Items tagged with review
Here’s a question for you: what’s Motorola’s most recent flagship phone? Take your time, we’ll wait... Perhaps the lovely Moto X from 2013 comes to mind, or the Moto X 2nd gen, or even the Moto X Pure/Style? Or maybe you’ll recall the Moto Z and Moto Mods? We’re here to tell you that, technically, Moto’s most recent flagship was the Z2 Force back in 2017. Yes, there was a Moto Z3, but it came with a Snapdragon 835 back when the 845 was still king. And while Moto eventually made an X4 and Z4, these were mid-range phones. So, needless to say, Moto’s recent Edge and Edge+ launch was a big deal. Our focus today is the Moto Edge+, a $1000 flagship exclusive...
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The highly anticipated OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro are on sale starting today, and lucky for prospective Android flagship shoppers, we have our full deep dive review on the pages ahead. OnePlus has made a name for itself over the years, especially with Android enthusiasts, for building high quality devices with thoughtful feature inclusions, while limiting costly unnecessary features and delivering exceptional value at almost unheard-of price points. Top-tier Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered devices with more RAM, more storage, and OnePlus' lean, mean Android-based Oxygen OS -- at price points hundreds less than competitive devices -- has been the hallmark of the brand. However, this new OnePlus 8...
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It’s fair to say that when you think of flagship phones, LG may not be the first brand that comes to mind. Although the company's made some strong devices over the years, including some of Google's Nexus and Pixel-branded phones, the South Korean giant hasn't had the same kind of success in the mobile space as some of its larger competitors. The company's introduced some competent handsets over the years, but often seems to rely on the strength of its carrier relationships -- at least here in the US. As a result, LG’s phones often feel designed to please the operators more so than end users, and to meet a particular -- typically aggressive -- price point. Last year’s G8 and...
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Samsung's Galaxy S line is the company's premier family of flagship Android phones. Over the years it has been underpinned by a recurring theme of bigger, faster, and prettier, with a ever-growing list of features. This year's Galaxy S20 family is no exception, starting out at a bold 6.2-inch format for the smallest Galaxy S20 5G device, 6.7-inches for the Galaxy S20+ 5G, and topping-out at the bodacious 6.9-inch Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G. We have the Galaxy S20 Ultra on tap for review here and it's Samsung's full boat, no compromises offering in the Galaxy S20 line-up. As its name suggests, the Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G is a 5G-ready phone powered by Qualcomm's most powerful Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform,...
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Gaming on a much larger screen has always had this almost unnatural appeal. Over the years, many enthusiasts likely have tried to hook up a PC to a much larger display for gaming bliss, whether it was a TV or projector via S-Video, component or DVI, or nowadays, the biggest possible LCD one can afford. When LCD TVs became the norm for home entertainment use, it made adopting the large screen experience much easier. PC Monitor manufacturers started catching on and now offer display sizes up to 65-inches in regular 16:9 or ultrawide 21:9 aspect ratios, with what we’d consider bare minimum PC gaming features these days: a 120Hz panel, G-Sync or FreeSync variable refresh rate compatibility,...
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Motorola seemingly has a knack for knocking out excellent mid-range Android phones like the Moto G series and the Moto Mod-capable and 5G ready Moto Z3. With more and more entrants bringing good enough performance at affordable price points, however, it's getting harder for manufacturers to differentiate. Even the underlying platforms are mostly standardized these days, with SoCs coming from just a couple of big players like Qualcomm. What's a manufacturer to do to stand out in the crowd? That's what Motorola is striving for with its Motorola One family of devices, specifically today's entrant, the Motorola One Action. Motorola's One lineup consists of several entrants all with different...
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The high end 2-in-1 notebook market is pretty crowded with entrants from Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, HP, ASUS and others. As a result, it's pretty tough to make a convertible laptop that stands out from the rest. HP's doing its best, however, with its new Elite Dragonfly line of lightweight, 2-in-1 hybrid PCs. What we have on hand today is the currently-shipping edition of the Elite Dragonfly. That means this notebook carries an eighth-generation Intel Core processor. No doubt that right now is a transitional period, where the previous generation is being phased out, and new Intel 10th Gen CPUs, with either Ice Lake or at least Comet Lake architectures with more cores, are the new...
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Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 family has long been synonymous with excellent build quality and premium features; Over the summer, we were extremely impressed with the 7th-generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon's build quality, performance, and its bright 4K IPS display. This time around we're looking at the larger ThinkPad X1 Extreme, which shares a design aesthetic with its smaller sibling. However, this model trades the smaller notebook's ultrabook specs for a larger 15.6" chassis and higher-powered components. Much like the Carbon, the ThinkPad X1 Extreme starts out with a 1080p IPS display and has several panel options that top out with a 3840x2160 UHD unit with a maximum brightness of 500 nits and certification...
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As most of your are probably aware, Google Stadia is an ambitious new game streaming service. It supplants the need for dedicated gaming hardware that renders high-end graphics by processing the workloads in the cloud and piping the final frames over the Internet to your device. In theory, all your device needs is a fast and stable Internet connection and software support for Stadia. It is a lofty goal. If successful, the monetary and complexity barriers to gaming are reduced even beyond traditional console setups, and cost is limited to just the price of game titles and maybe Stadia's Pro subscription. The core Stadia service, called Stadia Base, will be free in the future (early 2020). Users...
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The concept of a purpose-built gaming phone is still somewhat in its infancy, though we are starting to see generational upgrades, such as the ASUS ROG Phone II. As the name implies, this is the second generation of ASUS' gaming handset. Like the original ROG Phone released last year, the ROG Phone II combines bleeding edge hardware with gaming-centric software optimizations. ASUS sprinkles in some nifty features (like Air Triggers) and then surrounds it all with optional accessories to amp up the experience. What ASUS has essentially created is not just a gaming phone, but a smartphone gaming ecosystem. For this second act, ASUS sets the stage with some notable upgrades. One that perhaps stands...
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Without question, Google's Pixel 4 XL has been the most leaked smartphone of 2019 prior to its official launch. Heck, even Google teased the device and a key feature or two along the way, so it goes without saying, the hype was big for this fourth generation Pixel. Google tries to set the bar for Android ecosystem partners with respect to industrial design and new enabling technologies with its Pixel phones. And in fact, the new Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL bring with them a couple of firsts for made by Google devices, specifically a 90Hz display and wireless charging. The premise is that hopefully these new features are "done right" so to speak, or at least that the technology has matured enough to...
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Update: 11/9/19 - You could WIN a machine just like this, only with a killer Outer Worlds paint job, in our 20th Anniversary Giveaway! Falcon Northwest has been in the boutique PC building game since 1992, but the company's Talon desktop PC didn't hit the market until 1999. Ironically, that's about the time HotHardware.com came into being on the interwebs, but we digress. The first Talon came loaded with a AMD Athlon 500MHz processor, a 13.5GB hard drive, 64MB SDRAM, and the Pièce de résistance: a 3dfx Voodoo3 graphics card. Yeah baby, good times. These specs are laughable by today's standards, but at the time the Talon was a solid performer at a sensible price and it featured a smaller chassis...
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Over that last few years, OnePlus has earned a reputation for offering well-appointed, high-performance mobile devices that compete with other contemporary flagships, but with highly aggressive pricing. When we looked at the OnePlus 7 Pro back in June, or the OnePlus 6T before that, we declared both handsets leaders, in terms of value and performance. With the upcoming OnePlus 7T, which is due to start shipping in just a few days, OnePlus is trying to capture that status again. Looking at the OnePlus 7T’s list of features and hardware specifications, it appears to be a premium Android phone in every sense of the word. The device is built upon Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 855+ mobile...
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The modern work place is everywhere. Thanks to the need to attract top talent, many employers have generous work-from-home policies that allow employees who would normally be stuck in an office, to work from almost anywhere. Without the advent of fast portable PCs to do that work, however, this wouldn't be as easy as folding up a laptop and taking it with you. There are also plenty of road warriors who spend more than half their working lives traveling, and those folks need (or want) good-looking, fast laptop PCs like the HP Zbook 14u G6 we'll be showing you here, to take with them. Back in April, Hewlett-Packard announced a whole host of new Zbook mobile workstations. At the time,...
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