Kiran Upadhyay

As we suspected in our review, the iPhone X is not faring well in the first drop and durability tests. Two different drop tests showed immediate damage to the device. Consumer electronics site CNET ran a drop test from a height of three feet. The glass at the corner of the phone cracked on the very first test, which dropped the phone on its side. A second test dropped the phone on its face, leading to even more fractures. CNET concluded that dropping the phone without a case is "out of the question." The damage CNET encountered was only cosmetic—a more extreme drop test from SquareTrade showed damage to functionality as well. SquareTrade is a company that offers protection plans for mobile devices, so it should be noted that the company has an incentive to convince consumers that their devices may be at risk Source

Xiaomi unveiled its newest flagship smartphone — the Mi 6 — today at an event in Beijing, having skipped Mobile World Congress, the telecom industry’s largest annual event where it announced the Mi5 last year. There’s plenty at stake with this new device, given that Xiaomi suffered a sales slump last year with CEO Lei Jun admitting that the company has entered a transitional period after growing too fast. So, what about the Mi 6? Well, the first thing to note is that there are plenty of similarities to the iPhone 7, but price isn’t one of them. The entry model — featuring 64 GB of storage — comes in at 2499 RMB, that’s around $360, with a 128 GB option (2899 RMB, $420) and ceramic edition (2999 RMB, $435) completing the range. All three are far cheaper than iPhone equivalents, but, interestingly for Xiaomi, the range is more expensive that the company’s usual flagship prices. The most obvious iPhone comparison is that there is no headphone jack on the Mi 6, just as Apple ele...

Apple has a new patent granted by the USPTO today (via AppleInsider), which describes a system that can actually re-orient an iPhone during freefall, changing the angle of its eventual impact with the ground after first determining how best to shift it to make sure the fall does as little damage as possible. The patent also includes descriptions of other more advanced and fantastic scenarios, including ejection devices for cables, and even retractable air foils to control the angle of descent, like those Elon Musk is testing for his reusable rockets at Space X, but built into an iPhone. The actual meat of the patent has far more realistic goals, and uses existing tech to control the angle of a fall – the iPhone’s internal vibration motor. It’s still not super likely we’ll see these incorporated into new devices, as the tech described is a variation of the vibration motors contained in models that launched before the iPhone 6. The 6 and 6 Plus contain a different kind of tech to not...

Spare a thought for Microsoft, a relative newcomer to the mobile making business, after Redmond completed its $7.2BN+ acquisition of former European mobile making powerhouse Nokia earlier this year. If Microsoft was hoping to see quick marketshare wins in Europe once its hands were fully on the levers of production that has not come to pass. The latest 12-week smartphone sales figures from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, up to this September, indicate that Windows Phone’s already small share of the smartphone market has shrunk in Europe — dropping 0.3 percentage points in aggregate across the top five markets in Europe (the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany). Breaking those markets out individually, only Italy continues to see marketshare gains for Windows Phone, with a 1.5 percentage point rise on the year ago period in that market — giving Microsoft’s OS a 15.2 per cent share on smartphone sales in the country (where it is second only to Android’s 71.8 per cent). But Italy rem...

Scenario: It’s 12:30 am. You’re in Taco Bell. You’d do pretty much anything for a crunchwrap supreme. The problem: If you open your mouth and try to speak, it’ll become immediately obvious that you just smoked what you’re at least 90% sure was all of the weed in the entire world. Solution: You can now order Taco Bell on your phone. The company is prepped to announce that they’ve launched a mobile ordering application for iPhone and Android. Once the respective apps go live, you should be able to find the iPhone app here and the Android app here. This is great, because sometimes saying “Two tacos, please” and waiting 19 seconds is way, way too much work. Oh, and good news for the sober folk: food ordered via the mobile app can be picked up through the drive-through. They’ve eliminated the need to get out of the car; they’ve mostly eliminated the need to speak to anyone… you know what this means? The only logical next step is, clearly, tacocopter. Some of the key ingredien...