Browsing: Android

The Poco F9 Ultra launched with the same Snapdragon as its predecessor, and Poco said on the record why: memory prices. It is the first time an Android brand has tied the DRAM shortage to a specific product decision, and it will not be the last phone this year built around the same math.

Oukitel brought a rugged phone with a 16,000mAh battery to IFA 2026, roughly triple what an iPhone 17 Pro Max carries, in a body 16.4mm thick. The battery gets the headline, but the thermal camera and night vision sensor are what make it worth understanding.

The September Android Drop lets you tell Gemini where you put your passport and ask for it back later. It is a genuinely useful feature built on a much smaller idea than the headline suggests, and the version requirements mean most people will only get two of the five things Google announced.

Google Messages now lets you give every conversation its own color and wallpaper. Unlike Apple’s version, the theme you pick stays on your phone and never changes what the other person sees. Here is how to set one up and why the option may be missing.

The Enough Phone targets a 5.3-inch screen, a battery you can swap by hand, and a Kickstarter campaign that needs 20,000 backers. It arrives four months before an EU rule that was supposed to make swappable batteries normal, and that rule has a loophole.

Chinese flagships are shipping 7,000mAh and larger silicon carbon batteries while Apple, Samsung, and Google stay near 5,000mAh. The split comes down to one tradeoff: capacity now against cycle life later, and both sides have a real argument.

Google Assistant starts being removed from Android on September 4, and there is no way back once your device switches. Here is which of your devices are affected, the two features Gemini still cannot replace, and the ten minute check worth doing before Friday.

Qualcomm has confirmed two Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chips for September 22, including the first phone CPU to reach 5GHz. The split is not generosity, it is a response to 2nm wafer costs and a memory crisis, and it changes what the word flagship means on an Android spec sheet.

A blank grey icon called Android Pulse appeared in Play Store updates last weekend, and it turned out to have been running on phones since March. Here is what Google’s hidden system service actually does, what the data safety listing declares, and why the reaction was harsher than the app deserved.

Global smartphone shipments are on track to fall close to 14 percent in 2026, the sharpest drop ever recorded. Manufacturers are absorbing the memory crisis by quietly cutting RAM, storage and chipsets instead of raising prices further. Here is what changed and how to spot it.