Articles by Alex Dobie

“You look like you’re talking into a piece of toast.”

The Samsung Galaxy Note celebrates its 10th birthday this month with no current handset on sale and the series’s strong likelihood of being completely retired in early 2022. Although the spirit of the Note will live on through the Galaxy S22 Ultra, it still feels like the end of an era.

It’s fitting, then, that the apparent cancellation of the Note comes as every high-end phone is a Galaxy Note — or at least offers the first Note’s prominent standout feature: An enormous screen for more productive work and immersive play. For a pretty long time, the Note was the only place to get that experience. And it started in late 2011 with the launch of the first phone in the series.

Since the S Pen was the main feature that gave the Note its name, the phone was so enormous for the time that much of the early coverage focused on its sheer size.

A trailblazing phone held back by the Android of the time.

The first Note was easily on…

Despite some early software wonk, Google’s new handsets dominate at their respective price points.

The Google phone has been a long time coming. Almost 15 years ago, the first rumors of the “gPhone” were swirling before the T-Mobile G1 emerged in 2008. Then, a year later, the Nexus program began, bringing a range of even Googlier Google phones to market. Then the original 2016 Pixel was plugged as the true “phone by Google.”

Even with that storied history, I’m here to tell you that the new Google Pixel 6 devices — and the larger Google Pixel 6 Pro in particular — feel like the first, honest-to-goodness Google flagships. The new Pixels are among the best phones on the market and make a strong statement about Google’s future intentions as a smartphone maker.

The unique Googliness of these devices starts on the outside, with the new Pixel design identity and camera bar. Google, thankfully, has moved on from the past generation of Pixel design language, which basically saw the com…

Google’s first ‘flagship’ phone is a bit more expensive, but the price premium over the regular Pixel 6 could be worth it.

Everyone’s smartphone needs are different. Not everyone likes big phones. Not everyone needs the very best camera or multi-day battery life or quick charging. But depending on your situation and your priorities, there are plenty of reasons why upgrading to the Google Pixel 6 Pro instead of the base model Pixel 6 might make sense.

There’s a reason Google calls this model its “first flagship phone” — the Pixel 6 Pro is more advanced and more high-end than any previous Pixel model, and that includes its little brother.

1. That telephoto camera

The single most extensive upgrade in the Pixel 6 Pro is the rear camera system. While the smaller Pixel 6 packs the same main and ultrawide shooter as the more expensive model, only the Pro offers Google’s 4X 48-megapixel telephoto camera. Compared to hybrid zoom from the main sensor on the standard Pixel 6, there’s si…

With its bathtub notch, dual front-facing cameras, and groundbreaking AI capabilities, the Pixel 3 was one of the more memorable phones in the series.

The launch of Google’s third-generation Pixels came after a challenging transitional year for the company’s hardware division. The Google Pixel 2 XL had been panned by many for its lackluster P-OLED screen, and so display quality was a huge part of Google’s messaging around the launch of 2018’s Pixel 3. By this point, Google had fully integrated its newly acquired ex-HTC engineers into the Google family, and so everyone was waiting to see how this 100%, top-to-bottom Google phone would turn out.

These were also the first Pixels manufactured under contract by Foxconn instead of a partner brand like HTC or LG. Google also switched to an entirely glass-backed design for its 2018 Pixels, a necessary compromise to fit in Qi wireless charging support.

By now, Google was well underway with its transformation into an AI-first company. At th…

Using Android as an example of the ‘dangers’ of sideloading is misguided, but that doesn’t mean opening the floodgates on iOS is necessarily a good idea.

As part of its ongoing legal spat with Epic Games, Apple recently published a whitepaper entitled, “Building a Trusted Ecosystem for Millions of Apps: A threat analysis of sideloading.” The document outlines Apple’s case for retaining tight control over the iPhone’s highly lucrative app ecosystem in the face of pressure from major developers and U.S. lawmakers. “Sideloading” is used by the firm as a catch-all term for allowing apps to be installed from the web or local storage in addition to third-party app stores — effectively, any source that isn’t vetted in the same way as the iOS App Store.

As you might expect, the report paints the bleakest possible picture of security on Android, which as a platform has allowed apps from outside the default app store to be installed since its earliest days. Figures and case studies are che…

It’s complicated.

Android 12 — or “Snow Cone” if you prefer — officially launched October 4. But good luck finding an official update on any existing phones, outside of public beta builds for Samsung and OnePlus devices. So instead, Google’s official announcement of Android 12’s release to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) states:

Keep an eye out for Android 12 coming to a device near you, starting with Pixel in the next few weeks, and Samsung Galaxy, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Tecno, Vivo, and Xiaomi devices later this year.

It’s highly unusual for the open-source release of a new version of Android to not be accompanied by official updates for Google’s phones. Even before the Pixel series, Nexus phones were guaranteed day-one updates when a new version dropped. So what’s going on here? Is Android 12 really finished and ready to go, or is Google pulling a fast one?

The Android bits are done, but the Pixel bits aren’t.

To answer this, we need to unpick the Android…

If Apple’s going to take on Samsung with a high-priced, low-volume ultra-flagship, a foldable would make a lot of sense.

New iPhones inevitably attract excitement from Apple’s army of loyal fans. After 15 years, the iPhone launch has become an annual ritual. But it’s also true that the buzz around launch day has fizzled somewhat over the last several release cycles. New iPhones increasingly follow a similar pattern of incremental improvements that may be exciting to users upgrading from two or three-year-old devices but do little to stir tech enthusiasts.

The iPhone is a compelling product, one that’s good enough for most people. It’s also one of the most advanced phones on the market, owing to Apple’s unique silicon advantage. But at the same time, it’s also less exciting than it’s ever been.

Many pundits are describing Apple’s latest iPhone 13 devices as “12s” models, including Android Central’s Michael Hicks. His reaction when watching last week’s iPhone 13 unveiling:

What …

Wait — is it really a surprise to find pre-release versions of Android aren’t quite perfect yet?

This past week, Samsung surprised many of us by dropping its first One UI 4 beta, based on Android 12, well ahead of the stable code drop from Google. At the time of writing, we’re not expecting Pixel phones to get stable Android 12 until early October. As such, the early version available to Galaxy S21 owners right now is … well, kind of a mess. Performance issues and bugs aplenty reveal that the current One UI 4 build is further away from stable status than previous Samsung betas, which on the whole have been relatively stable. So if you want to try Android 12 on Samsung’s best Android phones, you might want to hold off for a more reliable build.

The same pattern is apparent in the Android 12 public beta for Pixel phones. Fairly serious bugs remained right up to the current beta 5 build. And even that version still has obvious user-facing issues, like the broken “at a glance” widg…

We all want great selfies without a hole punch or notch. But there’s a delicate balance between display performance and photo quality.

For the past several years, the smartphone industry has been relentlessly marching towards one ideal: An all-screen phone front, uninterrupted by bezels, notches, hole punches, or other blemishes. High screen-to-body ratios have been a hallmark feature of many of the best Android phones for some time now, but the dream is to eliminate anything that’s not screen on the front of the handset.

There are trade-offs with each of the technical solutions to this problem. Phones like the ASUS Zenfone 8 Flip eliminate the need for a dedicated selfie camera by installing the rear shooters in a special rotating module — though this results in a fairly bulky handset and eliminates any possible water resistance in the device.

Under-display cameras — or UDCs — are perhaps the most ambitious solution, however. We’ve seen these in a handful of prototype hands…

The Pixel 5a isn’t much of an upgrade over the 4a 5G, and it isn’t launching everywhere. So what’s going on?

The Google Pixel 5a is finally here, and 2021’s only mid-tier Pixel model is just a little bit different compared to last year’s Pixel 4a. It’s got a much bigger screen, a gigantic battery, and important table-stakes features like water resistance that were missing from the 4a.

But a more important question than what the Pixel 5a is — it’s pretty much just an upgraded Pixel 4a 5G, after all — is why it exists.

Visually, this model clearly belongs to the previous generation of Pixels — the 2020 generation, as opposed to the newfangled Pixel 6 with its Google Tensor chip, high-end ambitions, and chunky camera visor.

The Pixel 5a looks set to fill that all-important “cheap 5G phone” role for Google — so perhaps it makes sense that it’s channeling that older Pixel 4a 5G style. It is largely the same phone, after all. The 5a uses the same Snapdragon 765G processor and a…