Smartphones

The HiSense Colour E Ink Smartphone

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Back at CES 2020 HiSense presented an unusual device-- the A5, a smartphone featuring a colour ePaper display, the result of recent development by E Ink. Now the company announces the device is set to hit the market soon in April 2020.

Hisense A5

While most smartphones tout high refresh rates and fast chipsets, the A5 is a far more modest device. After all, while the front-lit 5.8-inch 1440 x 720 resolution display does indeed handle colour, it can only display 4096, a far cry from the millions LCD and OLED are capable of. Meanwhile the refresh rate is only impressive in comparison to other ePaper displays, and cannot handle video. However it does make for a great eReader, be it for text or comics.

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TCL Details 10 Series Smartphones

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TCL presents a trio of upcoming own-branded Android smartphones-- the 10 Pro, 10L and 10 5G, all featuring fairly mid-tier specs and features such as a curved glass AMOLED display and horizontally-aligned camera arrays on the back.

TCL 10 Series

First seen back at CES 2020, the TCL smartphones carry displays made by the company itself (as opposed to by Samsung or LG Display) within a fairly standard design. The flagship offering in the series is the 10 Pro, a 6.47-inch headset with a fingerprint sensor built underneath the 2340 x 1080 resolution display. It runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 processor with 6GB memory and 128GB storage (expandable via microSD card). The quad-camera array on the back consists of a 64MP main sensor, a 16MP wide-angle camera, a 5MP macro camera and a 2MP for improved low-light performance. A teardrop notch on the top houses a 24MP selfie shooter.

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Planet Computer Brings Back the PDA

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Planet Computer, the company behind the Cosmo Communicator, returns to crowdfunding with another PDA-- the Astro Slide 5G Transformer, a device the company claims is "the most powerful 5G smartphone and pocket computer hybrid."

Astro Slide Transformer

The Astro Slide appears to satisfy both modern and old-school sensibilities, since a "revolutionary" RockUp slider hinge reveals a physical QWERTY keyboard beneath the 6.53-inch touchscreen. The hinge even allows one to flip the display up when they slide out the keyboard, turning the device into a mini-laptop. Planet Computer says the keyboard makes the Astro Slide ideal for emails, messaging and editing documents, and the device runs on Android 10 with a multi-boot option offering Linux support.

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Xiaomi Mi 10 Range Reaches Europe

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Xiaomi announces the global availability of the Mi 10 smartphone range, with a choice of three models-- regular Mi 10, the Pro featuring a superior camera and the Lite 5G, a smaller model offering, as the name suggests, 5G connectivity.

Xiaomi Mi 10

The Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro are big smartphones featuring the same 6.67-inch AMOLED TrueColor 90Hz display, a Snapdragon 865 chipset, 8GB LPDDR5 RAM and 5G connectivity. The main difference lies in storage and cameras, since while the regular Mi 10 has 128GB of storage and 48MP quad-camera array, the Pro ups the specs with 256GB of storage and a 108MP camera array with an 8K capture mode, 10x hybrid zoom and 50x digital zoom. Interestingly, the Mi 10 has a larger 4750mAh battery with 30W fast charging, as the Pro carries a 4500mAh battery, if one with faster 50W charging.

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The First Nokia 5G Smartphone

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HMD Global announces the first 5G Nokia smartphone-- the Nokia 8.3 5G, a "global, future-proof" handset set, together with the mid-range Nokia 5.3 and 1.3 and another reissue of a classic feature phone, the Nokia 5310.

Nokia 8.3

Designed with support for multiple 5G network deployments, the Nokia 8.3 5G is the first device using the Qualcomm 5G RF Front end module solution. Part of the Snapdragon 765G chipset, it condenses over 40 RF components into a single module, allowing for future-proof connectivity. Also found in the 765G are two Cortex A76 cores and six A55 cores, making it slower than the highest-end Snapdragon SoC, the 865.

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