Articles tagged "Flashback"

The king was on his last legs – Symbian once ruled the smartphone world, but the introduction of the iPhone followed by the arrival of Android spelled the end for the platform. However, it would not go gentle into that good night. Symbian is the...

The Nokia N95 was a high point for Symbian, but as we noted in our previous Flashback article, its success was never replicated. It was also the end for this form factor – the Swiss army knife slider phone. The original N95 came in early 2007,...

Samsung’s rugged XCover line dates back to 2010 and started off with feature phones, but even when it switched to smartphones it was never a premium line. For tough + premium there was the Galaxy S Active line. The Samsung Galaxy S4 Active was...

Samsung and LG are two tech giants from South Korea that have a healthy rivalry in so many markets – this used to include phones, until LG pulled the plug in 2021. Today we want to rewind to a couple of years before that for the story of the last of...

Mini phones are on our mind again – when are they not? – but the most recent memory to surface is just another confirmation that the market doesn’t actually want such devices. Specifically, we want to talk about the Samsung Galaxy S III mini and...

In a past installment we looked at the history of the memory card. The microSD emerged as the clear victor, but it might soon follow MMC and Memory Stick into the great beyond, at least as far as smartphones are concerned. These days a microSD...

This week we bid farewell to the Lightning port – with the launch of the iPhone 15 series and the Pro models its story comes to a close. We have already had a detailed look at Lightning, what it was, what it could do and what it couldn’t do. Here we...

This week Sony unveiled its Xperia 5 V, a camera-focused phone that while not the smallest smartphone around is still one of the most compact to feature a flaghsip chipset and a premium camera setup. And while thinking back on some of Sony’s most...

Modern smartphone chipsets are awesome – their CPUs reach incredible clock speeds of up to 3.46GHz on the iPhone 14 Pro series (Apple A16). The Android rivals aren’t far behind at 3.36GHz with the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2. But while raising the clock...

A long time ago Sony joined forces with Ericsson to tackle the mobile market. They found great success with feature phones that focused on camera or music, the time with Symbian was interesting but less successful and eventually the pair settled on...

According to stats from App Annie, back in 2013 there were only 7 mobile games with a revenue of $100 million (or more) a year (PDF). Fast forward to 2021 and there were 7 mobile games with revenues of $100 million or more... a month. Mobile games...

Look at your phone – it’s a rectangle with rounded corners, isn’t it? While this was established as the prevailing shape early on, there were those that knew in their hearts there are better, more natural shapes. In 2015 Monohm showcased the...

The more tech-savvy among you probably know that Android is based on the Linux kernel. But it is nothing like a typical Linux that you may have seen on PCs – or on smartphones. Nokia and Intel spent a lot of time and money trying to launch a...

While Windows is best known as a desktop operating system, Microsoft’s big push with Windows 8 was to make both the internals and the user interface capable of running on a touch-based, ARM-powered device. This caused a massive rewrite of Windows...

Henry Ford once said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. The authenticity of the quote isn’t 100% confirmed, but the point is clear – people can’t always come up with the best solutions to their...

Unlimited power! For a brief moment in 2019 there was a smartphone with a massive 18,000mAh battery – yes, that’s 3-4 times bigger than a typical phone battery today. However, it failed to find an audience and it launch was canceled. We’re...

Apple introduced the original iPhone in January 2007 and a few months later it leveraged the new all-touch interface to add a new branch to the iPod family tree. While the iPod touch was outsold by the iPhone, it was still highly successful – Apple...

How wide is too wide? That’s a silly question, LG thought in 2009 when it released the LG BL40 New Chocolate. With a 4” display of cinematic 21:9 aspect ratio, this phone was unique for its time – at that point a typical phone had a 4:3 or 3:2...

Meizu has had an interesting history and after several turbulent years it pulled out of the smartphone market. Now that it is under the wing of car-maker Geely, the company is poised to make its return with the launch of the Meizu 20 series on March...

A couple of years ago we looked at the best LG phones and called the LG G5 “the most ambitious LG phone ever”. We stand by that – the phone brought some features that had a marked impact on the market and some that did not, not even on LG’s own...