier phone to recommend. However, if you’d rather not endorse Motorola’s vision of a mobile AI future, I would avoid it and look for a future that’s a little less cool.

Razr Plus 2024 review: Price and availability

Motorola Razr Plus 2024 in green showing TechRadar.com on the big display — (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

Available to pre-order for $999.99 / £999.99 / AU $1,699
256GB storage in US; 512GB storage in UK and Australia
Called Motorola Razr Plus 2024 in the US, Motorola Razr 50 Ultra everywhere else

The Motorola Razr Plus 2024 starts around $1,000 / £1,000 / AU$1,700, which puts it in the same price range as the Google Pixel 8 Pro and the Apple iPhone 15 Pro.

To Motorola’s benefit, Samsung raised the price of its flip phone by $100 / AU$150 (the Z Flip’s price is unchanged in the UK), making the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 more expensive than the Razr Plus 2024 in those regions.

That’s a lot of competition at this price, but Motorola loves to offer discounts, so I would wait for a good deal if you don’t need to buy this phone right away. The Razr Plus 2023 saw fantastic deals throughout its first year on the market, including a perpetual $300 discount in the US.

Will the new Razr Plus 2024 get the same deals? Only time will tell, but the improvements here aren’t so groundbreaking that a price cut is out of the question. The cover display is a bit larger, and the phone is now officially water resistant, instead of just unofficially splashproof.

This phone would be an easier choice if it cost less, but at this price I worry that it competes poorly on cameras, long-term software support, and overall durability – aspects that make a smartphone worth keeping for longer. If Moto dropped the price by 25% or more, I wouldn’t care so much.

Value score: 3 / 5

Razr Plus 2024 review: Specs

Motorola Razr Plus 2024 in green — Motorola Razr Plus 2024 (left) and Razr 2024 (right) (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

Motorola only offers one configuration for the Motorola Razr Plus 2024 in the US, and another in the UK and Australia – you get 12GB of RAM wherever you are, with 256GB of storage in the US and 512GB in the UK and Australia. Don’t worry, US fans; that’s enough space, especially if you use cloud storage for photos and videos.

The Razr Plus 2024 doesn’t skimp on specs when it comes to its two displays: each screen refreshes at a blazing fast 165Hz, and brightness levels are exceptionally high.

The Motorola Razr Plus 2024 is the first phone with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset that was announced earlier this year. It’s a step down from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor found in phones like the OnePlus 12, but Qualcomm says it can still handle more AI tasks than older Snapdragon platforms. I found performance to be acceptable for non-AI tasks, and battery life was excellent on this new platform.

Razr Plus 2024 review: Design

Bigger cover display than any other flip phone
Stylish color options available
Cameras sometimes get in the way

The Motorola Razr Plus 2024 is the coolest phone you can buy, and Moto has clad it in some fabulous colors, including the Spring Green of my review sample and a Hot Pink that’s a throwback to 2005’s pink Motorola Razr V3. Motorola has found its audience for this phone – people who hate boring slabs of glass and metal, even if the metal is titanium.

Everything about the design is thoughtful and slick, from the ‘vegan leather’ back that shows off the Peach Fuzz paint job nicely, to the humongous cover display that the twin camera lenses float in like lily pads in a pixel pond. The foldable inner screen lays so flat you have to concentrate to feel the crease.

Motorola Razr Plus 2024 in green playing SZA on Spotify — Sometimes it doesn't matter if the cameras are in the way (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

That folding mechanism is improved as well. It snaps open and shut in a much more satisfying way than on the Razr Plus 2023, and flicking the phone open and slamming it shut is a joy that becomes addictive; I may need to start making more phone calls so I can answer and hang up more often. The Razr Plus 2024 is also more durable, with an IPX8 rating ensuring that it can take a dunk under water without issue. It’s not all perfect. Sure, the cover display is amazing, wrapping around the camera lenses like pixel magic, but some important buttons on my apps were obscured by those lenses, and while you can resize apps to fit better, it’s a chore. On Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 6, the cover display is smaller, but it isn’t blocked by the lenses. Samsung may be onto something here.

I also take issue with ‘vegan leather,’ but only because ‘vegan’ gets confused with ‘environmentally friendly.’ Vegan leather is plastic. It’s very nice plastic, and Motorola says it won’t fade or stain, and it’s still good for vegans because no animals were harmed in its production. Other benefits seem purely aesthetic, not environmental. Whatever, aesthetic is in.

If you want a phone that’s cooler than what everybody else is carrying, get the Razr Plus 2024. Watch eyes widen when you fold it in half and tuck it away. Check the smiles on your cover display as you take a group photo.

This is a phone for showing off, and my biggest design complaint is that I can only choose one color. Check back around the new year, as well, because Motorola has partnered with Pantone for two years straight to launch Razr phones in Pantone’s Color of the Year.

Design score: 5 / 5

Razr Plus 2024 review: Display

Motorola Razr Plus 2024 in green with Google Maps on the cover display — (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

Wow and wow: both the inner and outer displays are excellent
Interior screen is humongous
Both displays are super-bright, maybe too bright

The Motorola Razr Plus 2024 has a larger cover display than last year’s Razr Plus, and though it didn’t need the upgrade, the bigger outer screen cements Motorola’s dominance in flip phones. This is how a flip smartphone should look. Once you’ve used it, with its dominating cover display, you’ll see that no other flip phone comes close.

Both screens on the Razr Plus 2024 are incredibly bright. The big interior screen can hit 3,000 nits peak brightness, according to Moto, and the cover display can go to 2,400 nits. That’s too bright for a phone I leave next to my bed – checking messages late at night, I blasted myself in the face with bright light more than a few times.

The cover screen wraps around the camera lenses for a signature Motorola look that Samsung hasn’t aped for its Galaxy Z Flip series. Sometimes those lenses get in the way, as on my Roku TV remote app, where some buttons are hidden. I still think it’s a better look than the cutout that Samsung uses; I just wish developers accounted for apps being shown on a smaller, squarish screen.

Motorola Razr Plus 2024 in green showing the Roku TV app running on the cover display with buttons blocked by the camera lenses — Sometimes those cameras block important buttons (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

The foldable inner display is flatter than ever – I can’t see the crease unless I hold the phone at an angle to the light. I can hardly feel the crease either, even if I flick my finger back and forth.

Display score: 5 / 5

Razr Plus 2024 review: Software

Motorola Razr Plus 2024 in green showing the keyboard on the cover display — (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

A light touch on Androi… wait, is that AI? Oh no
Motorola makes the huge AI mistake we’ve been hoping it would avoid

I’ll get the basic Motorola Android software out of the way first so I can rant about my huge problems with Moto AI. I was hoping that Motorola would stay away from AI – OnePlus has mostly managed to avoid the topic – but unfortunately, Moto ventures into dangerous AI territory, and the results are sadly predictable.

Ignoring Moto AI, the Motorola Razr Plus 2024 is a solid Android phone. Motorola’s version of Android looks a lot like Android on the Google Pixel 8. Moto doesn’t brand its interface; it’s just Android 14. It also doesn’t promise five years of software updates, so don’t expect to run Android 19 on this phone, like you will (hopefully) with the Samsung Galaxy S24 and Google Pixel 8 phones.

Motorola Razr Plus 2024 in green showing Quick Settings — (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

Motorola has added useful shortcuts to its phones. I love the camera gesture: you twist your wrist a couple of times to launch it. I found this even more fun and reliable than double-pressing the power button, which is the shortcut on most Android phones. You can also ‘chop’ the phone twice to toggle the flashlight on and off.

Both of these shortcuts also work when the phone is closed, which makes taking selfies on the cover display even easier, with a quick double twist of my wrist. The Razr Plus is also the best flashlight phone I’ve ever used, since it’s so easy to hold when it’s closed.

Okay, enough compliments – let’s talk about AI. Motorola has added some AI features, with more on the way. I’ll start with AI wallpaper, because it’s emblematic of the larger problem.

The Motorola Razr Plus 2024 has an AI wallpaper generator, but it’s nothing like the AI wallpaper you’ll find on the Google Pixel 8 and Samsung Galaxy S24, both of which use AI as a tool to produce stylish and unique wallpapers.

The Motorola Razr Plus, on the other hand, produces images that often cling to stereotypes, with repeated results that are racist, misogynistic, and bigoted. I wish I were joking.

On the Pixel 8, the AI wallpaper is limited. You choose a look such as ‘Soft-focus,’ and then you fill in some blanks: “A soft-focus photo of ________ with ________ hues.”

You can’t fill the blanks with any word you choose – there are options to pick. For the first blank, there are eight choices, including Butterflies, Flowers, and Fireflies. There are nine options for the hues, including Red, Cream, and Natural. It’s limited, but you get 72 different options, and the phone creates four images each time you generate a wallpaper from a phrase. So that one ‘Soft-focus’ scene results in 288 wallpapers. You can ask the phone to generate new wallpaper again and again based on the same phrase, so the choices are limited, but there are infinite possible results.

If the Pixel 8 seems too constrained in this respect, and you’d like the option to submit open prompts, as you’ll find on Midjourney and other AI image-generation tools, I have good news and bad news.

Motorola Razr Plus 2024 in green showing an AI wallpaper of a lighthouse — Moto AI created this happy, furry lighthouse wallpaper for me (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

The good news is that the Motorola Razr Plus 2024 has an AI wallpaper feature that can generate anything you can imagine (with some limits); the bad news is that the generative AI image tools are so bad that they're offensive.

How is the Razr Plus 2024 offensive? That depends on what a happy person looks like. Or a successful person. A happy person could look like anybody! So, how does an AI generate an image of a happy person? What image does it create, drawing upon its understanding of a successful person?

I asked the Razr Plus 2024 to make me a wallpaper image of “a happy person.” I asked 10 times. Eight of the images were young, white, blond women smiling. Another image was a young, white man smiling, and the last was a dark-haired, young, white woman.

I tried the same test for a number of terms, and the results were strikingly similar. If you ask the Moto AI wallpaper tool to create an image of “a successful person,” I’ll bet you $1,000 that person will be young, male, and white.

It’s a huge problem when your AI has been modeled to understand that only young white people can be happy or successful, but if you think that’s bad, buckle up.

I asked the Razr Plus 2024 to make me a wallpaper of “a Jewish person.” I asked 20 times. I got 20 white men. Not a single woman, nor any other skin tone. Almost all the men were wearing hats, beards, and payes, the long locks that Orthodox Jews grow at their temples. There was nobody who might not be an Orthodox Jew, even though Orthodox Judaism accounts for only one in seven Jews in the world. I asked for “a Palestinian person” and I only got men with beards.

When an AI has been modeled to understand that all Jewish people look the same, or that all Palestinian people look the same, to the exclusion of women, then that AI will generate images that support stereotypes including anti-Semitism, misogyny, and other forms of bigotry. That’s what I see happening with Moto AI, and I have a huge problem with this.

Also, it’s just weird. I asked for “friends having fun at the beach” and I only got groups of young, white people, mostly wearing string bikinis. AI doesn’t do good string bikinis, and the photos were monstrous, like a horror movie. I asked for “a strong person” and I got impossibly muscle-bound men, often only a view of bodies from the bulging neck to below the bulging crotch. I’m not joking.

How did this make it into a final product? This is entirely unacceptable. Moto AI isn’t an AI wallpaper generator. It’s an AI stereotype generator. It needs to be removed.

If Motorola isn’t taking this seriously, maybe it will if one of its execs asks its own AI for an image of “a cool smartphone.” I got pictures of an iPhone Pro, with its characteristic triangle camera layout. I got no pictures of a Motorola Razr.

Before this review, I took the unusual step of telling Motorola that I had serious concerns about the AI image tool, and asked if they had any response. I shared the results of my queries, and the conclusions I was drawing. At press time, Motorola had no response.

If you do use the Moto AI wallpaper generator, despite all of the above, be warned that there’s a monthly limit to how many images you can create. You can’t buy more images, so you just have to wait until the first of the next month.

Software score: 1 / 5

Razr Plus 2024 review: Cameras

Image quality is good, but still not great
Taking photos and video is much more fun with a Razr

Photographers say the best camera is the one you have with you; I carry two or three phones at a time, so I would say that the best camera is the one I like using the most. Whether or not the Motorola Razr Plus 2024 takes the best photos, it is the most fun camera to use in almost every situation.

Video shooting is especially clever with the Razr Plus. The camera automatically recognizes ‘camcorder mode,’ when you bend the screen halfway and aim the camera at the action. The Razr Plus will start recording video automatically, and you can stop with a tap anywhere on the bottom half of the screen.

Shooting selfies is ridiculously fun. There’s no need to open the phone – I just give my wrist a twist (or tap the Camera app) and the cover display shows what the camera sees. Instead of using the selfie camera, the higher-quality main cameras can take selfies and portraits. Holding the folded Razr Plus is easier than trying to hold a large smartphone for selfie shots, and people loved seeing themselves on the cover display as I lined up group photos.

The Razr Plus has even more creative shooting options. You can fold the phone in a variety of ways to make it stand on its own. If you want a selfie when the phone is aiming up from the ground, just raise a palm and the camera will start a countdown. It works very nicely. There’s also a Photobooth mode that will take four shots in a row and post the quad-photo composite to Google Photos.

Images from the Razr Plus 2024 look good, and photos are definitely helped by whatever AI tools Motorola is applying. Colors look very saturated in most shots, although photographs seem to lack a sense of depth and life. In photos with a blurred bokeh background, the blurring looks very artificial and digital, and not smooth like you’d get from a better camera.

The camera also had trouble focusing, especially for close-ups. It never seemed to get exactly what I wanted in the sharpest plane of focus, even if I tapped on my subject on the screen before taking the shot.

I also had some trouble with the digital level that you can use on the camera screen to ensure that your photos look straight. My landscape photos often seemed crooked, even though I followed the level until it turned green.

Camera score: 3 / 5

Razr Plus 2024 camera samples

Here are samples taken in New York City and the surrounding suburbs

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Motorola Razr Plus 2024 camera image samples — (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

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Razr Plus 2024 review: Performance

Mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3
Performance was smooth until the AI needed to talk to the cloud

The Motorola Razr Plus 2024 is the first phone launched with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset, and the ‘s’ apparently stands for ‘slower.’ In Future Labs’ benchmark tests, the Motorola Razr Plus 2024 landed closer to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5, which uses a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, than the Galaxy S24, which has the more powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy. We’re still putting the new Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 through testing, but it has the same processor inside as the Galaxy S24.

Still, I had no trouble running any of my apps on the Motorola Razr Plus 2024, and the interface was smooth and snappy. Even fancy tricks like opening the camera with gestures, or moving an app from the big internal display to the smaller cover screen, worked with no delay. The phone also did a great job playing games and movies, including high-resolution, multiplayer games like Call of Duty: Mobile.

My only setback came when I was using the new AI features. I have Google Gemini loaded on the phone, and I subscribe to Gemini Advanced, so I enjoyed using Gemini on the Moto Razr Plus cover display – you can’t do that on the Galaxy Z Flip 6. However, most AI features were very laggy, especially compared to the performance of similar features, like the AI writing tools and AI wallpapers, on the Pixel 8 Pro and Galaxy S24. Whether I was generating a new wallpaper or just revising some text, I had to wait for a connection to Motorola’s cloud, and this added a long delay.

In fact, often the AI features would simply fail to connect, seemingly for no reason. I could make 10 successful requests in a row, then all of a sudden the AI would stop working for the next request. It would usually work again if I changed one word slightly, but there was no apparent problem with my choice of words; it just stopped working, then started again.

Performance score: 3 / 5

Razr Plus 2024 review: Battery

Excellent battery life beats the competition
Fast charging is nice, but no charger included

That mid-range Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 processor on the Razr Plus 2024 pays off in battery life, if not in performance. The Razr Plus has a 4,000mAh battery that is only 7.5% larger than the 3,700mAh cell in the Galaxy Z Flip 5, but it delivers almost 50% more battery life in our tests. We saw less than 10 hours of screen time on the Z Flip 5, but we regularly topped 14 hours of use with the Motorola Razr Plus 2024. The Galaxy Z Flip 6 has a 4,000mAh cell, and we’ll publish detailed comparisons once we’re done testing Samsung’s latest flip phone.

The Motorola Razr Plus offers fast 45W charging, but you need to buy a special charger to use the 45W capabilities. There’s no charger included in the box, and if you’re upgrading, especially from an iPhone, your charger probably tops out at 25W or less. It’s worth buying a newer charger, because that fast charging speed can give you extra hours of phone time if you top up in the 10 minutes you spend getting ready for an evening out.

I had a weird charging glitch with the Razr Plus 2024 as well as my Motorola Razr 2024 review sample. As I was charging the phones, they would frequently wake up and flash the charging percentage on screen, as if I had just plugged in the power cord. They would each do this repeatedly, no matter which USB-C cord I used.

Even worse, when I put the phones on a wireless Qi2 charger, they did the same thing. The phones still charged, but the display lit up in an annoying way to report their progress every few seconds.

I was expecting a software update during my two-week review period, but it never arrived. I’m hoping Motorola’s first update for the Razr 2024 family fixes this glitch.

Battery score: 4 / 5

Should you buy the Motorola Razr Plus 2024?

Buy it if...

You want the coolest-looking phone around
The Motorola Razr Plus 2024 is the coolest phone you can buy right now, with snazzy color options and unbeatable features that show what a flip phone can be in the age of smartphones.

You want two devices in one
The Razr Plus 2024 has such a large cover display that it’s almost like getting two devices – a pocket-sized communicator that opens up to reveal a massive smartphone inside. It’s a totally new experience.

You don’t want the phone everybody else has
The Razr Plus 2024 is drawing iPhone fans away from Apple, according to Motorola, and it’s easy to see why. Motorola does everything Apple won’t, from foldable screens to bright colors to open AI features.

Don't buy it if...

You need a really good camera
The camera on the Motorola Razr Plus has gotten undeniably better, but it still can’t match the best camera phones you can buy, and doesn’t have the lenses and features of other phones in this price range.

You’re worried about bad AI features
The Motorola Razr Plus makes a major misstep with its AI image generator tool that creates stereotyping images and results that feel racist, misogynist, and possibly anti-Semitic. Yes, it’s that bad.

You can wait for a good discount The Motorola Razr Plus 2024 launches at a good price, comparable to Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip, but Moto put last year’s Razr on a perpetual sale that dropped the price by hundreds. If you can wait, you might save big.

Razr Plus 2024 review: Also consider

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6
The Galaxy Z Flip 6 is like a Motorola Razr Plus with more power and less cover screen. Samsung is more conservative with its outer display, but the Z Flip packs more features, and is a professional flip phone, not a party trick.

Apple iPhone 15 Pro
For the same price as the Razr Plus 2024 you can have an iPhone 15 Pro, which not only has much better cameras, but will also give you Apple’s (hopefully) more refined Apple Intelligence AI features in the next year or so.

Motorola Razr 2024
The base-model Motorola Razr this year has a slower processor, but a much bigger cover display than before, more like last year’s Razr Plus. For the incredibly low price it may be worth suffering the weird AI, and you can get it in orange.

How I tested the Motorola Razr Plus 2024

I tested the Motorola Razr Plus 2024 for two weeks before starting this review. I received the Razr Plus 2024 and the Razr 2024 together, and I used the Razr Plus as my only smartphone for work purposes. I checked messages, managed my calendar, wrote stories, and edited photos on the display. I also used the phone as a primary personal phone: controlling my smart home devices, playing games, and managing my social life.

I tested the durability of the phone thoroughly. Every time I opened and closed the phone I did so with deliberate force. I used the phone in the bathtub, and washed it in the sink. I dropped it a few times onto the pavement. It still looks just fine.

To test the AI features, I used a standard prompt list that I always use with AI image-generation tools to prove that they resort to common stereotypes. I ask every AI tool for the same images, 10 times for each prompt, and sometimes more if results are interesting or inconsistent. I ask for images that test stereotypes on race, religion, ethnicity, culture, gender, socio-economic status, and other criteria.

I tested the Motorola Razr Plus 2024 with a variety of accessories, including the Pixel Buds Pro earbuds, a Pixel Watch 2, and my Bluetooth car receiver. I used an Xbox One gaming controller, in addition to a variety of charging devices, especially my Anker 737 battery, which can charge the Razr Plus at full speed.

Read more about how we test

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First reviewed July 2024

Honor 200 Pro review: a portrait powerhouse

5:30 pm | June 12, 2024

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Honor Phones Phones | Tags: Australia, UK, US | Comments: Off

Honor 200 Pro: Two-minute review

Honor’s 'number-series' phones have a reputation for delivering flagship-level specs at mid-range prices. We saw this in 2023 with the impressive Honor 90, and the Honor 70 before that. However, while the range has, in the past, included Pro variants in China, they’ve never made their way to Europe, until now.

The Honor 200 Pro is a different class of device to last year’s Honor 90. Rather than targeting the upper mid-range market, it’s aimed at the lower-tier of flagship devices. Think the Samsung Galaxy S24, rather than A55. At this level, you need top-notch cameras, blazing-fast performance and cutting-edge features to compete, and thankfully, the Honor 200 Pro delivers on all fronts.

The most exciting feature is, surprisingly, a new set of portrait filters developed with the world-famous Studio Harcourt. Yes, they’re just filters, but the results speak for themselves. You can take some truly stunning portraits with this phone.

Elsewhere, the device is solid on across the board. The phone's Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset allows for smooth and snappy daily operations and a great gaming experience, the mammoth 5,200mAh battery keeps things ticking over for a long time, and its charging is among the fastest in its class, either wired or wirelessly.

The competition is fierce, though, and devices like the Samsung Galaxy S24 and Google Pixel 8 are sure to be more appealing to some buyers. In either case, you get more advanced AI features and a longer window of support, but you’ll miss out on the impressive battery life and portrait prowess of the Honor 200 Pro. Whether it’s right for you depends on your priorities.

Honor 200 Pro review: Price and availability

Costs £699.99 in the UK
Released May 2024 – China only, June, 2024 – internationally
No availability in US and Australia

The Honor 200 Pro launched alongside its non-Pro sibling, the Honor 200, in China on May 31, 2024. Then, less than a month later, both devices made their global debut in Paris on June 12. Both phones are now available to pre-order in Europe, but as usual, there’s no US or Australian launch on the cards.

The Honor 200 Pro costs £699.99 in the UK and comes in one storage configuration: 512GB with 12GB RAM. For context, the comparable Samsung Galaxy S24 starts at $799 / £799 / AU$1,399, so £699.99 is a reasonable price for the Honor 200 Pro.

Value score: 5 / 5

Honor 200 Pro review: Specs

Honor 200 Pro review: Design

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Velvety-feeling matte glass back
Casa Milá-inspired camera surround
IP65 dust and water resistant

The Honor 200 Pro stands out from the crowd with its unique elongated circular camera surround. Apparently, this design is inspired by the shape of Barcelona’s Casa Milá, but it also looks a bit like an airplane window, or a turret from Portal.

I found the notch a little off-putting at first, but it has grown on me somewhat, and it definitely helps to differentiate this model from the sea of circular and square-shaped camera bumps. The silver bezel surrounding the camera glass looks super-premium, too.

Elsewhere, things are a little more traditional. The phone has curved edges on the front and rear that make it feel slim and comfortable in the hand, and there’s a high-gloss metal frame around the edges.

The rear is made from glass and it has a velvety-feeling matte texture, similar to recent Vivo flagships like the X100 Pro. It feels lovely and is completely immune to fingerprints, but it’s slippery, so you’ll need to be very careful if you use it without a case. Thankfully, a transparent TPU number is included in the box, so you can keep it protected easily.

The Honor 200 Pro is available in three colors: Moonlight White, Black and Ocean Cyan. I have the white version in for testing, which has a marble-like pattern across the rear, and it reminds me of a fancy kitchen countertop. The black version has a more understated uniform finish, for those that prefer a more professional look. Meanwhile, the cyan model is the loudest; it has a dual-texture rear with a sweeping S-shaped curve down the back.

Design score: 4 / 5

Honor 200 Pro review: Display

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6.78-inch quad-curved 120Hz OLED display
3840Hz PWM dimming
4000 nits peak brightness

The Honor 200 Pro has a bright, vivid display that’s curved on all sides, and an adaptive refresh rate that can dynamically shift between 60Hz and 120Hz, depending on what you’re viewing. It’s not quite as impressive as an LTPO panel, which can go all the way down to 1Hz, but it still means you can expect longer battery life without sacrificing smooth scrolling and high-refresh-rate gaming.

Usually, I prefer flat displays, but the Honor Magic 6 Pro won me over with its relatively tight curves – effectively delivering the best of both worlds. I was hoping for more of the same here, but that’s unfortunately not the case. The Honor 200 Pro has a more typical curved display.

Some people are sure to love it, and it definitely helps to make the device feel slim in the hand and pocket, but it’s more prone to accidental touches than I’d like.

Elsewhere, I have zero complaints. The panel is sharp and high-resolution, the color rendition looks fantastic, and it’s more than bright enough to compete with the springtime sunshine. There are plenty of eye health features included here, too.

The display can deliver an astonishing PWM dimming rate of 3840Hz, besting some of the priciest flagships on the market. The Samsung S24 Ultra only supports 480Hz PWM dimming, for example. If you’re not familiar, this tech essentially ensures low flicker at all brightness levels, to reduce eye strain for those who are sensitive to such things.

Display score: 4 / 5

Honor 200 Pro review: Cameras

50MP main (f/1.9)
50MP 2.5x telephoto (f/2.4)
12MP ultra-wide macro (f/2.2)

Honor describes the 200 Pro as “the portrait master”, so clearly it believes in the phone’s photographic capabilities. And indeed, this phone packs some serious hardware to support that claim.

Around the back, you’ll find a 50MP main camera with a 1/1.3-inch sensor and OIS, a 50MP 2.5x telephoto with OIS and a 12MP ultra-wide with macro focusing capabilities. On the front, there’s a pill-shaped cutout housing a 50MP wide-angle selfie camera.

As usual, the main camera delivers the most impressive results, especially in low light, where the larger sensor comes into play. The camera app gives you a 2x button for digitally cropping in with this camera, and there’s almost no loss of quality when the lighting is sufficient.

The 2.5x telephoto is very impressive, too. Personally, I would have liked a longer focal length, but this 70mm-ish equivalent is still very useful. You can get good results pushing it to about 5x or so before the image starts to break down, but if you go above 10x with the digital zoom, prepare for disappointment.

The ultra-wide is decent, but with a 16mm equivalent field of view, it’s not quite as wide as some of the competition. It does have autofocus, though, and it can focus extremely close for some unique macro shots. It’s lower resolution than the other sensors, but it still captures a good amount of detail. It’s not great in low light, but that’s usually the case with ultra-wides.

The selfie camera has an ample 50MP resolution and a wide FOV that makes it suitable for group shots. Of course, you can also digitally crop into a more typical focal length. It doesn't seem to have autofocus, which is a bit disappointing, so you’ll need to ensure that you’re standing in the sweet spot for the best results.

The most impressive thing about this camera isn’t the hardware, though, it's a new portrait mode developed in collaboration with legendary Parisian portrait studio Studio Harcourt. And yes, it is essentially just a couple of filters, but they’re really, really good ones.

Harcourt Classic aims to recreate the studio’s signature black and white headshots, and the results can be stunning. It’s most effective with portraits – that’s what the feature is designed for, after all – but I got great results with animals, too.

Harcourt Color is a similar effect, but in color, as the name suggests. It creates images with a lovely warm color palette. Both modes add an artificial bokeh effect, and they seem to accentuate lens flares from light sources, too. Honor’s edge detection is second to none, and I was really impressed with how well it managed to cut out wisps of hair and other difficult scenes.

Finally, there’s a Harcourt Vibrant, and I found this a little less impressive. It processes color similarly to the normal camera modes, and it loses some of that vintage allure that the other modes provide. Still, it might be useful to have if you prefer a poppy vibrant shot.

I was a little disappointed to learn that these effects only work on the main and telephoto rear cameras, so you can’t use them for snapping selfies. I’d love to see support for that added, but maybe this selfie camera didn’t quite get the Harcourt stamp of approval.

When it comes to video shooting, the Honor 200 Pro supports capture at up to 4K 60fps on the main and telephoto cameras, while the ultra-wide and selfie camera max out at 4K 30fps. The resulting videos have great stabilization, and as usual, Honor’s software has tons of features packed in, including full manual controls.

Cameras score: 4 / 5

Honor 200 Pro camera samples

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Honor 200 Pro review: Performance

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Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset
12GB RAM and 512GB storage

The Honor 200 Pro is powered by the new Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset, which is supposed to bring some of the flagship Gen 3 experience to more affordable price points. In day-to-day use, I’d say it achieves that goal; the phone feels snappy and apps open quickly with no stuttering or hesitation.

In benchmarks, the difference becomes more apparent. The Honor 200 Pro finds itself lagging behind last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-powered phones in graphical performance, and occasionally beating them in computational workloads. So, it’s not quite top-of-the-line, but it’s still a more capable gaming machine than the Exynos-powered Galaxy S24 or Pixel 8, for example.

I had no issues playing graphically demanding games like Wuthering Waves at maximum settings, so in the real world, the 8s Gen 3 provides more than enough horsepower for most people. The phone does heat up a bit when you give it such a demanding workload, but it always remained comfortable to hold. Honor’s new super-sized vapor chamber is clearly working as it should.

Performance score: 4 / 5

Honor 200 Pro review: Software

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Magic OS 8.0, based on Android 14

The Honor 200 Pro runs Magic OS 8.0, a heavily customized skin that’s built on top of Android 14. This is the same software that we tested on the Honor Magic 6 Pro, and it’s a pretty significant departure from the stock Android experience.

Honor takes some inspiration from Apple for Magic OS. The notification shade and quick settings menu are separated, the app drawer is disabled by default, and there’s even a Dynamic Island-like feature that Honor calls Magic Capsule.

If you’re used to a more traditional Android experience, Magic OS will take some getting used to. On the flip side, if you’re coming from an iPhone, you might have an easier time. As an Android user, I found it jarring at first, but it has grown on me. I especially like the Magic Capsule, as it gives me quick access to my media controls and timers no matter which app I have running in the foreground.

Another great feature is Honor’s Magic Portal. This allows you to drag text or images to the side of your display, and a selection of recommended apps will pop up. Then you can quickly share or search for your selection in the relevant app. I love being able to drag an address into Google Maps for speedy directions, and it’s a really fast way to reverse image search, too.

It’s not all perfect, though. There’s a little bit of bloatware to clean up when you first set up the phone (mostly just Honor’s own apps), and the Magic Capsule had a couple of hiccups during my use. Again, nothing horrific, but it wouldn’t let me tap the media controls at some points, and then it randomly started working again. I am using pre-release software, mind, so in all likelihood, these issues will be ironed out.

Software score: 3 / 5

Honor 200 Pro review: Battery

5,200mAh silicon-carbon battery
100W wired charging
66W wireless charging

The Honor 200 Pro uses the same cutting-edge battery tech as the Honor Magic 6 Pro to squeeze a 5,200mAh battery pack into a very svelte shell. This means it’ll easily get you through a day of very heavy use, a day and a half poses no issue, and you might even get two days out of a charge if you use it sparingly.

What’s more, the Honor 200 Pro charges up very quickly with the included 100W wall adapter. By my count, it took just 50 minutes to go from completely dead to fully charged. Half an hour on the charger will get you up to around 70%.

It also boasts the same lightning-fast 66W wireless charging speed as the pricier Magic 6 Pro. You’ll need Honor’s SuperCharge stand to get the full power output, but I happen to own one, and it’s impressively quick. It’s well worth the investment to be able just to slap your phone down and have it fully topped up in about an hour.

Battery score: 4 / 5

Should you buy the Honor 200 Pro?

Buy it if...

You want a more affordable version of the Magic 6 Pro
There are plenty of similarities between this phone and Honor’s flagship Magic 6 Pro. If you like the look of that device, but it doesn’t fit your budget, then this is a great alternative.

You love taking portrait shots
The Studio Harcourt-inspired portrait modes are some of the most impressive I’ve ever seen. If you take lots of portraits, you’re sure to love this phone.

You want a slim phone with great battery life
The Honor 200 Pro has a slim chassis and its curved edges make it feel even slimmer. Despite that, it packs one of the biggest batteries in its class and can go a long time in between charges.

Don't buy it if...

You’re an avid selfie snapper
While the rest of the cameras impressed, I found the selfie camera underwhelming. There’s no autofocus and you can’t use the awesome Harcourt filters, either.

You love stock Android
Honor’s MagicOS 8.0 is a big change from stock Android, and some users are sure to find it overwhelming.

Honor 200 Pro review: Also consider

The Honor 200 Pro delivers impressive specifications and features at a competitive price point, but the competition has plenty to offer, too.

Samsung Galaxy S24
Samsung’s most affordable flagship is a more compact option that doesn’t compromise on specs and quality. If you’re keen on generative AI features, it offers a lot more in that department.

How I tested the Honor 200 Pro

Review test period: Two weeks
Testing included: everyday use including web browsing, social media, photography, video calling, gaming, streaming video, music playback
Tools used: Geekbench 6, 3DMark, GFXBench, native Android stats, Honor 100W charger and wireless SuperCharge stand

I popped my SIM card into the Honor 200 Pro and lived with it as my main device for around two weeks before reaching any conclusions. I used it exactly as I would use any other phone, taking tons of pictures, gaming, messaging, working, streaming video and navigating with Google Maps.

I also compared the experience of playing graphically demanding games like Wuthering Waves, Genshin Impact and PUBG Mobile to my experiences with other Android flagships like the Honor Magic 6 Pro, Vivo X100 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. In addition, I ran several benchmarks on the handset including 3DMark, GFXbench and Geekbench.

Battery performance was assessed based on my real-world usage and charging times were measured using the included 100W wall adapter and cable. I also tested the wireless charging capabilities with Honor’s Wireless 100W SuperCharge stand.

Read more about how we test

First reviewed June 2024

Samsung Galaxy A55 review: mid tier has never looked so high end

10:43 am | May 28, 2024

Author: admin | Category: Computers Gadgets Phones Samsung Galaxy Phones Samsung Phones | Tags: Australia, OS, UK, US | Comments: Off

Samsung Galaxy A55 5G: Two-minute review

If you’re shopping for a mid-range phone in 2024, there’s a lot of box-ticking happening in this category. Thankfully, Samsung is a pretty sure-fire bet in this space and its latest release, the Galaxy A55, is another strong contender to become one of the best cheap phones you can get. Like its predecessor, it’s a mid-tier phone with a design that arguably looks and feels as good as its flagship counterpart.

It might not possess all the high-end components and cutting-edge features of the Galaxy S range, but straight out of the box, the Galaxy A55 looks and feels like a premium smartphone – all while costing less than half the handsets that sit atop our list of the best Samsung phones. And while it might be slightly sacrilegious, I think it's even more attractive than the Samsung Galaxy S24.

The A55 has kept the elegantly smooth and clean design of its predecessor, including the shiny back glass that was a major improvement over the Samsung Galaxy A53. However, what sets the A55 apart from both the Galaxy A54 and other mid-tier phones, and what makes it feel like a premium device, is that it’s completely ditched plastic in favor of a new and strikingly classy metal build.

Samsung Galaxy A55 on desk — (Image credit: TechRadar/ Max Delaney)

Upgrading the already impressive 6.4-inch display in the A54 to 6.6-inches, you could assume the size increase would make the A55 harder to hold than its predecessor. Don't immediately rule out the A55, however: while I admittedly have big hands and had no issue using the Galaxy A54, I found the A55’s aluminum frame even easier to grip. As a happy side effect, this ensures its bigger Super AMOLED display isn't tarnished by having to put your grubby fingerprints all over it to comfortably hold it.

That's about where the big talking points end. The Galaxy A55 won't leave you disappointed in the photography department, keeping the same 50MP main, 12MP ultra-wide and 5MP macro camera trio that we loved in our Samsung Galaxy A54 review. The photos and videos are detailed, the app is snappy, the autofocus is quick and it does indeed perform well in low-light areas, even if it takes a bit of a learning curve to get the best results. The only real flaw I found was that the photos taken in bright sunshine tended to be overexposed, resulting in a hazy, unsaturated image.

Despite retaining the same 5,000mAH battery as its predecessor, the Galaxy A55 easily saw me through more than seven hours of screen time during my testing – that’s regular use like social media, YouTube, some light gaming and sitting on the home screen while I stare into the abyss – and that’s thanks to its new Exynos 1480 chipset. It's unlikely to see you through the two-day battery life that Samsung boasts about, but it will last long enough for most users. While I loved the battery life, it's charging was slower than I'd have liked, and it didn't have the convenience of wireless charging to make up for it.

Samsung Galaxy A55 rear glass on natural background — (Image credit: Future/ Max Delaney)

This also isn't the phone for the more intense or passionate mobile gamer, but it can still handle relatively demanding titles (like 3D online shooters) with medium graphics settings.

These few sacrifices, though, are what make the Galaxy A55 a great budget smartphone – a speedier chipset than before, a bigger display and a premium design at an affordable price tag that matches the launch price of the A54 in some markets.

Samsung Galaxy A55 review: Price and availability

Launch price from £439 / AU$699
Released March 20 in the UK and March 25 in Australia; unavailable in the US at the time of writing
Available in two storage options and four colorways

While it was released across the globe in March 2024, the Galaxy A55 is unavailable in the United States as Samsung places a larger focus on the Samsung Galaxy S23 FE and the even more budget-friendly Samsung Galaxy A35 5G in that market.

In other markets like the UK and Australia, the A55 is available in two storage options – 128GB and 256GB – both with only 8GB of RAM (there is a model with 12GB RAM that seems to be listed only for availability in India). However, the Samsung Galaxy A55 5G provides the rare feature of up to 1TB of additional storage via a microSD card.

In a change to what we see across a span of products, Aussies actually get quite the deal in comparison to their UK brethren, as £439 directly converts to over AU$800. So while we think the Australian price is very fair, UK customers aren't getting the same deal. It's not all bad, though, as the UK price is actually cheaper than the launch price of the Galaxy A54's two £449 and £499 models last year, and the 6GB RAM option is no more.

Value Score: 4/5

Samsung Galaxy A55 review: Specs

There's a few considerable changes from the Galaxy A54, including improved glass durability, a larger display and greater size generally. Here's a quick breakdown of the Samsung Galaxy A55's specs.

Samsung Galaxy A55 review: Design

Aluminum build
IP67 rating means it can handle a splash
Fingerprint sensitive
Bigger and heavier than it predecessor

With no plastic in its build, Samsung has continued its lean towards sustainability by opting to use aluminum for the Galaxy A55’s chassis, giving it a premium-looking, exceptionally classy and functional metal build. When combined with its stylish back glass, it amounts to a supremely elegant design that brings the handset physically more in line with Samsung's Galaxy S series.

It's not beauty over function, though, as the upgraded Corning Gorilla Glass Victus Plus – the toughest yet – adds even more durability to its front and back than what we saw in the A54, and the pretty aluminum build increases sturdiness while making it easier to grip. During my testing period, it's strong build and IP67 rating had no problems handling the trials of everyday life – in and out of bags, a few small drops onto a carpeted floor and some water-laden situations when listening to podcasts while in the shower – the A55 is almost as durable as it is beautiful.

Samsung Galaxy A55 showcasing fingerprint smudges on its rear glass — (Image credit: TechRadar/Max Delaney)

Unfortunately, that big sleek, glossy back glass isn’t without drawbacks, as I found out as soon as I picked up my Navy Galaxy A55, which was anything but ‘Awesome’ in this respect. It picks up smudges as easily as my niece picks up germs from preschool. Even leaving some room for the possibility that I have an above-average knack for smudges, the phone is extremely smudge sensitive. However, it's safe to assume fingerprint marks on the lilac, lemon and ice blue models will be less visible.

It's also probably worth mentioning that the A55 doesn't lie evenly on its back due to its floating camera design – and placing it face down just put the abundance of fingerprint smudges on display. This little niggle is not exclusive to the Galaxy A55, but I did find it bothersome.

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Samsung Galaxy A55's rear outdoors — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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While UK customers will have access to the full gamut of colorways, a design factor that the Galaxy A55 5G has retained from its predecessor, Australian customers only get two colors. Last year it was Awesome Violet and Awesome Graphite, and now in 2024 it's Awesome Lilac and Awesome Navy. Apparently Aussies only like near-black shades and variants of purple. The UK has a little more room for taste, with Awesome IceBlue and Awesome Lemon added into the fold.

Design Score: 4.5/5

Samsung Galaxy A55 review: Display

Samsung Galaxy A55 display — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

Bigger display than the Galaxy A54 (6.6-inches)
1000-nit peak brightness
120Hz variable refresh rate
Protected with Corning Gorilla Glass Victus+

It would be unreasonable to expect immense display upgrades with such heavy improvements to the A55's design, but there are a few slight improvements from the A54 that make a definitive difference. Most notably being a slight increase in size, moving up to 6.6 inches from the A54's 6.4 inches. Otherwise, you'll get the same 1080 x 2340 resolution Super AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate, HDR 10 support and the same 19:5.9 aspect ratio.

While Samsung makes a clear point of saying the A55 peaks at 1000 nits, and did not say that the A54 did, our time with both shows that the difference, if any at all, is negligible. In comparison to the Google Pixel 8a's 2000-nit maximum, let alone something like the OnePlus 12 that boasts an insane 4500 nits, the A55's output can't be considered much more than a pass mark.

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Galaxy A55 display reflecting the sky — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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Galaxy A55 display — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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Samsung Galaxy A55 display playing PUBG Mobile — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

The Samsung Galaxy A55 5G has a wonderful display that makes swiping through socials, watching videos and playing games an absolute blast. Heck, I could almost taste LeBron James' wine while watching the Mind the Game podcast. With a passable peak brightness you'll be able to enjoy its beauty even in direct sunlight and its minimum brightness is more than comfortable laying in bed. The A55's display is vibrant, detailed and strong, so while there might be better displays on more expensive phones, I have very few complaints.

One thing I did like about the A55's display was the built-in fingerprint sensor. While it's not the snappiest I've experienced, it was accurate and faster than typing in a passcode or pattern. Even if it's a bit slow for your taste, the payoff of the A55's flawlessly clean design – with no fingerprint sensor or button below the screen or on the back glass – is well worth it. However, I was unimpressed with the A55's facial recognition, too often finding myself swiping to unlock before it was ready, despite my face being unobstructed.

Display Score: 4/5

Samsung Galaxy A55 review: Software

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Samsung Galaxy A55 software — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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Galaxy A55 homepage, app library and control panel (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

Android 14 w/ One UI 6.1
Four years of OS updates
Knox Vault and Seamless Updates

If you were expecting the Galaxy A55’s software to mimic that of the Galaxy S24, you've set yourself up for disappointment. This is a mid-tier phone that costs a lot less than the S24, so expecting mass upgrades from the A54's output would be unfair. That said, the OS is far from bad, it's just a minimal update to that of the A54, running on the Android 14-based One UI 6.1.

Despite reported issues for older phones and rumored impact on charging speed from the One UI 6.1 update, the Galaxy A55 runs very smoothly, and will be familiar to those with some Samsung experience. While it doesn't have the Galaxy AI functionality of the S line, and only four major upcoming OS updates to the latter’s seven, One UI 6.1 is a perfectly fine operating system that works seamlessly within the A55.

One positive feature worth noting – a very happy introduction that comes years after Google launched a similar function with the first Google Pixel – is the introduction of a new era of update functionality for Samsung devices. 'Seamless Updates' adds the ability to download system updates in the background, and the A55 is the first Samsung phone to feature it as part of the brand's March 2024 security patch.

Shutting your phone down for 20 minutes while it updates is, or should be, a thing of the past, and this patch means only a speedy 3-minute restart is needed to complete updates. Along with seamless updates, the A55 also sees the addition of Knox Vault – a new addition passed down from the S24 – that secures important data like passwords and biometrics.

Now, while those two little features aren't much, when put together with the design and display developments we've already looked at, it makes for quite the enhancement. Combined with smooth performance and everything Samsung fans already enjoy about the Galaxy software – squircles and all – there's a lot to like about the software of the A55. With guaranteed four years of software updates coming, you can rest easy knowing your phone will remain up to date, at least for a while.

Software score: 4/5

Samsung Galaxy A55 review: Cameras

Galaxy A55 camera trio — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

50MP f/1.8 main camera w/ OIS
12MP ultra-wide + 5MP macro camera
32MP f/2.2 front-facing camera
Improved low-light photography

Photography is a crucial part of the modern handset, and a phone's camera can make or break it in the eyes of the user. In the best way possible, the Galaxy A55's camera does neither.

Providing a rear trio of cameras that can take wonderful photos in various ways, and a front camera that you'll have no problem taking flattering selfies with, the camera is a huge upgrade… over the Samsung Galaxy A53's 64MP main camera. But, a lack of massive change from the A54 isn't what disappointed me about it.

Whether it's selfies, ultra-wide shots, high-detail pics or snaps of your morning coffee, the Galaxy A55 has an objectively good camera system that will be more than serviceable, even for the most photo-obsessed. My biggest problem was that it just didn't capture the reality of what I was looking at when I most expected it to – aka in bright sunlight. Whether it was photos of my sun-baking dog, the book I was reading or a cat-holding selfie out in the garden, the results were a toned-down, dull version of what my eyes were seeing due to overexposure. They were still clear, beautiful images, but a touch too hazy for my liking.

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Photos of my sun-loving doggo — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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Some flicks of a morning coffee and some very handsome limes — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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Galaxy A55 excels at pet photos — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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Galaxy A55 Camera — (Image credit: TechRadar)

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Night photography — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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Samsung Galaxy A55 camera — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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Combine that issue with a macro camera that was near-impossible to hit the sweet spot with – as you can see by my best results below – and you have a camera that is little more than good. There is just too much high-quality competition, even within this price range, to give it any further praise.

Samsung does make up for that slightly, though, with an abundance of options to help you take the best photo possible, even before you get to the pool of editing tools waiting for one to be taken. Within the four main photo-type options in the camera app (Fun, Portrait, Photo and Video) are tools to help you smooth out the image, get the right framing, activate a timer, turn the flash on and enter the camera settings to ensure you're ready to click away.

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Samsung Galaxy A55 macro camera — macro camera results (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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Galaxy A55 macro camera — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

While the modes within More, like macro, slow-mo and Pro, will undoubtedly be put to good use by some users, they remain mostly unused by me. However, the one mode hidden here that I do think is worth a special mention, is night mode. I wasn't blown away by the A55's ability to take photos in low-light areas at first. However, when I put it to the test in a pitch-black room its performance was truly impressive.

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Galaxy A55 night-mode photography — Testing the night mode on the Samsung Galaxy A55 (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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Galaxy A55 low-light photography — The before: the books are invisible in normal, standard photo mode (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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Samsung Galaxy A55 low-light photography — The after. The same lighting but with night mode turned on (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

While it might not be a breathtaking photo of the night sky, I think the night mode better portrays how well the Galaxy A55's camera performs in low light. As you can see from my sample images, it works pretty darn well. From freezing cherished moments at dimly-lit restaurants, taking selfies under the hazy ambiance of street lights and snapping pics of your puppy snoozing under the TV’s silver glow, the A55's nighttime performance will be there for a really good shot.

Camera score: 4/5

Samsung Galaxy A55 review: Performance and Audio

Samsung Galaxy A55's rear glass shining in the midday sun — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

New Exynos 1480 Chipset
8GB RAM (12GB in select locations) with no more 6GB model
Stereo speakers
Up to 256GB of storage with up to 1TB additional storage

With a new chipset, I had high hopes for a noticeable performance improvement over the Galaxy A54, but I was prepared for the more-than-likely event that it would be hardly noticeable. Thankfully, the Exynos 1480 chipset provided much more of the former than the latter.

With scores of 1155 and 3468 in the two single-core and multi-core Geekbench tests, and solid results in the 3D Mark: Wildlife, Wildlife Extreme and Sling Shot Extreme stress tests of 3996, 939 and 6216, the Galaxy A55 won't be getting any awards on the test front. However, its results were consistent. For reference, the Google Pixel 7a and Samsung Galaxy S24 results can be seen below.

Despite what the numbers might say and how they compare, the A55 felt excellent during my time with it. From Spotify, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Netflix to the camera, the A55 ran each one of them perfectly, even when I switched haphazardly between them to try and force some lag – it didn't break a sweat.

Galaxy A55 rear glass reflecting the sky while resting on a red hat — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

One area the Galaxy A55 did slow down slightly was within high-performance apps like the Camera after considerable use. With a day’s worth of apps open and some considerable time spent within the camera app, load times started to get noticeable when switching between camera modes. Though it was little more than slight stutters, the lag did stand out compared to its otherwise smooth performance.

Perhaps due to its upgraded cooling system and adaptive refresh rate that better uses its battery, the A55 will be more than adequate for even a heavy casual mobile gamer. I had no problems earning 20 eliminations and a win in my first game of PUBG Mobile, even if it was against a bot, and was happy to see PUBG automatically set the graphics and framerate to their mid-range settings, with the A55 remaining smooth even when turned up to Ultra HD and the highest framerate. However, some rendering issues did start to occur at those high settings, but didn't impact gameplay. Whether it's PUBG Mobile, Apex Legends or hours of Candy Crush interspersed with regular phone use, the Galaxy A55 will handle it all, with battery to spare.

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PUBG Mobile on the Samsung Galaxy A55 — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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PUBG Mobile on Galaxy A55 — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

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As for audio, whether you like to listen to podcasts through the phone's stereo speakers or blast music through a pair of the best wireless headphones, the days of muffled speakers from the A-series handsets are gone. You'll find little problems in how the A55 handles its audio.

The phone's earpiece and down-firing speakers combine to offer clear, balanced sound, providing easy listening when you don't feel like using headphones – and you won't unless you need to. While audiophiles might want to stick with their high-powered stereo units, the A55 does more than well enough for the average person, retaining some clarity even at high volume. And, in regards to connecting wireless devices via Bluetooth, I had absolutely no issues – even when pairing Apple AirPods 3, which don't always easily connect to Android devices.

Performance and Audio score: 4/5

Samsung Galaxy A55 review: Battery

5000mAh battery
25W wired charging
Advertised two-day battery life

Simultaneously great and disappointing might sound strange, but the Samsung Galaxy A55's fantastic battery life was slightly tarnished by its disappointing charge speed.

The surprisingly good battery life of the Galaxy A55, improving on the A54, more than offsets the slight disappointment I felt when my handset went from only 18% to 48% after 30 minutes of charging. That's far from terrible, and fully charging in around 90 minutes to reach 100% isn't the worst thing in the world, but it took longer than I had hoped. Unfortunately, Samsung's claims that the A55 has “super fast charging”, burying in the fine print that the fast-charging wall adapter is sold separately, sets the phone up for some disappointment.

Samsung Galaxy A55 on-screen battery and charging information — (Image credit: TechRadar / Max Delaney)

Retaining its predecessor's 5,000mAh battery, Samsung created high expectations once again, and fell short once again. While you won't get two days of use unless you leave your phone untouched and unopened, I was still impressed by the A55's battery life. Whether it was the seven hours of continuous Stranger Things – after which it still had more than 15% battery left – or hours of Candy Crush, plus everyday actions like social media, video calling, browsing and audio playing – the battery life of the A55 more than held up. I racked up around seven hours of screen time from a full charge, far more than my personal average of just over five, and there was still ample battery at the end of the day.

While the A54 charges slightly faster than the A55 in my experience, the Exynos 1480 chip the Galaxy A55 uses helps it to outlast its predecessor – if by a miniscule amount – leaving enough charge left that could be the difference between ordering an Uber and being left stranded. In short, the Samsung Galaxy A55 5G has more than enough battery life to get you through work, fun and be there when you need it. Just don't expect it to charge to 50% in 15 minutes before you head out.

Battery score: 4/5

Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy A55?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

Also consider...

If this review of the Samsung Galaxy A55 has left you wondering about other mid-tier alternatives, take a look at a few listed below. I’ve also compiled a specs comparison between them and the A55 for a clearer snapshot.

How I tested the Samsung Galaxy A55

Review period: Three weeks
Testing included: everyday use including web browsing, social media, photography, video calling, gaming, streaming video, music playback
Tools used: 3D Mark: Original, 3D Mark:Extreme, 3D Mark: Slingshot Extreme (unlimited), Geekbench 6.2.2, Geekbench, native Android stats

Once I received the Samsung Galaxy A55, I put it to the test immediately by running it through some benchmarking tools. I then used it as my main phone through the first week and this included playing games, taking photos and watching content.

Across the final two weeks of my testing time, I put it under the stresses, both technical and physical, of everyday life. From scrolling sessions at home to podcasts on the bus to being pulled in and out of my bag and accidentally walking into the doorway of my bedroom. These activities allowed me to see how the battery holds up over the course of time with normal use, not just how it handles high-impact stress tests.

With a heavy coverage focus on phones here at TechRadar, I'm knowledgeable of the phone market, what it has to offer and how different phones aimed at different budgets fit into it – making me the perfect candidate to test a mid-tier phone like the Samsung Galaxy A55 5G.

Read more about how we test

[First reviewed May 2024]

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