Month: February 2019

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  The Mate X uses one big, wraparound display. [credit: Huawei ]

Hot on the heels of the announcement of Samsung's first foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Fold, Huawei is taking a swing at the form factor with the Huawei Mate X. Huawei is taking a totally different approach compared to Samsung—its putting the display on the outside of the phone instead of on the inside, and this comes with a number of pros and cons.

But first, the specs. The Mate X has a massive 8-inch 2480×2200 OLED display that wraps around the phone body. When open, that's a bigger screen than the Galaxy Fold, which is only 7.3-inches. When closed, the Mate X's 8-inch display splits into a 6.6-inch, 2480 x 1148 display section on the front, and a 6.38-inch, 2480 x 892 section on the back. You can take your pick of front or back screen—the both dwarf the 4.6-inch, ridiculously-bezeled display on the front of the Galaxy Fold.

The lopsidedness of Huawei's folded displays are due to a vertical camera bar that runs along the back of the phone. This houses three cameras—a 40 MP main camera, a 16 MP wide angle lens, and an 8 MP telephoto—and an LED flash, and a power button. It's also the only section of the phone that is 11mm thick, which gives you both a place to hold the device, and provides room for bigger components like the USB-C port on the bottom and a side-mounted fingerprint scanner. There is still no room for a headphone jack, though.

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Ferrey|Getty Images)

Although we make every effort to cover our own travel costs, in this case NASCAR flew us to Orlando and provided two nights in a hotel.

The Daytona 500 is NASCAR's season-opener, and also the series' biggest race. Held at the track just a little way from the beach in Florida where the series got its start, it's a 200-lap, 500-mile test of endurance for car, driver, and team. (And depending when they started partying, for the fans.) I've been to quite a few endurance races at this point, and although there are some differences between a NASCAR race and your average long-distance sportscar event I figured the basics would still apply. Like driver preparation, for example.

"It's a tough challenge, especially because it's the first race of the year; it's easy not to be in the best shape coming off the holidays. Being a race car driver on an easy day, when it's not too hot, when the tires work, when everything is smooth—it's not over the top challenging. But there are very few easy days," explained Brad Keselowski, who races for Team Penske in the #2 car. "Daytona is a long race, usually in weather that's much warmer than anywhere else so you're not acclimated. And it's a restrictor plate race so the cars are grouped up, you can't just drive off into the distance. And there's a lot of anxiety because it's like the first day of school."

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  The Nokia 9 Pureview. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

HMD's Nokia brand is building another flagship smartphone, and unlike the Nokia 8 Sirocco, this one is actually coming to the US. HMD is announcing the "Nokia 9 Pureview" at Mobile World Congress, and it's got a whopping five cameras on the back.

HMD devices usually live in a price range with very little competition. In the sub-$400 market the company really only has Motorola to contend with, and it can easily win most of those matchups by virtue of regularly shipping security updates and new OS releases. This is a $700 smartphone, though, and in the cut-throat world of flagship devices, HMD has a lot more competition than it is used to. Does the Nokia 9 stack up well against the $550 OnePlus 6T? Can it really hang in the price range of the $750 Galaxy S10e? We aren't so sure.

The first concern is the spec sheet. While just about every phone announced at Mobile World Congress this year will be running the new Snapdragon 855, the Nokia 9 is running the Snapdragon 845, a chip that is now fully one year old. By using the old Snapdragon HMD is missing out on a chip that Qualcomm claims has a 45-percent faster CPU and a 20-percent faster GPU, and should be more battery efficient thanks to the change from a 10nm manufacturing process to a 7nm one. In the "save some money" category, the OnePlus 6T will give you the same SoC for $150 less, in the "spend a bit more" category, the Galaxy S10e has the newer Snapdragon 855 for an extra $50.