Nokia 2 hands-on: It’s all about the battery

The Nokia 2 offers two-day battery life along with the promise of timely updates.

HMD Global launched three budget devices this year — the Nokia 3, 5, and 6 — and its latest handset is its most affordable yet. The Nokia 2 will retail for €99, and is aimed at first-time buyers looking to make the switch from feature phones.

At the outset, the Nokia 2 has a lot going for it. The phone shares a similar design aesthetic as other Nokia-branded phones, including a metal frame milled out of series 6000 aluminum. The design and build quality make the Nokia 2 stand tall in this category, and it’s great to see HMD lavish such attention to detail on a budget phone.

While the frame of the phone is metal, the back itself is made out of polycarbonate, and the matte finish improves the grip. The 5-inch form factor makes the device ideal for one-handed usage. The 720p panel is also one of the better screens in the budget segment, and it’s protected by Gorilla Glass 3.

That said, it’s been a while since I’ve seen a device with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage. I didn’t notice any slowdowns in the few minutes I used the phone, but the demo units weren’t loaded down with apps. HMD says it optimized the phone to work on the hardware, and that it will intelligently monitor background apps to ensure sufficient memory is available at all times.

Internal storage is going to be an area where the Nokia 2 is on the backfoot. Accounting for the OS, you’re left with a paltry 4.67GB of free space for your content. While you can extend storage with the microSD slot, the lack of adequate internal memory is an issue.

The Snapdragon 212 is a chipset Nokia has used in the past, albeit during its Windows Phone days in the Lumia 650. You’re not going to get the same amount of performance as the Snapdragon 430/435, but HMD isn’t targeting that audience. The Finnish manufacturer has been in this field for some time now, and it knows what its customers want. As the Nokia 2 is targeted at users who are primarily mobile-first, battery life takes center stage.

The Nokia 2 is a battery monster.

With a 4100mAh battery under the hood, you’ll easily get two days’ worth of battery life, accounting for around five hours of screen-on-time a day on average. The Snapdragon 212 chipset doesn’t offer Quick Charge, so you’ll be looking at anywhere between two to two-and-a-half hours when charging the battery on the Nokia 2.

On the bright side, you won’t have to charge the phone as much. Elsewhere, you get a microUSB charging port, 3.5mm headphone jack at the top, Bluetooth 4.0, and WiFi 802.11 b/g/n.

The Nokia 2 has an 8MP camera at the back, and the few images I took came out looking decent.

The phone comes with Android 7.1.2 Nougat out of the box along with the September security patch, and HMD says it’ll roll out the Oreo update shortly. The manufacturer isn’t committing to a timeline, but thus far it has managed to deliver on its word.

An increasing portfolio creates an added strain on engineering resources, so it’ll be interesting to see if HMD can continue to roll out monthly updates for its phones.

If the Redmi 4 and 4A have shown anything, it’s that there’s a huge market for entry-level devices. Both phones are two of the best-selling devices in India this year, and were integral to Xiaomi’s meteoric rise.

HMD Global is now looking to emulate that success with the Nokia 2. The phone doesn’t have the same hardware prowess as Xiaomi’s devices, but the fact that it isn’t running a heavily themed user interface will make things easier.

The Nokia 2 will be going up for sale in mid-November for €99. There are better alternatives available at that price, but HMD is betting on the promise of timely updates and class-leading battery life as the differentiator.

Amazon Fire HD 8 vs. Fire HD 10 — which should you buy?

When you think of Android tablets, it’s time to think of Amazon.

Amazon’s not overly flashy about it, but it’s got a couple of the better Android tablets available today. That’s perhaps damning with faint praise, but hear me out. The Fire HD 8 and Fire HD 10 perhaps get you the most bang for your buck. Certainly that’s true for Android-based tablets, and you could well argue it’s true of any tablet anywhere.

The basics: As the names imply, Amazon has an 8-inch tablet and a 10-inch tablet. They’re both running the “Fire OS” operating system, which is Amazon’s own version of Android. They get apps from the Amazon Appstore, and have full access to Amazon Music, Books, Video, Movies and everything else Amazon does.

And both are inexpensive. Not relatively inexpensive, but downright cheap. But they’re cheap without really feeling cheap, ya know?

What else do you need, right?

OK, you need to choose between the two. We can help. Here’s what I’d consider between the Amazon Fire HD 8 and Fire HD 10.

See Fire HD tablets at Amazon

The Amazon Fire HD 10 ($149 at Amazon) and Fire HD 8 ($79 at Amazon).

Comparing Fire HD prices

As you’d expect, the larger Fire HD cost more than the smaller. But there’s more to break down here. Each is available with “special offers,” which means there are ads on the lock screen and in the notification pull-down. They don’t actually bother me too much. But they don’t really jack up the price of the hardware that much if you choose to go the other route.

You’ll also pay more (or less) depending on how much storage you opt for. Here’s the breakdown of the two tablets.

So on the whole, the smaller Fire HD 8 is a little less than half as expensive as the larger Fire HD 10. But you also get more for your money if you get the model with the lower storage, as the price per gigabyte is a bit lower. Couple that with the fact that you can add in a microSD card to extend the storage, and you wouldn’t be wrong to go for the lower of the two sizes.

The best SD cards for Amazon Fire tablets

Which one’s better to use?

For the most part, using the Fire HD 8 and Fire HD 10 gives you a relatively similar experience. They both run the same Fire OS operating system (slightly different version numbers, but whatever).

But the Fire HD 10 has better internals. It’s got a better processor and more RAM, and it definitely runs things a little more smoothly — though still not anything earth-shattering — than the Fire HD 8. These are still very much mid-range tablets, but the Fire HD 10 won’t leave you wondering what’s going on behind the scenes as much.

But for me the bigger difference is in the displays.

Sure, we’re talking an 8-inch display versus a 10-inch display. But we’re also talking differences in resolutions. The Fire HD 8 tops out at 720p, while the Fire HD 10 comes in at 1080p. Along with that higher resolution, the Fire HD 10’s display density is about 15 percent greater than the Fire HD 8. And I’ve found that dark colors are definitely darker on the Fire HD 10. That makes pretty much everything look better. And that’s key for the Fire HD 10 because it’s ultimately the better device for watching video. And video is a key component of Amazon’s strategy these days.

The short, short version

Here’s how I’d break it down:

• If cost is your chief concern, go for the Fire HD 8. It’ll serve you well enough.
• If you’re going to be watching a lot of video, get the Fire HD 10. The bigger screen makes a difference, and the higher pixel density does as well.
• And if you’re giving one of these to a kid, make sure to get a case.

Amazon Fire tablets

• Amazon Fire 7
• Amazon Fire HD 8
• Amazon Fire 7 Kids Edition
• Amazon Fire 8 Kids Edition
• Amazon Fire HD 10

See more at Amazon

How Apple’s iPhone X stacks up to the Galaxy Note 8

Here’s how Apple and Samsung’s best of 2017 stack up to one another.

If you’ve checked your YouTube subscription box over the past few hours, you’ve probably seen a heap of iPhone X unboxings, first impressions, and reviews. The hype for Apple’s latest flagship is real, and even if you’re not a fan of the iPhone/iOS, there’s no denying that this is one of Apple’s biggest products in a number of years.

Apple fanatics will likely be blown away by what the iPhone X has to offer, but how does the device stack up to other Android phones? More specifically, how does the iPhone X compare to Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8?

One of our forum users posted this question, and here’s what some of you had to say in response.

Dominator81
10-27-2017 01:59 AM

“

I actually like the gestures and was a fan of Webos… If the camera turns out to be unbelievably amazing and only if Face ID works better than the Iris scanner- it would have to work at all angles regularly, the I’d probably get one. Otherwise I’m happy with my N8 powerhouse and Pixel 2

Reply

TheAlmightyDrew
10-27-2017 03:35 AM

“

You lose significant screen real estate, the headphone jack, Samsung Pay, the S Pen, fast charging out of the box (no need to spend another $75 on the accessories for it), customization etc etc. No. That would be a huge step backwards.

Reply

Iva_LadyDiCaprio98
10-27-2017 06:39 AM

“

Absolutely not. No iPhone or any other manufacturers aside from Samsung themselves can ever convince me to switch over. The Note8 is far superior and better in comparison to ANY new iPhone, especially the X. There is nothing offered on the X that could possibly even make me curious because all iPhones are uniform and boring and they don’t fit my needs. I’m always gonna be a Samsung girl. Apple,…

Reply

Auronda40
10-27-2017 04:05 PM

“

I am so in love with my Note 8. I couldn’t give this up for anything. This is the best phone I’ve ever had. I love all the features it’s like my own little world in here lol. I came from an iPhone 6s plus and as soon as I saw this phone during the Samsung keynote I knew I had to have it. I decided not to wait for iPhone X pre orders to start and went ahead and pre ordered this Note 8. So glad I…

Reply

Retinella
10-27-2017 09:29 PM

“

The funny thing is that I exchanged my unlocked Note 8 for an iPhone 8 Plus just because Apple updates its software whenever a new problem is out there, like the latest WiFi bug. The Pixel 2 XL’s screen is trash so that’s why I didn’t pick that up.

As for the iPhone X, I will be waiting outside Best Buy on November 3rd with the hopes of scoring a 256GB silver one.

Reply

With that said, we’d like to know – How do you think the iPhone X stacks up to the Galaxy Note 8 (or any Android phone for that matter)?

Join the conversation in the forum!

Samsung Galaxy Note 8

• Galaxy Note 8 review
• Complete Galaxy Note 8 specs
• Galaxy Note 8 vs. Galaxy Note 5
• Which Note 8 color is best?
• Join our Galaxy Note 8 forums

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The Morning After: Tuesday, October 31st 2017

Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.

Happy Halloween (and Día de Muertos)! We’ve been talking about the AI that makes photo-realistic (non-existent) celebrity faces, PlayStation’s big Paris showcase and the “accelerator on a chip” that could revolutionize medicine. Oh, and we have our first impressions of the iPhone X.

Day 1.Apple iPhone X

You’ll have to wait a little longer for our full review — we’ve only been testing the phone for about a day — but there’s already plenty to get into. No home button, OLED screen, Animoji, and more. Take a look and find out why Chris Velazco says this device “drastically redefines the iPhone as we know it.”

A true jack-of-all-trades in the health-centric smartwatch world.Samsung Gear Sport review: a versatile fitness-first smartwatch

The battle for must-have wearables continues, and Samsung’s Gear Sport is a jack of many trades and master of few. Samsung stuffed the smartwatch with an ambitious array of features — from fitness, calorie and sleep-tracking to smart home control, contactless payments, music playback and more. Some of these, like guided workouts and smartphone notifications, work well. Others, like sleep-tracking, lag the competition. Still, this is a powerful, versatile and attractive smartwatch for the price.

Samsung will release the software needed at a future date.String a few Galaxy S5s together and you can mine bitcoin

Samsung read the last e-waste report from Greenpeace, too, and likely wasn’t too happy about the slamming it got from the organization. Which leads us to the Korean electronics juggernaut’s system for upcycling old phones. Specifically, the company rigged a bunch of them together and turned them into a bitcoin-mining contraption.

1-UP.Nintendo expects Switch will beat Wii U lifetime sales in a year

Mario has only just landed, and already Nintendo thinks the Switch could best the Wii U lifetime sales in its first year. The older console only reached 13.56 million sales over the entirety of its five-year lifetime.

Go fast.Watch Sony’s Paris Games Week event in under 10 minutes

Here’s everything of import from PlayStation’s showcase in France yesterday. The Last of Us 2, anyone?

Big scientific advancements sometimes come in small packages.Stanford’s ‘accelerator on a chip’ could revolutionize medical care

When the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford first opened its doors in 1966, it had already earned the distinction of housing the world’s longest linear accelerator: A 3.2- kilometer monstrosity buried 25 feet under the gently rolling hills of northern California. Today the lab, along with an international consortium of research organizations, is working to create a new kind of accelerator — one small enough to fit in a shoebox but offering huge scientific potential.

But wait, there’s more…

• What’s on TV: ‘Call of Duty,’ ‘Shameless’ and ‘The Dark Tower’
• Sprint owner SoftBank may be calling off T-Mobile merger
• Samsung collects record profits, again
• Neural network creates photo-realistic images of fake celebs
• This might be our best look at the OnePlus 5T yet

The Morning After is a new daily newsletter from Engadget designed to help you fight off FOMO. Who knows what you’ll miss if you don’t subscribe.

UK banks can now clear cheques in a day

Although the future of payments is digital, thanks to contactless and mobile, physical methods like cheques are still remarkably popular. For years, recipients have needed to wait up to five days for their signed piece of paper to clear, but that’s all about to change. Thanks to a new image-based processing system implemented by the Cheque and Credit Clearing Company, cheques can now be cleared in a day.

The new process is simple. Instead of taking each cheque and sending it via post to a clearing centre — which involves a system of checking, verifying and transportation around the country — the new system allows banks to simply take photos of them and swap the resulting images with other financial institutions. The result is that account holders will be able to withdraw the funds by 23:59 the next weekday (excluding bank holidays).

The Cheque and Credit Clearing Company warns that while the new system went live on October 30th, the volumes of cheques being rapidly processed will be small. It’ll continue to operate the new and old systems in parallel, before switching everyone over to faster processing during the summer of 2018.

Cheques will still need to be written and paid in the same way (which includes apps, if your bank supports it), but the money will leave accounts a lot quicker.

Source: Cheque and Credit Clearing Company

‘Super Mario Odyssey’ is selling even faster than ‘Zelda’

The Nintendo Switch has been a massive hit since its launch in March, selling more than seven million units worldwide so far, putting it on track to beat Wii U lifetime sales in just a year. But these aren’t the only numbers Nintendo gets to flaunt. According to its financial briefing released today, the company estimates sales of Super Mario Odyssey have exceeded two million units in just three days. In other words, since it hit the shelves, the game has sold at a rate of 463 copies a minute (or eight per second).

This is impressive (Zelda: Breath of the Wild took around a month to shift 2.7m units) and marks Nintendo’s biggest launch ever for a Switch title, beating all Wii U game launches. According to UK-based Chart-Track, the game’s release has also inspired a 64% increase in Switch console sales.

In its briefing, the company said it plans to make more Switch systems available, and would like to see Super Mario Odyssey become “an evergreen title” beyond the initial launch excitement. With the holidays fast approaching, Nintendo will no doubt be levelling up on the back of this one for some time to come.

Via: Neowin

Source: Nintendo

The Nokia 2 is a very cheap Android phone with a huge battery

HMD continues to slide in more Nokia phones where it sees an opportunity. This time around? A very cheap smartphone that doesn’t look awful and has enough battery to go the distance. The Nokia 2, priced at 100 Euros (roughly $120) walks that fine line between dreary specifications and the fact that it’s just really really cheap. Oh, and a giant 4,100mAh battery that puts it ahead of a lot of flagship smartphones.

Notably for this price, it’s running Android Nougat with Google Assistant in tow. Processor-wise, there’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon 212 processor to power a 5-inch 1280×720 LCD display. Camera-wise, there’s an 8-megapixel rear camera and 5-megapixel front-facing shooter. There’s only 8GB of built-in storage, but there’s the opportunity to expand that to 128GB with the microSD slot. The spec sheet reminds me of Samsung’s Galaxy S2 — secretly one of my most-liked phones ever. That, however, launched back in 2011.

Juho Sarvikas, Chief Product Officer at HMD Global, says that “every component of the Nokia 2 — from the display to battery, chipset to system design — has been engineered to draw as little power as possible from the huge battery.” That’s the main… draw here, alongside that cheerfully cheap price tag.

The renders suggest the phone is rather tasteful looking, but we’d reserve judgement there until we eye the thing in real life. It could be the true “festival phone”, and it will reportedly go on sale next month in certain regions, with a launch in the UK, at least, penned for 2018.

Source: Nokia

Microsoft’s Surface Pro gets LTE Advanced option this December

Microsoft’s business customers will be able to get their hands on the Surface Pro with LTE Advanced from December, as rumoured earlier this year. In a blog post outlining the company’s vision for workplace technology, the company says the release is designed to bring even greater mobility to its Surface Pro line, supporting half of the global workforce which will be mobile by 2020. Boasting a Cat 9 modem, it’s the fastest LTE-enabled laptop in its class, supporting 20 cellular bands for global connectivity. There’s no specifics on battery life yet, but this year’s earlier Surface release promised 13.5 hours while watching video. It’s not clear how LTE support will affect that, but if Microsoft’s dream of a totally-mobile workplace is anything to go by, it’ll have enough juice to let you work comfortably away from the office. The Surface Pro with LTE will ship on December 1 to business customers, with a base model price tag of $1,149.

Source: Microsoft

iPhone X Supports Reachability With Swipe Down Gesture on Home Screen Indicator Once Enabled

Despite some speculation suggesting the iPhone X would not support Reachability, reviews of the device published today have confirmed that the feature can be enabled in the Settings app on the device.

Once enabled, Reachability can be invoked by swiping down on the bar that serves as a visual indicator for returning to the Home screen.

Skip to the 5:05 mark in Engadget’s first impressions video to see Reachability in action. The tidbit was highlighted on Reddit by user Whert Ser Nert.

Reachability is designed to bring down the entire top portion of the iPhone’s display so it is within thumb’s reach for one-handed access to apps and content. The feature is invoked by double tapping the Home button on other iPhone models.

Related Roundup: iPhone XTag: ReachabilityBuyer’s Guide: iPhone X (Buy Now)
Discuss this article in our forums

List of iPhone X Reviews and First Impressions After Just 24 Hours

Apple has lifted its embargo for iPhone X reviews today after providing many media outlets with the device less than 24 hours ago.

MacRumors is combing through the first impressions published so far to find interesting tidbits about the iPhone X, and in the meantime, we’ve compiled a list of both text and video reviews of the device in one convenient place.

• The Verge
• Digital Trends
• Forbes
• The Washington Post
• Financial Post
• Business Insider
• Mashable
• CNBC
• TechCrunch
• iMore
• CNET
• The Independent
• BuzzFeed News
• The Loop
• The Telegraph
• SlashGear
• The Economic Times of India
• Tom’s Guide

Related Roundup: iPhone XTag: reviewsBuyer’s Guide: iPhone X (Buy Now)
Discuss this article in our forums