Month: January 2020

We’ve seen a lot of subtle design changes take place in the smartphone space over the years. Bezels kept getting smaller, leaving less space for front camera hardware. And then in 2018, we saw the hideous display notch make its debut. 2019, on the other hand, had a more sane approach towards maximizing screen real estate. Enter the hole-punch design that eliminated the notch by punching a hole in the screen and placing a camera sensor there. It appears that Vivo has taken that to another level, based on its recent patent filing.

A lot of Vivo’s marketing strategy has been centered around selfie cameras. The company is famous (and notorious) for putting all their eggs in the selfie camera basket and skimping on essentials such as a powerful SoC and the likes.

So, it comes as no surprise that the company now wants to cram in four of them on an upcoming smartphone. Tigermobiles stumbled upon a patent filing by Vivo that shows us some potential arrangements of the cameras, as you can see above.

A camera on each edge seems rather odd, and it’ll be interesting to see how Vivo makes it work. Perhaps it could comprise four separate lenses to capture that perfect selfie. The second and third camera arrangement seems likelier, as it could pair two lenses together that work in tandem, similar to the cameras on the Nokia Pureview.

It may be a long time before we see such a device make it to the open market. Vivo, in particular, has never shied away from trying out new designs. For example, the pop-up camera first made its debut in a Vivo phone. While it still isn’t an industry standard, it does up free up some valuable screen real estate.

Now, the bigger question here is, does a smartphone really need four selfie cameras? Probably not. Has that ever stopped Vivo from experimenting with outrageous design choices? Not once. What outrageous contraption does Vivo have for us in 2020? Only time will tell.

Oppo made an impression in 2019 with handsets like the mid-range Reno 2Z (£329), RX17 Pro (£479) and Reno 10x Zoom (£450) earning plaudits from ZDNet’s reviewers. Even the top-end Find X (£799) with its pop-up backplate housing the front and rear cameras was well received.

To kick off the new year, we have the Oppo A9 2020, a handset costing just £220 (inc. VAT) that gives you an impressive amount of capability for the cash.

Some obvious compromises have been made to meet this budget price point. The screen is large at 6.5 inches, but it’s LCD rather than AMOLED, and has a resolution of just 1,600 by 720 pixel (270ppi). Obviously this means it pales somewhat compared to phones with high-resolution AMOLED screens, but it’s still perfectly usable.

The other key compromise is the chipset, Qualcomm’s mid-range Snapdragon 665 with 4GB of RAM. This turned in predictably mediocre benchmarks, averaging 1411 (multi core) and 316 (single core) on three runs of Geekbench 5. With leading Android Geekbench 5 scores currently over 2500 (multi core) and 750 (single core), that’s clearly nothing to get excited about.

What is worth getting excited about is battery life. With a 5,000mAh battery and a relatively undemanding screen and processor, the Oppo A9 2020 lasted for 25 hours 33 minutes under the PC Mark for Android rundown test. That’s huge, and in the real world two-day life is not out of the question, making this a good handset choice if you like to watch a bit of catch-up TV on the move. If you prefer to download content to watch later, then you’ll appreciate that no compromise has been made on storage to meet the price. Also, this handset supports reverse charging, allowing you to replenish the battery in other devices if the need arises (and you have a cable to hand, of course).

There is 128GB of storage installed, and although 23GB is used before you get to install your own stuff, that still leaves 105GB free. The Oppo A9 2020 runs on Android 9 with the Oppo ColorOS overlay. The most obvious feature of ColorOS is the use of square icons, but under the surface there’s quite a lot to like. One useful feature is the shortcuts applet that pops up when you make a quick flick inwards from the right edge of the screen, near the power button. This can be customised to provide fast access to your favourite apps and tools.

The Oppo A9 2020 caters for two SIMs and a MicroSD card, making it possible to boost storage and run two phone numbers at the same time.

That large battery means this is a relatively large handset that’s marginally thicker than you might expect, at 9.1mm. It’s on the heavy side too at 195g. I think the size and weight gains are worth it. The battery may add to the handset’s thickness, but the screen bezels are minimal: the front camera sits in a little notch, and while there’s a visible bezel on the bottom short edge, the screen-to-body ratio is still pretty high at 82.4%.

My Space Purple review sample had a light-refracting back which meant it transformed through shades of mauve and blue. There’s also a Marine Green option. The effect is nowhere near as sophisticated as seen on leading handsets that use this technique, such as the Honor View 20. Still, it does add a little pizazz. The usual Oppo colour flash on the power switch is another distinguishing mark.

There’s a 3.5mm headset jack and two speakers, one of which outputs sound from a grille on the bottom edge, while the other uses a tiny grille above the screen. There’s plenty of volume, sound quality is OK, and it’s nice to see an affordable handset get two speakers.

The front camera is a 16MP unit and there are four cameras at the back. The main rear camera has a 48MP sensor and an f/1.8 wide-angle lens. This is complemented by an 8MP sensor with an f/2.25 ultra-wide angle lens, and two 2MP-f/2.4 cameras for extra depth and black-and-white detail. If all you do is point and shoot, then the two 2MP cameras could arguably have been omitted to reduce the price further.

Considering its price, there’s plenty to like about the Oppo A9 2020. Two SIMs, plenty of storage, a 6.5-inch screen, two speakers and excellent battery life, with reverse charging, is an appealing bundle for the money.

Just days before CES kicks off, Alienware announced a revamped version of its 25-inch AW2518HF gaming monitor. The size and specs of the upcoming AW2521HF are largely the same, except it swaps out the TN (twisted nematic) screen on the old model for a higher quality IPS (in-plane switching) panel without sacrificing any speed.

That’s to say it retains the same 240Hz refresh rate as its predecessor, making it suitable for competitive gaming. We have already seen some larger size IPS displays ramp to 240Hz, including Alienware’s own AW2720HF. However, I’m not aware of any 24-inch or 25-inch monitors sporting IPS panels with a 240Hz refresh rate.

IPS panels typically offer better image quality than TN screens, by way of displaying a wider color gamut. In this case, Dell says the AW2521HF offers 99 percent coverage of the sRGB color space. Viewing angles are better as well, with IPS panels commonly maintaining a good image at up to 178 degrees (horizontal and vertical). Each monitor is different, though, so we’ll have to wait until we get our hands the AW2521HF before we pass judgement one way or the other.

Alienware is also claiming the AW2521HF offers a “true” 1ms response time, presumably meaning it is a gray-to-gray (GtG) measurement, which is how long it takes for a pixel to change from one shade of gray to another. While not specified, I’m guessing the 1ms metric is an overdrive rating. Enabling overdrive can sometimes introduce ghosting (DisplayNinja has an excellent article on the subject), though there is no way of knowing how much of an issue (if at all) this is without testing the monitor.

As you might have surmised, this is an FHD monitor with a native 1920×1080 resolution, just like the larger 27-inch model. 1080p is arguably a better fit for a 25-inch display anyway.

The AW2521HF also features “FreeSync and G-Sync compatibility.” Translation—it’s a FreeSync monitor that works with works with G-Sync, though it’s not clear if it will bear the G-Sync Compatible badge, which requires certification by Nvidia, or if Alienware is simply saying it handles G-Sync just fine based on its own tests.

Alienware says the AW2521HF will be available globally on March 11 for $499.99. We’ll have to see how street pricing shakes out. The specs alone put this one in possible contention as one of the best gaming monitors, though the larger 27-inch AW2720HF is $409.99 on Amazon right now.

Dell is kicking off 2020 with a significant refresh of its XPS 13 laptops, including the Ubuntu-powered XPS 13 Developer Edition.

The XPS 13 9300 boasts Intel’s 10th generation Core processors, ranging from the i3-1005G1 on the basic model, all the way to the quad-core i7-1065G7. It’s worth noting that the pricier XPS 4K ships with Chipzilla’s latest silicon. However, the standard 1080p lineup has languished on Intel’s eighth-generation kit for some time. This update promises to give a welcome boost to performance, graphics and battery longevity.

Similarly, the entry-level storage has been raised from a paltry 128GB to 256GB, although the base model still comes with a somewhat stingy 4GB of RAM. God help you if you buy this and use the notoriously memory-hungry biz productivity app Slack.

Arguably, the most significant changes are found in the actual industrial design of the XPS 9300. Plenty of attention has been heaped on the display, raising the size of the panel from 13.3 inches to 13.4 inches. And while that sounds like a fairly modest increase, every extra centimetre of screen real estate is helpful, particularly when working on the hoof.

It also comes encased in Corning’s Gorilla Glass 6, which is a step up from the previous model, which used the fifth generation of the notably hardy glass. This should protect it from the inevitable scuffs and prangs that life throws at you.

Dell managed to increase the actual size of the viewable display area while shrinking the bezels, giving the new XPS 13 a screen-to-body ratio of 91.5 per cent and an aspect ratio of 16:10.

This allows the XPS 13 9300 to occupy the same footprint as a standard 11.6-inch laptop. No doubt this will be welcome news to productivity-focused business travellers, who regularly have to contend with the ever-shrinking nature of airline seats. We’re looking at you, British Airways.

Moving on, the XPS 13’s keyboard has been slightly reworked to incorporate the fingerprint reader into the actual key layout, rather than have it floating to the side, or underneath. It now sits embedded in the power key, adjacent to the “delete” and “backspace” keys. This is a relatively minor design change, but it does look vastly better, which is important given that business laptops increasingly compete on aesthetics.

It’s worth noting that the fingerprint reader doesn’t work on the Ubuntu 18.04-powered Developer Edition. That’s a bit of a major oversight, and it’s not immediately clear if Dell has plans to remedy it in a future update (we’ve asked).

To allow for the smaller body, the keyboard on the XPS 13 9300 now stretches to the sides of the device, which Dell calls an “edge-to-edge” keyboard. That said, the keys themselves haven’t been shrunk. Quite the opposite — they’re 9 per cent bigger. Meanwhile, the touchpad has been stretched 17 per cent.

Like the latest XPS 4K (and, indeed, the Butterfly-less 16-inch MacBook Pro), it has 1mm of key travel. That’s a bit shallower than I would like, but it’s not a deal-breaker, nor is it particularly unusual for an ultrabook.

With this refresh, Dell (perhaps controversially) clings to Rivet Networks’ Killer Wi-Fi cards, which have proven unpopular with users in the past over perceived reliability issues. This prompted many (including this reviewer) to replace them with reliable Intel cards.

The XPS 9300 uses the AX1650 chipset, which supports Wi-Fi 6. For what it’s worth, reviews of the AX1650 have been relatively promising, so don’t count it out just yet.

The Dell XPS 13 9300 will be unleashed on 7 January in the US, UK, France, Denmark and Sweden, with the rest of the world getting it at some unspecified point in February. It’ll retail at $999.99 for the entry-level model.

Like your computing with a bit of Linux flavour? The Dell XPS 13 9300 Developer Edition goes on sale in the US, Canada and Europe on 4 February, with a starting price tag of $1,199.99.