Month: February 2019

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  Sony's new flagship phone: the Xperia 1. It's very tall, with a 6.5-inch, 21:9 display. [credit: Jeff Dunn ]

Not to be outdone by Huawei, Nokia, Xiaomi, LG, and just about every other phone maker not named Apple or Samsung, Sony is using this week’s Mobile World Congress to introduce its latest smartphones for 2019.

Sales of the Japanese tech firm’s smartphones have been in free fall for the past few years, but the company is hoping to reverse its fortunes with a new top-end model (the Xperia 1) and two new mid-rangers (the Xperias 10 and 10 Plus). I was able to get some brief hands-on time with the three new devices at an event in Manhattan earlier this month.

Here’s a rundown of what to expect.

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  The LG V50. Sure it looks boring here, but... [credit: LG ]

Mobile World Congress looks to be all about funky form factors this year, and following the Samsung Galaxy Fold and the Huawei Mate X, LG is sort-of tossing its hat into the foldable smartphone ring. LG's newest flagship, the (deep breath) "LG V50 ThinQ 5G," is not a foldable smartphone, but it does have an optional case with a whole second screen on it. With two near-identical phone displays next to each other, you can get a lot of the split screen functionality of a foldable smartphone. There are even some interesting new use-cases LG has dreamed up.

On the surface, the LG V50 is mostly a bog-standard 2019 smartphone. You're getting a 6.4-inch, 3120×1440 notched display, a Snapdragon 855 SoC, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, three rear cameras, two front cameras, and a 4000mAh battery. There's a MicroSD card, an increasingly-rare headphone jack, and a USB-C port. The one thing that makes it stand out from the pack is that this is a 5G phone, with mmWave capability brought to you by the Snapdragon X50 modem. Note that this is not necessarily a good thing, given that this is first-generation 5G hardware that greatly complicates smartphone design.

Form the phone Voltron

You can take your middle-of-the-pack LG phone and strap on the "LG DualScreen" accessory, and suddenly this phone becomes interesting. The DualScreen is basically a folio case, but on the inside, instead of a soft screen cover there is an entire second OLED display. The case adds a 6.2-inch 2160×1080 display to the V50's built-in 6.4-inch, 3120×1440 display, and a stiff hinge in the middle means you can have two screens side-by-side.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Dell gave its XPS laptop an overhaul last year, but 2019 is all about refinement. Announced at CES, this year's XPS 13 laptop looks largely the same as the 2018 model, but it has a few new and improved features that attempt to right some of the wrongs of the previous generation.

The "wrong" that we've harped on the most since the XPS line arrived was its up-nose webcam. That strange webcam placement became a mainstay on the XPS 13 for years—even when other Dell laptops didn't have it. Finally, Dell has done away with that and managed to stick a custom-made, minuscule webcam inside the top, thread-thin bezel of the XPS 13's display.

Those who don't use laptop webcams may roll their eyes at this change, but it's an important one to call out especially when discussing Dell's newest edition of its flagship laptop. With that change and others, Dell is hoping it has created a near-perfect Ultrabook. But how close has the company actually gotten to achieving that goal?