Within a few minutes of speaking to HMD Global’s Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Pekka Rantala, we get exactly what she meant. He is amiably energetic on stage and gestures often. There is laughter in his voice. His blue eyes, behind rather minimalistic glasses, twinkle in a manner that would make LED indicators on phones jealous. He perhaps knows more about Nokia than anyone else does – he reminded the audience at a recent launch that the Nokia ringtone was actually taken from a composition by a Spanish guitar maestro that was more than a hundred years old, and during his first, two-decade-long tenure at Nokia, was known to some as the Lord of Messaging....

As in so many things in technology and indeed in life, there is alas, no clear cut answer to this. On the one hand, yes, there is no doubting that software updates to devices or apps have their positive side. They show that the company is concerned about its product and is addressing issues affecting it. “Not like some big brands which launch a device and then forget about updating it for months,” a OnePlus user pointed out to me when I asked him for his take on the situation....

Even with the drawback of having to carry around another device, the portable battery pack is almost worth its weight in gold, and for those of you who do a lot of work on a smartphone, it is a necessary device to have around at all times. There are a few of these portable battery packs out there, but a new Kickstarter project aims to take it to the new level: the Limeade Blast....

The Meizu MX4 boasts high-end hardware, sporting a 5.36-inch full HD (1080p) display (actually a little better, with 1920 x 1152 screen resolution) with 418 ppi density, setting the screen ratio to 15:9. Inside the device sits the MediaTek’s MT6595 octa-core processor which employs four ARM Cortex-A17 processors and four Cortex-A7 processors. On the connectivity front, MX4 is company’s first 4G smartphone, and supports several 3G bands, Wi-fi and Bluetooth....

The Micromax Canvas 5 is fitted with a 5.2-Inch FHD display with 2.5D curved screen and thinned out bezels. The device draws its power from a octa-core 64-bit MediaTek processor clocked at 1.3GHz and paired with a 3GB of RAM, making it the first Micromax device to come with 3GB of RAM. On the storage front the Canvas 5 offers 16GB of internal storage which is further expandable up to 64GB, thanks to the microSD card slot....

Mophie is all set to launch a new iPhone X battery case and despite being of lower capacity, the case seems to fit in perfectly. The Mophie Juice Air Pack for iPhone X will be the first Qi Certified charger which will allow both the case and the phone to be charged. The Mophie Juice Air Pack has appeared on AT&T’s database and is listed with a capacity of 1720mAh and it has also passed the wireless test....

Look, ma, the G5 Plus with a removable back! The build of the G series has been very plasticky from the very beginning but the G5 Plus and the G5 have changed the game with their metal body avatars. The metal body immediately makes the G5 feel more expensive than its predecessor, the G4, which had a plastic body. The two devices look like identical twins at first glance, but the differences are easily spotted if inspected closely....

Update: The MRP on the box is, in fact, Rs 15,999 and not Rs 18,999 as we reported earlier. Motorola had announced the Moto G7 last week in Brazil. The company had released four variants of the device – the Moto G7, the Moto G7 Plus, the Moto G7 Power and the Moto G7 Play. As per our sources, there is no sign of any of the other devices coming to the Indian market....

Also, the Focus comes baked in with an erase button on the top which will instantly erase your session in a single tap. By targeting trackers Mozilla is confident that the browser will load the pages faster since according to them it is the tracking tools that often increase the load time. Furthermore, if any particular site is not opening it means that they need a tracker to open and this is when the Focus will either redirect the users to Firefox or Safari browser....

It is a ten-second long video and was first seen on Xiaomi’s official Weibo handle. It shows a person using the smartphone in an unfolded (open) state in portrait mode, scrolling through some content. He goes back to the home screen and changes the smartphone’s orientation to landscape, and then folds it from both the sides before placing it on a box. Upon noticing closely, a few seconds of lag in the animation can be noticed on a couple of occasions....

For the past few weeks, the Nokia 8 has been constantly appearing online leaving almost nothing to the imagination. The press renders revealed in a VentureBeat report recently suggested a rather conventional design which Nokia’s existing budget smartphone lineup also comes with. The polycarbonate clamshell body doesn’t seem quite appealing at first glance, although it does allow the company to maintain a common language across all of its smartphones. In addition to that, there will be a fingerprint scanner housed under the front home key and two off-screen capacitive buttons beside it....

Nokia has just announced the Lumia 925, which comes with a set of improvements in the camera capabilities. However, what makes the Lumia 925 stand out from its siblings in the Lumia family ((Lumia 920 & Lumia 928) is the unique metal band design around the body which also allows for a fabulous antenna reception, as they claim. The Lumia 925 comes with the same PureView branding, Carl Zeiss optics, an 8....

And since VR is such a hot topic, OnePlus is going to unveil its next-generation smartphone with an unusual VR launch (most likely with help from its new Cardboard VR, as well). And now it seems that VR is about to get another unexpected fan. According to a fresh report coming from trustworthy publication Re/code, it seems that the Finnish company is all set to unveil its first VR project next week....

So, naturally, this has upset those users who were hoping for a not so heavy modified Android version and something closer to the clean, Vanilla version. While this could happen in the future with another device, if you own a Nokia X, X+ or XL and you want to run on clean Android, an ingenious developer has released Vanilla Android 4.1.2 for the Nokia X which is already available for download....

As expected, Nokia has brought the dual-SIM version of the Nokia X to India. At Rs.8599 ($140), that’s pretty competitively priced. If you still don’t know, Nokia X isn’t your typical Android phone. Nokia has taken the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) version of Android and has stripped out all Google services & Google APIs, and replaced them with Nokia APIs & Microsoft services. You won’t have access to the Google Play Store, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps etc....

At large, the Nubia Alpha is similar to today’s smartphone with various features like camera, microphone, heart rate sensor, network connectivity, etc except that everything is crammed into a tiny form factor that can be wrapped around a wrist and used. In terms of design, the Nubia Alpha is shaped like a watch, with all the smartphone features crammed in. It features a flexible display that allows it to be wrapped and bent like a bracelet....

The Nintendo Switch is perhaps the most high-profile gadget of recent times that has not been officially released in India. The console brought Nintendo back from the seemingly dead and has pretty much wiped the floor with the competition from Microsoft and Sony while becoming one of the most successful gaming products of recent times. It has an enviable game library and extremely innovative gameplay which lets you play games on the tablet itself with controllers or connect it to a larger display using a connector....

One such example is the Fusion Music Player. I was skeptical at first about this player, since I have used Winamp for as long as I can remember. Nevertheless, I installed the player and started using it for the purpose of this review. What happened is something I was not expecting: I loved it! Those features, oh God, those features, simply awesome. What features does Fusion Music Player have? I don’t know where to start....

Smaller Notch The most significant cosmetic change OnePlus has made on the OnePlus 6T is the narrower notch at the top of the screen. Unfortunately, though, it houses the same set of sensors as the OnePlus 6 which essentially means the facial unlock system on the OnePlus 6T still relies on software to authenticate you. The presence of a smaller notch, however, mends one of our pet peeves with the OnePlus 6 which was that there wasn’t just enough room for any status bar icons apart from the essential ones....

OnePlus Nord N10 5G The OnePlus Nord N10 is a smartphone targeted towards those who wish to hop on to the 5G train early on. It comes with a 6.49-inch FHD+ display, with a hole-punch cutout to house the front-facing camera. The display also offers a 90Hz refresh rate. Under the hood, it runs on the Snapdragon 690 processor, coupled with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. To power the internals, there is a 4300mAh battery with support for Warp Charge 30T....