Tag: os

Vivo handsets to get Android 11 soon.

We recently reviewed the Vivo X51 5G and then we found that £100 had been knocked off the price. Now we’re finding out that the phone will be getting Android 11 very soon too. Vivo has announced that the updates will start rolling out from end of November, …

Top 14 things that make iPadOS so great

The iOS innovations more or less stopped impressing us a long time ago. There’s almost nothing that they’re changing except for a dark theme, a volume control indicator, and a keyboard with swipes. There is nothing more to highlight. However, when it comes to the iPad, more innovations …

OPPO reveals ColorOS 11

As we’re a UK based site, we’ll try to get over the spelling of the word “Color” and move on (we’re still having trouble with Honor). This, then, is the new ColorOS 11. It’s just been launched and it’s one of the first to run on stable Android …

Gamers! Listen up! The RedMagic 5G is here!

Got yourself £539 and want to buy yourself a true gaming phone without breaking the bank? This is the RedMagic 5G, available right now from the RedMagic online store. There’s a couple of versions and so prices are as follows.. 8GB+128GB for $579 / €579 / £539 12GB+256GB …

OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro – Video unboxing

It’s a lovely sunny day and I’m out in the garden to take the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro out of their boxes. This really was my first unboxing of both and, as we’re on lockdown, my quietest place right now is the garden. If you want …

OnePlus 8 Pro and OnePlus 8 Leaked all over the shop.

Crickey. Here comes another massive OnePlus leak! The boys at John Lewis have just added … – A Glacial Green OnePlus 8 Pro with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage for £899 – An Onyx Black OnePlus 8 Pro with 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage for £799 – …

Chrome OS to get Android 10 Gestures.

Lots of us here at Coolsmartphone use Chromebooks as our primary computing device, and now we’re hearing from the folks over at Android Police that they can be used in “tablet mode” with a gesture input. This is very similar to the one you’ll use in Android 10. …

Google drop-kicks Huawei.

The smartphone landscape is cut-throat. HTC? Gone. Sony? Motorola? LG? Struggling. But Huawei have enjoyed a massive rise to fame. They were already huge in China, but they’re now huge in various places around the world and, here in the UK their phones are selling like hot cakes. …

iOS 12: Full preview and insight into key features

My son now has an iPhone and just recently I noticed that it hadn’t been fully updated. Usually I’m the one in the family who has a weird need to ensure that all the apps are updated on my phone and that the OS is the very latest …

Android Q Beta has landed

With Google I/O not far away now, it’s the time of year where Android fans get to try out the latest update. It’s also the time to start the naming guessing game! Today the first version of Android Q has been made available for Pixel owners to download …

OPPO to launch the R17 Pro in Europe

Following on from their debut in France with the Find X, OPPO have today announced that their R series flagship product, the R17 Pro (also called RX17 Pro), will be arriving in European markets on November 16th. Pricing is €599, which is around £523, but expect to see …

Android 9 Pie starts baking

The long wait is over, Android 9 has been confirmed as ‘Pie’ and best of all, it is rolling out right now! Owners of the Pixel range have started to receive a notification their update is ready to be downloaded, and we are hoping that other devices like …

How long can Android remain free?

As you may have read here on Coolsmartphone recently, Google Android was given a huge fine by the EU after exploiting their control over the Android OS. They were, it seems, reducing the appearance of rivals. However, with another huge fine being pushed through the door, people are …

Google Pixelbook Review

The Introduction I must admit, I wasn’t planning to get hands-on with a Pixelbook. That was mainly due to the price of the thing. However, when I dropped the Pixel Buds back to Google UK, I was excited to find that they would loan me a Pixelbook. This …

Quickly now! Join the Huawei Mate 9 Android Oreo beta

If you’ve got a Huawei Mate 9 then you may be looking on with envy after the Mate 10 announcement. Don’t worry though, because, if you’re super-quick, you can get in on the Android 8.0 (Oreo) action too. Head to the Huawei beta test area and you can …

The death of convergence? The end of Ubuntu Phone

In 2013, billionaire space-tourist and Linux advocate Mark Shuttleworth announced Ubuntu Phone. It was based, rather obviously, on the Linux distribution, Ubuntu. Ubuntu had already seen a lot of success in the server and desktop world, and could arguably be the most important distribution since the creation of the open-source …

I accidentally bought another Chromebook

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but Microsoft Windows and I have had an argument. After many years together we’ve now gone our separate ways. Quite some time ago, when I first started messing around with PC’s, Windows 95, Windows 98 – they were the operating systems you’d …

Firefox OS dies off

Way back in 2013 (was it really that long?!) we got our first look at the ZTE Open, a smartphone running on a whole new operating system from Mozilla – Firefox OS. Today, just four years later, the entire connected devices division have been laid off and the …

CyanogenMod vanishes off the web as DNS is pulled

It seems that there’s no love lost between Cyanogen Inc and CyanogenMod. The CyanogenMod.org website is now dead. It comes just hours after this blog post from the developers behind it. When the CyanogenMod team announced that they were going to fork the source code yesterday we simply …

Goodbye CyanogenMod. Hello forkers.

Well, we didn’t want this to come (especially so late on Christmas Eve when we’re all full of mince pies) but it has. Following our earlier news that Cyanogen OS is to be retired, it now looks like CyanogenMod in its current form is toast too. However, there’s …

Cyanogen OS finishes at year’s end.

A short time ago we reported that Cyanogen as a company would be shedding considerable staff. They were also closing buildings with some of the team moving to a single location. The new CEO, Lior Tal, announced the company would cutting ties with co-founder Steve Kondik too. Now Cyanogen …

Cyanogen. No more?

The Wileyfox Spark X we reviewed recently ran an OS based on Android called “CyanogenMod”. Think of it as an Android OS with extra goodness. We tested out the theming support and the privacy guard in our review but there’s also FLAC audio support, CPU overclocking, an unlockable …

No Windows 10 phones from Lenovo

Let’s face it, Microsoft have realigned their mobile efforts away from hardware. Not only that, but the traditional smartphone operating system doesn’t seem to be high on the priority list for the company. Their own Lumia handsets are being killed off and there’s not exactly a queue of …

Skype on a Chromebook – Almost there

You may remember how I created a way to get the Android version of Skype working on a Chromebook. It’s 10 steps, but to be honest it should be a lot easier. Thankfully, since I wrote that, things have progressed somewhat. Firstly we Android apps coming to Chromebooks …

Remix arrives for Pixel C and Nexus 9

Yeah. We asked the question back in December. Was that Pixel C meant to have a Chrome OS? In my mind it’d certainly work better than Android, especially in that form factor. Now though, you can add one of our favourite alternatives (there’s been a FEW articles about …

The death of Windows Phone. Market share sinks further.

Say what you like about my Windows Phone tirade, it’s all sadly true. Call it what you want – Windows 10 mobile, Windows Phone, I’m angry at how easily Microsoft let their lead slip. I’m annoyed at how slowly they realised. I’m frustrated at how they treated the …

Windows 10 Mobile has arrived

Word on the street is that Windows 10 Mobile is arriving on handsets right now, with select Windows 8.1 devices getting the update. Mike Phillips has mailed in to tell us that he’s got it on his Lumia 1520 already. The supported devices for the upgrade are as …

New Year, New OS

I’ve been a windows user all my life or at least since I bought my first PC thirty years ago. (Actually I tell a lie as I had an Amstrad PCW before that but let’s not get into all that CPM nonsense right now.) I’ve used DoS 5.1 …

Firefox OS now a dead duck on smartphones

Well, that went well didn’t it? The Firefox OS looks to be getting killed off on smartphones. It’s just days since they were promoting the fact that you can develop for it easily. Sadly the OS, like many contenders in the mobile space, was just no match for …

Chromebook Pixel and Pixel C now available

I use a Chromebook. It’s a Samsung Chromebook which is quite highly spec’d but, when it went on sale, it was priced too highly and didn’t sell that well. I gave it a few years, and after swearing at my Windows laptop for the six millionth time, I …

Remix OS overview.

The other day I unboxed the Remix Ultra Tablet and posted an article with my first thoughts. I have now had a bit more time to use the tablet and I now wish to share an overview of the OS as it is very similar to the Android …

Windows Phone isn’t even a choice for Huawei

Despite some critical headlines, we can’t stop coming back to the guys at Huawei. Their smartphone shipments show no sign of slowing down – 52 million smartphones were shipped last year and they’re the third largest smartphone manufacturer. We were impressed with the P6, their flagship, and the …

CMInstaller – Making CyanogenMod accessible to all.

CyanogenMod has long been the go to place for Android custom software and modification. Cyanogen (Steve Kondik) and the team recently ventured into the hardware business with the oppo N1. The handset has been well received and had opened up the Cyanogen version of Android to the masses. Now the …

Jolla – Different, in a good way

Stefano Mosconi is the Chief Information Officer for Jolla. I sat down with him here at Mobile World Congress and he’s an instantly likeable guy, being both open and honest about the product he’s helped to create. Our very own Aran was one of the first to get …

Jolla Phone – Hands on

Well, this thing is fast, make no mistake. The lovely lady showing us around the handset didn’t have specs at the time, but you could tell from the speed of the thing that it was very slick indeed. We found out later that the handset actually runs a …

The dual OS Geeksphone Revolution is now available to order

Firefox OS hasn’t really made much of an impact since its appearance the other year, yet that doesn’t stop me being intrigued by it. Geeksphone the Spanish phone manufacturer have pushed out several models now all running Firefox OS and with their latest model they seem to have …

Tizen event on Feb 23rd

Right remember Samsung’s own operating system Tizen ? Well if you’re like me I thought that it was dead and buried, but apparently not. According to the Sammobile site, Samsung is still very much committed to showing off where it’s at with the development of Tizen and devices …