Matthew Hughes

HMD Global, the licencee of the once-ubiquitous Nokia mobile phone brand, today unveiled its latest budget blower, the Nokia 2.3. This handset resembles a heavily upgraded version of the Nokia 2.2. It carries the same MediaTek Helio A22 chipset, but has improvements in other areas. The rear-facing camera, for instance, is now …

For a company that prizes itself on its privacy credentials, Apple received a bit of a bloody nose earlier this week when long-time security journalist Brian Krebs revealed the iPhone 11 Pro intermittently seeks the user’s location — even when there are no applications with location permissions in use. In recent years, Apple …

CommentEarlier this year, I reviewed arguably the worst phone I've ever used in eight years of covering tech for a living: the Doogee S40. I've always prided myself on my fairness, but I genuinely couldn't find a silver lining to this appalling waste of rare-earth metals. It had a crap screen, a weak camera, and was frustratingly slow …

The middle ground of the smartphone market is a bit of a battleground. Manufacturers of all stripes – except Apple – keep flinging devices at punters with fairly high-end specs, but price tags under the £500 mark. The latest salvo comes from embattled Chinese comms giant Huawei, which today announced the launch of its Nova 6 …

Huawei Technologies today filed a fresh lawsuit against the US Federal Communications Commission over its decision to ban rural carriers from buying the company's mobile hardware with Universal Service Fund (USF) cash. The mobile giant's argument, per its filing in the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, is that the FCC …

Motorola has updated its mid-range lineup with the announcement of the Android 10-powered One Hyper. This handset is notable for several reasons, including the addition of a 64MP rear-facing camera, as well as a 32MP pop-up selfie shooter. The latter is similar to that on the Honor 9X, which we reviewed earlier this year. The …

ExclusiveDen Automation, the once-promising UK smart home startup that raised nearly £4.5m via equity crowdfunding and boasted former Amstrad chief Bob Watkins as CEO, has agreed to go into liquidation, The Register can report. Documents seen by this publication show Wilkin Chapman Business Solutions Limited has been appointed as …

Are smartphones getting interesting again? For the longest time, handsets occupied the same tedious rectangular form-factor. The sole areas of differentiation were found in the components under the hood. But then Apple introduced the notch, which, although divisive, forced copycat Android manufacturers to see how much they …

What even is a flagship phone anymore? It was only a few years ago that the line of demarcation between a scrappy midranger and a high-spec handset was well defined. If you spent an extra £300 on a phone, you could reasonably expect to get an extra £300 worth of value. Now, thanks largely to efforts from a predominantly …

Phone launches are usually leakier than an Ikea colander, and the release of the upcoming Xiaomi Mi CC9 Pro is no exception. Pictures of the handset, which Xiaomi will formally launch next week, have already been leaked by Chinese regulatory agency TENAA – the country's equivalent of the FCC – showing a handset with five …

Yesterday, at its developer conference, Samsung announced three new laptops: a pair of notebooks certified by Intel's Project Athena programme, the Galaxy Book Flex and Galaxy Book Ion, as well as a machine that uses Intel's new Lakefield chipsets, the Galaxy Book S. As the name implies, the Galaxy Book Flex is a 2-in-1 …

The wearables market is popping, if you believe the latest report from entrail prodders at Gartner: the sector will might be worth an impressive $52bn by 2020, up from $32bn in 2018. Gartner predicts much of that expansion will be driven by what it deems "earworn wearables". It uses this somewhat clunky term to describe the …

Unlike the seeming majority of wearables (including those from Apple, Fitbit, and Huawei), the resurrected Moto 360 smartwatch isn't targeted at fitness enthusiasts. Rather, it sits in a niche that's been perversely neglected by most brands. Paraphrasing a company rep, this smartwatch is for those who want something that looks …

Amazon has failed to stop high-flying salesman Philip Moyer, who once flogged its cloud services to the financial services industry, from moving to Google's cloud division, although its efforts were partly upheld by a Seattle court. Even though Amazon Web Services couldn't prevent Moyer from taking up his new role, US district …

Iconic camera company Red has upped sticks and quit the smartphone biz following the retirement of its founder Jim Jannard and mobe-fondlers' dismal reception of the firm's first effort, the Hydrogen One. In a statement issued on the Red community forums, Jannard explained the reasons for his stepping down. I have spent the …

Google's Pixel 4XL may still be wet behind its ears, but it couldn't escape the indignity of a teardown by spudger-brandishing folk at iFixit, who came away unimpressed after some tinkering with the screwdrivers. Digging into the phone's innards, the engineers found a variety of components sourced from rival handset …

As the global focus on computing curricula intensifies and parents continue to push their kids towards STEM subjects in the hopes that leads to better opportunities later on in life, the proliferation of "coding kits" aimed at kids is keeping pace. Much of this seeks to teach the fundamentals of programming in an age- …

Hands OnThis morning, at a launch event in Amsterdam, Honor formally unveiled its latest handset: the 9X. Typically, the release of a mid-range handset from an explicitly youth-focused brand wouldn't elicit much attention from these pages, but this is different. As you undoubtedly know, earlier this year the Trump administration …

If you've ever bought a phone charger or cable from Amazon, there's a decent chance it came from Anker, a fast-growing Chinese consumer electronics firm whose products regularly occupy the top-selling spots in their respective categories. Over the past few years, Anker has diversified into other categories, including household …

Almost eight months after its initial debut at Mobile World Conference, Huawei's long-awaited Mate X foldable handset finally has a launch date. In a Weibo post earlier today, Huawei opened pre-sales of the much-delayed phone, with units expected to ship to customers in China on 15 November. The cheapest model, which packs 8GB …