Today we have got something a little bit different as I am unboxing not just a phone but a satellite communication device and a work tool for those of us who aren’t afraid to get a bit mucky in the pursuit of an income.
I am of course talking about the CAT S75 by Bullitt
Some of you may be wondering who Bullitt is and you are correct to wonder as they are not a common name in the world of smartphone builders like Samsung, Apple OnePlus Honor and Google. Bullitt is a company that specialises in making a phone that is for workers and explorers, phones that like it rough and don’t shy away from being a bit bulky in the name of protection and ruggedness. They have been the company behind CAT-branded phones for a few years now but they also make devices for Motorola Mobility as well (more on that later).

So without further ado let’s step out of my comfortable foldy flagship zone and into the more toughened world of rugged mobile tech and unbox this tough customer.

Now that your eyes have been sufficiently seared by the beauty within that glorious white box let’s talk specs….

Specs

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So that is the specs taken care of let’s have a quick look around the device to see the hardy beats in all its glory.

Staring up front is where we can find the 6.6″ LCD IPS panel which is made of Gorilla Glass Victus at 0.8 mm thickness to ensure that is scratch and impact-resistant. it will also work with gloves if you enable Glove Mode in the settings and can be used with wet fingers! The screen will refresh at up to 120hz and this can be set on at all times, reduced to 60hz or set to adaptive mode which will automatically adjust depending on what is being done on the device. 

Also to be found on the front of the phone is the front-facing 8MP camera which is located in an old-style teardrop and is in the bezel around the screen. The bezels by the way are huge and this is deliberate and is most likely been done in this way to help against the screen breaking if dropped but I also suspect that it may be to do with the aforementioned glove mode.

Tucked into the section just above the camera is the earpiece which is also built into that top bezel as well this sounds crisp and clear and I have not had any issues hearing people during calls. 

Moving around to the right-hand side we can find the strangely placed buttons. This is one of the first phones I have used in quite some time where the power key is placed above the volume rocker. This requires some finger gymnastics to find the power key on what is already quite a tall phone. the good news is that this can mostly be negated buy the “lift-to-wake” feature that is present in the phone’s settings and also by using the fingerprint reader on the back. Both the volume rocker and the power buttons do have a solid feel and are responsive when pressed. They are not metal though but they do feel sturdy which is a theme throughout the phone.

On the base of the phone, we can find a USB Type C port that is flanked by what looks to be a dual speaker but in reality, this is a single-speaker affair. The grill on the right of the USB port is the speaker and the other side most likely is hiding a mic array under the grill. Although I cannot see the water ingress protection for myself I expect these apertures to all have gaskets on them internally.

Continuing around to the left-hand side is where the programmable key is hiding along with the only port that will allow access to the internals of the phone the Sim/SD card slot. The programmable button like the other on the right of the phone is again solid but this time has the added benefit of being ribbed for ease of location as this can be used for a Zello Push To Talk (PTT) button or just for any other functions which can be configured in software.

The Combo Sim/SD card tray is quite deeply recessed inside the phone and is a toolless style the flap that covers this is a reassuringly solid feeling and when closed creates a tight seal. I am a little concerned that it could be flipped open with relative ease but I am sure that this has been thought about in design and I wouldn’t be surprised if the internal sections of this compartment are all coated in a waterproofing agent.

Finishing our tour of the sides we come to the top of the phone which house the SOS button in a deep red, which is again ribbed for ease of location but this time it is recessed into the phone’s casing so that it is level to prevent accidental activation. Next to this is the only visible Mic hole on the phone.

Around the back, we have got a fairly clean panel with the exceptions being the camera array and the fingerprint reader. the fingerprint reader is nicely positioned where your index finger would naturally fall so it is easy to use and a good size for me but if you have bigger/wider fingers it may be problematic for you. It responds quickly and seems to be pretty accurate with a very low failure rate from my testing at least.

The camera array is housed in a single slightly raised bump that is on the rear right corner of the phone in a very similar position that Samsung tend to place their cameras. In the array, we have got a 50MP Main Camera (f/1.8), 8MP Wide angle camera and a 2MP macro featuring underwater mode. Below this, we have got a very bright dual LED Flash which works really well as a torch as well if you need it too.

That concludes the tour of the phone.

I have been able to get some limited use out of the phone since it arrived on my doorstep on Monday but I have got plans to take it with me mountain biking this weekend to give it a bit more of a test. This is one of the areas where Bullitt and CAt intend for this style of the phone to be used so I will be putting it through its paces as best as I can over the next few days.

I am normally quite gentle on the phone I am lent for review as i don’t want to break them and be asked to pay for the damages! However in this case I am going to be a bit rough with the phone as it is a tough phone after all so within the realms of relative sense I will be tough on this phone over my testing period. I may even be able to get some underwater photography use out of this if I am allowed to keep it for my trip to Turkey later this month! It then the north sea may have to suffice instead not that you will be able to see much in there!!

If you are interested in picking up a tough phone from CAT or more specifically the CAT s75 then you can do so from the CAT phones store now for £549. If however, you prefer your phones with Motorola branding then you can also pick this phone up as the Motorola Mobility made Defy 2 although I think this is limited to America’s at this time.

As a small treat here is a link to the app satellite messaging app working as it should, not as I tried to demo unsuccessfully in the video above!!

The post CAT S75 by Bullitt – Unboxing is original content from Coolsmartphone. If you see it on another news website, please let us know.

It is time to pull my thoughts together for the OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G after I have been using it for a few weeks.

I have already taken the time to put this through it unboxing process and provided a few very brief initial first thoughts for the device, however, that was before I lived with it for any sort of time. I wanted to dig down to the very core of the Core Edition phone to find out what made it tick and now this has been done, I have a better grasp of the subject matter.

So let’s get started and see if this phone that is currently on sale for £269 at OnePlus is worth spending some of your hard-earned cash on.
Design

I have gone over this in more detail in the unboxing article I wrote when I first receive the device earlier last month. I was pretty pleased with the design of the phone as it has some very nice details. A couple of areas that stand out now having used the phone are broken down in some detail below.

-It’s a bit square… but in a good way.

I have got to day this was one of the things that struck me the most about the design of this phone when I first unboxed it and even before that when I saw the early pictures. I will go as far as say this was one of the things that made me want to review the phone, to begin with. If you have been a reader of Coolsmartphone for some time you may remember I was a big fan of the Xperia lineup of old and one of the things that I liked most about their design, which is continued into today’s phones that they are pushing out was the “blockiness” of the design. I can’t quite put my finger on it but I like this.

The Nord CE 3 is very much from the same school of thought in this regard. it has a large flat glass display a flat plastic back and flat plastic side and bottom rails making up the frame. These all appeal to me. The rails along the side and bottom are nicely textured to add a bit of grip to the exterior making it easier to hold and they are very slightly rounded off on the four corners which contribute to the comfort when it is hand. It is very similar in terms of the design that is currently being offered of the iPhone 14 lie up and this has been unchanged for what feels like forever. I do like this design choice and it fits the market segment correctly I feel.

-The buttons are split between both sides of the phone

I have found that this is a design choice that OnePlus started to follow a while ago and I like it for the most part as it means that you aren’t confused as to which button does which. So on the right-hand side, you have got the power button which also pulls double duty as a fingerprint reader. It is nicely raised enough (just about 1mm)so that it can be found with ease and has good action. The fingerprint reader is also pretty responsive too which is a nice touch. the volume buttons are then located on the left-hand side almost exactly opposite the power button. This means that unlike on my Pixel 7 Pro, I am not often pressing the volume key instead of the power key. There is however a downside which I need to mention and that is that it is very easy to accidentally take a screenshot with these buttons the way they are located which I have done several times by mistake!! it is an easy fix as you can turn the feature off in the settings which I am yet to do, whenever I remember to do it I then get sidetracked by something else.

-The back is plastic.

Now for a lot of people, this is a negative but for me and given the costs of this phone I am not too bummed out by this. I get that having a glass rear panel is nicer as the feel is better and it affords a better feel in the hand. it does however mean that the phone is inherently more fragile and if you were to drop it then the glass will break meaning an expensive repair and potential for other damage. having a plastic back means that the phone is more resistant to damage if the phone does get dropped and it is cheaper to make in the first place. So for me, this is a good decision on the material used but they did in my opinion, especially on the back colour way make a fundamental mistake. They have given the back of the phone a “Piano black” style finish which we see on a lot of car interiors these days. This is one of the most annoying finishes that they could have had as this means that the phone is constantly covered in smudges and fingerprints. if you give this to a teenager without the case this phone will look mining in a matter of seconds. It is, for this reason, I was very glad to see that OnePlus has continued to provide a free clear TPU case for the phone in the box as this was applied as soon as the initial picture had been taken and only removed if I need to photograph the back panel. If you’re choosing this phone and hate fingerprints get the Lime Green one as even if this is the same glossy finish you won’t see the fingerprints as much on that colour version.

-Camera Modules are exaggerated.

This is a bit of an odd one to me. I can see what has been done as this is the designed direction being taken for the Nord series in its 3rd generation. the camera modules on the back of the phone are pretty massive for the overall size of the phone. I can get it for the top array as that features the bigger camera but the bottom array is a bit nasty looking as it has 2 camera lenses in the same circle. This means that if you glance a the phone then you would think this has 2 rear cameras but in reality, you really only have the one which is mounted into the top circle.

I was on a video call the other day for work and happened to be doing something on my phone for password authentication and out of the blue I got a comment from one of my colleagues saying that the cameras were ridiculously big! I then felt compelled to advise him that it was only the top one that was the actual camera and the bottom one contained a depth of field sensor and the 2 MP macro lens The person who commented uses a Samsung phone that incidentally has the same 107Mp sensor on his phone and was shocked at how big they had made the housing for the camera when compared to his phone. It is not a problem in any way but just something that came up in my time with the device.

-Sim and Micro SD card support!

It has been such a long time since I have had the pleasure to use a phone that supports micro SD card expansion that I forgot all about this feature and how useful it is. I love that if I needed to I can throw in a memory card to the phone and store extra content on it. This would be great for me to take this away on a trip as it means I can throw a load of music and MP4 files onto a large SD card and then I will have a way of keeping my 10-year-old entertained on long journeys. It also means that if he was using it and it and the screen were to get broken as long as I set the camera to store photos on the external storage then he will have all those photos available to him on that memory card. Given that the phone also only comes with one storage size of 128GB having the expandable memory is a great selling point as it will allow the phone to be used for longer without the need to buy extra cloud solutions once that internal memory has been used up. I have been using the phone for a few weeks with my regular app loadout and music on the phone and I have already used 90GB of the stage so having the ability to add extra will be very useful.

of course that is only one of the use cases for the extra slot as the phone also supports a secondary sim which is a gain very useful if you are using this a travel phone as it means that you can have both your primary and secondary sim inside it at the same time. The phone has various future that will allow you to determine which SIM is used or what which can be set up easily for you to make the best use of this feature.

-3.5mm headphone jack on board.

So I defiantly did not expect to see this on such a budget-oriented device as this feature was something that was for the large part now defunct on all phones bar the Sony lineup Xperia 1 Series devices which are all £1k plus phones. I am pleased to see this is back as it was a feature I used to get better audio when I was recording videos at trade shows but it also means that if I was going to be giving this to a child I can give them headphones that they can use that won’t cost me a small fortune but will still allow a good sound experience. it also means one less thing for them to lose and let run out of power.

-SuperVooc 67W charging.

Fast charging is a must for phones these days and the Nord CE 3 has this covered with the built-in SuperVooc fast charging capability meaning that even the most demanding of users will find that they can back up to speed in no time at all. With a recharging speed of 0% to 80% in just 30 minutes you can have enough power for your day’s adventure in the time it takes you to get yourself ready whiteout having to worry about the phone not being charged. I have been using SuperVooc charging on a Realme phone that my wife uses for nearly a year now and it is a godsend as she never remembers to charge her phone so it always needs that quick boost, which SuperVooc affords.

However, it is often a cited concern that using fast charging will harm the battery or the phone which is where the SuperVooc Endurance Edition aspect of the charging protocols comes into its own. The phone and charger will use the phone’s built-in Battery Health Engine software to ensure that the phone’s battery will be kept in optimum condition so that you charge it whenever you need it and depending on your charging habits the charging speed will be adjusted. So if for example you are plugging in overnight all the time then the phone will pick up on this behaviour and it will then slow down the charging rate accordingly. If however, you are more of charge and dash style person then it will allow the phone to charge quickly and fast for the short period the phone is plugged in. This is normally a feature that is only found on flagship-grade phones so it is nice to see this on a lower specced device.

So those are some of the design features that jump out to me about the OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G. The key overwhelming feeling I get from the phone is that this is a phone that does what it says on the tin but the design is only part of what allows this to happen a lot of that does what it says on the tin comes from the hardware and what is inside the phone so let’s spend a few moments going through that
Hardware

First up and following on nicely from the battery tech I have just been looking at is that this phone has a suitably large 5000mah hour battery meaning that you should in most use cases not have to worry too much about being left with a depleted battery on most days. In most of my usage, I have normally had anywhere from 30% to 40% left in my daily use cases. Now admittedly I am not a young man and I don’t spend a lot of time using social media or taking pictures as I am at work for 8 hours of the day and my phone will just be ticking over quietly in the corner. However, I do use the phone for at least 2 hrs of media playback over Bluetooth on most days while I drive to and from the office for work. I will normally have about a 1hrs use of email and then another hour of web browsing and social scrolling in the evenings throw in a few Youtube videos and that is where we are at. All of this time I have had the phone connected to a Galaxy Watch 5 Pro over Bluetooth as well for tracking steps and notification duties as well. I have not ever been worried about the phone running low on juice so far and most days I can stretch the usage out to last me up to days which is nice to have.

It is good to see this price point getting a decent size battery and coupled with the aforementioned charging speed and tech this is head and shoulders above some higher-end devices that I have tested and owned over the years.

Next up is the screen that is I would say average to good. Whilst I had no problems with its speed and fluidity of displaying content and navigating on the large 6.72″ 120Hz FHD Display I did have an issue with the brightness of the screen as I found that it was very hard to see in direct sunlight. This is partly down to the panel being an LCD and the colours being not as vibrant due to the capabilities of LCD panels by their very nature. The panel was also not a very bright panel maxing out at 680nits which when combined with my preference for dark mode does make it tricky to see when the sun comes out.

I also dont think it was being helped by the screen protector that comes pre-applied to the phone as this seems to be a dust magnet and I found myself constantly cleaning the screen down especially when I had just taken it out of my pocket to use it. I am not sure what material was used by OnePlus for the screen protector but the combination of the screen protector and TPU case meant that the phone was constantly being covered in lint and dust. I did ultimately remove the screen protector as it started to peel at the edges and the dust pick up did reduce a bit so that is some food for thought.

Under the hood the brains of the phone are in the form of the efficient energy-sipping Snapdragon 695 5G chipset that was plenty powerful for most daily tasks which I carried out on the phone it was very rare for me to see any sort of slowdowns on the phone. Again as mentioned above I don’t tend to push these phones to their max but I was able to do all I wanted to do on it with very little speed difference when compared to either my Z Fold 4 5G or my Pixel 7 Pro. The only chick was that I did occasionally notice that when I was using some apps that required large data set to be loaded this was a bit slower than on my flagship devices. I didn’t see the same when playing F1 Mobile at least not after I went through the initial loadout of the game that was as this did take a bit longer than I would have liked, but it is a big game so I will let the Nord CE 3 off for that one. I use the inbuilt gaming mode to monitor the performance of the game and I was consistently getting frames rates in the high 20s’ through the session apart from one very strange moment when the phone slowed down to single figures and everything turned into a bit of an awful laggy mess. A quick force close of the app seemed to resolve the issue and it didn’t come back even after playing for about another hour of gameplay time.

Another area where I was keen to test the phone’s performance was when I was using it with Android Auto in my car. This has been the downfall of phones that are much better specced than the Nord CE 3 in the past. I am happy to report that the phone didn’t have any problems when using Android Auto in a wired mode, Unfortunately, I was unable to test the wired functionality as my car does not support that feature but it worked fine when using it for music playback and handling voice and texts while I was on the road.

In terms of call quality, the phone delivered here calls were crisp and clear and they synced up with Bluetooth fine both on my watch and my car. In terms of the signal I was experiencing the same sort of signal that I typically get on most phones I have tested as of late in some specific areas I was able to get a better signal on the Nord CE 3 that I sometimes would get on my Pixel 7 Pro. I would say that this is another respect of having the plastic case design as it allows more of the signal to get into the phone’s antennas which unlike the Nord CE 3’s counterparts have to use signal channels creating potential weakness in the frame. This has been a problem on the OnePlus devices since the adoption of the larger camera modules on the OnePlus 10 series phones and sadly it is still evident on their 11 series. The good news is this should be the case with the Nord CE 3 and the other phones within the Nord series of devices.

So in terms of hardware and performance, the OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G is great bang for its buck as long as your expectations are realistic.

A lot of the phone’s appeal comes down to the software experience that is provided by the phone and that brings me nicely to the software side
Software

The concept of the OnePlus phones, when they were originally envisioned, was to bring true flagship value to the masses at a low and affordable price point. While there have been some shifts in this ethos over the years I do feel that a lot of hose aspects still ring true in the way that the Oxygen OS 13.1 UI that sits on top of Android 13 still works. Yes, there has been a lot of merging with the parent companies Colour Os that can be found on Oppo and Realme phones but this is not necessarily a bad thing as Oxygen OS is a really good UI. It doesn’t add too much duplication and where the duplications of apps or functions do happen they are either well thought out and useful or easily sidestepped. I have been running this phone as my daily driver for quite some time during this elongated review and I have found that I was never left lacking in terms of the way the software works.

The UI allows me to set the phone up the way I want it to I have options if I want them and if I don’t then I am not forced to adopt them. An example of this is the App Drawer. I can set the phone to either have on or off as I want. I can have a swipe-down gesture brings up my notifications screen or it can bring down the OnePlus Shelf option, which is a place to keep useful widgets for quick access. Being that I am a bit of an old-school user I prefer the notifications dropdown but I have the option for either which is good to see. I do appreciate the search function in the app drawer and I have found myself using it more than once.

With all that being said, there are some minor annoyances that you do learn to live with but are not found on a device from the pixel lineup. So if I get a notification I need to tap on the small arrow icon to view it on Oxygen OS which is a bit annoying when I am trying to quickly clear my notifications. on other phones I can just pull down and as I do so all my notifications expand fully allowing me to see what I need and quickly dismiss irrelevant apps.

A lot of the OnePlus built-in apps require you to approve the Status Of Usage before you use them which is annoying but is only an issue on the first use so this is forgivable.

I did also find that the battery management was sometimes a little too persistent for my liking as I would be reminded about an app that is open in the background that I want to be open too frequently. If I want the app open then I know what it is going to do to my battery. Again this is probably something that is just me as I know what I am doing but for an inexperienced user, this would potentially prove to be useful as it will stop the phone from running unneeded programs in the background. I do feel that this is not as big of a problem as the Oxygen OS management software makes it out to be though as I normally get the same sort of battery life out of the OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G as I get on my Pixel 7 Pro despite them using different chipsets screen types etc.

If you can live with these very minor issues in the software there is a lot to like about Oxygen OS 13.1 and don’t let the OG Oneplus Oxygen OS hater put you off. I have been more than happy living with the phone daily and would be more than happy to recommend this phone based on the software implementation to either my wife or my parent. I also know that my son would be more than happy with this phone as it would allow him to do everything he wants to do and more.

Just before I wrap up on the software there is one more section that I want to mention. that is of course virtual RAM. This is something that more and more phones are starting to feature and I am pleased to see that it is on board here as it does allow the phone to stretch its legs if you need that extra bit of memory for gaming or multi-app use. It is particularly useful when gaming as it allows for an option called Championship Mode

This will essentially turn your phone into a dedicated handheld when you are in a game and draws the maximum power from the phone for gaming only everything else becomes secondary. By default, the virtual RAM capacity is set as 4GB but this can be doubled if required (In my testing I have not needed to do this but it could be useful for some)

Last but not least let’s look at the camera.
Camera

This is perhaps one of the weaker aspects of the phone but going into this I was aware that the camera was not going to be amazing as we do only have one sensor to work with in reality here. The camera adopts pixel binning using a 9 in 1 ratio meaning that your 108 MP sensor will produce images of 12 MP in size which is plenty for an entry-level camera. the difference here though is as the image is being captured by a high MP sensor it can pull in more data about the subject matter and essentially capture more light. this in turn results in brighter, clearer and more natural-looking images. In addition, you do of course have you wide variety of capture modes included and some of these modes will feature an aspect of AI Assitance to tweak your settings to suit the lighting levels the subject the depth of focus etc.

You also have got 3x Lossless Zoom which is of course a digital manipulation afforded by the large sensor size but it works reasonably well as can be seen in the zoomed images below. But that is enough of me stating the facts here are some image si have captured for you to assess yourself and make your judgements.

As you can see from the images the camera is not too bad in optimum light conditions. The macro shots come out pretty well and it does a good job of keeping the subject in focus when using portrait mode (even when the subject is not a person!). This is all pretty much par for the course with any camera these days. It is when the light drops that normally things start to wrong.

I have included a few low-light shots here to show what I mean

The first of the above shots was without night mode and the second was with night mode on. As you can see there is a little bit of improvement but it is not great as we have a lot of edge blurring on the shot. To be fair to the Nord CE most phones would have struggled with this type of shot. This however is not something that would actively disuade me from this phone as these are firmly in the minority of the photos I would be intending to take with this phone. Also, the LED flash is more than bright enough to make up for the low light issue.

As for video the phone can record at up to 1080p at up to 30FPS in normal video and it will also do 720p at up to 120fps samples of which can be seen below.

Last but not least is the selfie mode which is more than good enough. it also allows for background blurring and it does a pretty good job at keep the focus on the subject whilst blurring out the background.

I am happy with the camera performance for a phone of this price point and would be more than happy to recommend this to someone who doesn’t need anything more advanced which to be fair is the vast majority of us.
Conclusion

This phone is a very good budget offering and I have enjoyed using it. If I had not become so accustomed to the high-end flagships that I can use due to this website I would be happy with this phone as one for myself. it is of course not perfect but given what you are paying it does a great job. I found it slightly irritating when I was using it in very bright sunlight due to the relatively low nit levels that the screen was able to produce. There were some things in the software that did annoy me slightly but none of these things were a deal breaker for me overall.

OnePlus has always been very good at hitting the cash-to-spec balance well with the Nord range and this is why I am normally such a big fan of it. I have recommended that some of my colleagues look to this phone as a possible replacement for their ageing phones that they are currently using as they have said that cost is a bigger factor for them than high-end specs. I feel that this is the market where the OnePlus Nord cE 3 Lite 5g shines brightest. If you are on the lookout for a phone for a gift to a family member who doesn’t need the specs to be top-end but wants to know that they have something reliable and easy to use this is defiantly one I would recommend.

In terms of its competition there are a lot of cheap but good ones in this segment b the direct competitors for me though are the Pixel 6A and the Realme 10 Pro. The Pixel 6A I currently a tad more expensive but it does bring all of the Pixel’s unique features to the party and as such this would be a bit of a step up especially if the camera was one of the main drivers for the user. The Realme 10 Pro on the other hand is essentially the same phone albeit in a different shell and with slightly different branding. The main reason why I don’t think Realme would be one I would recommend is that it is a largely unknown brand in the UK.

So there you have the OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G, This is a very competent phone with a great price tag and some great specs on board. if you know someone who just needs a smartphone but doesn’t demand the best interest of specs, then this is a strong recommendation. it is also a great alternative for your normal phone if you are looking for a secondary device for work, or travel to the sketchier areas of the world. (on my recent trip to Marroco this would have been a great option over my Fold 4 as it wouldn’t have been the end of the world had I needed to replace it if it got lost /stolen etc). lastly, if you have kids who have not quite learned the value of high-end electronics and don’t take the best care of things this would be a great option for them as well.

If you are wanting to get a OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G now is a great time to buy as they currently are selling them for £269 on the OnePlus Website, they are also available on Amazon for £289.99 with next-day delivery if you have a prime account

The post OnePus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G – Review is original content from Coolsmartphone. If you see it on another news website, please let us know.

This is a big launch for Honor as this is the first non-Samsung horizontal folding phone that has been launched in the UK. It is also aiming to be undercutting the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 and the recently announced Pixel Fold. if you caught the recent article that I published regarding the price for this phone you will have noted that you can get the Magic Vs for as little as £1399 as the standard RRP, however, it is highly probable that this will be subject to discounts as Honor do love to do a good discount now and again. That is a massive and significant saving over the other two options on the market at this time.

The Pixel Fold is coming in at £1849 for a matching spec and the Z Fold 4 will cost £1769 without any trade-in options on either phone. Now I know that these phones will offer things that the Magic VS cannot but the latest from Honor is by no means a slouch in any respect. I will be mainly focusing this review on the comparison with the Z Fold 4 as I have been using this as my primary phone for nearly 8 months outwith times when I have been using a review device. I have grown quite accustomed to the way I want my folding phone to work for me and things that can be improved in this area.

So I would normally go into a full tour of the device and a specs list for you at this point in the review but I am going to skip that here and suggest that you pursue the Unboxing Article that I posted back when I first received the phone earlier this month.

I will however include the specs list here again for those of you who don’t want to click over to that post above.

Design

Now that we have ticked that off it is time for a few of my thought now that I have used the phone and lived with it for a bit longer.

First thing first and this won’t be a surprise for those of you who have used foldable already is that this phone has got a fair bit of heft about it. You will notice this in your pocket when you are stowing it, not just in the weight though as the phone is thicker than a candy bar design. This is hardly surprising as the phone essentially consists of two phones held together by a hinge assembly in the middle. Whilst I have mentioned the hinge this is an area where Honor has invested a lot of time and energy in the development of the phone and as such they have managed to achieve something that Samsung has not in that this hinge is a no-gap hinge and the actual size of it is considerably smaller than that of the Z Fold 4

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The hinge is also slightly less complicated and whilst this does mean that the size is smaller it doe cause an issue when you are trying to find the correct screen angle when using it partially folded. The Z Fold 4 will be happy at most over approx 25 degrees to the full 180 degrees. This is down to the much more complex hinge design which Samsung has refined over 4 generations of development. Sadly the same cannot be said about the Magic Vs hinge as I found that it was only really happy at an opening angle between 35 degrees to about 150 degrees as the hinge does not have the same friction capabilities built into the device.

Whilst this is by no means a deal breaker for me it is something that I feel is important to know about as some people will want to use the phone at the wide end of these angles for viewing video content etc. I found it was a pain point when I was using it to read Ebooks in particular. There is however one saving grace in that the Magic Vs is very secure when it is fully closed maybe even more so than the Z Fold 4 is.

A big difference between the two devices in terms of the screen footprints both when folded or unfolded, this is most notable when the phones are closed as the Magic Vs has got the larger outer display, especially in terms of width. this makes for a nicer experience when using the phone closed as you can use it more like a regular phone. I found that I was using it more in the folded state than I was with the Z Fold 4, I really only used the screen unfolded if I was settling into a long session of browsing socials, the web or consuming media content. This feels like one of the key benefits of a folding phone and the way you interact with them but this is also where software becomes a big factor as well and I will cover that a bit later on.

Another design aspect that liked is the bundled case that I had included in my review kit as it doesn’t add any bulk to what is as I already mentioned a chunky device, this is appreciated and is a massive improvement to my Z Fold 4 which I ended up using without a case for most of the time I have had and it shows the marks due to this.

The next thing I like more than I thought I would is the positioning of the Volume buttons and the Power buttons on the different sections of the folding screens. It meant that I had a lot fewer accidental presses when I was playing games or watching videos on the phone. The Power key is in a good place for finding and using for unlocking the phone however it is set up in a strange way in the software. I found that there were a lot of occasions when I was having to use the fingerprint reader differently than on the Z Fold 4. Normally I would expect that when I put my finger on the reader it would perform a scan and then unlock the screen without the need for an actual press. I thought this must have been a setting issue so I check the settings and it was set up correctly but it was just not working as I expected, now I have got an early production unit so your mileage may vary if you get one but it is something to be aware of.

UPDATE:-Shortly after starting this review my Magic Vs received a software update that seems to have improved the behaviour of the fingerprint reader and I was not seeing the missed read of the sensor as often.

I also like the positioning of the speakers as it provides a good soundscape when watching videos as the speakers are less likely to be covered by your fingers when holding it in the landscape.

In terms of negatives I would say the main ones are the fingerprint magnet that is the rear cover, I would recommend the Blue colour version if you don’t like a smudgy rear. The offset camera lens array means that the phone will not sit flat on a surface and will rock, especially when being used in folded mode. Other than these things I genuinely do like the design of the phone and I would (barring the hinge stiffness which I identified earlier) say that it may be slightly above the Z Fold 4 in the design stakes. However, there is so much more to these two phones than design, so it is time to dig into the hardware and performance.
Hardware and Performance

So there are a few areas where the hardware of the Magic Vs is significantly different to that of the Z Fold 4. The there areas I want to specifically focus on are the Screen Tech, the Battery and Charging tech and the Camera Array.

Screen tech:

Without further ado let’s take a closer look at the screens. The external screens as we have mentioned are different in terms of size and aspect ratio but that is really the main difference. Yes, the Samsung one will get slightly brighter but in most scenarios the Magic Vs has been plenty bright enough for me. The refresh rates of both panels are the same at 120hz and they are both sufficiently high resolution for daily use. With both screens using forms of OLED tech the colours are bright and crisp on both and the blacks are inky and deep when they need to be, incendentally in terms of colour representation the same statement rings true for the internal displays on both phones. The big difference comes into play when we are talking about the internal displays as the Z Fold 4 has one or two aspects where it gets a leg up on the Magic Vs.

I will cover the more minor one first, the refresh rate of the internal display on the Magic Vs drops to a 90hz refresh rate which is not something I would really worry about and unless you have very good eyesight in normal use you will not notice this. I was only able to see a very slight difference when was scrolling a website with the phones both unfolded and them set up side by side. It shouldn’t affect your gaming either as the Honor will also push the refresh rate to the highest available setting during gaming due to the GPU Turbo X software tweaks.

The second big difference is potentially much more substantial and that is that the Magic Vs does not have a digitizer on the inner screen meaning that you will not be able to use a stylus of any kind on the inner display like you can on the Z Fold 4. Now I say that is potentially a bigger issue but for me, it is a non-issue as I can count on my fingers of one hand how many times I have actually used the SPen on the Z Fold 4 inner display. I simply don’t see this as being a useful feature and this is down to the way the stylus has been integrated with the phone. Quite simply it hasn’t been, which means it is never on me as I refuse to have it clipped onto the outside of the phone case adding even more bulk to what is already a bulky phone. I am glad that Honor did not try and copy this feature as I don’t feel it is a useful enhancement for me until that is they can actually have the SPen stowed inside the phone frame for quick and easy access like on the Note series of old. In short, if you need a folding phone that has Stylus input then buy a Z Fold series device if not then the world is going to be your oyster as you now have the Honor Magic Vs 5G and the Pixel Fold to choose from in the UK and more will come very soon trust me on that.

Battery and Charging tech:

In the simplest possible terms, this phone has the Z Fold 4 liked in terms of what the battery is and what it can do in terms of longevity and charging speed. it is however not that fully onesided as the Z Fold 4 does claw some points back here with Qi Wireless charging and reverse Wireless charging support. The batteries in both phones are split cells across both sides of the hinge as this allows for the phone to feel more balanced. I believe the split in the Magic Vs is a 50/50 split whereas with the Z Fold 4, I think there is a bit more battery in the camera half of the phone. This doesn’t really matter in terms of the use as both phones balanced excellently for weight on both halves. What it does mean as the cell sizes for the Honor are equal in capacity then it can adopt the faster charging technology to fill the bigger 5000mah total capacity battery.

The Honor will use their propriety SuperCharge charging technology to allow the Magic Vs to charge from 0 to full in under an hour as opposed to the slower charging of Z Fold 4, which can take nearly 1 hour 30 mins from my testing. Whilst this is not a big issue for me it is good to know that I can quickly top up the Magic Vs with a SuperCharge charger and it will get back up to 50% in the time it takes for me to have a quick shower before I head out for the day.

What is however a shame is that this is the only way I can get power into the phone as there is no QI charging here either fast or slow and no reverse charging for your earbuds or watches etc. This is annoying as I have become a wireless charging covert for my phones and I hate having to use wired charging as I have a wired charging stand built into my desk and on my bedside table I even have it available in my car! Fortunately, the pain of having to plug in is lessened by the fact that I can eek two days of use out of this battery without too much trouble on a normal workday. When using it more intensively that will come down to about a day and a quarter. This is however still better than on the Z Fold 4 as most days I was getting near to empty by the end of the day. So there are pros and cons in each camp but I think for me, I am in my happy place with the Wireless charging capability on the Z Fold 4 if I had to choose one over the other.

Camera array:

Again this is an area where there are differences in terms of the numbers but in reality, those differences are not that significant. That is until you come to the front camera of the inside display. So let’s address that first, on the Z Fold 4 Samsung has tried to use a hidden under-display camera to hide the camera when it is not in use this results in the camera being quite a low MP (4) and this reflects the quality of image that is produced as it is normally pretty bad. On the Magic Vs, they decided against the use of this emerging tech and went with a much more simple hole-punch camera which allows them to use a higher quality 16MP sensor that works as you expect as normal from a front-facing camera, they actually use the same senoras they use on the outer display so you will not see any difference between the two cameras. As for my thoughts, I am not going to use either normally so I don’t care about it but I do like that the one on the Z Fold 4 is kinda hidden when it is not in use.

As for the rear camera’s we have got similar triple sensor arrays on both phones with slightly different setups.

On the Z Fold 4 we have got the following;

12MP Ultra-Wide camera F1.8 aperture , 50 MP Wide-Angle camera F2.2 aperture, 10MP 3x Optical Zoom Telephoto camera F2.4 aperture

On the Magic Vs we have the following

50MP Ultra-Wide camera F2.o aperture, 54MP Main camera F1.9 aperture, 8MP 3x Optical Zoom Telephoto camera F2.4 aperture

So as you can see they have got differing numbers of megapixels but as we know the numbers don’t always paint the full picture when it comes to cameras. I have been able to get good photos from both but I will go into this is in more detail in the cameras section of the review below. What is a big difference is in terms of the way these cameras are mounted. The array on the Magic Vs is mounted in the corner in a very similar position to what we find with the Z Fold 4 but the difference is that while the lenses on the ZFold 4 are in a slim sliver, the Magic Vs has them all in one large and wide glass bump. I feel that this bump protrudes a lot more on the Magic Vs which means that the phone is more prone to rocking when laid on a flat surface in folded state. This may be exaggerated by the way that the stock case fits around the camera bumps respectively but then found the Z Fold 4 was more stable, probably due to the slightly bulkier case.

As I am writing this I had almost forgotten one fairly major difference to the hardware is the level of ingress protection of the devices as this is very different across the two phones. Neither of the phones has any official dustproof rating so this may not be one to use on your next trip to the desert but if you are planning on getting them wet then I would be concerned with the Magic Vs as it does not have any waterproofing rating whereas the Z Fold 4 is rated for IP8X which should mean that it can take a quick splash here and there. In all honesty, I wouldn’t feel 100% comfortable with taking either of these down to my local beach due to the sand….. Eurgh nasty stuff.

As for Performance, the phones are very level in terms of performance which is hardly surprising as I have got two phones which at their cores both have the same specs, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 + Gen processor, 12GB of Ram and 512GB of storage (Z Fold 4 is available in smaller 256GB and larger 1TB sizes). They both use the Adreno 730 GU as well so the raw number crunching abilities are the same, however, this is again an area where software is a big factor so more about that later. I have been happy to use both phones as my daily driver and experienced very few issues with ever needing more oompf out of either device. The only thing I would say is that the Samsung feels a touch more refined but I am going to put this down to the software implementation as you will see there are some significant differences to be found there.
Software

I have broached this matter a few times so it is now to pool the wool back and dig into what makes these phones so different. The crux here is that the software on the Samsung is more evolved and fits better to the foldable form factor. This is quite understandable as they have had four years of developing the software for the fold whereas Honor is only in its second year of doing things for foldable phones. Normally I would say that I prefer the cleanness of the lack of modding that has been carried out to the core Android 13 software on the Magic Vs as I am normally a big fan of the pure Android UI but this is not the case here. Let me explain.

The Magic Vs has taken a simple approach to the implementation of Andriod 13 on the phone and as such there is no immediate apparent evidence that the form factor has been given much thought. An example of this is when you have taken the time to set up your home screen layout on the external display and then you open it to be a tablet-style device this app layout is exactly the same in terms of layout (see below examples).

Now those of you who are familiar with my reviews may be thinking well that is just how you like things clean and uncomplicated. However, when it comes to a tablet-style foldable form factor I want my tablet-mode home screen to reflect that I am working on a bigger canvas. My logic is if I am unfolding the screen I am doing so as I want to be reviewing the content on that bigger screen or I want to be productive, I will therefore have my main apps for these tasks at the forefront with the widgets laid out to fit into the bigger display format. When I then fold the back top phone mode I would then go back to my regular app layout for daily normal use. Now I will be the first to admit this is perhaps a behavioural trait that has been learned from using the Z Fold devices over a few generations, but I would also argue that this may have come from using tablets in the past as well.

Unfortunately, this is not the case with the Magic Vs as when you unfold the screen to enter tablet mode your app layout is exactly the same just with slightly bigger iconography. This is something that I have now learnt to live with but it is a shame that Samsung give you the option to have different home screen layouts depending on what mode you are in. I do however this is an option that comes more from Samsung One UI than from Google so I do understand. What is more concerning is that I dont see many other ways that the Ui Element s that Google has been developing for foldable have come through either. We dont have a navigation dock to allow you to quickly switch between apps, the back navigation gesture does not only work on the active app when in-app pair mode and the biggest sin of all is the lack of the App Drawer as shown in the video below!!!

This last point is in my opinion inexcusable for any Android software UI and it is especially worse on a Folding phone. Up until I was given this review unit I have always had the option on Honor devices and some others from Chinese brands as well to have either all apps on-screen iPhone style or an App Drawer. I have always been a fan of the latter and it is normally the first thing I do when setting up a phone if it isn’t on by default. I was shocked to see that this was not an option that I could see within the Ui anywhere, so I asked Honor as I thought it may be down to me having an early preview of the phone. Sadly this was not the case as I am now (to my knowledge) running release firmware and there is still no App drawer. I was advised that this was due to the UI embracing the folding nature of the device. the end result is I have an extra display screen which has all the apps that I rarely used and a folder with all of the Honor duplicate apps in there as well. It is messy and I can’t fathom why anyone would want this on an Android phone at all.

Moving away from the negative to the more positive, Once you do start using the multi-tasking it does become more intuitive use but it is nowhere near as simple as on the Z Fold 4. You can have apps open as split-screen apps and floating apps as well. you can also use Picture in Picture mode for some video playback apps. Some apps are context and fold-state aware. for example, Gmail will adopt a dual view mode like you get a on tablet when the phone is unfolded in landscape but it will revert to normal when folded. Youtube will also respond to the fold state and orientation really nicely as seen in the image below. Twitter gives you the option of opening a split screen when you click on a link whilst having your main feed open and being able to action the reply or link in the other half, this does need to be enabled under foldable settings though. Some other apps are not quite as well-honed but that is more to do with the developers than anything else.

My main takeaway from the Magic Vs is that Samsung has done a boatload of work to make the software work with the folding phone form factor as well as it does on the Z Fold 4 and Android have some catching up to do. This does concern me slightly as I have put down a preorder for the Pixel Fold and if the UI features that I like come from Samsung, is that going to be a mistake?

Only time will tell I guess but I hope with Google now have ig hardware of their own in the mix this will give the push needed for Developers to start thinking about how we can really use the real estate better. Hopefully, with the Magic Vs being on the more affordable end of the currently available foldable it will bring the tablet-style foldable form factor to a wider audience which will also increase the need for better software implementation onto these devices from Google themselves.

Here is a selection of images of the software of various apps for you to see some of the multitasking at work.

I just hope that any changes that are made to the core Android design in Android 14 are quickly rolled out to the Magic Vs as well

Last but not least we need to discuss the camera on the Magic Vs
Camera

While this is not one of the main draws for the phone as that is the giant foldable screen it still needs to perform to a reasonable degree as this would be your main on-the-go camera if you are to buy one of these phones. The good news is I have been pleased with the camera in the situations I have tried it in. I am not going to say that I have been blown away by the camera performance but it has been more than satisfactory for use day to day.

I have been happy with the various different levels of Zoom and I have found that I have not been lacking in this area it does a good job at closes up and wider shots as well and I include a few samples of this below for you to see for yourself.

The camera modes are as you would expect from Honor all here and this allows for you to get some rather interesting shots and capture on multiple camera modules at one time which is a nice feature but if I am honest it is not one I see myself eve rising and indeed I have not used it during the course of this review.

I like the UI of the camera it is straightforward to use and easy navigate, you can also customise which shortcut modes you have in your toolbar for quick changes to shooting modes. Honestly, I am not much a of pixel peeper if the pictures that are captured by the camera are useable then for the most part I am happy. I have included a selection of photos below for you to review if you want to see what the phone can produce along with a very short video clip to give it a representation of the video quality.

Here is a video clip that was shot a 1080p and 30fps but has had to be downgraded by WordPress to share here so it is now 720p and 25fps but it is still representative of what the camera can do for video work.

Next up is the obligatory selfie using the front-facing outer display camera which is the same in terms of spec as the internal one.

Pretty happy with the result but given the subject matter it was never gonna be great was it?

Finally here are a few low-light images where weaknesses for the camera start to show

This one isn’t too and as it has picked up a bit of light from the clock face and that has helped however the next one which is the other side of the room where it was darker things start to unfold pretty quickly.

Magic Vs very Low Light

You can start to see some edge blending where the phone tries to make up for the lack of clarity to try and give you a good image but it fails miserably. For context this is the same shot with some light

You can clearly see the differences here. Most phones would of course struggle in the conditions I took the same shot with my Z Fold 4 and the result was a bit better but still far from perfect as I could still see the edge blurring see below

Z Fold 4 very Low Light

I am as I mentioned above pretty happy with the result in the good lighting of the Magic Vs and as I don’t tend to venture out after dusk anymore i would normally be using the Night modes of the camera anyway so this is moot point for me.
Conclusion

So there you have it my review of the Honor Magic Fold Vs. This is an important phone for Honor as mentioned as it is them making a statement that they want to play in the Foldable market on the global stage (the previous Magic V was a Chinese-only release) and they have come out strong and also undercut their rivals in the space in doing so. However, I do feel that whilst the hardware is something for the most part I prefer, with the exception of the hinge mechanism which is too prone to unfolding when you don’t want it to, there is til work to be done on software. Honest ly this conclusion surprises me as i thought that i would prefer the implementation of the more clean Ui over what is offered by Samsungs One Ui on the Z Fold 4. I also felt that the lack of an app drawer on this phone is a big misstep and this will need to be looked into as they should at least give the user the option (i did eventually get over it though!).

Do I think it is worth the investment into getting one now given that we have just had the Pixel Fold announced and we have got the Z Fold 5 on the horizon imminently? Well, it is a simple question of how much you are willing to pay and also if you think having a non-stowable stylus is important. if you are not willing to pay but do want the stylus and don’t mind buying a refurbished unit then i would say go for the Z Fold 4 as you pick these up for less than half the original price at the moment in great condition. if you want the wider aspect ratio afforded by the front display then you have got two real options the unknown Pixel Fold which has a very phone-like width to the front display and then becomes more of a tablet when unfolded or you go with the slimmer but taller Honor Magic vs which still give you all the benefits of folding screens but in taller skinnier front screen ratio and a squarer unfolded internal display, it is also nearly £500 cheaper.

I like the Honor Magic Vs 5G but the software is a bit too compromised for me and as such I would b sticking with the Z Fold 4 for the time being but it has given me food for thought about my planned move to the Pixel Fold at the end of next month. I guess i have inadvertently become a One UI Foldable fan, which was very unexpected!!

The Honor Magic Vs 5G is available to buy now from Honor’s website and is currently retailing at £1399 with shipping of the BHlack colour sooner than the Cyan one which is the more popular and the one I would go for if I was buying one now.

The post Honor Magic Vs 5G – Review. is original content from Coolsmartphone. If you see it on another news website, please let us know.

I have been looking at the OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G over the last few days and I have recently done an unboxing of the device which left me impressed. The phone was already cheap at £299 however that price has dropped by £20 meaning that you can now pick up this phone for under £280, £279 to be exact.

I am still to complete my review of the device but in the few days I have used it so far I am pretty pleased with the device. The hardware feels great and its battery life is plenty to get me through a full day with ease and a bit left in the tank.

The camera is one potential area for weakness but at the price that this phone is currently at I can excuse certain weaknesses. OnePlus seem to be pitching this phone as an entry-level phone and look to be targeting a younger segment of the market especially if the marketing material is anything to buy. This price reduction will ensure that it is one on the potential list for buyers in that category.

That’s it for now just a quick update for you on a cracking deal especially if you have a young adult in your group that needs a new device 

The post OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G – Price drop!! is original content from Coolsmartphone. If you see it on another news website, please let us know.

So we are a little bit late to the party on this one but we have finally had that chance to do an unboxing of the latest phone in the OnePlus Nord lineup. I have used the 1st Gen Nord and I also had the opportunity to use the 2nd Gen Nord 2 as well. Both were great phones and while they were significantly cheaper in price than the full-on number series devices, I was not disappointed by them.

Now admittedly there have always been some sacrifices made t get the Nord series produced on a tighter budget and these are as evident as they always are on the OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G (to be henceforth referred to as the Nord CE 3). I will come back to some of the ommissions that were made to get under the budget set by the designers in a moment, before that though let’s take a moment to review the unboxing video.

Here are the Specs below

The Specs

Next up is time for a tour of the device in all its glory starting of course from the top edge and working our way around the phone.

So on the top, we find that we have got a single microphone port and that is it.

Next around on the right-hand side is where we will find the power key that also doubles up as the fingerprint reader for the phone. This sits slightly proud of the edge of the body which makes it a bit easier to locate. unfortunately by the nature of it being a fingerprint reader as well as the power key, it lacks all texture meaning it can be missed easily. As a fingerprint reader, it is reasonably accurate but I have to say it is not one of the better side-mounted units I have used it is early days maybe it will improve over time.

Moving to the bottom of the phone is where we can find a speaker grill on the left and the mic hole and lo and behold a 3.5mm headphone jack! This is a rarity o phones these days and is nice to see although if I am honest I can’t see myself actually using it given the Nord Buds 2 that I also got in the box with the phone ( this is not standard as i got a demo kit for review purpose) Still nice to see that there are some phones out there that still account for this now somewhat niche requirement.

Sitting in between these is a USB Type C port that will support SuperVooc fast charging at 67W which is really nice to see and the phone does charge in a really quick timeframe which is handy given the lack of wireless charging in any way, which is understandable for the price point.

Continuing around the fourth edge we have got our combo volume rocker and sim card slot which has another uncommon trick inside. This Nano Sim card slot is also cable of receiving a second Nano Sim Card or a Micro SDcArd slot of up to 1TB! This is great news for the memory hoarders out there!

On the rear, we got our camera array which I composed of two large circular apertures the top of which contains a Samsung HM6 sensor capable of up to 108MP and has an aperture of F/1.75. The sensor sits behind a Six Element lens and although it does not have OIS it is at least supported by EIS.

Below we find that the second circle contains a 2MP depth of field sensor and 2MP Macro lens. Next to this, we find a single LED flash which is plenty bright and doubles nicely as a torch when needed.

The main feature here is the 108MP camera sensor which I have yet to test in anger but hopefully will produce serviceable results for the user without too much faffing with settings.

The back panel is made of plastic and is very very fingerprint friendly due to its glossy finish which is why I was glad to find the enclosed TPU see-through case which has a reassuringly tight fit around the phone.

Coming back the front of the phone we have a few things to mention, starting at the very top of the display is where we will find a small portal for the earpiece and the top speaker. The speakers both combine to give an average sound experience that is suitable for Youtube but if you are gaming or listening to music I would recommend that you either use some Bluetooth headphones or take advantage of the built-in 3.5mm headphone jack to get the best audio experience.

Below this earpiece is of course where we find the fourth camera on the phone and all I can say about his one is that it is a 16MP camera and that is about it as I haven’t been provided with any other details. it does of course come with all the normal features that you would find on an Android phone designed for both the Asian and Western markets ie all the retouch tools associated with Beauty Mode. Fortunately, these can be turned off to give you normalise results.

Below this is the LCD Panel which is capable of an Adaptive refresh rate between 30Hz/48Hz/50Hz/60HZ/90Hz/120Hz. In honesty though I checked this and you only have 2 options either High (120Hz Max) and Standard (60Hz Max) so maybe some creative market mumbo jumbo there. I am sure that the screen is capable of the step changes ut most users are unlikely to notice them. It is nice to see these High refresh rates filtering down to both LCD panels and cheaper devices though so nice job OnePlus.

The screen is a really nice size of the screen especially as this phone is being targeted towards a market where the screen size is an important factor as its intended audience will be using the phone more for media consumption/creation, social media and gaming than say phone calls. I have used it for a little bit and I am more than happy with the screen but then I am someone who has recently made the move to foldable which is the top of the big screen pile so what do I know? OnePlus does at least include an easy-to-use one-handed mode if you find this is required.

So that sums up the tour of the phone which from my limited experience so far is a cracker of a phone and one that I think any young (or young at heart) phone user would be more than happy with. I will of course run it as a daily device for a full review but I have to say I am presently surprised with the initial experience of the phone out of the box. I know that my son would be more than happy with it as it is sufficient for most of what he does on his mum’s phone (that he steals a lot). I also think that the more price-conscious user would be more than happy with this as a phone as it ticks a lot of boxes for a lot of people from what I have seen so far.

If you like what you have seen and want to pick up the OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G for yourself then you can buy it now from OnePlus on their website for £299 and you can also get a free set of 3.5mm headphones or a Snaddtone bumper case if the include clear case is not to you liking. it is also available for the same price minus the freebies from Amazon as well if you prefer shopping there.

The post OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite 5G – Unboxing. is original content from Coolsmartphone. If you see it on another news website, please let us know.

The Honor Magic Vs 5G has finally been given it a release date here in the UK and it is also more importantly maybe has been given a price.

There are two prices to be aware of here a pre-order price and then the full RRP. Let’s have a look at them with a little bit more insight.

The first price which I am going to call the preorder price is going to be £1199 which will only be available if you subscribe and get a £200 off early bird voucher! This is an awesome price for the phone and at the price, I would be very tempted. The price is on the verge of impulse buys for the current flagship phones on the market these days! 

The second price is the full RRP and this is still pretty darn good at £1399 which is about £400 pound cheaper than the newly announced Pixel Fold.

So when are you going to be able to buy one if those prices have tickled your fancy? The Magic Vs will go on sale in the UK on the 19th of May on the HONOR website in Cyan and Black, and on the 26th of May on Amazon, Argos and Very in Black. It is also going to be available from the 3 network later in June TBC and you will get 6 months of free airtime as part of the bundle.

Bear in mind though if you want the Cyan colour and let’s face it it is the best colour then this is an exclusive to the Honor store

I am really glad to see that these prices are coming in at what they are and it is not shy in terms of these specs as you will have been able to see from my Unboxing post from the other day. There are several things that single this phone out above the competition (now that we have seen some of it at least).

Do you plan on getting one as these prices are a bit more compelling than the prices being offered from the like of Samsung and Google for their high-end foldables?

Here is a short teaser vid to tickle your taste buds

HONOR Announces the UK Launch and Price of its Folding Flagship, the HONOR Magic Vs priced at £1,399

London, UK – May 12^th, 2023 – Global technology brand, HONOR, today announced the UK launch date and price of its latest folding flagship smartphone, HONOR Magic Vs. The Magic Vs will go on sale in the UK on the 19^th May on the HONOR website, Hihonor, in Cyan and Black, and on the 26^th May in Amazon, Argos and Very in Black. The Magic Vs will also be available with Three in Early June, with 6-months free airtime on Unlimited data plans.

The UK RRP for Magic Vs is £1,399, however with launch offers from Hihonor, customers can purchase the Magic Vs from as low as £1,199 if users subscribe for more info and purchase the device before 26^th May.

The HONOR Magic Vs was announced globally at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year. However, HONOR Magic Vs is the first foldable flagship to debut outside of China and boasts exceptional design, display, and performance upgrades compared to existing foldable smartphones on the market.

Introducing A Groundbreaking Hinge Design

The HONOR Magic Vs is exceptionally slim and lightweight, measuring just 12.9mm thin when folded and 267g in weight. Despite its compact nature, the HONOR Magic Vs features a 5000mAh battery, the largest battery capacity among foldable smartphones under 270g available today.

Contributing to the light weight of the HONOR Magic Vs is a revolutionary Super-light Gearless Hinge that has been carefully crafted using single-piece casting technology, reducing the number of structural components from 92 in the previous generation down to just 4. The hinge can withstand up to 400,000 folds as tested by TÜV Rheinland, which is equivalent to more than ten years of use based on 100 folds per day, setting a new benchmark for foldable smartphone design.

The HONOR Magic Vs folds tightly without a gap and has an almost fully flat screen when unfolded, a feature that competing foldable devices on the market do not offer.

Dual Display Delivers an Exceptional Viewing Experience

The HONOR Magic Vs features a user-friendly 6.45-inch external display with a 21:9 aspect ratio and a 90% screen-to-body ratio. When unfolded, the HONOR Magic Vs delivers a tablet-like experience with an extra-wide 7.9-inch internal display, enabling users to multi-task and view content with remarkable ease.

Packed with professional eye comfort solutions, the HONOR Magic Vs features Dynamic Dimming, Circadian Night Display, and 1920Hz Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) Dimming, the highest frequency ever achieved in the current foldable smartphones markets, to effectively reduce the effects of digital eye strain. 

Superior Configurations for a Powerful User Experience

The HONOR Magic Vs is equipped with an impressive rear triple camera system comprising a 54MP IMX800 Main Camera, a 50MP Ultra-Wide & Macro Main Camera and an 8MP 3X Optical Zoom Camera, delivering an exceptional photography experience, no matter the shooting scenario.

Powered by the Snapdragon^® 8+ Gen 1 Mobile Platform from Qualcomm, the HONOR Magic Vs delivers enhanced performance with higher power efficiency for a faster and smoother user experience. With HONOR’s Turbo X engines, it strives to bring you longer battery life and a smoother experience.

The HONOR Magic Vs runs the latest HONOR MagicOS 7.1 based on Android 13. In addition to MagicRing for multi-device collaboration and Magic Text for intelligent text recognition, the foldable flagship features Smart Multi-window and APP Extender to support multi-tasking across applications and within the same application, respectively, helping users save time.

Olivier Dobo, Marketing Director at HONOR UK said: “We know our product portfolio puts some of the best features into the hands of consumers. With HONOR Magic Vs coming to the UK, we are thrilled that UK customers will get to experience our latest folding flagship device.”

He continued: “With Magic Vs’ unique hinge design, stellar camera set-up and Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset, we know it can fiercely compete in the existing foldable phone market and bring solid form-factor and exceptional performance for those who want the best out of their foldable phone.”

For more information, please visit HONOR online at www.hihonor.com/uk

The post Honor Magic Vs 5G – Release date and pricing announced is original content from Coolsmartphone. If you see it on another news website, please let us know.

I have been using a folding phone for quite a few years now but up until the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 5G was available (and a nice tax rebate came my way), I had not been able to find one that stuck. The problem was that here in the UK unless you wanted to import from China, there were no real other options. The good news is that all changes in the next couple of weeks as we are about to have another two (at least) options become available.

I am lucky enough to have been given the opportunity to test one of those options and I have had my hands on the for the last week. I am talking about the Honor Magic Vs 5G. I have a preview unit of what will be landing in the UK markets very soon and I have some thoughts on it since I unboxed it a week ago. Usually, I would post my first thoughts within 24 hrs of the unboxing being done, however, this time around I was awaiting a forward update to be released before I posted. That update has now arrived so I am now happy to post my thoughts.

Now that is out of the way let’s dive into the device’s specs.

Some pretty good-looking specs but folding phones are so much more than their component parts. The key to a folding phone and also to differentiating it in terms of the way it feels is all down to the design and feel. So onto the tour of the device.

Let’s start with the hinge. there has been a lot of talk about the Hinge in the Honor Magic Vs 5G. It is rightly deserving this as the hinge from the outside edge is very small looking and it feels very strong when in use. On the inside of the hinge, we have only 4 major components instead of the predecessor’s 96 major components! That is some real evolution of design there. However, it does present a problem. i have become quite accustomed to having the hinge in a halfway open position on my Fold 4 but this is not something that is easily achieved on the Magic Vs. it will Hold the angle but it does require a bit more fiddling to get it to stay put and even then it is only a matter of time until it unfolds fully. Whilst it may not be a major issue I have grown used to having the phone in “book mode” for reading e-books at night. It’s a shame that the Magic Vs doesn’t keep its position as well. I have tried to show an example of this in the clip below.

As for the rest of the tour let’s start-up on the top bezels where we can find on one side a pinhole mic a speaker grill and then an IR blaster, which i still find weird to see on phones these days but it has long been a feature of Honor devices

Moving around we have got a staggered arrangement meant of keys with the volume rocker being on the upper of the edge and the power button/fingerprint reader being on the bottom. This staggering is actually quite clever as it means when the phone is unfolded then the volume is on the left-hand side and the power is on the right.

When you use the phone in its landscape orientation of wit the fold horizontally then the power button is on the bottom. This is true of the Fold 4 as well but on the Magic Vs, I find that the power button is not where my fingers rest naturally which means I don’t accidentally press it when gaming.

On the bottom edge, we have got a Dual sim card slot with a waterproof gasket. another speaker grill and mic and then the USB Type C Gen 3.1. This allows for the use of fast charging when used on a suitable fats charger brick and also Video and data throughput allows you to utilise a Desktop UI akin to Samsungs DEX mode.

This USB port also opens the door to using Honor’s proprietary Supercharge technology which will allow the two internal batteries to charge at up to 66W depending on the battery state and conditions. This is very useful and does go a little way to make up for the loss of lack of a QI charging could for Wireless charging, although, for a phone of this level, I would still have expected that to be on board.

Moving around the rear we have a relatively normal-looking rear panel with an overly glossy fingerprint magnet glass panel and a larger-than-life camera array. This array features 3 sensors each of the highest quality. We have got  the following

• 54MP IMX800 Main Camera (f/1.9),
• 50MP Ultra Wide & Macro Main Camera (f/2.0),
• 8MP 3X Optical Zoom Camera (f/2.4)

However, things change when the phone is unfolded as part of the back of the phone used to be the outer display which now becomes a rear panel!

Now that I have mentioned the outer display it is a panel that is nice and tall but also and importantly a little bit wide than the one found o the Fold 4. This makes for a very useable outer display and the phone can be used perfectly in the one hand via this screen. the panel has the following  specs

Size: 6.45″
Type: OLED,
HDR10+ Screen-to-body ratio: 90%
Refresh rate: up to 120Hz
Brightness: up to 1200 nits
Resolution: 2560 x 1080 pixels
Pixel density: 431 PPI

It is a very nice panel to use and for the most part when in use it feels just like a normal phone albeit a bit thicker than a normal phone. Even though there is not a massive difference in the outer screen sizes of the Fold 4 against the Magic Vs for ease of use the Magic Vs just feels that little bit better which I have to say did surprise me. The only slight negative is that the pre-fitted screen protector is quite sticky and therefore smudges and fingerprints are easily added and the finger doesn’t seem to track as smoothly as on Gorilla Glass Victus. I do like having the high refresh rate on the outer display and i feel that this is now becoming the industry standard spec for this price point and a lot lower in some cases.

Embedded into the middle of the front /outer display is a 16MP selfie camera with the following specs

16MP Camera (f/2.45),
Video: Up to 1080 × 2520 pixels,
Photo: Up to 3456 × 4608 pixels

Just above the camera is a tiny groove which acts as the earpiece for voice calls and the audio produced from this opening is very clear and is not so loud that other parties will be able to hear your conversations either.

Whilst talking about calls you may have noticed that there are a lot of antenna lines around the edge of the phone and this makes for some really good signal reception on both cellular signal and Wifi signal. I have been impressed with the quality of the signals being held on all networks that I have tested the phone on. as you would reasonably expect from a phone of this level in 2023.

Finally, the bit we are most interested in is the internal folding display. the display itself is great and i cannot fault it for the colour and the brightness levels. I can’t even fault the fact that it is only a 90hz display. However, the issue that I do have with the inner display and an area where the fold 4 still come into its own is how the internal display is used. This is more something that will be discussed in the software section of the full review but it is a big weak point for the Magic Vs. The inner display will mirror exactly what has been going on on t router display in terms of the layout of apps and the icon size.

This is a big shame as otherwise, the display is really good and I would go as far as saying that the crease is less noticeable than that of the Fold 4 and any preceding fold device from Samsung. As you can hopefully see from the image of the devices alongside each other below the crease is so much more visible in Fold 4 than it is in Magic Vs. This is down to the Magic Vs using a different folding screen method from the Fold 4 and for me, this is the better out of the two options.

Fold 4 on the left and Magic Vs on the right

We do of course have one other major difference on the internal screens and that is the selfie camera which is a cutout on the magic vs and it shares the same spec as the one on the outer display. I can’t really say that it makes a big difference when I am using the phones regarding the cutout as i would tend to have the cutout in the bottom right-hand corner when I am holding the phone in landscape so it doesn’t intrude too much when I am gaming or watching videos.

So that pretty much covers my unboxing for the Honor Magic Fold Vs 5G. Overall impressions are the hardware is in some ways better than the Fold 4, however, where it takes its hits they are hard hits.

I do prefer the feel of the slightly wider folded phone and using it in this way feels more natural than on the Fold 4, the differences in terms of hardware are not so apparent when you unfold it though as the Fold 4 uses this mode better in terms of software and that outweighs the benefits of the reduced groove in the middle of the display.

I have had a few days of use of the Magic Vs under my belt by the time I have written this and i will say that there are some big differences here and they will be what really makes or breaks this as an option for me especially as i have been living with a 4th gen product for some time now. 

I look forward to getting you the full review out to you soon.

I will also be getting an update on the pricing ad availability of the Honor Magic Vs 5G in the UK soon which I will share with you very soon. if you are thinking of getting a folding phone then watch this space as things are about to get more interesting and the Honor Magic Vs 5G is going to play a big part in that.

The post Honor Magic Vs 5G Unboxing is original content from Coolsmartphone. If you see it on another news website, please let us know.

Experience high-quality entertainment with the compact and lightweight Dangbei Neo LED projector, featuring full HD resolution and Dolby-certified stereo speakers.

Dangbei, a leader in innovative home entertainment solutions, is today proud to announce the launch of its latest creation, the Dangbei Neo, an all-in-one mini projector with native Netflix. Officially licensed by Netflix, the DLP projector delivers 1080p FHD visuals on a screen up to 120” and immersive surround sound powered by Dolby Audio. The Neo also packs advanced features in a sleek, compact design that is sure to impress. One of the outstanding features of the Dangbei Neo is its native Netflix capability. This means that users can enjoy their favorite Netflix shows and movies without the need for any additional devices or software. With the Netflix app built into the projector, viewers can enjoy the same streaming experience they know and love, all on the big screen. With hotkeys for three popular streaming apps – Netflix, Prime Video and YouTube – navigating through their favourite’s has never been easier.

The Neo’s compact size makes it highly versatile as it can be used either at home or when traveling, and it can even fit in a backpack. Whether it’s set up at home, in the backyard or on a camping trip, the lightweight design (3.13lbs / 1.42kg) makes it easy to carry around. It can literally be used anywhere, providing there is a power outlet. If there is no internet connection nearby, the Neo can still be used due to a host of other connectivity options such as Mirrorcast.

Small, yet stunning. The Dangbei Neo, powered by DLP technology, delivers high performance with FHD 1080p image, 540 ISO lumens, HDR10 & HLG support, and about 90% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. Movies, TV shows, games, and more come to life with an impressive projection size of up to 120-inches, and its three color temperature options allow users to customize their viewing experience. The Dangbei Neo is also a treat for the ears as well as the eyes, with its built-in Stereo 2×6W speakers and Dolby Audio certified sound, providing a truly cinematic audio-visual experience.
Also included are intelligent imaging functions enhanced by the ToF camera system, such as auto focus, auto keystone correction, intelligent screen fit, and intelligent obstacle avoidance, providing more precise adjustments and ensuring clear and sharp images regardless of the Neo’s placement.

The Dangbei Neo also features screen mirroring and content casting, Bluetooth 5.0 and 5G Wi-Fi connectivity, allowing it to connect to various devices such as laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc. It’s even eco-friendly with a lifespan of up to 30,000 hours, and in fact uses less power than most TVs, providing years of entertainment giving the user peace of mind.

To celebrate the launch, Dangbei is offering a $100 discount coupon, making the Neo only $599 on Amazon and £649 on Amazon UK  using the £50 coupon available.

The post Dangbei Launches the Neo – An All-in-One Mini Projector with Native Netflix for the Best Compact Cinema Experience. is original content from Coolsmartphone. If you see it on another news website, please let us know.

I have been a follower and user of OnePlus devices for quite some time now and have had a variety of their devices over the years. I have witnessed the changes that have been made within the company from the early days up current day. There have been a lot of things that have happened inOnePlus’s short history as a phone maker, some have been negative e and some have been brilliant. I have always tried to stay pragmatic when it comes to the brand and its position in the market, however, It cannot be argued its positioning in the UK in particular has been under some very heavy scrutiny from the mobile phone buying public and there has been a lot of bad vibes being directed at OnePlus lately.

It is not the time or the place to go into these issues today however as OnePlus unveiled their new Flagship yesterday in the form of the Oneplus 11 5G and I have been lucky enough to be one of the first people to be able to use one and put it through its paces. Not to be a spoiler but I am impressed with what I have seen so far, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves as there is a review to be done!!

Design

I like the overall design of the Onplus 11 5G it is not too far stretch from what they have done before and you can see the evolution of the design when it is held in comparison with its predecessors the OnePlus 10 Pro 5G and the OnePlus 10T 5G. In general, the phone feels great in the hand and has a reassuring solidity to it. I don’t feel that the phone is fragile when I use it which is very comforting to know that if I am a bit rough with it then it should come off unharmed.

I have already done a full unboxing of the phone if you have not had a chance to view that it can be found below

If however, you prefer your device tours in text form then here we go.

Starting from the top edge of the phone we have got a microphone whole and what I can only presume is a port for air circulation for the top speaker which is a forward-facing affair and doubles the earpiece. It is pretty loud and works well when used for calls resulting in a clear sound profile allowing you to hear your calls clearly.

Moving down the right-hand side I am very pleased to say that we have got a return of the much-vaunted “Alert Slider” that was noticeably absent from the OnePlus 10T 5G. it is just satisfying to use as it has always been and I am so glad that it has been added back into the phone. Below this is where you will find the sleep wake button that will also double up as a Google Assistant button if you wish it to via quick in the software settings. Apart from that and a few antenna lines there is nothing else to see here so around we go.

On the bottom of the phone, we have got the other stereo speaker which is bottom-firing but is again like its bedfellows at the top of the phone plenty loud enough for you to know the difference. next to this is the USB Type C port which is sadly only USB 2 in terms of support but it does support SUPERVOOC fast charging of up to 100w when used with the correct charger (handily included in the box).

Onto the left-hand side and this is where we will find a few more antenna lines (they are everywhere on this phone) and also the volume rocker. This is a typical OnePlus design trait and it has been common practice for a few years now. I have to say though it can be a bit annoying as I have accidentally ended up taking a screenshot when picking out the phone as this is where my fingers will naturally end up. I suppose it would stop happening once you become more familiar with it or change the screenshot function within the setting of the phone.

Around the back is where one of the main features of this phone is to be found. I am of course meaning the camera module. The entire module itself is encased in a stainless steel camera decor (bump) which stretches to the edge of the frame. The back panel itself consists of Corning Gorilla Glass 5 to protect from being scratched and gives some impact protection. However, in the colour, I have (Eternal Green) the phone is a slippy customer so some sort of case would be a wise investment.

Here are a few shots of the official Oneplus 11 5g Aramid Fibre Bumper Case that i have been testing on the phone to stop it from slipping out of my hands and off flat surfaces!

The camera module itself consists of four three different cameras:

Main Camera:-

Sensor: Sony IMX890
Sensor Size: 1/1.56″
Megapixels: 50
Pixel Size: 1.0 μm
Lens Quantity: 6P
Optical Image Stabilization: OIS
Electronic Image Stabilization: Yes
Focal Length: 24mm equivalent
Aperture: ƒ/1.8

Ultra-Wide Camera:-

Sensor: Sony IMX581
Sensor Size: 1/2″
Megapixels: 48
Lens Quantity: 6P
Aperture: ƒ/2.2
Field of View: 115°

Portrait Tele Camera:

Sensor: Sony IMX709
Sensor Size: 1/2.74″
Megapixels: 32
Lens Quantity: 6P
Aperture: ƒ/2.0

Here is a close-up of the camera module

The last thing in this module is the Duel LED flash which is very bright!

Around the front is a glorious 6.7″ Super Fuid AMOLED LPTO 3 display, that has a PPI of 525 and a resolution of 3216 by 1440 to make it QHD+. The screen has a refresh rate of between 1Hz and 120Hz depending on the content being viewed and this is something I will cover later on in my review. The aspect ratio is a very reasonable 20.1:9 which feels about right for a panel of this size. The other features of the display are that it has a response rate of up to 1000 Hz, Supports sRGB, Display P3 and has a 10-bit colour depth. as if this wasn’t enough the display supports Dolby Vision and is covered by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus. I am sure that you will agree that on paper this looks pretty impressive and i can assure you that in person none of that impressiveness is lost!

Quite a nice tidy package I am sure you will agree. Now on with the specs sheet.

Specifications

So this is a pretty banging phone on the Specs sheet alone but how is it in real-life usage and what does that hardware feel like to use? Onto the hardware section of the review and we will throw in some performance just for good measure as well!

Hardware and Performance

A pretty face does not always mean a powerful core, however, I am very pleased to advise that this could not be further from the truth with the OnePlus 11 5G. The phone as we can see from the above specs sheet is packing a very powerful heart in the form of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor and this n turn is ably assisted by 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM on my phone with the added assistance of the RAM-Vita which will allow for the allocation of extra Virtual RAm if the OS find that the phone needs that extra boost in computational power. Not only is the RAM massive and fast but the storage on offer is, in my case 256GB of UFS.40. The combination of these elements allow for very fast read and write speeds and allows up to 44 simultaneous apps to be active in the background. Now I can not imagine a scenario where I will ever need that amount of apps to be open as I tend to break out into a cold sweat when I have more than 10 apps running at the same time. It is good to know however that I had the desire to run this amount I could do so without any significant problem

Along with the massive and quick storage, we have an equally large and fast charging battery in the form of a 5000mAh two-cell battery which charges at up to 100w via the SUPERVOOC fast charging technology that has now become synonymous with devices from the Oneplus, OPPO and Realme families. If you are reading this in America please be warned however due to the difference in power standards you will only get 80w of fast charging and your charging time will be a tad slower than the advertised time of 25 minutes from 1% to 100%. The fact that this battery can charge so quickly does lessen the sting a bit of the removal of Wireless charging from the device.

This is a strange decision as it was present on both of the last two OnePlus devices in the form of the OnePlus 9 family and the OnePlus 10 family (the OnePlus 10T notwithstanding). What makes it even stranger still is that OnePlus have included wireless charging into the Oneplus Buds Pro 2 which are being sold alongside the new phone and it would have been great to have been able to utilize the reverse wireless charging feature of the phone to allow you to quickly easily top up the earbuds when on the go.

The battery and its rapid charging could be seen as a point of concern to some as this has long been the weakest link for a lot of phones in the past. So in order to counter this Oneplus has developed its Battery Health Engine. Now coming into these phone reviews as someone who deals with the concerns of battery health daily due to owning an Electric vehicle, this sounds and indeed functions in a very similar manner to what is being done on the massive multi-cell battery backs that power the EVs of today.

In essence, the BHS will allow you to continue to use the total battery capacity and obtain faster speeds for longer by the use of the Smart Battery Health Algorithm and Battery Healing Technology. The former will allow the phone to self-regulate charging speeds automatically only doing the fastest charging when the phone needs it or you demand it by overriding a setting. it can also implement an 80% limit on the battery for normal daily charging if you are not regularly using the total capacity in one session. The latter is actually down to the electrolyte formula that has been used in the battery and this will help to protect the anode and cathode in that battery for longer meaning that the cells will last longer. Now all of this is great to see on paper but the sceptic in me has been burned before with EVs and their promised performance so the fact that the BHS system and the batteries have been independently tested by TÜV Rheinland gives me some peace of mind for the long term. How long i hear you ask well over 1600 charger cycles or 4 years (based on a daily charge session) whichever comes first.

So there is a side effect that we know about when it comes to faster charging and high performance and this is our old friend heat. Now don’t get me wrong, with the current temperatures as they are in the UK I am all for my phone doubling as a hand warmer! However, this is yet another thing that will hamper the longevity of a phone so therefore it is bad joo joo. So under that smooth glossy exterior of the OnePlus 11 5G, we find it has been optimised to try and reduce that thermal afterthought as much as possible to again ensure that you are getting the maximum performance for your movie binging, gaming, video recording, editing sessions when you are on the go. I would like to introduce the Cryo-velocity VC Cooling system, which claims to be the largest ever on the OnePlus 11 Series device’s (ED note could there be others in the series coming later on….) at a 3685 mm². if you were to lay that flat then you are looking at a piece of paper in between the sizes of A4 and A3 which is pretty awesome to think is inside the phone in the form of a Vapour chamber! If all that wasn’t enough then we also have a 5673 mm² graphene mid-frame layer to add to the mix. That is a huge amount for such a small device and it is hard to imagine how they managed to get all this inside the phone so here is a visual to show it off for you.

So what does all of this mean for performance well OnePlus has always had a mantra when it comes to performance and it is Never Settle and one of the key components of that is Smooth and Fast. The Oneplus 11 ticks the boxes when it comes down to this. I loaded up a few games to try and see how they would perform in testing conditions. I am pleased to advise that during some short but intense gaming sessions, the phone stayed cool and comfortable to hold and allowed me to play with everything on maximum settings with ease. I used F1 Mobile Racing and Republique as my test games. Both of these games ran smoothly with a consistent 29-30FPS on the screen even at their highest settings.

F1 Mobile

Obviously, these are not the most demanding games that could be run on the phone but they are what i am currently playing and I found them to work absolutely perfectly. I also took the time to run a few benchmarks on the phone and the result are shown in the screenshots below.

As you can see from the benchmarks that I have completed the OnePlus 11 is getting a faster FPS consistently over the Galaxy Z Fold 4 it also seems to handle the thermals a bit better as well as this was found in the sustained load test in Wildlife Extreme Stress test on 3D Mark. In the Geekbaench test the galaxy ZFold 4 does have a slightly high single-core score but when it comes to the multicore processing the OnePlus 11 comes out on top again.

Both of these devices are extremely powerful devices and will both be more than adequate for mobile gaming and I have not seen any sluggishness when using either of them in my daily use.

So now that we have established how powerful the phone is what can it do in terms of photography? This is a key area where this phone needs to perform well and i am not going to take it easy on the phone as I am going to be pitching it up against the Pixel 7 Pro which is one of the better phones for camera performance.

Camera

So let’s look at some macro Shots first

To my eyes, the pictures are both good but there seems to be a tad more detail on the face from the shot taken on Pixel 7 Pro. Also getting the OnePlus 11 5G to go into macro mode is a bit more of a faff as it wants to jump between macro and normal modes too easily.

Some more generic shots here one of my back garden where you can’t really see a massive difference I would say that things are about equal in these two images. The second set or some inside shots of my watch and OnePlus 11 5G edges it out for me in this one as it is a more pleasing image.

The next set is of a tricky lighting condition and in this group, you can see more from the OnePlus 11 5G shot than you can in the Pixel 7 Pro.

It is very close though but in the bottom right-hand corner, you can see a bit more colour detail of the frame on the picture from the OnePlus 11 5G.

Next up is a comparison of Zoom levels taken at the standard levels of 0.6 x zoom(o.5 x zoom for the Pixel 7 Pro) 1x ,2x and 5,

Some interesting things are going on here which i am a bit surprised by Overall at the different zoom levels the OnePlus 11 5G shots are better and truer to life than that of the Pixel 7 Pro shots. if you look in particular at the colours of the window sills on the OnePlus 11 5g they remain white through all the zoom levels. When you look closer at the Pixel 7 Pro shots you can see that the window sills adopt the blueish tint from the wall colour. Overall the Oneplus 11 5G images are truer to life. However, in the Ultawide images for each phone, the Pixel 7 Pro shows the colour of the wall much better than the OnePlus 11 5G which indicates that when the Ultrawide lens is being used the OnePlus 11 5G is lacking colour reproduction.

Time for a selfie shootout

I am expecting this too again by similar in terms of the results but I will say that the process of turning all the enhancements off on the OnePlus 11 5G is a bit more involved than that of the Pixel so if you are just looking for the unenhanced image then bear this in mind.

You will see that the OnePlus 11 has got a slightly wider angle than the Pixel 7 Pro but that being said you do have the wide angle available as an option on the Pixel 7 Pro which is not a feature found on the OnePlus 11. In terms of colour, I would say that they are even, with the Oneplus 11 5G being a tad brighter when you look at the wall in the background. However, once it comes down to sharpness this is where the Pixel take a lead. When I look at a zoomed-in version of the images focusing on my beard I can see more defined hairs on the Pixel 7 Pro than on the OnePlus 11 5G.

This could be a by-product of the fact that to get a real-world image of what you actually look like you need to turn off a load of the extra AI stuff on the OnePlus 11 5G. In isolation the OnePlus 11 5Gis a perfectly adequate selfie shooter. It also does a very good job of getting portraits when you actually select that mode. There is a noticeable difference and you can adjust the depth of field focus on the portrait mode with the OnePlus 11 5Gwhich you cannot do on the Pixel 7 Pro until you have taken the image it can be edited afterwards.

So that is the end of the comparison of the images and I think it is fair to say that in most areas the OnePlus 11 5G is a good camera and it stacks up very nicely against the Pixel 7 Pro. There is however one area where the Pixel 7 Pro stands out above the OnePlus 11 5G and indeed in this reviewer’s opinion. This area i simplicity in the camera UI. As i mentioned briefly above there are a lot of different things that you can tweak and fiddle with on the OnePlus 11 5G and for me, this is actually a turn-off. I like my camera interface to be simple and I don’t want to have to faff with setting to get the image I want. If you do like using filters and tweaking settings even in the normal modes then the OnePlus is probably for you but for me i want simple and this is where the Pixel 7 Pro wins out for me and even with the choice of phones that I have is always my go-to when I need a camera I can rely on 100%.

Below i just want to share some more images of what can be achieved by the OnePlus 11 5G when you are willing to play with some of the other settings including the option for using XPAN mode which i never really fully figured out if I am honest!

So With the stills camera covered pretty extensively, I also wanted to include a little bit of Video for you just to show what the phone is capable of. This sample has been recorded at 1080p using a 30 FPS second framerate but the video will allow up to 8K and up to 24fps when in that mode. Due to the constraints of WordPress I have not been able to upload that sample and i don’t really ever see myself using it, however, it is there if you want it!

I am happy now to move on to another area where OnePlus has been scrutinised a lot recently and this is the question of Software.

Software

OnePlus phones used to be nearly unique in the relative sparseness of things that they added to the UI on their phones. But as with the inevitable march of time they have also had to change things up as time has moved forward. So over the past few years, we have seen what was once a user favourite in the form of Oxygen UI become Oxygen OS 13 in its current form. I have found that this new OS bears a remarkable similarity to an OS i have also seen on another brand of Phone in the form of a Realme device. (see Realme GT 2 5G review).

This is not surprising given that Realme and Oppo devices run Colour OS and OnePlus devices run Oxygen OS but hold on a minute those OS’s are different are they? Well dear reader this is where eth problem lies the lines between these OS’s have now blurred significantly so much so that in the far east the OnePlus 11 5G was launched with colour OS 13 instead of Oxygen OS 13 and if you were to place phones from each region next to each other you would struggle to identify the difference between them.

But what does this all mean for the user? Well in short it is actually not that bad when compared to something like One UI from Samsung or Magic UI from Honor but if you compare it to what Oxygen UI used to be then it is also not that great. I loved Oxygen UI back in the day because it was as close as you could get to having a Nexus/Pixel phone without having one of them, it was also normally significantly cheaper than the aforementioned devices as well! However, now the Oneplus Phones are no longer clean in terms of software and they have added extra features and started to duplicate apps which is not a good place to be in my book.

Dont get me wrong there are new features to Oxygen OS 13 that I like the cute Always on Display that shows either Polar bears or Coral and the effect that temperature has on them is a nice touch, I also like the gaming app that collates your game into one place and has the ability to get pop pout tools when playing a game and also block notifications. However, there is a lot of other largely useless stuff on there that just gets in the way. I dislike that I am limited to only having an app drawer that will not show more than 4 icons across.

I don’t need the duplicate apps that are present and I shouldn’t be seeing what is essentially a storefront for OnePlus every time I go into the settings screen.

Now i know that OnePlus is not alone in the above implementations of strange add-ons to UI’s but that is what used to distinguish OnePlus from the rest of the industry they were not just putting extra bloat in for the sake of it and they kept the UI clean and streamlined. A lot of this may just be me being a bit grumpy and old-fashioned but I liked that I didn’t use to have to spend an hour removing unnecessary apps from my phone to get it to work the way I want it to. I am sure that there will be users who are new to OnePlus who have been pulled in by the Specs and the camera who will not even notice these changes from the old to the new but for me it is annoying. Dont get me wrong once i had spent some time cleaning up duplicate apps (there are not that many to be fair) and turned off the extra features that I did not want or need then I enjoyed using the phone a lot and the software is not bad at all. I just prefer things to be a bit cleaner like that what is to be found on Pixels and dare I say iPhones!

Moving on from that rant let’s get int the conclusions about this phone.

Conclusion

As i inclined at the top of this review i am impressed with what I have seen about the OnePlus 11 5G and i am happy to have had the chance to use it for the time i have been able to do so. I suppose though the real test of it is whether I would buy one with my own hard-earned cash. Well for me it is a no but where does that leave you the normal consumer? I would defiantly give this phone a look it is a great-looking and very powerful phone that comes in at an awesome price point.

Yes, there are a few things that are missing such as Wireless Charging and a full IP 68 rating but the lack of wireless charging was really a non-issue for me as the battery life is really good and the IP rating doesn’t bother me at all.

I was also very impressed by the camera as this is a massive step in the right direction from what I had seen during my last time using a Co-developed camera (OnePlus 9 series). it seems that OnePlus and Hassleblad have actually figured out what is important to people and made sure that this works for them. In all honesty, If you were to give me a batch of photos from either the Pixel 7 Pro or the OnePlus 11 5G and ask me which was which I would struggle to tell you either way.

So if you fancy a phone that is one of the most powerful currently in the market with a respectable camera and a sensible price point, then you could do a lot worse than getting a OnePlus 11 5G, and the good news is that if you do want one you can order it now from OnePlus or from Amazon right now. Prices start at £729.00, when you are there then be sure to also pick up one of their cases, as well as this, is a slippy customer, particularly in the Eternal Green colour like the one I have been testing!

The post OnePlus 11 5G – Review is original content from Coolsmartphone. If you see it on another news website, please let us know.

Today is a good day as we get to do the unboxing of the OnePlus 11 5G and the Oneplus Buds Pro 2 in all their glory.

The phone has been released the specs have been shared and the press releases have all gone out what else is their to do apart from a joint unboxing.

Now due to the length of the video below which you will see is pretty well detailed and also that I have covered OnePlus 11 5G’s launch extensively in another article here. I will share the unboxing video without further fanfare.

I am really looking forward to getting the review of this phone underway and sharing my thoughts on this device but the first impression of both the phone and the earbuds is very good. I am quite surprised at how taken I was with the earbuds on my first use. As for the phone, it has been a bit of a longer burn to get used to it but I am again quite taken by it. the camera is good and I have had no real slowdowns to report so far.

So for now that is my very brief thoughts on the device on its launch day, I will be doing more content on these two devices in the coming days so please check back into Coolsmartphone.com for more on the devices. Here are a few more pictures showing its svelte design off for the time being.

Dont forget if you wish to know more about the OnePlus 11 5G and the OnePlus Buds Pro 2 then you can find out more from the OnePlus website

The post OnePlus 11 5G and OnePlus Buds Pro 2 – Unboxing is original content from Coolsmartphone. If you see it on another news website, please let us know.