Category: General

Voices in your Head? – Sony Launches new Xperia Ear

Virtual Assistants are something that major phone vendors have been pushing for a while. Whether it may be Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana or the new Google Assistant on the new Pixel phones. Now Sony has gotten into the act with their new Xperia Ear. According to the Sony blurb, this …

Xiaomi sells 1 million phones in India in 18 days

A couple of the writers here at CSP are interested in devices that originate from the far east and are relativity unknown here in Europe. I’m currently reviewing an completely unknown device from a unknown manufacturer, which at the moment is well above my expectations… review coming soon. …

​Offline viewing for Netflix may be coming soon

If you have a look at today’s modern media suppliers – the likes of Amazon’s Prime Video, Sky Go, BBC iPlayer and the all 4 app all offer the ability to download programs and watch them later offline.  When quizzed earlier this year, one of the biggest online …

The M6 Toll – Not quite contactless, actually

Yesterday, for a special treat, I used the M6 Toll road. It’s just a couple of miles from my house and takes around 20 minutes off my journey but I, along with many, many, many other people, simply don’t use it due to the insane cost. At £5.50 …

August Retro EP634 Bluetooth Headphones – Review

I’m going to completely give away the whole upshot of this review in the first paragraph for you now. Sure, you can always skip along to the bottom of the most reviews, but I’m going to serve it up on a platter right here in paragraph one. OK. …

Flat iPhone? Wind it up!

My wife says that I’m always winding her up, so let’s put it to good use and charge a battery with my skills. Now, bear with me here, because I know that this is a bit expensive, but if you hang around the AMPWare website for a few …

Brizebox – Review

As the explosion of online shopping continues, more and more of us are having deliveries to our homes (I am now on first name terms with my local Amazon delivery driver, we have so many deliveries). Here lies one of our first world problems, i.e. making sure somebody’s …

Pixel Timepiece – Set for launch in Q1

Serial leaker Evan Blass is rarely wrong when it comes to upcoming handsets and gadgets. He’ll get the pictures and the gossip ahead of time and today he’s revealed that Google will indeed be stepping into the Smartwatch ring very soon indeed. As we mentioned before, Google seems …

Charging all your iPhone and iPads .. tidily.

If you’ve got a few gadgets of the iOS variety, “charging time” can be messy process. Cables everywhere and devices stacked on top of each other. This PowerDock5 Charging Station could fix that and, although it’s £79.95, it has 5 USB ports on the side and short cables …

RATED – The BBC iPlayer Radio app

Welcome to the first in a series of articles celebrating apps which are an example to others on how things should be done. I’m probably preaching to the converted, but I wanted to talk about the BBC iPlayer Radio app. It’s available for iPhone,, Android and Kindle. For …

Vodafone Wallet with PayPal – Hands on

Paying for things has taken a massive leap forward in recent years. Money seems to be getting used less and less, and instead I’m tapping my bank card on terminals in supermarkets, on vending machines and through toll booths. It’s simple, it’s quick and it’s really easy. Now, …

ZTE Blade V7 coming exclusively to Three

Head to Amazon and you can pick up a ZTE Blade V7 for a pretty small amount of cash. For your money you’ll get a phone with a 5.2″ 1080 x 1920 pixel screen, Android 6.0 and an octa-core 1.3GHz CPU. It also comes with 2GB RAM, 16GB …

Lessening cash flows for continued HTC woes

I still love HTC. I really do. Sure, they’ve made some missteps over the years in terms of product, and they may have put out one too many phones that are pretty much exactly the same bar shape and look, but Nokia did the same thing when they …

OnePlus tease Android 7 Nougat for the OnePlus 3

If you are a regular reader of this site, you will know that I’m a real OnePlus fanboy. I’ve owned every device that the company have released, and upon seeing the price of the new Google Pixel phones I’ll definitely be staying in the OnePlus stable. To be …

TalkTalk fined £400,000

You may have heard about TalkTalk this year. They’re a British television, telecommunications, Internet and mobile network service provider. They’ve just been handed a whopping £400,000 fine for what is classed as poor web security. It follows a cyber attack which occurred in October last year. This resulted …

A plug-in self-drive solution – Remoto Pilot

Part of me didn’t like this pretty much immediately purely due to the video below. I mean, what’s going on with the face fur on this guy? And does he have to look so cocky? “I’m not just going to use my phone while my car is driving …

A phone and a contract for just £6 per month

Fancy a phone and a 4G contract for just £6 per month? Check this offer out from iD Mobile. They already do SIM only plans from just £4 per month and sure, that’s only 250MB of data, but for another £2 per month you can get a phone …

Anki OverDrive, the Supertruck arises

Here at Coolsmartphone towers, we love Anki Overdrive, the model racing game powered by your smartphone. Its mix of high speed, artificial intelligence, and weapons provide a great past time for the whole family. Think of it as Scalextric on steroids… and guns. Now Anki has released its Supertruck …

Pixel Prices Published. Pretty Premium.

Morning. Last night Google unveiled the phones we all expected them to unveil. The Pixel and the Pixel XL – a phone and a slightly bigger phone. From a distance, from far, far away, it’s like the Apple launch in a way. Two phones, one a big larger …

Doodling on messages coming to WhatsApp

Oh, you wish there was just one true cross-platform messaging app, don’t you? Oh hang on there is, and it’s called SMS. SMS has been truly cross-platfrom and also operating-sysem neutral for the past, I don’t know, 30 years. Yet no one seems to have grown the service, apart …

Buying a Samsung S6 or S7? Go Tesco Mobile and get free gifts.

Head down to Tesco Mobile to get your Galaxy S6 and S7 and you’ll get more than just a very smart Android handset. Tesco are giving away goodies worth between £39.99 and £199 which you can perhaps keep and use as Christmas presents if you don’t want them …

Xperia XZ unboxing

We have managed to do it – we finally have an unboxing before a phone is due for release. This took us a fair few hours of persuasion and persistence from me upon the bigwigs at Sony to allow us to have this device, the Sony Xperia XZ. …

Microsoft Band Canned. Team disband.

I tried out the Microsoft Band and Band 2. I was quite impressed but sadly there’ll be no third version. A few weeks ago Thurrott reported that the future of Microsoft Band looked less than promising. Let’s face it, Microsoft tried to do the “hardware thing” and failed …

iPhone 7 Accessories – Start your engines!

It’s a familiar pattern for folks in the industry. Rumours regarding the next big smartphone release begin to take shape – usually a year or so before the product unveiling. Designers and manufacturers of third party accessories get to work on finding out whatever they can regarding the …

Keep in the loop – Back straps for your phone

There’s two types of people in this world. The first type will put a cover on their phone and they’ll keep it in mint condition. Even when they trade the thing in, it’ll look brand new. The second category is reserved for people like myself, who often find …

Huawei set to launch next Phablet

It’s that time of year again the lull between the iPhone launch and the Google phone launch. It is during this time that we normally see a few other smaller scale players have announcements in time for the holiday season. One such company is Huawei (who are by …

iPhone 7 explodes in transit

Following on the recent news of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 batteries catching fire, it appears that one of Apple’s latest flagships suffered the same fate. This time, it was the time for the iPhone 7, which exploded whilst being delivered to its new owner, according to the Reddit user who …

Voice Navigation “OK Google” coming to Google Maps 

  Are you an “OK Google” superuser? To be honest, I’m not. I keep forgetting that it’s there, but today Google has announced an update to the Google Maps app which I think that I will use and be an extremely useful addition. “OK Google” and voice commands …

OnePlus 3 – Exclusive to O2 from this Thursday

Those of you who follow us on Twitter can look away now. Indeed, if you’re a regular visitor then you really don’t need to read this story, because this is something we told you about way back in June. Our readers knew all about the OnePlus 3 arriving …

Anker Power and protection mega unboxing

Over the last few weeks, I have been in the fortunate position to play host to some very cool charging tech from Anker. Anker is a company that has been providing power solutions to the mobile warrior for quite some time now, and they have some truly awesome kit …

The hidden iPhone 7 3.5mm audio port – How to find it

It’s now time for another article about someone doing something stupid to a brand new iPhone 7. They’re hoping that they’ll get enough YouTube clicks so that they can get enough revenue to replace the phone that they’re just about to break. I know… this whole internet thing …

Rainbow Wrap Earbuds – Review

Well, these earbuds are certainly the most colourful earbuds I have tested so far. Leigh had another version earlier in Summer to play with. The new Rainbow edition is a limited edition of the Wraps series of earbuds. The Rainbow edition will match the specifications of the current …

Koopower Solar Fairy Lights – Review

KooPower have been in touch again and, following on from the wireless doorbell we reviewed, we now have 12 metres of LED fairy lights. Now, I’ve had these in the back garden for quite a while as I honestly thought that they wouldn’t work. Why? Well, solar powered …