Would we switch to the Huawei P40 Pro?

Huawei not only sent over two Huawei P40 Pro’s, one in Black and the other in the new Silver Frost colour, but they also wanted us to test this for an entire week and give you our thoughts on it. 

You’ve probably seen the Unboxing and our First Impressions of the P40 Pro, but now it’s time to dive in a little deeper into what this phone can do. Just a small spoiler, the Huawei P40 Pro has the very best Camera on any Smartphone out right now and getting all of your apps across is surprisingly easily. We were shocked to see that we could pretty much clone an entire Galaxy Fold onto the P40 Pro with ease.

But we’re getting carried away, so here is everything you need to know in terms of the P40 Pro when it comes to the: Design, Display, Camera, Performance, Special Features, Battery Life & Value.

---

Apps

First things first, something that you’re all probably wondering, and something that we were definitely wondering when we got the P40 Pro, was how do we transfer apps? Google Apps & Services are no longer supported so how are we going to use apps on the P40 Pro? Well, to our surprise, it was actually extremely easy.

When you set up your P40 Pro, you will be get asked to download the Phone Clone tool on your other Smartphone. This tool will basically transfer pretty much every single app from your old phone, onto your P40 Pro. We were quite impressed that we had Instagram, Amazon, Philips Hue, Call of Duty mobile and even Apple Music. On top of this, you do have Huawei’s AppGallery which also has most popular apps, such as Tiktok, Snapchat, Amazon, Microsoft Office, Telegram, Fortnite, Asphalt 9 and more already on it. More apps are also being added every single day.

If there is indeed an app that you weren’t able to transfer and that you couldn’t find on Huawei’s AppGallery, you can always download the individual APK’s from official sources or download Third Party app stores and get them from there.

---

Design

In terms of the design, there are three models of the Huawei P40. We have the regular P40, which comes with a 6.1” Display and a Triple Lens Camera Module. We then have the P40 Pro, the one that we have, which comes with a 6.58” Display and a Quad Camera Module Array. Finally, we have the P40 Pro+, which will be launching in June, this has the same 6.58” Display but with a Penta Camera Module Array. Probably the best news here is that, no matter which one you buy, you will still get the same Sensor on the Main Camera. This is, at the moment, the biggest Sensor on any Smartphone on the market.

The P40 Pro looks & feels like a premium, high-end device.

When we had a look at the P40 Pro, we have to say, we really do like this design. It’s not too big, not too small, it’s pretty much the perfect size to be able to use it with one hand, without necessarily sacrificing the Display size. We do have a similar design style to what we’ve seen on other Android phones, with a Dual Front-Facing Camera Cutout, but what’s quite unique about the P40 Pro is that it is one of the few Smartphones to implement a Waterfall design. This means that, unlike some Smartphones that just have curved sides, the top and the bottom are also curved. 

The Display however, doesn’t go until the end of the glass. Instead, it ends way before it. We would’ve loved to see a Waterfall Display and not just Waterfall Glass, but we guess this would’ve caused some serious accidental touch issues, so we’re not surprised that Huawei hasn’t done it.

Holding that Display in place, is a polished metal frame that matches the colour of your phone. On the bottom we have the SIM Card slot, which also holds Huawei’s proprietary NM Card, which can expand the 256GB Internal Storage by up to another 256GB.

On the right-hand side, we have the power button and the volume button, on the left-hand side we have nothing and finally on the top, we have a Microphone Port as well as an IR Blaster. Smartphones used to have this back in the day but pretty much all of them removed it. It allows you to control your TV, your DVD player and pretty much anything that has an IR Receiver. We’re glad to see that Huawei still has one, as it’s such a great feature to have.

Finally, on the back we have the Quad-Camera Module Array which we’ll be covering in the Camera section. This is one of our favourite backs, on a Smartphone, ever. You probably know that we’re a big fan of Frosted Glass backs on Smartphones, the P40 Pro is no exception. While you can indeed still get it in Black if that’s what you like, the Silver Frost back looks absolutely stunning. It is pretty much fingerprint proof and the colour of the back does slightly change depending on the angle at which the light hits it.

Also, it’s probably worth noting that the P40 Pro, even though it has the biggest Sensor on any Smartphone, the Camera bump isn’t as big or as thick as on other Smartphones, so the table wobble is much less than you would expect.

---

Display

Moving on to the Display, the P40 Pro comes with a 2640x1200 Resolution Display, with a PPI of 441. This is an OLED Display, with a DCI-P3 Colour Gamut and HDR10, so if you’re into photo editing and grading, this is a perfect Display for that. Not only that, but Huawei also added a 90Hz Refresh Rate, making this display 50% smoother than any other regular 60Hz panel out there. 

---

Camera

Moving on to the Camera, this is by far the P40 Pro’s key selling feature, and probably the main reason that people would want to go for the P40 Pro. So, here are a few reasons why the Camera on this phone just blows everything else out of the water.

Largest Sensor on any Smartphone

This has the largest Sensor or any Smartphone to date. It has a 1/1.28 inch Sensor with 2.44µm size pixels with a 50MP Resolution. The larger the pixels, the more light they can capture and the better the phone is in Low Light.

RYYB  Sensor

Rather than the sub-pixels on the Sensor being in the standard RGGB (Red-Green-Green-Blue) sub-pixels, the P40 Pro has a RYYB (Red-Yellow-Yellow-Blue) arrangement. This, according to Huawei, lets 40% more light in, which, combined with the massive Sensor size itself, makes the P40 Pro the best Smartphone Camera in Low Light…ever.

Best in Low Light

The P40 Pro makes something that was barely even visible with the naked eye and turns it into daylight. It pretty much works like magic and you don’t even need to have Night Mode enabled because, thanks to that massive Sensor, the P40 Pro is capable of achieving great shots like the ones we have featured in our video, where the competition struggles severely. 

Usually, Smartphones have an ISO of 1600 or 3200 in the most extreme cases, but the P40 Pro has up to 51200 which can be bumped even higher to 409,600.

What was the biggest let down with the S20 Ultra, is the main selling point for the Huawei P40 Pro.

Natural Bokeh

Now some of you might be familiar with how DSLR Cameras can get these very nice Depth of Field shots, where the subject is perfectly in focus and the background is all blurred out. This is caused by both the Lens itself as well as the size of the Sensor. Since the P40 Pro has such a massive Sensor, you can actually get shots with a very impressive Bokeh or Depth of Field, even when you’re not using Portrait Mode at all. This means that the background separation would be perfect, as this is done through hardware, rather than software. 

Leica Lenses 

Now, like we said, aside from the Sensor itself, the Lens also makes a very big difference and the P40 Pro uses Leica Lenses. Leica being one of the world’s most well-known Camera and Lens manufacturers. They make high-end Lenses for DSLR Cameras and they’ve teamed up with Huawei to make the Lenses used on the P40 Pro’s Camera.

Best 50x Zoom

The P40 Pro comes with a 12MP Periscope Camera Module that gives us 5x Optical Zoom and 50X Digital Zoom. We compared this Zoom against another Smartphone that has 100x Space Zoom and it turns out that Huawei’s 50x Module was significantly better than that other 100x Module. This seems to be the sharpest Zoom on any Smartphone that we’ve used. You can even use Night Mode on the Telephoto Module as well. 

Cinematic Ultra-Wide 

Then we have one more Module, which is a 40MP Ultra-Wide Angle Module. Huawei’s calling this a Cine Camera, which was specifically designed for video. We have to say, the video looks stunning on this, Stabilisation is great and Low Light performance, even on the Wide Angle Module, is just outstanding. The P40 Pro is also the best Smartphone that we’ve used for Low Light video. 

100% Pixels for Autofocusing

Finally, the last thing that makes this Camera so unique is that unlike some of the competition, that use Sensors almost as big as the P40 Pro but have some serious Autofocusing issues, the P40 Pro uses 100% of the pixels on the Sensor for Focusing and because of this, Focusing is pretty much instant, we haven’t had a single issue with Focusing on the P40 Pro. 

The P40 Pro really makes a splash when it comes to Slow-Motion.

A few more things that we want to mention when it comes to the Camera, is that we also get a Depth Sensor on the back, for improving Portrait Mode photography and the Front-Facing Camera is really good as well. It’s a 32MP Selfie Camera and the Low Light is outstanding there too. 

Slowest Slow-Motion

Then the P40 Pro, also has the best Slow Motion on any Smartphone on the market right now. Usually Smartphones top out at 240FPS Slow Motion, with some being capable of doing 960FPS, but the P40 Pro can actually do 7680fps Slow Motion whilst also being much clearer than the competition. 

Best Time-Lapse

The P40 Pro can also do 4K Time-Lapses, whereas other Smartphones are limited to 1080p Time-Lapses. This is pretty much the best Camera that we’ve ever used on a Smartphone. Definitely comment down below if you want to see a blind Camera Comparison against some of the other high-end Smartphones, similar to the ones we’ve done in the past! 

---

Performance

Performance on the P40 Pro has been great. It comes with Huawei’s own Kirin 990 Processor, which is their highest-end model, as well as the Mali G76 GPU, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of Storage.

To be honest, that 90Hz Refresh Rate Display makes everything buttery smooth. We haven’t experienced any lag or any slowdowns whatsoever, performance has been perfect. 

---

Special Features

The best of both worlds.

Aside from all the Camera features, there are a few more features that make the P40 Pro quite a unique device.

For example, not only do we have an in-display Fingerprint Reader, but we also have a true Depth Sensing Camera on the front. Similar to FaceID, we have an advanced face unlock system on the front, making the P40 Pro the only 2020 flagship so far to have both an in-display Fingerprint Reader and the true Depth Sensing Camera on the front. 

We also have IP68 Water Resistance, a Haptic Engine for when you’re typing an navigating the phone, full-onscreen Navigational Gestures, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.1, a Gravity Sensor, that IR Blaster than we mentioned before, a Bone Conduction earpiece because we don’t have any earpiece cut-out on the top, as well as 5G and we even get an Always-On Display, which is one of our favourite features ever, on a Smartphone.

---

Battery Life

When it comes to the battery itself, the P40 Pro comes with a 4200 mAh Battery and it also supports 40W Fast Charging right out of the box. As well as this, it supports 27W Wireless Charging and Reverse Wireless Charging, which means that you can not only charge other devices from the back of the P40 Pro, but you can also charge other Smartphones as well. 

---

Value

When it comes to Value, the P40 Pro costs £900 in the UK. This is expensive but still more affordable than pretty much all of the competition. 

So, if you’re looking for the very best Smartphone Camera out there, this is the one. You will have to go through some hoops and do a bit of tweaking to get all of your stuff working, but the good news is that most apps did indeed work right out of the box. This will only get better once more and more apps start coming to Huawei’s AppGallery.

The iPhone SE (2020)

Credit: Apple

The new iPhone SE 2020 has been announced, this is the device that we thought was going to be called the iPhone 9, which, if you ask us, would have been a much better name for it. We get a 4.7” Retina HD Display, up to 256 GB of Internal Storage, an A13 Bionic Chip, a 12MP Wide Camera, Portrait Lighting Effects, 4K Video recording at up to 60 FPS, Touch ID and so much more!

Pre-Orders begin on 17/04/2020 at 1PM GMT and prices begin at $399/£419, full release on 24/04/2020.

Stay tuned for our upcoming iPhone SE content!

The Best Laptop for Students?

HONOR reached out and wanted us to show you their brand new MagicBook Laptop. They claimed that this is the very best Laptop for students and it does have some very unique features which no other Laptop has. We are going to run you through all the specifications, all the features and everything that this Laptop can do, then you can decide if the new HONOR MagicBook is a good option for you!

---

What We Will Cover

As most of you were, or probably still are students, the most important factors when buying a Laptop for University are: 

1. The Portability – You need this to be a lightweight Laptop that you can easily take it to classes. 

2. The Battery Life – You cannot have this last for two hours, you need this to last for pretty much an entire day. 

3. The Display - This has to be pretty good, both in terms of its size and also in terms of its sharpness. The last thing you want is a horrible Display that you need to look at all day. 

4. The Keyboard - You’ll (hopefully) be doing a lot of typing, so the Keyboard is extremely important. 

5. The Performance - This depends on what you are studying. If you’re into Computer Science, Animation or Graphic Design, you need your Laptop to be able to handle all of that.

6. The Price - No student wants to spend a ton on a Laptop, unless your parents buy it for you, then it doesn’t really matter. However, as a student who bought my own gear, from my own hard earned money, I know how important it is to get all of the above for a good price.

---

1) The Portability

Starting off with the Portability, the new HONOR MagicBook 14 is… well…a 14” Laptop, but it’s footprint is just about the same, or even smaller than some 13” Laptops. It weighs in at just 1.38kg and is just 15.9mm thick. It is not the lightest Laptop on the market but it is still one of the thinnest. You’ll see why that is, when we get to the Performance section, we think you’ll be quite impressed. 

One of the more compact Laptops on the market right now.

Just to give you guys an idea on how light this really is, we can lift and hold it with just two fingers and, when this is in a bag, you almost don’t feel it at all. Sometimes we thought that the bag was empty and had to stop and check that is was still there. So, if you’re a student, the HONOR MagicBook 14 is great for Portability.

Also, it’s not just the Portability that’s great about the MagicBook 14, it also looks stunning. It comes in a full Aluminum build, which also has a matt finish, so no need to worry about fingerprints and smudges. On top of this, the MagicBook 14 also has this beautiful diamond-cut Chamfered Edge Frame that shines in blue whenever you shine some light on it. We absolutely love this effect, it almost gives you the impression that it has an LED strip all around the body. 

---

2) Battery Life

When it comes to the Battery Life, you get 10 hours for things such as web-browsing and office work. This is what most students will be doing, so you can pretty much get an all-day battery life in this scenario. But, the MagicBook does indeed come with two very special battery related features that students would absolutely love. 

When it comes to charging, one size fits all

The first one being the fact that it comes with a USB Type C Port for charging. This means that if you have any modern Smartphone, you can actually use your Smartphone Charger to charge your Laptop as well (and vice-versa). On top of this, you can even buy a USB Type C Battery Bank and charge the MagicBook from there, if you’re out in the wilds and you have no power socket anywhere near you.

But what is probably our favourite feature of this laptop is the fact that you get this very powerful 65W Charger with it, which also supports Fast Charging. Normally, Laptops take around three to four hours to fully charge, depending on the model of course, but the MagicBook 14 can charge to close to 50% in just 30 minutes. This means that if you’re running late for class and you just have a few minutes to top off, you can easily get a few more hours of usage out of it. With most other Laptops, this would not be possible at all.

---

3) Display

The MagicBook 14, as the name implies, comes with a 14” Display. This is a 1920x1080 Resolution Display with a 16:9 Aspect Ratio. We do like the fact that it’s 14 inches in size and the Bezels are insanely thin. However, the bottom Bezel looks more like on a traditional Laptop. We would’ve loved to see those thin Bezels on all four sides, but this would’ve resulted in the Keyboard or the Trackpad being sacrificed. A 16:10 Display would have solved this to some extent, as it is taller. 

Regardless, it is a pretty nice Display with about 300-400 Nits of Brightness, which is also laminated with an anti-reflective coating. It’s not a Touch-Screen, in case you’re wondering, but the Display can go full flat so you get 180 degrees of tilt here, perfect for any viewing experience. 

---

4) Keyboard

The Keyboard is where it gets really interesting. We have a Scissor-Type Keyboard mechanism, pretty standard on most Laptops. The keys themselves are quite thin, but they do provide significantly more travel than the Butterfly Keyboard that we’ve had on MacBooks for so many years now. The Keyboard is also backlit so you can easily type at night, which is always a nice feature to have.

A fresh take on a Web-Cam, stashed away at the top of the Keyboard

You might have noticed that there is no visible Camera on this. This is because HONOR actually hid it inside the Keyboard. All you have to do to bring it up, is to press on the Camera key. If you were ever concerned about someone spying on you through the Webcam, this is really the best approach there is. The Camera is always hidden unless you want it visible. 

Also, our next favourite thing about this Keyboard is that you also have a built-in Fingerprint Reader. It’s built into the power button, so you can always use that to unlock your Laptop, so no need to type in your password. 

---

5) Performance

The MagicBook actually comes with an AMD Processor, the Ryzen 5 3500U in the case of our unit and this is a pretty powerful Chip. It’s a 15W Processor with a base clock of 2.1GHz and Turbo up to 3.7GHz, this is also a Quad-Core Processor. 

We also get 16GB of 2400MHz DDR4 Memory as well as an AMD GPU. This is an integrated GPU, the RX Vega 8, but it’s actually quite powerful when it comes to the Performance, for an integrated GPU. You can indeed play some games in low to medium settings, at 1080p Resolution and get a decent FPS. If you’re into photo editing and even some 1080p or light-weight 4K video editing, the MagicBook can even handle that.

The MagicBook 14 also comes with a unique S-Shaped Blade design for the Fan, with 49% more Blades than in competitor Laptops. This gives you a 28% better Fan performance, while Heat Dissipation is also increased by up to 38%, according to HONOR. We also get a very good selection of Ports here. We get one USB Type C, one USB Type A, one HDMI, another USB type A on the other side and a 3.5mm Headphone Jack

‘Magic-Link’ is one of the stand-out features on this Laptop

But probably one of the coolest things that this Laptop can do is something called Magic-Link. If you have an HONOR or Huawei Smartphone, you can just hold it close to the HONOR Magic Link sticker on the MagicBook and it will instantly open up the EMUI Desktop on your Laptop. Long story short, this lets you control your Smartphone using your Laptop, but you can transfer photos and files directly to your MagicBook. It actually works like magic. You just open up your Photo Gallery app and drag them from your Smartphone onto your Laptop and they instantly transfer. This is honestly the best phone-to-laptop sync tool that we’ve ever seen. It’s fast, it’s powerful and it’s extremely easy and intuitive to use. 

---

6) Price

Having said all of this. What is the price of the MagicBook? Well, we’re guessing most of you would expect this to cost around £1200 or around £1000 at least, but that’s not really the case here.

We mentioned Price as one of the most important things for a student that buys a new Laptop and definitely the best news here is that the HONOR MagicBook 14 only costs £550. 

---

Conclusion

In the end, what are our final thoughts on the MagicBook 14 and who should get this? 

First off all, this is a very portable Laptop that not only offers a great all-day Battery Life but it also gives you some insanely fast Charging. If you’re the kind of person that’s always on the go, and you need that Portability and Battery Life, the MagicBook 14 is definitely for you.

Also, if you are a student, this is an amazing choice as it costs pretty much half of what you would expect a good student Laptop to cost. You get a great selection of Ports and a Quad-Core Processor, alongside a very powerful integrated GPU, which can handle everything from photo editing to lightweight video editing & gaming.

The Webcam, which is hidden inside the Keyboard, as well as the Fingerprint Reader, make this a very good option for anyone concerned about their privacy.

Nintendo Switch Pro – The PS5 & Xbox Series X Killer?

INTRO

As most of you probably know, 2020 is the year of..well..self-isolation but also the year of new Games Consoles. We got the last major release back in 2013, with the PS4 and the Xbox One, and now we’re waiting on two big releases in the PS5 and Xbox Series X. Then, we have Nintendo as the third player in this console war.

Some of you might say that Nintendo’s not really a player because, performance wise, the Nintendo Switch is far behind the PS4 and the Xbox One, not even to mention the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X. While that is indeed true, you can not argue with the fact that the Switch has now outsold the Xbox One, making the Switch the second best selling Console out right now, right after the PS4. 

The demand is definitely there and the interest from the hardcore & casual gaming community is also there. The Switch came out in 2017, three years ago, so while it is still technically in the middle of its’ life-cycle, it is significantly underpowered when compared to even the PS4 & Xbox One. We’ve seen a lot of leaks that Nintendo is working on a Nintendo Switch Pro, so here is everything we know about it and also why I think this could just be the surprise contender to the PS5 and the Xbox Series X.

---

The Original Switch

We’ll be honest, when the Nintendo Switch came out, we weren’t fans at all. We did like the idea of having a console that can be used in so many ways, from hand-held to table-top to having it connected to a TV, but we were not a fan of how underpowered it was.

The original Switch was truly unique, but it took some getting used to.

We kept comparing the Graphics on the Switch to the PS4 and the Xbox One in third party games, but there was just no comparison. Whilst other games such as Fortnite and Witcher 3 are playable on the Switch, they look significantly worse than on the PS4 and the Xbox One. But then, in late 2019, Apple launched Apple Arcade. I signed up for the free trial on my iPad and when I was on the road and travelling, I gave it a shot. It was pretty good but it was heavily lacking any big Triple-A titles. Which made me think, what if I actually gave the Switch a try? 

So, I bought my first Switch in late 2019, less than six months ago, and I simply fell in love with it! It felt amazing in the hand, the games were just unbelievable, playing Triple-A games on the go is just something that you cannot do on anything else right now. This is unless you count Game-Streaming but unfortunately, when you’re traveling, the connection is very poor so it’s not really doable.

But what sold me right away were the first party games such as: Link’s Awakening, Pokémon Sword, Super Mario Odyssey, Animal Crossing and others. These are some of the best games that I’ve ever played and the fact that I could play these on the go, as well as on my TV, on the same device was absolutely outstanding. The Switch has actually now become my favourite console ever. Also, we’ve seen a lot of leaks & rumors on Nintendo’s upcoming Switch 2, or Switch Pro, Console.

---

A Mid-Cycle Upgrade

Nintendo has actually released two new Consoles in 2019. One of them was a newer model of the original Switch, with significantly improved battery life. The other was the Nintendo Switch Lite, a brand new Switch, which was specifically designed for hand-held play and does not support TV output. 

A console built purely for hand-held gaming, that supports AAA Titles. The Switch Lite was released in 2019.

It’s pretty safe to assume that the next Switch would have some resemblance to the Switch Lite, in terms of its design. This is how we modelled our very own ZONEofTECH concept of the Nintendo Switch Pro.  We thinned out the Bezels considerably to the point where they’re even thinner than on the Switch Lite. The Switch Lite already had much thinner Bezels, when compared to the original Switch. We modelled ours with a 7.3” Display, up from the current 6.2” panel, but kept the exact same Form Factor with the same thickness, height and width, just with a larger Display. The current Switch has a plastic Display which is very easily scratched. It’s an LCD Display but the Colour Reproduction is quite poor, so we’ve equipped ours with an OLED panel, a glass panel which would be perfectly suitable for this Switch Pro.

The reason why this might be called a Switch Pro, rather than a Switch 2, is because rather than this being the next generation Switch, it will be a spec bump to the current model, similar to what Sony and Microsoft have done with the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X. It will have a higher price point, but it will offer more premium features that the current Switch isn’t able to, such as higher Frame-Rates and especially a higher Resolution for games.

We have seen reports that Nintendo is finally considering releasing a Switch with 4K output support, something that the PS4 Pro introduced back in 2016. This also implies that we would very likely get a bump in handheld Resolution, from 720p to at least 1080p. Even with a more powerful chipset, which we’ll cover in just a second, it would be quite difficult for the Switch to be able to do 4K gaming, considering that it also needs to be a hand-held Console. And while the hand-held output would still just be 1080p, the Switch would require significantly more power when docked, in order to be able to do 4K.

If Nintendo were to add something like a Thunderbolt Port and a dedicated GPU in the dock itself, this would easily solve all of the performance related issues. This way, you can still have a very good hand-held experience in 1080p, but then also get full 4K the moment you dock the console in. At the moment, on the current Switch, aside from a bump in Resolution from 720p to 1080p, there’s isn’t really that much that you’re getting by docking the console. A dedicated GPU in the dock itself would solve this issue.

---

Specifications

Speaking of specs, we have seen reports that Nintendo and Nvidia are working together in order to develop the new CPU & GPU for the next generation Switch. As you probably know, the current Switches both use Nvidia’s Tegra X1 chip, an extremely weak SoC (System on a Chip) that contains both the CPU and the GPU. It was developed in 2015, five years ago, originally for the Nvidia Shield TV Smartbox, which in 2019 got upgraded to the new TegraX1+ Chip.

Will a potential Switch Pro get more current, high-end hardware?

The X1+ is about 25% more powerful than the original X1 from 2015, but even a 25% bump in performance would be extremely disappointing for the next Switch. This is the Processor that both the 2019 Switch and the 2019 Switch Lite should have included but instead, we just got a more power efficient version of the original X1. This makes us think that maybe ,and hopefully, Nintendo and Nvidia are indeed planning a very big performance upgrade for the next Switch, with an SoC designed specifically for the Switch. 

Essentially, when the Switch was launched, Nintendo didn’t know how well it was going to sell, especially after the disaster that was the Wii U. So, instead of creating a Custom Chip, they just repurposed the best Mobile Processor that Nvidia had, which at that time was the two year old Tegra X1. But, considering how well the Switch has done in terms of sales, it is extremely likely that the reports stating that Nintendo and Nvidia are working together on as Custom Chipset are indeed correct. Japanese website ‘Gamepeida’ reports that the RAM would now be doubled to 8GB, compared to the 4GB we have now and the Storage will also be bumped to 128GB, up from the current 32GB. We don’t think the Storage was ever an issue, as you can indeed expand that via a microSD card, but you couldn’t really do anything about the Display or the performance. 

A new report from ‘DigitTimes’ claims that the Switch Pro would enter mass production in Q1 2020, but this is likely not the case anymore, given the recent outbreak throughout the world. Also, Nintendo themselves have indeed confirmed that there will be no new Nintendo Console in 2020. So, this Switch Pro would very likely release in early 2021, rather than 2020. This is mostly because it won’t be able to compete with the PS5 and Xbox Series X, at least when it comes to the performance.

Another report claims that Nvidia is working with Nintendo, on developing a new SoC on their new Volta architecture. But even Volta is quite old as it was released in 2017, it was replaced by Turing which itself will soon be replaced by Ampere. We wouldn’t be surprised if Nvidia ends up using an older architecture again, but given the success of the Switch, it would make more sense to design something that is at least set in the present, when it comes to raw power.  Nintendo also showed us the trailer for ‘Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2’, but they haven’t said anything about a potential release date. I would expect ‘Breath of the Wild 2’ to launch at the same time as this new Switch, this way they can promote the capabilities of the new Console whilst also promoting the game itself.

---

Backwards Compatibility, Remote Play & Design

Speaking of games, Backwards Compatibility has been reported to be happening numerous times and I wouldn’t really expect otherwise.  The PS5 and the Xbox Series X will both support current generation games, while the Xbox will go as far as supporting Xbox 360 and even original Xbox games. Not supporting Nintendo Switch games, especially considering that this will be a Switch Pro, rather than a Switch 2, is looking extremely unlikely.

This wouldn’t be the first time Nintendo & Sony have teamed-up. (Image: Archyde)

Now something interesting that we were not expecting to see, is that Sony was surveying their users on Remote Play support for the Nintendo Switch. I don’t think any reasonable person would say no to this, so it might be the case that by the end of 2020, we could start seeing Remote Play support on the current Switch Consoles. This isn’t really a next-gen Switch feature, but it is something that we did want to mention.

One of our complaints with the original Switch was that it was quite uncomfortable to use in hand-held for long periods of time. This was indeed fixed with the Switch Lite, but it does remain an issue on the regular Switch. You can buy some grip attachments to solve this, but they only end up making the Console thicker and heavier. 

With the Switch Pro, we’ve modelled our concept as a mix between the Switch Lite and the regular Switch. Aside from the Display, we’ve also replaced the Arrow Keys with a proper D-Pad, just like on the Switch Lite. We’ve made the Joysticks a bit bigger and also applied the same colour options as we have on the Switch Lite. This would be a single colour for the entire device, but Joy-cons would still be removable and replaceable, in case you do want to make it look a bit more unique.

---

Conclusion

In the end, this is how this Switch is looking so far, with a brand new CPU & GPU that are both based on a more modern architecture from Nvidia, which is finally capable of doing 4K gaming when docked.

If you think about it, Nvidia actually needs this more than Nintendo does. They’re doing well in the Laptop space but AMD is completely taking the Console space. Both the current generation PS4 and Xbox One, as well as the next generation PS5 and Xbox Series X, are all running on AMD hardware.  Nvidia has to release something ground-breaking for this next generation Switch.

iPad Pro (2020) - The Future of Computing?

Apple has finally updated the iPad Pro, their highest end iPad, which hasn’t seen an update since 2018. So, without any further ado, here are our initial impressions with Apple’s highest end iPad for 2020! 

Apple released the iPad Pro Third Generation back in October 2018 and this was the biggest change the iPad had since the iPad itself launched in 2010. The home button finally went away, we got FaceID and on-screen gestures, so this iPad was essentially the equivalent to the iPhone X. It was that big of a change.

Now, Apple has usually updated their iPad every year, but for whatever reason, we didn’t get a new iPad in 2019. This was quite strange because we got an iPad Pro Fourth Generation mock-up from our friend Sonny Dickson, we even did a full video on that back in September 2019. It featured a larger, Triple Lens Camera Module but no other visual changes apart from that. But, fast-forward six months and we finally got that iPad Pro.

---

Unboxing

When we take a look at the box, we get a very similar style on the front with just the screen of the iPad, like we did with the 2018 model. They did change the wallpaper this time, although we actually prefer the way the previous box looked as it made the iPad’s Bezels look thinner, since the wallpaper was black. They do look quite thick on this one. On the top and bottom, we get an Apple logo which matches the colour of the iPad that’s inside. On the sides we get iPad Pro branding, which also matches the colour of the iPad.

When it comes to stickers, there’s a stark contrast in Apple’s approach.

On the back, we get a listing of everything that’s inside, plus the capacity, which in our case is 128GB. It also makes note of the fact that this is the second generation of the 11” iPad Pro. For whatever reason, Apple isn’t calling this the Fourth Generation iPad Pro, even though they were following this trend with previous iPad Pro releases.

When we open up the box and we get the iPad itself. We then get a booklet, which contains the Apple stickers that don’t seem to match the colour of the iPad. Apple is honestly so inconsistent with these stickers. Not all of their products include them, like the Apple Watch for example, and some do match the colour of your device, like with the MacBook Air and Mac Pro. However, some don’t, such as with the MacBook Pro and even the iPhone.

Aside from this, we get the Warranty & Safety Guide as well as the Quick Start Guide, which includes some tips on how to navigate the iPad (button placement and so on). We get a USB-C to USB-C Cable because the iPad Pro, unlike the iPhones, do have a USB-C Port, just like the MacBooks. We also get a Fast Charger, which is the same 18W USB C Charger that we get with the iPhones. What we really like about this Charger is just how compact it is. The UK plug has these collapsible feet, which makes it perfect for traveling, so good job Apple! That’s pretty much all we get inside the box, quite a straight-forward experience so now, here’s what you need to know about this iPad. 

---

Weight & Camera

In terms of design, it looks pretty much identical to the 2018 model. We have the same Bezel sizes, the same colour options, the same exact thickness, the same everything actually, aside from two things.

The first being the weight. The 2018 11” iPad Pro was 468 Grams, while this new one is 471 Grams. The WiFi & Cellular model is 473 Grams. Definitely not something that you’ll be able to tell but it is there. The second visual difference is the Camera Module. We now get a much larger Camera Module compared to before, which now houses a second Camera Module. These modules are very similar to the Cameras that we get on the iPhone 11. Not the 11 Pro, but the regular iPhone 11. 

Spot the difference?

The Main Module is basically identical, while the second module is an Ultra-Wide Angle Module. However, unlike the iPhone 11 & 11 Pro, both of which have a 12MP 120 degree Field of View Module, the iPad Pro 2020 has a 10MP 125 degree Field of View Module. So, the Resolution is a bit lower but with a higher Field of View. We also get a brighter True Tone flash but that’s pretty much it. The module itself is actually smaller than on the iPhone 11 Pro but it is a bit bigger than the mock-up that we showed to you in September 2019. On that mock-up, we had three Camera modules, wheres here we only (sort of) have two.

There is actually a third module, which is this almost invisible black circle and is what is called a ToF Camera. Apple is calling this a LiDAR Sensor but it’s essentially the exact same thing. This Sensor emits laser beams which get bounced around the environment and then get picked up again by the Sensor. Then, based on the time it takes for the beams to get reflected back and the angle at which they get reflected, the iPad can essentially create a 3D map of the environment. The FaceID Camera on the iPhone X and newer, even the FaceID camera on the 2018 & 2020 iPad Pro, already have this functionality. It’s just that now we have it on the back as well. 

So, you might be wondering why do we have it on the back? Well, it’s not for scanning faces but for scanning and mapping in the environment in 3D. The biggest difference between this and FaceID, is that unlike FaceID, which works at about 30cm-40cm max, the LiDAR Module on the back of the iPad works at up to 5m, which is a huge difference. This is how it can map the environment in 3D so accurately. Apple even went as far as calling this the best device for AR, in the world!

Unfortunately, there aren’t that many AR apps in the first place and even the ones that we do have, do not yet take advantage of this yet. They need to use ARKit 3.5, which just got released, to take full advantage of the new LiDAR sensor. Until then, we still get improved Object Tracking in apps such as Ikea Place, but when it comes to object and people Occlusion, that would require an update. 

The only place where the LiDAR sensor is taken use of accordingly, is in Apple’s own Measure App. Now, when you measure something, not only will it instantly allow you to measure an object without having to calibrate the app first, but the circle that you use to measure will actually follow an object’s shape. So, if you have a table or a wall, it would automatically detect those and sit flat on them, whereas on the iPhone, this circle would actually go through objects, it would not detect them. Definitely stay tuned for our full in-depth review, a few weeks from now, after we get to spend more time with this and hopefully by then, we’ll also get some updates to the current AR apps.

---

Specifications

Aside from the weight and the new Camera, something else that’s different on this new iPad is the Processor and the RAM.

In terms of the RAM, we now get 6GB all across the board. Before, we got 4GB on all models except for the 1TB model, which did indeed come with 6GB of RAM. We’ve never really had any RAM management issues on our 2018 iPad Pro. Interesting enough, the iPhone 11 Pro Max has been a completely different story, even though they both have 4GB of RAM.  6GB of RAM should make this iPad a bit more future proof than the last model. 

A breakdown of the Processors that we’ve had in past releases.

With the CPU, we get the brand new Apple A12Z Processor. Now, this is interesting because this is the first time since 2010, when Apple launched their first A-series Processor (the A4 on the iPhone) that they’ve added a new name into the mix. Previous iPads have had the A8X, the A9X, A10X, and the A12X. The addition of ‘X’ signifies a more powerful version of the regular CPU models that we got inside the iPhones. Long story short, the only difference between the A12X , which is was what we got in 2018 iPad Pro, and the A12Z, is that the ‘Z’ has eight GPU Cores, while the X from the 2018 model has seven GPU Cores.

Fun fact, the A12X was also manufactured with eight Cores but had one of the Cores disabled. This is how CPU manufacturing works. Only about 60% of the CPU’s manufactured are even usable. From this 60% batch, very few have all of the Cores working perfectly. So, the ones that have issues get rebranded into different Processors, with some of the Cores disabled. The same thing applies to GPU’s. If you buy an RTX 2060, that’s actually a 2080 that had a few manufacturing issues and they disabled some of the Cores.

It seems to us that Apple is just using the exact same A12X CPU, but they’re using a higher quality version of it, that has all the Cores working perfectly. Aside from this, we do get improved microphones. Apple’s calling these ‘studio quality’ microphones. We get WiFi 6 but aside from this, this is still pretty much the exact same iPad.

One thing that we do get which is actually a pretty nice thing to have, is higher base Storage. We go from 64GB ,up to 128GB for the same price, which is nice. For most people, 128GB is generally good enough, however this is definitely not the case with 64GB, especially when you consider that Apple’s calling this a “Pro” device. 

---

The Magic Keyboard

New device, same old 1:1 pricing for US & UK consumers.

Probably the biggest upgrade by far, is this new Magic Keyboard. It not only gives you a similar typing experience to the 16” MacBook Pro, but you also get a Trackpad, which is now fully supported in iPadOS.

But, this keyboard costs $300 (£300 in the UK), so it’s crazy expensive. For the price of this Keyboard and an iPad Pro, you actually end up spending more than you would for a MacBook Air. We would say the MacBook Air is just so much more worth it since you get macOS, which is still far superior to iPadOS in terms of what you can do with it.

Also, this keyboard does work on the previous model as well, which is great. If you have an older iPad Pro or a non-Pro iPad, Logitech released some new Keyboards for those iPads, which also have a Trackpad included, so you’re not really missing out on anything here. 

---

Conclusion

We would say that the best thing about this iPad, is that it made the 2018 model cheaper! You can find it extremely cheap online now.

But, there is said to be a second iPad Pro coming out around November or so. This will feature the brand new Apple A14X Processor, which will be based on a 5nm process and it should give us some major performance improvements. We’ve even seen reports that Apple will be including a miniLED display into this iPad, or at least the high-end 12.9” version, which will give us Black Levels similar to an OLED Display. Apple’s Pro Display XDR is using miniLED. We have 576 Dimming Zones, but the iPad Pro is said to have thousands. So we’re really looking forward to that.

Huawei P40 Pro - First Impressions

The Huawei P40 Pro is here and we’ve managed to get some hands-on. In this article, we’ll go through our first impressions and see how it stacks up against some of its’ main competitors in key areas such as Display, Camera, Specifications and Apps. Also, be sure to check out the video we’ve posted on the channel, which also includes our live unboxing of the new Huawei P40 Pro.

---

Display

The Build Quality and feel is as good as you would expect from a high-end, flagship Smartphone.

When it comes to the Design and the overall size, the P40 Pro seems to be very similar to the Galaxy S10+ from last year. We do, however, get a larger Display on the P40 Pro, which is 6.58”, compared to the 6.4” display that the S10+ had. We really do like the way it feels in the hand, it’s got a very nice weight to it. In terms of Design & Build Quality, it feels very premium and we are very impressed.

When it comes to the Display, this is a 2640x1200 Resolution OLED Display, with DCI-P3 Coverage, HDR10+ Support as well as a 90Hz Refresh Rate. We do have a fairly large Front-Facing Camera Cutout, the reason being that we get a large 32MP Sensor, with an f/2.2 Aperture, and a ToF Sensor.

As with the iPhone X onwards and the Google Pixel 4, the P40 Pro also features an advanced face unlock system. On top of this, we also have an in-display Optical Fingerprint Reader, so the same as on the OnePlus 7T Pro. This makes the Huawei P40 Pro the only 2020 flagship right now that has both an in-display Fingerprint Reader as well as an advanced facial recognition system, on the front. But what makes this phone so unique, is the Camera.

---

Camera

One of our main issues with the S20 Ultra is the Camera, but this is where the P40 Pro excels.

The P40 Pro comes with a 50MP 1/1.28” Sensor, which is even larger than the 108MP 1/1.33” Sensor that we have on the S20 Ultra. So, at the moment, this is the largest Sensor on any Smartphone. The larger the Sensor, the better it is in low light and also the more natural Bokeh. The module at the top, is a 40MP Ultra-Wide Angle Module, while the module below it, is an 12MP Telephoto Module, very similar to that Periscope Module that we also got in last year’s P30 Pro. We also have 5x Optical Zoom and 50x Digital Zoom. We’ve done a few tests against the S20 Ultra, which in theory should have a much better Telephoto Module, with up to 100x Digital Zoom. However, it turns out that the P40 Pro was actually much sharper at 50x. 

The P40 Pro also comes with Leica Optics. In case you don’t know, Leica is one of the most famous manufacturers of Lenses in the world. They make some of the best ones on the market, so it’s pretty amazing to see a partnership between such a well known Camera Gear Manufacturer and a Smartphone Manufacturer. 

We don’t have 8K Video on this, but that’s fine because at the moment, 8K recording quality is pretty poor, at least when it comes to Frame-Rate and Dynamic Range. However, we do have 4K at 60FPS as well as autofocus with the Front-Facing Camera. We are extremely excited to be testing out this Camera so, if you guys want to see an in-depth blind Camera comparison, then definitely subscribe and hit the notification bell to be the first to see that video as soon as it comes out.

---

Specifications

At 40W, this makes the P40 Pro the fastest Wireless Charging Smartphone on the market.

In terms of the Specifications, the P40 Pro comes with the Kirin 990 Processor, which is based on a 7nm+ Process. This is Huawei’s most powerful Processor, as well as 8GB of RAM.  We also get 128GB of Storage, as well as Nano Memory Support. This is Huawei’s proprietary microSD card but with this, you can expand the Storage by up to 256GB. Fast charging has also been improved, we now get 40W Fast Wired Charging, as well as 40W Wireless Charging, which makes this the fastest wireless charging on any smartphone out there, at the moment. In fact, there are zero wireless chargers that even have this speed right now.  Reverse wireless charging is also here, which is something that Huawei was the first to introduce to the market, with the Mate 20 Pro.

The P40 Pro also features the most insane level of Slow-Motion ever, for a Smartphone. So, just to give you guys an idea, the iPhone 11 Pro Max can do 240FPS Slow Motion, the S20 Ultra can do 480FPS Slow Motion (960FPS is only available on the S20 & S20+, not the S20 Ultra). The P40 Pro can do 7680FPS, which is just ridiculous, take a look for yourselves!

---

Google Apps

Now, some of you might be wondering how you would get Google apps on this? Is the Google Play store still available? The answer is…kind of. Right out of the box, you do not have any Google apps on this. You can still side-load them if you know what you’re doing, it’s not really that difficult to do really, so you can indeed get them working this way.

Despite recent events, you can still get all of your favourite apps on the Huawei P40 Pro.

But, Huawei has launched their ‘AppGallery’ app, which is their own App Store and it turns out that you can actually find a lot of popular apps on there right now. Microsoft Office, Snapchat, Telegram, TikTok, Asphalt 9 and many more apps that you might be familiar with from the Google Play store are already here, with many more to come. 

Additionally, you can have something called ‘PhoneClone’, which transfers all of your data from your current phone, onto the P40. If you’re wondering about apps, PhoneClone will automatically find the PlayStore apps on the Huawei AppGallery and download them from there and, if it cannot find the apps on the Playstore, it would actually copy the app and transfer it directly to the P40 Pro. This is a pretty smart-way to get your apps transferred and it’s such an easy process. 

What are your comments & thoughts on the P40 Pro?

PS5 vs Xbox Series X – CPU, GPU, Storage, Games & Price!

INTRO

Sony has finally unveiled the full specs of the PS5. So now that we know the full specs of both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X, which one is actually more powerful? Some of you might have heard that the Xbox Series X is more powerful than the PS5, but there are some ways in which the PS5 significantly tops the Xbox. Without any further ado, here is the full comparison of the PS5 and the Xbox Series X, covering the: CPU, GPU, Memory, Storage, Special Features, Exclusive Games and Price! 

---

CPU

Starting off with the CPU, they’re both doing very well here. They both feature a desktop class, AMD Processor that’s based on the AMD Zen 2 architecture. They’re also both 3rd generation AMD Ryzen Processors with 8-Cores, which means that they’re quite similar to the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Processor, which is a very well received CPU. 

It’s nowhere near as powerful as the 3700X, as the clock-speeds are quite a bit lower. We have a 3.5GHz clock speed on the PS5 compared to the 3.8GHz clock speed on the Xbox Series X. From this alone, you would think that the Xbox is quite a bit more powerful in terms of the CPU, which to some extent is true. However, Microsoft has indeed confirmed that if SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading) is enabled, these speeds would drop to 3.6GHz. Sony’s 3.5GHz clock is indeed with Multi-Threading enabled. So, in that case, considering that most applications and games will indeed be taking advantage of Multi-Threading, the difference in CPU power isn’t as high anymore, although the Xbox Series X still has a slight advantage over the PS5.

Now, something that Sony has mentioned is that their system is capable of Turbo Boosting. However, the highest turbo boost clock speed will still be 3.5GHz. This simply means that games will only run at 3.5GHz if they really have to. Otherwise, they will run at a lower clock speed, in order to keep the system cool and also bring the fan noise down. The Xbox Series X will be running at that 3.5GHz clock speed pretty much all the time. So, slightly higher performance on the Xbox, but a lower fan speed on the PS5. 

---

GPU

So, what about the GPU? If we look at the raw GPU power, the PS5 has 10.28 TFLOPS, while the Xbox Series X has 12.16 TFLOPS. Now, that’s a 1.88 difference in raw performance, which is actually pretty massive. The PS4, for example, had 1.84 TFLOPS, while the PS4 Pro had 4.2. If you just look at TFLOPS alone, the difference in performance between the PS5 and the Xbox Series X is almost as big as the difference in performance between the PS4 and the PS4 Pro.

However, when Mark Cerny, the PS5’s Lead System Architect presented the PS5 on stage, he did talk about why the PS5 has a lower number of TFLOPS. First, he mentioned how the new GPU architecture that they’re using (RDNA2) has a TFLOP count which is not equal to GCN TFLOPS. Long story short, even if the PS5 looks to be 2.44 times more powerful (GPU wise) than the PS4 Pro, it is actually way more than that as RDNA2 is a much newer architecture.

The difference between the PS5 and the Xbox Series X is almost exactly the same as the full TFLOP count on the PS4, although this was older architecture.

Now, when you calculate the raw performance or the TFLOPS of a GPU, you need to take a few things into account. The biggest ones being the number of CU’s (Compute Units) and the Frequency at which these are running at. So, if we take a look at these, the PS5 has 36 Compute Units running at 2.23GHz, while the Xbox Series X has 52 Compute Units, running at 1.825GHz. Mark Cerny did say that they made that choice because he prefers to prioritise a higher clock speed, to a higher number of Compute Units and in a way, we do agree. Think of Compute Units as a Core in a Processor. Many applications (especially games) do prefer using a lower number of Cores at a higher clock speed, as opposed to a higher number of cores at a lower clock speed. Of course here we’re talking about the GPU and not the CPU, where things are indeed a bit different. So let’s take a look at the Xbox One X and the PS4 Pro.

As most of you may know, the Xbox Series X is noticeably more powerful than the PS4 Pro is, being able to play most third party games at a native 3840x2160 Resolution, in some cases even at 60FPS. While the PS4 Pro can easily do 2560x1440 but it has some serious issues doing anything higher, natively. Also, the Xbox One X had 6 TFLOPS of GPU Compute Power with 40 Compute Units at 1.172GHz, compared to 4.2TFLOPS with 36 Compute Units at 911MHz for the PS4 Pro. You can see how the higher clock speed and those four extra compute units made such a massive difference on the Xbox One X. 

So, Sony might be right about something here. A higher clock speed for the Compute Units is usually preferred to a higher number of Compute Units, at a lower clock speed. Even though on paper, the difference is TFLOPS between the PS5 and the Xbox Series X looks massive, in reality, this might not be as high. However, I would still put my money on the Xbox Series X being slightly more powerful than the PS5, albeit at a lower performance gap than what it looks like on paper. 

---

Memory

Moving on to the RAM. Well, both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X now have 16GB of GDDR6 Memory, which is not RAM but part of it will be used as RAM for the system, while the rest will be used in games, as Video Memory. They both deal with this approach quite differently.

The PS5 uses 16GB of GDDR6 Memory, on a 256-bit Memory Interface, running at 448GB/s, which is insanely fast. Just to give you guys an idea, the original PS4 had 8GB of GDDR5 Memory on a 256-bit Memory Interface while running at 176GB/s, the PS4 Pro had a 217.6GB/s Bandwidth. Sony hasn’t yet said how much of this 16GB Pool would be available to developers, but it is expected to remain the same as before, with 3.5GB used by the OS and the rest, 12.5GB in this case, available for developers.

On Microsoft’s end, things are quite a bit different. Even though we have the same 16 GB GDDR6 Memory, we have a 320-bit Memory Interface, compared to 256-bit on the PS5, this Memory is split into two chunks. One chunk is 10GB in size, with a Bandwidth of 560GB/s, which is much higher than on the PS5, while the other chunk is 6GB in size, with a Bandwidth of 336GB/s, which is noticeably lower than on the PS5. Microsoft said that they did this because they wanted developers to have access to some really fast GPU memory, the CPU doesn’t need that much fast memory and neither does the OS. The OS will be using 2.5GB of 336GB/s memory, which means that in a game, the GPU will have access to 10GB of 560GB/s Memory and the CPU will get 3.5GB of 336GB/s Memory. 

If you do the average of 560GB/s and 336GB/s, you actually get 448GB, which is the same memory bandwidth that the PS5 has. As the APU, which includes both the CPU and the GPU, are both made by AMD, it makes sense for the memory to be extremely similar. It seems like Microsoft has just split that in a different way, compared to Sony. 

---

Storage

Something that is indeed quite different, is Storage. Both the Xbox Series X and the PS5 have an SSD now, which is light years ahead of the HDD that we had in the current generation. The fastest m.2 Flash Modules that we have right now, are around 3-3.5GB/s in speed. However, the PS5’s custom made Flash Module has a speed of 5.5GB/s. That’s absolutely insane! This is essentially 110 times faster than the PS4 Pro’s traditional HDD. 

The Xbox Series X has a 2.4GB/s module, which while still 50 times faster that the Xbox One’s drive, is considerably slower than the PS5’s drive. On top of this, Sony has said that the PS5’s internal storage is so fast, that it can technically be used as RAM, 5.5GB/s is almost as fast as DDR3 RAM which, for a 1066MHz Memory, is around 8.5GB/s in speed. Microsoft has also addressed this possibility, but realistically Sony has a much bigger advantage here, that is, if developers do make full use of it.

Fun fact, if you take a look at Star Citizen, which is a PC exclusive game, this game makes full use of m.2 Flash Modules. If you have an m.2 Drive, you can get even 30fps higher in the game, compared to using a standard HDD, so this is a good example were a faster Storage can indeed directly impact the FPS in a game.

An old idea for a new generation (Credit: Xbox)

Another area in which the PS5 excels when it comes to Storage, is in terms of storage expansion. The Xbox Series X has a 1TB Internal Drive. The PS5 could have anywhere between 800GB to 1TB, but the usable capacity is likely to be around 825GB, like we’ve seen in Mark Cerny’s presentation.  However, while the Xbox Series X will feature these proprietary 1TB drives that you can just slot in the back and expand the Storage, the PS5 will support any m.2 Module that you can buy off of Amazon (or elsewhere), that has at least 5.5GB/s in speed. They will be releasing a list of all supported models, but that’s great because it means that we’ll get a much higher selection compared to the Xbox and we can even get higher capacity drivers if we want. 

However, while the PS5’s m.2 Expansion Modules will be replacing the Internal Drive, the Xbox module will be adding to that Internal Storage. On top of this, Microsoft has confirmed that external HDD’s are still supported, for the previous generation games. Sony hasn’t talked about supporting external HDD’s just yet, but it is likely that they will be doing something quite similar.

---

Special Features

Let's summarise what we’ve said so far. CPU wise, the Xbox is slightly more powerful. GPU wise, the Xbox is again looking to me more powerful but Storage Wise, the PS5 has more than double the performance. Now we have the Special Features, the things that make each console unique.

Both consoles will indeed be supporting previous generation games, so both will be Backwards Compatible. But, while the PS5 will only be supporting PS4 games and not even all of them at this point, the Xbox Series X will be supporting Xbox One games, Xbox 360 Games and even some original Xbox games. So if you care about playing your entire library of old games, the Xbox is a much better choice. Sony does have Playstation Now, which does support some PS3 games, but the catalogue just doesn’t compare to what Microsoft is offering. 

Both consoles will also support Ray Tracing, which will make Reflections, Shadows and Lightning look significantly better than what we have now.  

This time, 3D Audio is built into the hardware to make it the new standard.

An area in which Sony should excel, is in terms of Audio. Mark Cerny  did talk a lot about their new Tempest Engine, and how they will be achieving 3D Audio thanks to a dedicated hardware engine. Remember the dedicated Playstation Platinum headphones do support 3D audio on the PS4, however with this new hardware based engine, every pair of headphones will support 3D Audio on the PS5. Sony is even working on bringing this to TV Speakers and Soundbars as well.

While the Controller on the Xbox Series X looks mostly the same as on the Xbox One X, with the exception of a share button, the PS5 controller is said to be adding a full display as well as Haptic Feedback, which will allow you to feel when you’re driving on asphalt or grass or dirt. Apparently, this is one of the best features of the PS5, according to people that have actually tried it. But, Microsoft has indeed introduced a Dynamic Latency input. By significantly reducing the input lag from the Controller, this could make the Xbox the better choice for competitive gaming.

Speaking of this, both consoles will be supporting 120z output, so games will be able to run in up to 120fps, as well as 8K Resolution, but this will be a Dynamic Resolution while 4K would be Native this time. 

Both consoles will also be supporting different methods of Compression for games, so games will actually take up less space than they do now. On top of this, Sony has confirmed that you will be able to uninstall different parts of a game, such as the campaign after you’ve finished it, and then install the multiplayer right after. 

---

Exclusive Games 

Speaking of games, there is a very big difference between the two, in terms of exclusives. This is because Microsoft has confirmed that there will be no exclusive games on the Xbox Series X for the first two years, as all Xbox Series X games will be required to also work on the Xbox One series of consoles. Unfortunately, this does mean that developers will be severely held back in terms of what they can achieve, at least for the first 2 years. If you’re not sure why we’re saying this, we made a full video in which we explained why this is a real issue, be sure to check that out.

The PS5 on the other hand, while it will indeed have some PS4 games, like ‘The Last of Us 2’, that will also work on the PS5, it will indeed have exclusive PS5 games that will only work on the PS5 and not the PS4. Because of this, we might see true next-gen games on the PS5 first.

Microsoft did show us a gameplay demo of Gears 5 which compared to the Xbox One X, looked barely any different on the Series X. However, they did show us Hellblade 2, which was absolutely mind-blowing in terms of Graphics, this did indeed look like a truly next generation game. This is said to be coming only to the Series X and PC but we don’t know when this will be exactly.

So there is a chance that this will be the first game that was developed with just the Series X in mind and not Xbox One, the main reason why it can look so good. This is what you can expect from games that have indeed been developed for the next-gen hardware, compared to Gears 5 for example, which looks the same as on the current generation, just with better texture detail and longer rendering distances. 

---

Price 

Credit: PSErebus

And finally, we have the price. Neither Sony or Microsoft have revealed the prices yet.  However, we have had some leaks that put the PS5 at around $500 (£450 in the UK), making the PS5 $100 more than the PS4 Pro. 

Microsoft on the other hand, is said to have two models of the Xbox, a low end model and the high end model that we’ve all seen. The low end model is said to be less expensive than the PS5, while the high end model is said to be more expensive. I would expect the high end to cost around $580-$600, while the low end should be around $300-$400. 

Now, some of you might think that paying this much for a console is just ridiculous, but you would be surprised. A Console would last you for six to seven years. A Smartphone, which now usually costs close to $1000 (or more), is something that most people replace every two years. So, in six years time, you would’ve spent $3000 on smartphones, compared to $600 on a new console. This is a pretty massive difference.

---

Conclusion

So, in the end, which one is the better console? Well, the Xbox Series X seems to win in terms of CPU and GPU performance. The PS5 is more balanced when it comes to System Memory and it is significantly faster when it comes to the Storage, plus it also supports third-party SSD Modules. The PS5 supports 3D Audio and Haptic Feedback on the Controller, while the Xbox Series X supports a lower latency and significantly more previous gen games, while also offering two models of the console. When it comes to exclusives, Sony seems to have the upper hand, at least for the first few years.

PS5 (2020) – 25 Things You Didn’t Know!

INTRO 

The Playstation 5 has finally been revealed by Sony! Well, some of it, anyway. Mark Cerny, the lead system architect for both the PS4 and the PS5, has gone on stage for almost an entire hour and has talked very in-depth, just the way we like it, about all the main specification of the PS5. So, without any further ado, here are 25 interesting facts that you might not have known about the PS5!

---

1) World’s Fastest SSD

At Number One, the PS4 came with a traditional HDD. The PS5 now comes with an SSD. But this is not your usual SSD. This is actually a custom SSD module made by Sony, that is ridiculously fast. It turns out that this SSD module that Sony custom made for the PS5 is actually the fastest SSD module in the world right now!

---

2) 110 Times Faster

Ok, but how fast is this internal storage of the PS5? The PS4 had a traditional HDD, that had around 50MB/s transfer speeds. The PS5 now uses this brand new Custom SSD, which as transfer speeds of 5.5GB/s (or 5500MB/s), which makes it 110 times faster! 

A top of the line MacBook Pro, iMac Pro or Mac Pro, which are known to have the fastest SSD modules on the planet right now, have around 3.5GB/s transfer speeds. The PS5 has 5.5 GB/s, a massive improvement over even the fastest SSD modules out right now. But, how is this even possible? Well, the PS5 is now taking full use of the brand new PCIe 4 standard, this is how it can achieve these incredible speeds.

---

3) Mark Cerny

The guy that was on the stage and talked about the specs of the PS5 and how the entire system works, is none other than Mark Cerny himself. Mark Cerny was the lead system architect for the PS4. He was the main reason as to why the PS4 was so successful when compared to the PS3. The PS3 had this very complex architecture with the Cell Processor, that developers found extremely difficult to develop games for. 

The PS4 on the other hand, not only had significantly more power than even its competitor, the Xbox One, but it had a more traditional PC like architecture and it was so much easier for developers to take full advantage of it. All of this was thanks to Mark Cerny.

He was not only responsible for the PS4’s success, he was also heavily involved in the development of some very well known 1st party PS4 titles, such as Ratchet and Clank, Crash Bandicoot, Uncharted Drake’s Fortune, God of War 3, Killzone 3, Knack, The Last Guardian, Knack 2, Spider-Man, Death Stranding and so many more.  Not only that, but as an American, he’s also fluent in Japanese and moved to Japan in the 80’s and 90’s.  

He’s given tours of their game development studios to Steven Spielberg and Michael Jackson and he’s well known for developing the “Cerny Method’, this is where developers try to complete just a small portion of the game in pre-production fully and from there they can decide if the whole game is worth taking any further. Now, Mark Cerny has also been directly involved with the PS5’s development by being the lead system architect.

---

4) Massive Freedom for Developers

Since this new SSD is so insanely fast, it brings some massive freedom for developers. For example, because of how slow the HDD was, in some cases developers had to implement a lift, or a very long staircase, or a subway system or something that would allow the game to load a new part of the world or scene in the background. Masking loading times with a subway ride would no longer be required so developers can now design their games much more freely.

---

5) SSD as RAM 

We knew it was going to be fast, but this was totally unprecedented.

Because of that insane 5.5GB/s speed, the PS5 can actually use the SSD as RAM (to some extent) and offload some of the assets onto it, keeping the RAM free for the most important assets.  But, how much faster is the actual RAM?

Well, DDR1 memory at 266MHz is around 2.1GBs. DDR2 Memory at 533MHz is 4.2GB/s. DDR3 memory at 1066MHz is 8.5GB/s and DDR4 memory at 2133MHz is 17GB/s. So this SSD, while still nowhere near the speed of RAM, is still close in performance to DDR3 memory, which is still very impressive. 

---

6) Kraken Compressions

Mark Cerny did mention that they’re using something called Kraken Compression to reduce the size of the games by 10%. Not only that, but he also mentioned, last year, that the PS5 will allow you to install or uninstall specific portions of the game. For example, in a game like Modern Warfare, you will be able to just install the campaign and then uninstall it once you’ve finished playing it, then you can install the Multiplayer and so on. This will save a ton of space by letting the user install just what he or she wants, in a game. 

---

7) SSD Size 

We know that this SSD is fast but how big is it? Well, Mark Cerny hasn’t really said that but, in a slide from yesterday’s livestream, he did mention 825GB as an example for the size. This points to a 1TB SSD, but the usable capacity for developers would indeed be smaller, at around 825GB, due to formatting and the space that the OS will require. 

---

8) SSD Expansion

The good news is that you will actually be able to expand  this 1TB of internal storage in a pretty genius way. While Microsoft will be selling their own 1TB Proprietary SSD modules for the Xbox Series X, Sony will actually allow you to install any m.2 Drive that you can buy off of Amazon. However, they will need to be at least as fast as the internal storage, and they will need to be PCIe 4 modules. At the moment, there are a few of these drives but the speed varies. Mark Cerny did mention that we should wait until manufacturers start producing these drives, but once they do, you would be able to buy any 3rd party drive as long as it matches the 5.5GB/s speed of the PS5 SSD.

---

9) Weaker than Xbox Series X?

Speaking of the Xbox Series X, now that we know the GPU power of the PS5 (10.28 TFLOPS), it seems like it is noticeably weaker than the Xbox Series X (12 TFLOPS). However, that might not necessarily be the case, or at least not to the extent that it seems. 

---

10) CU & Clock-Speeds 

The PS5 has 36 CU’s (compute units) at 2.23GHz. The Xbox Series X has 52CU at 1.82 GHz. Mark Cerny has said that he always prefers a higher clock speed, reason why they decided to go for a lower number of CU, but at the much higher clock speed. We do believe that he does have a very valid point here. 

Think of CU as the cores of a CPU, as an analogy. While some applications, like 3D rendering for example, do prefer a high number of cores at a lower clock speed, games in general prefer a lower number of cores but at a much higher clock speed. Usually games don’t need more than 4 cores. Now this is a GPU not a CPU, so things are quite a bit different but, depending on how the games are optimised, a higher clock speed might be preferred in most cases, to a higher number of compute units. So, while the Xbox Series X does look much more powerful, the gap might be much smaller than it looks. 

---

11) Xbox Series X SSD

Will less, turn out to be more?

Also, the SSD speed for the Xbox Series X is 2.4GB/s which while still fast, the PS5 has more than twice the speed in their SSD, which could not only mean that games will load noticeably faster on the PS5 but like we mentioned before, developers can also use the SSD on the PS5 as RAM, to some extent. This is quite a bit more difficult to do on the Xbox. 

---

12) Faster CPU 

CPU wise, we finally know the frequency. We now have an AMD CPU, a Ryzen 3rd gen, based on AMD’s Zen 2 x86-64 architecture. Also, we have 8 cores at 3.5GHz. While this is a pretty big improvement over the PS4’s 1.6GHz 8-core AMD Jaguar processor, the Xbox Series X does indeed have a clear advantage in the CPU department, thanks to a 3.8GHz processor, compared to 3.5GHz on the PS5. 

---

13) RDNA2 

But, the PS5 does indeed come with AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture (same as the Xbox), which isn’t even out yet for PC. This is AMD’s most advanced GPU architecture, which should hit stores by the end of this year. 

---

14) Legacy Modes 

Something pretty awesome in terms of the PS5, are the Legacy Modes. Essentially, the PS5’s GPU can turn off some of the Compute Units and the Clock Speeds, in order to make it essentially identical to a PS4 & PS4 Pro. This means that many PS4 games will be natively supported at launch.

---

15) Backwards Compatibility 

Speaking of this, Mark Cerny said that they tested the top 100 PS4 games and most of them were playable on the PS5, at launch. Without any updates at all required by the developers. That is great, however it does seem like not all the games will work, but a good majority of them should. Of course, if developers do release updates to their games, PS4 games will run at an even higher Resolution and Frame-Rate on the PS5 hardware. 

---

16) Ray Tracing

Just one example of what RTX will bring to Next-Gen Consoles.

Probably one of the biggest new features of the PS5 will be Ray-Tracing. Long story short, this will allow for some significantly improved Lightning, Shadows, Reflections and even Audio will be ray-traced. All of this would make the Graphics and the sound look way more realistic than anything we’ve seen up until this point. 

---

17) Video Memory 

Video Memory is also a very important aspect of the next generation of consoles. Mark Cerny has now confirmed that the PS5 will come with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, up from the 8GB of GDDR5 memory that we had on the PS4. Some of this is used for the OS as RAM, some for games and we’ll go through this and how it comes with the Xbox Series X, in a future video. Lots of interesting things to cover there so do make sure that you’re subscribed. 

---

18) Memory Bandwidth 

Aside from the amount of Video Memory itself, the Memory Bandwidth is also extremely important. We now have 448GB/s of bandwidth, up from 176GB/s, which is a gigantic upgrade. 

---

19) Advanced API’s and Tools

Sony will be giving developers a few API’s and tools that will make a big impact on their games. We have a new Geometry Engine, we have Primitive Shaders, which are essentially a heavily improved version of the Shaders that we have now. Long story short, a higher resolution on 3D textures (rocks and bumps in roads etc). These will look much more realistic on the PS5. Primitive Shaders aren’t something that developers need to use out of the gate, but if they choose to, they can take full advantage of them and heavily improve the realism in games. 

---

20) Cooling System 

Now, one of the mean new features of the PS5, will be its cooling system. We’ve all seen those insane looking Dev-Kits, we were actually the first to reveal the 1st image of an actual Dev-Kit that got sent to us. 

---

21) Design

Mark Cerny did say that they have made a very special cooling system, and thanks to the many reports that we’ve seen that claimed that the cooling system is an extremely expensive component for Sony, it is quite likely we would see a design similar to the DevKit or at least the 2nd leak that we got. This could quite possibly be something that implements a V-shaped cooling system and still has a modern design.

---

22) Tempest Engine 

We got a taste of 3D Audio with the PS4, but Sony are really pushing the boat out for the PS5

Mark Cerny did indeed talk a lot about their new Tempest Engine. Essentially, what this is, is a single Compute Unit dedicated for the new Audio Engine. We would be getting 3D Audio at the hardware level. This means, that no matter what headphones you have, you would be getting 3D audio, just like you used to on the PS4 with Sony’s 1st party 3D headphones. Not only that, but Sony is currently working on optimising the Tempest Engine for speakers as well as sound-bars, in order to be able to provide 3D audio, even if you’re not wearing headphones. This is unfortunately much more difficult to do, but to some extent at least, it is doable. 

---

23) Release Date 

If you’re wondering when the PS5 is getting released, this will indeed be by the end of the year. We have had many leaks saying that the actual release date would be in mid-November. 

---

24) Price

Price-wise Sony hasn’t said anything about the PS5, but this is expected to cost $500 in the US.

---

25) Selling at a Loss 

However, because of the sheer amount of high end components that Sony is packing into the PS5, we’ve seen reports that they are really struggling with the price. In fact, Sony might even have to sell the PS5 at a loss at first, in order to sell it at that $500 price point that many consumers would buy. They will be making their revenue back from the actual sales of games but, when it comes to the actual hardware, they might be at a loss.

iPad Pro (2020) & MacBook Air (2020) – 25 Things You NEED to KNOW!

Apple has unveiled two new products. A brand new iPad Pro and a new MacBook Air. It would technically be three if you included the storage bump on the Mac Mini, but we’re not counting that. In this article we want to cover some interesting facts that you should know about both of these new Apple releases.

---

1) We Had It!

We actually made this video back in September 2019, showing you a mockup of the 2020 iPad Pro. We showed you the Triple Lens Camera Module on the back. It was smaller than what it ended up being on the 2020 Model, but the main idea was indeed there. That iPad was supposed to be released in October or November 2019 but for reasons that we’re not aware of, it did end up getting delayed. But we do have it now, so here’s a few more interesting facts! 

---

2) 16” MacBook Pro Keyboard 

The Smart Keyboard on the previous model left a lot to be desired

The biggest update that we got, by far, is this brand new Magic Keyboard. From the looks of it, this now replaces the existing Smart Keyboard for the iPad Pro and is pretty much what will bring the iPad Pro closer to an actual laptop. Also, it has actual keys. These are 16” MacBook Pro style keys, with a good key travel, unlike the current Smart Keyboard which have those mushy micro-fibre textured keys. So typing on this should be a significantly better experience. We’re really looking forward to that! 

---

3) Trackpad Support

This new Magic Keyboard also now has a trackpad which fully works in iPadOS! It supports gestures, just like in macOS, but more importantly, it is also a dynamic cursor. So, unlike on Mac or Windows where you have this arrow all the time, on iPadOS, the cursor will automatically adapt to what’s being displayed on the screen. So, if you have menu buttons, the cursor will turn into a selection box for those buttons. Pretty cool!

---

4) Floating iPad

We think that the coolest thing here is that the iPad attaches magnetically to this top portion of the keyboard. So it essentially floats.

---

5) Adjustable Angle

Something that we didn’t have with the previous Smart Keyboards were adjustable angles. The 1st gen had none, the 2nd gen had two but now with the new Magic Keyboard, it seems like we can adjust the iPad at almost any angle up to 130 degrees, which makes it way more similar to an actual MacBook.

---

6) Backlit Keys

Apple has released a TV ad for the iPad and the keyboard and it seems that the keyboard is even backlit. Again, just like on the Macs, you can see the keys at night!

---

7) USB-C 

Finally, the last thing that I want to mention regarding this keyboard, is that it also has a USB C Port for charging. Since this is on the side, it makes charging the iPad Pro much easier than attaching a cable to the floating iPad’s body. This USB C Port connects to the iPad, via the Smart Connector, which means that you still have the second USB C port on the actual iPad, free to use. Just as a bonus one, the keyboard case even has an horizontal Apple logo on it, that once again, makes it even more similar to the Macs. 

---

8) LiDAR

Now, aside from the Magic Keyboard, which will be sold separately and will only be available starting May. The second biggest upgrade that we got is the new LiDAR scanner. Long story short, this is indeed that 3D ToF camera that we’ve seen reported before. This heavily improves the AR experience.

Apple claims that AR objects will now appear instantly and that realistic object occlusion, where AR objects can pass in front of, or behind real objects is now further improved and that motion capture and people occlusion is now more accurate than ever.  We’ve made a recent video on the upcoming Apple Glasses so definitely do give that a watch, because this 3D Mapping technology will be used in the 2020 iPhones as well as Apple’s upcoming AR Glasses. 

---

9) Different Cameras

You’ve probably noticed that on the back of this new iPad, we now have a triple lens camera module (Right). So one of those lenses is that LiDAR sensor that I mentioned. The second one is a 12MP f/1.8 module, which still has no Optical Image Stabilisation, while the third module is now an Ultra-Wide Module. However, unlike the Ultra-Wide Module on the iPhone 11 and the 11 Pro’s, this one is only a 10MP module, compared to 12MP and it has a 125 degree Field of View compared to 120, so it’s actually wider.

Interesting enough, Apple does claim that it does have 2x Optical Zoom and 5x Digital Zoom, however this would actually just be all digital, as there is no Telephoto Module.

---

10) A12Z

Something that I was very surprised to see is that instead of this iPad featuring Apple’s A13X processor, like it should’ve, it features a new A12Z chip. The A12X was introduced back in late 2018, a year and a half ago. So, from the looks of it, it seems that Apple didn’t get the chance to get the Apple A13X ready in time, for whatever reason, and decided to stick with pretty much the same chip as in 2018, just with some very small performance improvements. One of this improvements being that we now get 8 GPU cores, up from 7 that we had with the A12X. That chip however (the A12X), was still way more than most people needed, and it is still Apple’s most powerful mobile chip. So, no need to be worried that this will be slow.

---

11) RAM

Speaking of specs, we now have 6GB of RAM, up from the 4GB that we got with the previous model. With the 2018 iPad Pro, if you bought the highest capacity 1TB model, you would actually get 6GB of RAM, but the rest of the models only had 4GB. Now it’s 6GB all across the board. 

---

12) U1

On top of this, we also get the new U1 Chip, the Ultra-Wide Band Position Chip, that the new iPhones also got. This will be very useful for those new Apple tile-like trackers, which should launch at some point this year as well. Essentially, this Chip allows the iPad to very accurately locate other devices that also have that U1 hip. The tile-like trackers are also said to come with the U1. 

---

13) Studio Microphones

Apple has also improved the microphones in the new iPad. We now have five studio quality microphones, which should sound close to what we get with the new 16” MacBook Pro, when it comes to microphone quality. 

---

14) Expensive Keyboard

Now, if you want to buy that really cool keyboard that I was talking about before, it turns out that it will also be quite expensive. It will cost you $300 for the 11” iPad Pro or $350 for the 12.9” iPad Pro. Unfortunately, Apple is again applying a 1:1 conversion to the UK, so here it’s still £300 or £350. Apple is out ripping people off outside of the US again.

---

15) WiFi 6 

But hey, at least we do get WiFi 6, the next generation of WiFi standard. This is something that we don’t even get with the 16” MacBook Pro. The iPhone 11’s do at least have it. 

---

16) Wait until November!

Source: MacRumours

If you need a new iPad Pro but you’re not fully sure about this one, I would suggest waiting until November because that’s when we would be getting…another iPad Pro! We’ve had many reports that Apple will be launching two iPad Pro’s this year, one in March and one in November.

The November one would actually be the bigger upgrade, as that will be adding 5G, the new Apple A14X processor with some very big performance gains as well as (possibly) that brand new miniLED display that Ming-Chi Kuo talked about. This would be a massive upgrade in terms of the display quality, thanks to local dimming, it will be similar to OLED when it comes to black levels. Not as good but much better than what we have now.

---

17) MacBook Air Keyboard

Aside from this iPad Pro, we also got a new MacBook Air which is actually a pretty nice upgrade over the previous 2018 model. The biggest upgrade being the keyboard, which is now the same scissor switch keyboard mechanism that we got with the 16” MacBook Pro, which had the same keyboard mechanism as the old pre 2016 MacBook Pro’s. 

---

18) Quad Core 

The second biggest upgrade is the performance. We now get Intel’s 10th Generation Processors, up from the 8th Gen and the biggest news here is that you can configure the Air with up to an i7 Quad-Core Processor. But, don’t get fooled! These are Intel’s Y series Processors, their most power efficient chips. So even though this is a 1.2GHz quad core CPU that can turbo boost to 3.8GHz, it still doesn’t compare to the U Series that we get in the MacBook Pro 13” or anything else. It’s quite a bit less powerful.  But at least we do get two extra cores, for double the performance compared to the previous model. 

---

19) Gen11 Graphics

The new MacBook Air also features Intel’s brand new Gen11 Graphics. Not only that, but we also get Intel Iris Plus Graphics as standard, up from the Intel UHD 617, which means that we get 80% faster graphical performance, a pretty massive jump in the GPU too.

---

20) Much faster RAM

RAM speed is also improved. We still get up to 16GB of RAM but, thanks to the 10th generation Intel processor, we now get LPDDR4X memory, up from LPDDR3. This means that we also get significantly faster speeds of 3733MHz, up from 2133MHz. This is a gigantic upgrade. 

---

21) 6K Support

If you randomly have Apple’s Pro Display XDR lying around, well the MacBook Air now supports it in Full Resolution, thanks to the new Thunderbolt Controller and the more powerful GPU. Ironically, if you have an iMac Pro 2017, that one does not support Apple’s 6K display.

---

22) Improved Speakers

The new MacBook Air also comes with improved speakers. Not only do they have Wider Stereo sound now, but they also support Dolby Atmos, so they should sound much closer to what we get in the 13” MacBook Pro.

---

23) Microphones

While we don’t get studio quality microphones, we do get a 3-microphone array now, with Directional Beamforming. 

---

24) No WiFi 6

Something that we don’t get unfortunately, is WiFi 6. We still have the old WiFi 5 standard, which is very odd because Intel’s 10th generation processors actually do support WiFI 6 natively. This means that Apple has intentionally told Intel to leave it out of their custom designed chips, those chips are specifically made for just Apple at this point as Apple likely wanted to promote WiFi 6 as just a feature that’s coming in the new MacBook Pro’s. 

---

25) Price Drop! 

A welcome bump in storage, an even more welcome drop in price.

However, something that I was very happy to see, what that in-spite of all of the upgrades that we got, Apple actually dropped the price for this MacBook Air. Previously, it used to start at $1100, but now it dropped to $1000. Not only that, but the baseline storage is now 256GB, up from 128GB, so you’re also getting double the storage for a lower price. 

---

26) Display vs Pro

Unfortunately, even though the MacBook Air seems like the perfect laptop, for me at least, it is not.  The main reason being the display. While this is indeed a Retina display, it is only a 300-400 nit display, compared to the 500 nit display of a MacBook Pro. It also lacks a DCI-P3 color gamut, which means that if you plan on doing any video or photo work, the MacBook Pro is still a much better choice!

The Portless iPhone!

In case you’re a bit confused as to why this article is titled The iPhone with no ports, well, that’s because Apple’s working on one and here’s everything that we know.

---

This article is pretty interesting because we’ll be covering the future of the iPhone and that future is indeed an iPhone that has no ports.  But why, how and when is this going to happen? Let’s first start with taking a look at Apple’s history when it comes to connectors. Back in 2003 when the Third Generation iPod was introduced, it also featured something quite innovative, which was Apple’s 30-pin dock connector. 

You might remember this from the old iPhones, but essentially this connector was way ahead of its time. It was a mechanical connector that locked into place and it was impossible to remove unless you were holding the two buttons on the side, so it was very secure. But what made this very unique was that it was a connector that combined multiple standards from data transfer, to audio, input controls for things such as changing the volume or the track and it also supported video output. 

A connector way ahead of its time.

This was extremely innovative for a connector that was released in 2003, albeit video support was only added in 2005 with the introduction of the iPod Video. Apple kept on using this connector on the iPhone, the iPad and all the iPods, up until 2012. Also, third-party manufactures were using the 30-pin connector heavily in accessories, such as like speakers, chargers and cars were even using it!

Then in 2012, like we said, Apple moved away from the 30-pin connector and launched something far superior, this was the Lightning connector. The Lightning connector was not only significantly smaller, but it was also reversible. It was the world’s first high end connector with the exact same pins on both the front and the back. Not only that, but it also improved the transfer speeds, while bumping the video output resolution to 1080p. 

However, many people were angry that Apple switched to Lightning, as their old accessories that they have acquired over the years, no longer worked. Apple did sell a 30 pin to lightning adapter, but for some reason people were still upset, even though Lightning was vastly superior to the old 30-pin dock. Soon after, accessory makers have started making accessories with the lightning port in mind. So we started seeing speakers, car mounts, docks and loads of others. 

However, 2012 was also when Bluetooth started taking off, meaning that most speakers also supported a Bluetooth connection and that you no longer had to physically connect your iPhone to the speakers in order for them to work. The same thing applied to cars, which started adding Bluetooth as well. Because of this, Lightning ended up being less widely used by accessory makers, compared to the 30-pin connector, when it came to audio accessories and docks. 

When Apple re-launched the 12” MacBook in 2015, something quite interesting happened. They removed all the ports and added a USB Type C port, the next generation USB port that, same as with Lightning, was fully reversible. Apple was actually one of the first technology manufactures to adopt USB type C.  This was the successor to the world famous USB type A ports that we’re all familiar with, but it was also the successor to microUSB, which is what loads of Smartphones used. 

USB-C, clearly a lot to handle for some.

USB C was also a much more beefed up version of Lightning, adding up to 100W of charging, USB 3.1 transfer speeds and 4K video output support all in a single small connector that was fully reversible. Shortly after, Apple started implementing USB C heavily. In 2016, when they launched the 4th generation MacBook Pro, they removed all the ports, with the exception of the Headphone Jack and replaced them with 4 USB type C ports. These ports were even more special that what the 12” MacBook from a year before had, this was because they also featured Thunderbolt 3. The transfer speeds were now 40Gb/s, up from the 10Gb/s that we had with USB C. 

So, in 2017 when Apple was readying up to launch the innovative iPhone X, everyone was expecting Apple to now switch from lightning to USB C, especially that around that time, we also started seeing smartphones implementing USB C. The whole idea was perfect. Having one connector, one single charger that you would use with any device (laptop, camera, smartphone). But, when the iPhone X launched, to the surprise of many people*, it still had Apple’s lightning port. 

Luckily, Apple did indeed add wireless charging, which Android phones have had for many years now but Apple finally did add it with the iPhone X and 8. These were both announced at the same event but USB C was nowhere to be found. In 2018, Apple launched the iPhone X equivalent to the iPad. The 3rd generation iPad Pro, which, just like the iPhone X, had no home button anymore. It had a full screen display with a full gesture based navigation system and FaceID.  With this massive change, Apple also updated the lightning port to USB C. Now, all the modern Macs including the 2018 MacBook Air, the new MacBook Pro’s, the new Mac Mini and every modern Mac had a USB C port as well as the newest iPad.

However, the 2018 iPhones (the iPhone XS), still came with a lightning port. USB type C was no where to be seen on iPhones. Also, here’s the thing, we’ve seen many reports throughout the years that Apple will finally be switching to USB type C, but that never happened. After Apple updated the iPad Pro with USB C in 2018, everyone was pretty much sure that Apple would have to switch to USB C in 2019. But again, after countless reports and even leaks on this, Apple still hasn’t done so. 

So, you might be wondering why? Why is Apple so stubborn when it comes to switching to USB C on the iPhone, whereas on their other devices, they were one of the first tech companies to switch to USB C? It doesn’t make any sense. The reason for that is simple. Revenue.

Unlike USB C, which is an open standard, lightning was fully developed by Apple. Which means that whenever a 3rd party manufacturer wants to make a lightning accessory for the iPhone, or even just a charger or a charging cable, they would need to pay Apple a licensing fee for every single sale that they make. Rather than this being, for example, a 10% fee for every accessory, it is a flat fee of $4, which is a lot!  This is why you cannot find any cheap lightning cables. Because, all the legit ones, the ones approved by Apple which legally they all have to be, all of those manufacturers have to give Apple a $4 cut for every lightning cable or accessory that they sell. According to’ Lifewire’, more than 2.2 billion iPhones have been sold between 2007-2018, out of which 217 million were just in 2018. 

Apple not exactly short of cash these days, but still cashing in on the old connectors.

Let’s say that 5% of those users buy a 3rd party lightning cable, or a lightning accessory, 3rd party charger or an external battery and so on. That’s already 10.8 million accessories, which would translate to $432 MILLION in revenue from just 3rd party accessories, for Apple, in 2018 alone. If you multiply that by the number of full years Apple has been selling lightning devices for, so 2013-2019 (7 years), that’s already over $3 BILLION in revenue from just licensing lightning.

But, it’s extremely likely that that number is way higher than that. I mean, how many of you have an external battery and how many of those already came with lightning cables in the box?  So there you go. Apple does state “publicly” that the reason why they don’t want to switch is because of consumers having so many lightning accessories but come on Apple, really? 

USB C is already even more widely implemented than lightning is. So the switch to USB C would be even more hassle free than not switching to USB C in the first place. This way, all of your Apple devices would charge with the same charger and the same cable. No need to carry a separate lightning cable just for your iPhone.

Now, the European Union does actually want to implement a law that would require all smartphones, tablets and other portable devices such as laptops, to have a USB C port for charging. This is in order to reduce confusion and also reduce the amount of waste.  This could indeed force Apple to finally switch to USB C, although that might not really be the case. This is because, according to Ming-Chi-Kuo, who’s been an extremely reliable source in terms of upcoming Apple products so far, stated that Apple will be launching a fully wilreess iPhone in 2021. So instead of switching to USB-C, they would skip it entirely and just go fully wireless instead. It’s not just Ming-Chi-Kuo saying this, Barclays analyst Blayne Curtis, who’s had a pretty good track record in the past, stated the same thing. That according to his inside sources, Apple will be releasing at least one iPhone model in 2021, that would remove the lightning port, which could result in the wired earpods being removed from the box entirely. 

We do have two comments here. The first one being that, yes, this does mean that the big 2020 iPhone redesign, the one with the redesigned frame and the new AR tracking capabilities and the smaller notch, will still have lightning. Our second comment is that this is definitely the future. The real question is would it be possible to do in 2021, or is this fully wireless future something that is 5-10 years down the line?

Well, if Apple does indeed remove the lightning port, they would indeed gain a tiny bit more space inside but more importantly, they would have a fully sealed up experience, especially if they decide to embed the speakers under the display like other manufacturers have experimented with. This means that the 2021 iPhones could indeed be extremely water resistant. But, at the same time, the iPhone 11 Pro’s can already withstand a submersion in 4m of water, up to 30min, which is way more than most people would submerge an iPhone into anyway. Besides, water damage isn’t even covered under warranty which is crazy!

If you expect Apple to cover water damage, don’t hold your breath.

If you submerge your smartphone in water, and this applies to any smartphone, even-though water resistance is indeed an advertised feature, if you do happen to have a faulty unit that has a manufacturing defect on the seal and it breaks, you can say goodbye to that phone for good because neither Apple nor Samsung would be helping you. This is because we cannot currently tell how deep in water the phone was when it broke. As soon as we can figure that out, which we should be able to do with the barometer which some phones do actually have, that’s when water resistance should start getting covered by the warranty.

But anyway, going back to a fully wireless iPhone. Is that even doable? Well, all the iPhones from the iPhone 8 onwards do support wireless charging. However, they also support up to 7.5W charging, as opposed to 9-12W like some android phones support. This means that it will take you around three hours or more to fully charge a phone via wireless charging, as opposed to just over an hour with fast wired charging. However, the bigger issue that I currently see with wireless charging, isn’t necessarily the speed but the convenience. 

With a cable, you just plug it in and that’s it. With wireless charging, you need to place your phone on a wireless charging pad, which means that you would not be able to use it in your hand while it’s charging. You can pretty much say goodbye to charging it on the road or charging it via a battery bank unless you have your wireless charger or a wireless charging battery bank with you. But you see, you still won’t be able to charge it in your bag, because the wireless charging battery bank would always need to be physically attached to your phone so yeah it’s a bit of a tricky one.

Now, did you guys know that the Apple Watch also charges wirelessly? Yes, it does come with a magnetic wireless charging connector that automatically attaches to the back of the watch and this is how it charges. We do believe that when Apple does switch to a fully wireless charging solution on the iPhones, they will be doing something similar to what they’ve done on the Apple Watch. A magnetic pad that would automatically snap to the back of the iPhone, which could indeed solve the issue of not being able to use it when it’s charging, or the issue with charging in your bag with a battery bank that could also attach automatically to the iPhone. They may at least have some sort of Apple Watch style cable that would then magnetically attach to the iPhone, again, just like on the Apple Watch.

This way, Apple could still license that magnetic wireless charging pad to 3rd parties and trust me, they could charge way more than $4 per unit for that and make billions by doing so. So the only problem that’s left to solve is…the speed. Luckily, there is a possible solution to that. While Apple only supports 7.5W wireless charging, VIVO have announced a concept phone, which is actually a fully working device, that supports 60W Wireless Charging!  Apparently you can fully charge it in just 20 minutes, which is even faster than the fastest wired charging out there, that’s nuts! 

A glimpse into the future of Smartphones? Click the image for a full look at vivo’s APEX 2020.

This specific phone for example, the Vivo Apex 2020, also has no ports at all, it charges just via wireless charging and has a lens with true optical zoom, the lenses themselves actually move in order to magnify the image. This phone also has a front facing camera module that’s under the display itself. So this is truly truly revolutionary and could be similar to what Apple could do in 2021. An iPhone with no notch at all, full wireless charging and a full-screen display with zero interruptions on the front. However, we only have two sources reporting on this (Ming-Chi Kuo and Blayne Curtis from Barclays). Albeit both with a very good track record in the past, but still only two sources. Well not anymore, because 9to5mac has found some pretty massive feature in iOS 13.4 beta.  Apparently there is a mention of a wireless iOS recovery mode, which should be implemented in the very near future. At the moment, if you want to restore an iPhone or reinstall iOS, you need to have it connected to a Mac. But now, you would be able to do this completely wirelessly, without the need to connect it to anything. 

So there you go, another hint that Apple is indeed considering switching to a fully wireless iPhone in the near future! 

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip – 30 Things You Didn’t Know!

Samsung has now released another foldable phone, right after the Galaxy Fold, and it’s called the Galaxy Z Flip.  We had a chance to go to the Unpacked Event ourselves and use it for a while, so here are 30 Interesting things you probably didn’t know about the Galaxy Z Flip!

We did a similar video & article, covering 40 things you didn’t know about the Galaxy S20’s. So feel free to check those out in case you’re curious about the S20’s, as this article is solely focused on the Z Flip!

---

1 - Crease 

So, since the Z Flip is a folding phone, albeit a vertical folding one rather than the horizontal style, it will have a crease in the middle. Now, is the crease noticeable? We would say no. We’ve used it for probably around 20-30 minutes at the event and while yes, you can see it from certain angles, we didn’t really notice it until we intentionally looked for it, so nothing to worry about.

---

2 - UTG

Also, unlike the Galaxy Fold, which just like all the other foldable devices that use plastic screens, such as the Royole Flexpai, the Huawei Mate X and the Moto Razr. The Galaxy Z Flip is the world’s first foldable phone to actually use a glass display.

It’s using Samsung’s brand new UTG (Ultra-Thin Glass) technology. We’re extremely curious to learn how on earth they managed to make this fold. Long story short, Corning did this, not Samsung. Samsung’s simply using Corning’s Flexible Gorilla Glass but regardless, this results in a much more durable screen, compared to the plastic display that you could literally destroy by just pressing a bit harder with your fingernail.

---

3 - Aspect Ratio

Something pretty awesome that Samsung didn’t really talk that much about, is the aspect ratio of this display. On TV’s and Computer Monitors, we usually have a 16:9 aspect ratio. The S10’s from last year had a 19:9 aspect ratio, a much taller and much more cinematic display.

The S20’s from this year have a 20:9 aspect ratio, even taller than the 19:9 on the S10. The Z Flip has a 22:9 (well, 21.9:9 to be more precise) aspect ratio display which is actually the tallest display on any smartphone. This is even taller than the Sony Xperia 1 which had a 21:9 aspect ratio and was known to have an extremely cinematic display.

---

4 - No High Refresh

Unfortunately, the display on the  Z Flip does not have the high 120Hz refresh rate display that the S20’s get, or even a 90Hz refresh rate. Instead, we get a 60Hz refresh rate panel, same as what the S10’s had last year and similar to what we already have on most other smartphones today.

---

5 - Resolution

Next up, even though the Z Flip has a pretty large 6.7” display, the same size as the S20+, the Z Flip is actually taller than the S20+ by quite a bit because of that 22:9 aspect ratio. Also, the resolution itself is lower than on the regular S20’s. We have a 2636x1080 resolution vs 3200x1440 on the S20’s. This translates to 425 PPI vs over 500, which is what we get on the S20’s.

---

6 - Bezels

If you do care about Bezels, the Z Flip has thicker bezels than the S20. It’s essentially this uniform border that surrounds the phone, sort of like the border on the iPhone 11 Pro’s, just with no notch.

---

7 - microSD

Something pretty interesting is that, unlike all the S20’s which do have a microSD card slot. The Z Flip does not, so you’ll be forever stuck with the base storage.

---

8 - Storage

Speaking of the storage, we do get 256GB as the baseline on the Z Flip which is pretty good. It’s pretty much double of what we get on the S20’s, which only come with 128GB But like I said before, this storage is fixed and you cannot expand it, whereas you can on the S20’s.

Also, the Z Flip now features the new UFS 3.0 storage, just like the S20’s, which gives you double the read and write speeds, compared to the S10. This translates to just over a 1GB/s read which is pretty insane on a smartphone. 

---

9 - New Hinge

Now, one of the most important things about a foldable phone, is the hinge. Luckily, Samsung has learned a lot from their Fold and the Z Flip now has their latest hinge design. It features synthetic fibres on the inside to protect it from any dust or dirt getting into the hinge but, my favourite part of it is that you can stop it at different angles. 

---

10 - Split-Screen 

If you stop at a 90 degree angle, the Z Flip will use this split-screen mode, where certain apps will use the two sections of the display as two separate displays. To give you guys a better idea, you can use this in the camera app and prop it up on a table and take a selfie, which is pretty cool. You can also use it in the gallery app and have a preview window of your photos on the bottom section of the display and the main photos on the top. It’s pretty much just a gimmick but at least they are making some good use of it even when the phone is half folded. Really good job Samsung. 

---

11 - Secondary Display

On the back of the Z Flip we do have a small secondary display, which is very small actually. It’s a 1.1” AMOLED display, with a resolution of 300x112. It’s mostly there to show you the time and the date.

---

12 - Selfie Display

However, if you close the Flip down, and press the power button, you can actually use this display as a viewfinder and take a selfie with the main camera module – which is pretty cool! The display is indeed extremely small, so it’s quite hard to position yourself, but at least it’s something. 

---

13 - VS Razr

How does the Z Flip match up to it’s main competitor?

Now, in case you’re wondering how the Z Flip compares to the Motorola Razr, which is really the only other vertically foldable phone on the market right now, the Z Flip is better in almost every single way.

It has much better specs, much better cameras and it has a glass display vs the plastic display on the Razr. The display is bigger, 6.7” vs 6.2”, it has a higher resolution as well, you get 4K60 video recording vs 4k30 on the back. You get 4K30 on the front vs 1080p 30 on the Razr and you get Android 10 vs Android 9 on the Razr. The Razr has a gigantic chin too so the Z Flip is the foldable phone to get, in case you’re looking for one that folds vertically.

---

14 - Fingerprint

Next up, compared to the S20’s, there are a few areas in which the Z Flip is a downgrade, aside from just the Display. For example, while the S20’s have an in-display fingerprint reader, the Z-Flip does not and instead it uses a fingerprint reader that’s embedded into another button.

---

15 - No 8K

Also, unlike the S20’s which can all record 8K video, the Z Flip maxes out at 4K30.

---

16 - S10 Cameras

Speaking of the cameras, the Z Flip actually uses the same exact main camera as the S10 did, from last year. The means a 12MP main module, with 1.4 µm pixels. 

---

17 - Goodbye Variable Aperture 

Unfortunately, we no longer get that f/1.5-f/2.4 variable aperture lens that the S9 and S10 had. Instead, we now get a fixed f/1.8 aperture, so low light performance on the Z Flip is actually worse than on the S10 from last year. The S20’s all get brand new sensors which larger pixels, but the Z Flip does not.

---

18 - S20 Wide

But luckily, we at least get the very same 12MP ultra-wide angle module that we have on the S20. 

---

19 - No Zoom

However, since we only get two camera modules on the back, both with 12MP of resolution, we cannot really get the same level of zoom that we get on the other three S20 models. In fact, we don’t really get any Optical Zoom at all, so even the 2x or 5x “zoom” that we’ll get will be purely digital. 

---

20 - Front Camera

Also, the front facing camera is very similar to the one on the S10. It’s a 10MP sensor, only with a smaller f/2.4 aperture, down from the f/1.9 aperture that we had on the S10. It’s actually a bit worse than the S10 one, however, the front facing camera cutout is actually smaller than on the S10 and Note 10, so at least that’s a plus.

---

21 - Water Resistance

In case you’re thinking of taking the Z Flip to the pool, don’t even think about it! That’s because the Z Flip doesn’t have any water resistance whatsoever. So avoid using it in rain as well.

---

22 - CPU

While the CPU is actually a flag-ship level CPU, unlike the Moto Razr, the Z Flip still uses the Snapdragon 855+ processor. Interesting enough, there is no Exynos version of the Z Flip at all. The 855+ is actually just a slightly overclocked 855 so the CPU performance is very similar to the S10’s from last year. The S20’s all get brand new 2020 processors with the Snapdragon 865 for the US & Canada versions and the Exynos 990 for the international version.

---

23 - RAM

Another downgrade of the Z Flip over the S20’s is in terms of the RAM. While the S20’s come with 12GB and even 16GB of RAM, on the highest end 512GB version of the S20 Ultra, the Z Flip comes with 8GB of RAM and that is the only option that you can get.

---

24 - Free Case

Back to some positives for a bit, the Z Flip does come with a free case in the box, which is pretty useful considering that cases for foldable phones are definitely not the easiest thing to find.

Credit: Samsung (left)

---

25 - WiFi

If you recently bought a brand new WiFi 6 router, you’re out of luck because the Z Flip doesn’t actually support WiFi 6, or Wifi 802.11ax like the S20’s and even the S10’s do, so that’s quite strange.

---

26 - Slow Charging 

Something else that you’re missing out on, is fast charging. The Z Flip supports 15W charging which his still pretty good, but comparing this to the 25W charging that we have on the S20’s or the 45W charging that we have on the Note 10 and the S20 Ultra, you can see that the Z Flip is lacking behind again.

---

27 - Battery Life

Speaking of the battery, I’m a bit concerned when it comes to the battery life of this phone. It has a massive 6.7” display but the battery size is only 3300mAh, which is actually smaller than the 3400mAh that the regular Galaxy S10, that had a much smaller 6.1” display, had last year. So I’m quite concerned in terms of how long this phone will actually last. 

---

28 - Goodbye DeX?

We’ve tried finding any notes about DeX support on the Z Flip and we haven’t found a single thing that mentions that DeX is supported on the Z Flip. In fact, even on the S20’s, DeX support isn’t listed anywhere on the Specs sheet. You have to go on the main web-page and it is indeed listed there in the Galaxy Essentials app list. 

---

29 - Concierge

Now, since the Z Flip is a very expensive phone, and I’ll get to that in my last point, it actually does come with a Premium Support service. It is called the Galaxy Concierge and you get 24/7 customer support, 7 days a week plus 1 year extra of free accidental damage cover. This is something that the Galaxy Fold also features.

---

30 - Screen Replacement

Also, in case you do need to get your screen replaced, it would cost you £99 in the UK for the Z Flip or £115 for the Galaxy Fold which is crazy low. I wasn’t expecting Samsung to only charge this much, considering that Apple chargers £326 for the iPhone 11 Pro Max’s display replacement, which has a more standard, non foldable display. 

---

31 - Don’t buy it 

And finally, the last thing that we want to mention is that you really shouldn’t buy the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip. That’s because it’s very expensive. At a price of $1400 or £1300, it costs more than your laptop probably does and it’s still just a smartphone.

In many ways, the S10 from last year is actually a better phone. You get a zoom module as well as a better front facing camera and also a better main camera module, alongside a larger battery. Sure, it doesn’t fold in half but the thing is, this is the only reason why the Z Flip is so expensive. It’s because it folds in half and it’s still a brand new technology that’s very expensive to manufacture. If you took all the folding away, what you would be left with would be a Samsung Galaxy S10e, with a larger 6.7” display and that’s it. 

Sure, if you do have some cash to burn and you just want a cool phone and you don’t really care about having the best specs and the best camera, then go for it. Otherwise, either go for a regular phone or go for the Galaxy Fold as that’s essentially a tablet that folds in half, so it’s actually much more useful than the Z Flip is.

Samsung Galaxy S20 - 40 Things You Didn't Know!

The Samsung Galaxy S20 is now here. This is, by far, one of the biggest changes that Samsung has ever made to their line of smartphones. We now have things such as a 100x Zoom camera module, 8K video recording, a massive 5000mAh battery as well as a an extremely fluid 120Hz display.

But, there are a few things that Samsung didn’t tell you about the S20’s, here are 40 of them!

---

1 - Our First Samsung Event!

Even-though this is not related to the S20’s directly, we got invited to the event ourselves, meaning that we attended the Unpacked 2020 Event in London.  This was our first ever Samsung event, so huge thanks to Samsung for having us.

We did get the chance to see all S20’s in person and play with them for quite a bit, which is the reason why we do have some personal thoughts to share in this article as well.

---

2 - 120Hz Limit

Honestly, this 120Hz refresh rate makes the S20’s feel years ahead in terms of performance. We could definitely tell that it was more fluid than even the OnePlus 7T Pro, which has a 90Hz display. 

However, there is one catch. You cannot use the new 120Hz refresh rate when the display is running at full resolution. You have to switch to FHD+, otherwise you’ll have to stick to 60Hz, which is a shame.

---

3 - 240Hz

Aside from that 120Hz panel, the touch input actually samples at a whopping 240Hz. Meaning that touch inputs would be twice as accurate as before. 

---

4 - Haptic Engine 

Next up, all three S20 models use the new Haptic Engine that the Note 10 introduced. This means that you can essentially feel a response back, for example with the Alarm Wheel in the Settings or when you take a photo. This basically makes your phone’s software more like hardware in a weird sort of way.

---

5 - Charge Time

The S20 Ultra now gets the extremely fast 45W charging that the Note 10+ introduced. So, even with that enormous 5000mAh battery, the Ultra will still be able to fully charge in just over an hour, which is pretty nuts. The other S20’s still get improved Fast Charging, up to 25W from the S10’s 15W. Which will get you up to 50% in just less than 30 minutes.

---

6 - Actual Zoom 

Now, one of the most unique new features about the S20’s (especially the Ultra) is that unbelievable 100X Zoom camera. There is quite a lot of confusion on this so to clarify, the 100x Zoom is not optical zoom, it is digital.

The S20 Ultra essentially has 10x “Hybrid Zoom” and around 5x Optical Zoom which is still a big improvement from the 2x that we had before. The remaining zoom up to 100x is done digitally, thanks to that massive 108MP main sensor. The other S20’s still have an impressive zoom level as well. They both have 30x Digital Zoom.

---

7 - Periscope Camera

Credit: Samsung

The reason the S20 Ultra can achieve 5x Optical Zoom is thanks to a new camera module called a Periscope Camera. Essentially, Samsung added a bunch of lenses that can heavily magnify the image. The only problem is that the camera module would stick out about 1cm from then entire phone which no-one wants. So, to fix that, they positioned the camera module horizontally, on its side and then they’re using a mirror to reflect the light from the outside of the phone, through the lenses and finally to the sensor. This works in the exact same way that a periscope from a submarine works. Pretty cool stuff! 

---

8 - Actual Picture Size

Now, taking a 12MP photo on a phone, usually takes up about 2MB, or so of space. This means that taking a photo with that massive 108MP image on the S20 Ultra, should take up close to 20MB, which is a considerable amount, especially if you’re the kind of person that takes loads of photos. Well, luckily this won’t be the case, because the photos taken with that 108MP sensor will actually be 12MP photos.

---

9 - Pixel Binning

This is because Samsung will be using something called Pixel Binning technology and essentially combining nine pixels into one. (108MP/9 = 12MP). Samsung also claims that this will provide better low light performance and we did get to experience this in person, and we have to say, the S20 Ultra’s low light is miles better than what we have on the Pixel 4.

---

10 - Improved Low Light

While we’re speaking about the camera, the low light performance will be improved substantially on the regular S20’s. This is because, even-though they only have a 12MP sensor, as opposed to the massive 108MP sensor of the S20 Ultra, they are indeed newer sensors with larger pixels of 1.8μm. On the S10, they were 1.4μm pixels.

---

11 - Biggest Camera Upgrade since S7

Ever since the Galaxy S7, Samsung has been using the exact same sensor specs. Yes, they were new sensors every year with slight tweaks, but the sensor size and the pixel size has remained the same from the S7 to the S10.  The only major camera improvement that we got on the main module was with the S9 and that switchable aperture camera. Most of the improvements were done through software. However, this is finally changing with all three models of the S20. 

---

12 - Goodbye Jack

Something that’s also changing is that we no longer have an MP3 jack, which is something that the Note 10’s got rid off. 

---

13 - GalaxyBuds+

However, Samsung has launched a new version of their GalaxyBuds headphones, the GalaxyBuds+. Unfortunately, they do not feature any crazy new features, like active noise cancellation or anything like that. Instead, they focus on improving the sound quality and improving the microphone quality whilst almost doubling the battery life to 22 hours. 

---

14 - GalaxyBuds+ iOS

Samsung has now released the iOS app for the Galaxy Buds. So, if you have an iPhone, the Galaxy Buds will integrate much better into your ecosystem.

---

15 - Storage Speed

Another big improvement that will make the S20’s feel so fast is the storage speed. All S20 models feature UFS 3.0 storage, compared to UFS 2.1 on the S10’s. Therefore, as with the Note 10, we’ll get double the read and write speeds, to just over 1GB/s read, which is insane! 

---

16 - microSD

Speaking of storage, all three models of the S20 will keep the microSD card slot. This is pretty amazing because you can actually get a 1TB microSD card and have up to 1.5TB on the S20 Ultra or 1.1TB on the other two S20’s.

---

17 - Storage Options

This is because, while all three S20’s will come with 128GB of storage as default, the S20 Ultra will have a second storage option of 512GB. Some might not appreciate Samsung not offering more than 128GB on the S20 and S20+. However, keep in mind that you do have that microSD card slot, in case you do need more storage for things such as apps and music.

---

18 - RAM 

When it comes to the RAM, the standard S20 comes with 8GB of RAM, which is the same as the S10 and S10+ from last year. The S20+ comes with 12GB of RAM, which is the same as the Note 10+ from last year. The S20 Ultra comes with either 12GB of RAM if you go for the 128GB model or a whopping 16GB of RAM if you choose the 512GB storage model. 

Most people don’t even have that in their laptops, so having 16GB of RAM in a phone, is just crazy! Also, all three S20 models will get LPDDR5 memory, which is the latest standard in memory with even lower power consumption than LPDDR4. 

---

19 - No 4G

Last year the S10e, the S10 and the S10+ all came with 4G and then we had another version of the S10, the S10 5G which had… 5G. This year, things are quite a bit different. The S20 and S20+ both come with 4G and 5G variants. And there’s not that big of a price difference between the two. The S20 Ultra on the other hand, only comes in 5G, which is probably why Samsung decided to pack such as massive 5000 mAh battery in that phone.

---

20 -  Faster 5G

If you really care about 5G, the Ultra does get mmWave 5G, which is the true next-gen 5G, while the other two S20’s get high band 5G, which is quite a bit slower.

---

21 - World’s First 8K

We can now record 8K footage on a smartphone for the first time, with limitations.

Now, going back to the cameras for a bit, all three S20’s have a very unique feature, the ability to record 8K video. This means that these are the world’s first smartphones that are able to capture 8K footage. Even-though the bitrate isn’t the highest and the frame-rate is limited to just 24FPS. It is still very impressive to have a phone capable of recording this.

So, if you did happen to purchase an 8K TV recently, then getting a Galaxy S20 might actually be a very good idea due to the lack of 8K content, 8K TV’s rely on upscaling 4K footage, whereas now with the S20, you’ll be able to take native 8K footage to watch on your 8K TV.

---

22 - 8K Requirements

Now, 8K has a resolution of 7680x4320. Meaning that if you want to shoot 8K footage, you need to have at LEAST a 33MP sensor.  Well that’s fine because the S20 Ultra has a 108MP sensor but, what about the other two S20’s? How can they shoot 8K content when they only have a 12 MP sensor?

Well, it turns out that while the S20 Ultra uses the main 108MP sensor, to record 8K footage, the other two S20’s actually use the zoom module instead, which is 64MP in resolution. 

---

23 - S20: No Optical Zoom

Because of this, Samsung actually removed the zoom lens from the zoom lens module, as they didn’t want you to only be able to shoot 8K content when you are really zoomed in. Therefore, the zoom on the S20 and the S20+ is purely digital and thanks to that massive 64MP sensor, you can zoom in quite a lot and still get a pretty sharp image. 

---

24 - Video Pro Mode

Samsung also added a Pro-Mode for video, meaning that you can now change the aperture, ISO and shutter speed when recording video as well. 

---

25 - New Ultra Wide Module

Now, something that needed quite a bit of improvement on the S10’s, was the Ultra Wide Angle module. Luckily, all S20’s now come with a brand new module.  A 12MP module, from the 16MP that we had before, which also has larger 1.4 μm pixels, compared to the 1 μm that we had on the S10. This results in better low light performance with the Ultra Wide module. 

---

26 - Wobble King

Unfortunately, because of that gigantic camera module, the S20 Ultra wobbles like crazy when it’s on the table. It was pretty much impossible to use while sitting flat, so that’s something to keep in mind.

---

27 - Chunk King

Something else to keep in mind, is just how thick the Ultra is. At 8.8mm thick, the Ultra is one of the thickest flagship smartphones on the market right now. However, the camera module is around double the thickness of the one on the iPhone 11 Pro Max and because of that, it’s much thicker than you would expect, especially if you put a case on it. 

---

28 - Goodbye Edge

Something that we’ve immediately noticed when using these phones is that the display is now flat, unlike previous Samsung phones from the S6 Edge, which had a curved display. The Ultra does have slightly more curve to it than the regular S20, but they all have 2.5D glass now, just like the iPhone and the Pixel 4. So you can gladly say goodbye to accidental touches.

---

29 - Goodbye f.1.5

Also, remember that switchable f/1.5 – f/2.4 aperture that we got with the S9? Well, that’s now gone entirely on all three S20 models and we now get a smaller f/1.8 aperture. 

---

30 - Smaller Camera Cutout

Additionally. you can say goodbye to the dual camera module cutout on the front that the S10+ and the S10 5G had. We now get a single camera cutout on all three models of the S20, which also happens to be smaller than on the Note 10+.

---

31 - Bezels

Speaking of bezels, it looks to us that the Note 10+ actually has a thinner chin and thinner bezels on the sides, thanks to those curved edges. Let me know in the comments if you think that’s the case as well.

---

32 - Goodbye Bixby

Have you noticed that the Bixby Button is now gone? Thank you Samsung!

---

33 - AirDrop

The S20’s all come with AirDrop now. It’s called QuickShare and you can quickly…share…items between multiple Samsung devices.

---

34 - New Aspect Ratio

All the S20’s now feature a noticeably taller 20:9 aspect ratio, compared to the 19:9 that we had before on the S10’s.

Meaning that even though these phones aren’t that much wider to hold in the hand, they are quite a bit taller and more difficult to use with one hand, as you cannot really reach to the top. 

Right: The S20 compared to the Note 10+

---

35 - CPU Differences

Also, you will get a different CPU based on where you buy your S20 from.

If you buy it from the US or Canada, you would get the new Snapdragon 865, whereas if you buy it from anywhere else, you’ll get it with Samsung’s own Exynos 990. 

---

36 - Google Camera App

They’re both almost identical CPU’s, however, if you do get the Snapdragon version, you’ll actually be able to install the Pixel Camera app and get that Google style of image processing, if you’re really into that. 

---

37 - Weight

We have to say, the S20 Ultra is quite a heavy phone. At 222 grams, it is one of the heaviest flagships on the market, however, the iPhone 11 Pro Max is still heavier at 226 grams. 

---

38 - All Lenses 

Something really cool about the S20’s is the Single Take mode, which allows  you to use all the lenses on the back to take a photo and then you can pick which photo to use at the very end.  

---

39 - OneUI 2

Also, all the new software features, such as the improved night mode and more that we get with all the S20’s will be available on the S10’s as well, with a future software update. 

---

40 - S20 is enough

And finally, if you’ve been eyeing up the Ultra and you think that you have to get the Ultra for the best features, you actually don’t! In fact ,the regular S20 has all of the main features of the S20 Ultra. It’s just that you don’t get that insane 100x Zoom, you just get 30x, which let’s be honest, for most people that’s more than enough. 

Where is the PS5?

To say that there has been a lot of speculation about the upcoming PS5 would be a huge understatement. The amount of Leaks & Rumors have now got to a point where it is becoming very difficult to make sense of any of it. Our alliances are very split in the office but I have always leaned towards Playstation. So, since it’s been 7 years (and a few days) since Sony announced the PS4, I decided to try and get my head around just what is going on with the PS5.

---

Announcement Dates

In some of our previous videos, we have discussed the idea of a February 5th announcement, as per the PSErebus leaks, and a live announcement on 29th February. Most of the gaming community seemed to think that this late February announcement would materialise and are still hopeful. We are very quickly running out of February and there are no reports of any press invites being sent out (as far as we know). Plus, given the recent Coronavirus outbreak, it would be easy to understand why Sony would not want to have a large gathering of its international workforce and journalists in a densely populated place such as New York, where this was rumoured to be taking place.

So what is the alternative?

Are the days of live reveals over?

Well, an idea which has been floated about recently has been a pre-recorded ‘State of Play’-esque style of announcement. Personally, I enjoy the buzz and live reaction of new consoles & games being announced live. One of my personal favourites was the ‘God of War’ reveal at E3 2016, it was just very over the top, unexpected and it gave me goosebumps. I think it would certainly lose some of the magic if the PS5 were to be announced in a pre-recorded trailer, but circumstances dictate that this is the safest option. Additionally, as Xbox revealed the Series X with an ad at the 2019 Game Awards, it wouldn’t be that much of a shock to anyone if Sony took a similar approach, regardless of the external factors.

Something that we need to bear in mind is that the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) kicks off on 16th March. They have already pulled out of this event (as well as Pax East), citing Coronavirus concerns. However, it will be in Sony’s interest to publicly announce the PS5 before this event, regardless of attendance, as they would risk an immense amount of leaks given how much these developers know and will come to know. Moreover, Sony have indicated, via an earnings call between Hiroki Totoki (Chief Financial Officer) and investors, that they would like to stick to a similar timeline to that of the PS4 launch (which was announced on 21st February, 2013).

So, from all of this information we can be fairly certain that an announcement is imminent, but I would be surprised if we got anything this month. But Sony are more than welcome to do so. We are also forgetting that Microsoft didn’t formally announce the Xbox One until May 2013 for a November release in that year, so even if it was March before we saw the PS5, we would actually on an earlier timeline than the previous console generation.

---

Release Date

We know that Sony plans to release the PS5 in ‘Holiday 2020’, so somewhere between September and December this year. Granted, that is still a pretty big window and is intentionally vague. From a production perspective, it gives them some wiggle room to adjust for demand. From a market perspective, they can wait for Xbox to blink first.

We’ve known the release window for the PS5 since October 2019

The PS4 launched on November 15th, 2013. It would be logical to think that the PS5 would launch at a similar time and be marketed as the must-have buy this Christmas. If they launch in October, they would realistically fall outside that window and if they launch in December, customers might not get their units in time. PSErebus, a prominent Twitter leaker who has a good track record, predicted a November 20th release date, which I would be inclined to say is at least very close.

---

Conclusion

I am of the opinion that Sony will release information when they are ready and we have to be patient. Unlike Microsoft, who have other platforms outside of Xbox where they generate huge revenue (primarily ‘Windows’), the Playstation is by far Sony’s biggest earner. They spun off their struggling computer brand ‘Vaio’ into its own individual entity in 2014, they don’t make much money from Smartphones or TV’s and they have gone through several restructurings in the past decade or so. 

The next biggest division within Sony is Cameras, but there is too much pressure for the PS5 to do well. If it does not perform to expectations, Sony could be in some serious hot water with its investors. The campaign for the PS5 has to be perfect from their point of view and there are a few major risks to mitigate (namely Coronavirus and the rumoured high production cost).

This may well be the last generation of the traditional hardware-based consoles so I just want the PS5 to be the best that it can possibly be, if that means waiting a little longer to see it, then fair enough.

PS5 & Xbox Series X – The Next Generation of Games!

---

Welcome back to the ultimate comparison between the PS5 and the Xbox Series X, based on everything that we know so far. We uploaded PART 1 of this comparison back in January. In that video, we talked about the CPU differences, the GPU, the Resolution, the Frame-Rate and the in-game Graphics.

This is PART 2 of that comparison, and here we will be covering the RAM, the SSD  and any Special Features that both of these consoles will come with, alongside any other recent leaks since our last video.

---

It seems like the Xbox Series X will be a bit more powerful than the PS5. The CPU will be pretty much identical between the two, but the GPU will be slightly more powerful on the Xbox. The Series X would have around 12.2 TFLOPS of raw GPU performance, compared to around 9.2 TFLOPS on the PS5. These are the calculations that DigitalFoundry made based on the recent AMD APU leaks from a few weeks prior, this will very likely be the case with the final unit. 

However, this is mostly because Microsoft will have two models of the Xbox, the low-end ‘Lockhart’ and the high-end ‘Scarlett’ (which will be more expensive than the PS5).

---

RAM

The Xbox Series X may dedicate more of its RAM to the OS than the PS5, but there’s still plenty left for developers to use.

Unlike PC’s where we have separate Video Memory (GDDR) and System Memory (DDR), consoles only have Video Memory, which the Operating System (OS) gets to use a chunk of. For example, on the PS4 Pro, we have 8GB of GDDR5 memory, out of which only 1GB is allocated to the OS, while the remaining 7GB are used by games. On the Xbox One X, we have 12GB of GDDR5 memory, out of which 3GB are used for the OS and 9GB are usable by developers, in games. When it comes to next-gen, both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X are said to come with 24GB of GDDR6 memory. 

When it comes to how much of this 24GB of GDDR5 memory would be dedicated to the OS, and how much can actually be used by developers, we don’t yet know. It really depends on how both companies approach their new OS on the next-gen consoles. If both companies follow a similar approach to the PS4 and the Xbox One, then Sony should have less memory dedicated to the OS, compared to Microsoft. So developers should have more to play with, in terms of video memory, with the PS5. 

In terms of the bandwidth, the Xbox Series X is said to have 560GB/s vs around 512GB/s on the PS5. 

---

Storage

Moving on to the storage, this will actually be the third massive change that the next-gen consoles will be getting, aside from the new CPU and GPU.

The current generation of consoles use plain old HDD’s. Yes, 5400RPM Hard-Drives, which we don’t really even see in laptops anymore, unless you’re looking at the lowest entry models. The HDD inside the current generation consoles only reach speeds of around 50-75MB/s, which is very slow. SSD’s, on the other hand, can reach speeds of up to 550MB/s but are limited by the SATA connector. While m.2 based Flash Storage can reach speeds of more than 3500MB/s. 

Luckily, both Sony & Microsoft have confirmed that the next-gen consoles will both be using Flash Storage. Yes, not even SATA based SSD’s, but m.2 based Flash modules that can reach some insane speeds.

Mark Cerny, the Lead System Architect for the PS5, said in a recent interview with ‘The Wired’, that the PS5 will have a storage module that has higher bandwidth than any SSD’s available on PC’s at the moment, which is very interesting. In that famous Spider-Man game demo, a scene that took 15 seconds to load on a PS4 Pro, only took 0.8 seconds with the PS5’s new storage (18.75 times faster). However, if we take the PS4 Pro’s HDD speed, which is about 75MB/s, and multiply that by 18.75, we get 1406MB/s. This is much faster than a SATA based SSD, so this is indeed an NVMe Flash Module, but nowhere near as fast as other flash modules that can reach speeds of over 3500MB/s. Still, it’s a massive improvement over what we currently have now.

Credit: Takashi Mochizuki

In another Spider-Man demo, Sony showed how fast you can actually swing through New York on the PS5 version of the game compared to the PS4 Pro version of the game. The PS4 Pro version ends up freezing once Spidey reaches a certain speed as the HDD simply cannot load the game assets fast enough, while the PS5’s Flash module has zero problems. So, with this new type of storage, not only will the games load up pretty much instantly, you will also be able to achieve much higher speeds in games where…you know…speed is important. For example, games such as Gran Turismo, Wipeout, or any other games that feature a ton of fast moving scenes, will feel so much more immersive with the next-gen consoles. Especially once you keep in mind that 60fps would be the standard with the next gen consoles and both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X will also support 120Hz output. 

We have seen a few reports that Samsung would be supplying Sony with their NVMe drives, to be used in the PS5.  Samsung did have an internal presentation and one slide did get leaked. We can see that they’re teasing their new generation of NVMe Flash modules that would apparently be used in 2020 consoles. We can also see how the system boot time drops from 49 seconds to around 9 seconds, this would be 5.44 times faster, which looks to be quite low for a Flash module.

So then why did Sony say that their drivers will have a higher bandwidth than SSD’s modules in PC’s today? Well, they were either referring to SATA based SSD where the bandwidth is indeed limited by the SATA connector or they might have been referring to the fact that their drivers would be using PCIe 4.0. This is something that AMD’s current Zen 2 platform supports and that’s where we’ve also first seen PCIe 4 introduced to the market.

Microsoft will also be doing something similar, they talked about this when they first unveiled Project Scarlett.  It will feature custom made Flash storage, something miles over what we currently have. A recent leak gives us a bit more insight into the Xbox Series X’s Flash module. A former Phison employee posted a description of his former job, on LinkedIn and it seems like we was working on a specific DRAM-less controller for the Flash module inside the Xbox Series X.

Check out @zoneofconcepts on Instagram for more behind the scenes content on our videos.

Judging by these specs, the Xbox Series X will only be able to achieve PCIe 3.0 speeds, rather than the 4.0 speeds that Sony are working towards. But, it’s extremely unlikely that Sony will be using drives with read speeds of 6500MB. So even if Sony will indeed support higher bandwidth storage, the Flash modules inside both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X will likely be very similar. 

Something pretty cool that you’ll be able to do storage-wise on the PS5, is that you will be able to uninstall certain aspects of the game. So games will be made in such a way so that if you want to only install the campaign, you can do that and then once you’ve finished it, you can uninstall it and install the multiplayer part of the game. This will let you save up a ton of storage. Not only that, but the games themselves will actually occupy less. On the current generation of consoles, because of how slow the HDD’s are, a lot of the games actually had to store multiple copies of textures so that the HDD could load the data from them faster. This won’t be required anymore, with the next gen consoles and so games, at least at launch, will occupy less.

We’ve heard a lot about Sony’s production costs and how material scarcity may end up affecting the RRP, what price do you think the PS5 will launch at?

And speaking of launch, PSErebus (a leaker who’s been very accurate in the past) stated that the PS5 will come with a 2TB SSD and a retail price of $500, 500 euros or £450. That’s pretty impressive! If Sony does indeed ship the PS5 with 2TB of storage, then this would be the dream. We don’t know anything in terms of the storage on the Xbox Series X just yet, but considering that the Series X is expected to cost more, around $600 for the high-end model, it should come with at least as much storage as the PS5 does.

Sony has confirmed that PS5 games will ship on new 100GB Blu-Ray disks and yes, for those of you who are wondering, Blu-Ray drivers are much slower than even a regular HDD, with read speeds of just around 25MB/s. So, with the PS5 and Xbox Series X, the games would not be run from the Blu-Ray disks anymore The only use case for the Blu-Ray disks would be to copy the game direct to your console, as opposed to downloading it from the online store. This is useful if your internet connection is slow and you will also be able to sell the games this way. The Blu-Ray drive will still be required to be inserted into the console, for licensing purposes. 

Since the next-gen consoles will rely so much on the internal storage, even games will make full use of this faster storage by enabling a seamless open-world with no loading times at all,  both consoles may heavily limit the use of external storage use. At the moment, you can plug in an external HDD or SSD and expand the internal storage that way. It’s a pretty easy and straight-forward process.  However, with next-gen, it’s very likely that we would either have First-Party storage modules, or the Third-Party external storage options would need to surpass a certain speed threshold in order for them to be used. Our guess is that only external SSD and m.2 drives will be usable.

---

Special Features

Finally, the last thing that we want to cover here, is the special features that both of these consoles will have.

RTX is going to be a real game-changer for next-gen consoles and thankfully, it will be on both.

Both Sony and Microsoft have confirmed that the next gen consoles will support hardware based Ray-Tracing. In case you don’t know that Ray-Tracing is, it is pretty much the key selling feature of Nvidia’s RTX series of GPU’s. Real-Time Ray tracing is the most realistic way of casting shadows and reflections in games. This is because, unlike regular reflection and shadow mapping which are always fixed, Ray Tracing involves each light ray being individually cast and reflected to light up a scene, resulting in extremely photo-realistic environments. This might not sound like much but it will make a massive difference in-game.

Additionally, each of the consoles will have some unique features to them. The Xbox Series X will have Microsoft’s Project xCloud, which will essentially turn your Xbox into a server that you’ll be able to access from pretty much any device and play your games, a little like Playstation Remote. Another new feature of the Xbox will be a Windows Mode, according to some recent leaks. This would allow you to access Steam and the Epic Games Store and play PC games directly from there. As Mouse & Keyboard are fully supported, the Xbox Series X will be closer to a PC than a console.  Also, Microsoft has already confirmed that all the Series X “Exclusives” will also work on PC, so the Series X won’t have any console exclusives games. That’s pretty much it in terms of the Xbox. Microsoft hasn’t really talked about any other new and exclusive features. On the PS5 side however, we do get quite a few unique features.

We can already get 3D Audio on the PS4, how much better will it be on the PS5?

For one, Sony has teased 3D Audio quite a lot. They said that this will make a massive difference as to how games are perceived and that the PS5 will even have a hardware based 3D Audio Chip that will handle all the 3D Audio processing. Now, there are a few First-Party headphones from Sony,  which do support 3D audio on the PS4 already and we happen to own a pair. They’re very good, but from the looks of it, this 3D Audio chip should take audio to the next level. Something else that Sony will have is next-gen haptics on the controller itself. Sony has already confirmed that the haptics in the new controller will be so good, that you will be able to feel the surface that a car in a game is driving on. So you will be able to feel the difference between asphalt, dirt, grass and so on. And lastly, the PS5 will support both the current PSVR as well as the upcoming PSVR 2. Microsoft has already confirmed that they won’t be doing a VR headset for the Xbox Series X anytime soon, as Phil Spencer himself, the head of Xbox, said - “nobody’s asking for VR”. 

One last key thing to mention here is that both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X will support Backwards Compatibility in games. The PS5 supporting PS4 games with rumors of this going all of the way back to the PS1. While the Xbox Series X will support Xbox One games as well as Xbox 360 games.

---

Conclusion

In the end, both consoles are going to be light years ahead of even the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X so no matter which one you get, you’ll be extremely happy. The Xbox will offer slightly better specs and PC game compatibility, while the PS5 will offer things such as Haptic Rumble on the controller and VR support. Also, Microsoft will be offering two models of the Xbox, a low-end and a high-end, while Sony will only offer one, the PS5. 

Phil Spencer might think the console war with Sony is over, but who’s he kidding? 

Which one are you getting?

AirPods Pro - FULL Review (after 1+ month of use)

---

These are the brand new AirPods Pro and you’ve probably heard all about them by now, some of you have even heard them in person.

When buying a pair of new headphones, I believe that there are six major things you need to consider:

1. Sound Quality

2. Comfortability

3. Battery Life

4. Special Features

5. Design

6. Value

I’ve been using the AirPods Pro’s since they came out on October the 30th, so well over a month now, and I’m finally ready to give you guys my full in-depth review on Apple’s highest end first party headphones.

Spoiler, they’re the best headphones I’ve ever used!

---

SOUND QUALITY

First off I have to say, I am not an audiofile person myself. In terms of overhead “pro” headphones that I’ve used, I’ve used the Audiotechnica M70X’s which are studio monitors, the Audiotechnica M50X’s, and the Beats Solo 2’s. I, of course, have used countless in-ear headphones, from Apple’s original EarPods, to the new EarPods, to the Lightning EarPods, to AirPods, Samsung headphones, HTC headphones, Jaybird X3’s and a few more. So I’ve used a fair amount of headphones, but not as many as possible some of you guys. Just wanted to give you a bit of a background as to where I’m coming from in terms of the sound quality.

So how is the Sound Quality on the AirPods Pro’s? Well, they’re good. They’re not the best sounding truly wireless headphones on the market, the Sony ones are better and there’s a few other better options in terms of the sound quality, but they’re still very good.

When I compared the new AirPods to the originals I certainly felt that the new ones had much richer mids and definitely more bass than the originals. It’s kinda like the difference between the 2019 15” MacBook Pro and the new 16” MacBook Pro, where you can just hear more with the new 16”’s speakers, so that’s great!

The addition of the rubber seals means that sound is less likely to escape

But what makes the AirPods Pro sound even better now is the fact that they’re now finally in-ear headphones. They now have a rubber seal, which is something that you can find on pretty much any other pair of headphones on the market right now, which helps seal the sound coming from the AirPods, so that pretty much no sound escapes. You can pretty much say goodbye to people around you hearing everything that you listen to, at least on medium volume. But, this seal also improves the sound quality simply by the fact that less sound escapes from your ear.

More about that eartip once I get to the comfortability section of the video, but there is one more feature that improves the sound quality, and that is the Active Noise Cancellation. So like I said before, the ear tips help to prevent sound escaping from your ear, but at the same time they also help prevent external ambient sound from entering your ear. Overall, they do offer a passive noise cancellation on their own, but Apple’s added Active Noise Cancellation makes it even better. The way it works is that the AirPods Pro now have an outward facing microphone which is this long black grill on the stem which picks up all the ambient noise around you and then the AirPods themselves emit a counter noise of opposite frequency that cancels out the background noise.

I wasn’t sure how well this would work when I heard about it, but it works much better than I expected. If you’re in a place where there’s a lot of the same consistent noise, such as on a bus, a train, a plane, it’s very easy for the AirPods Pro to cancel out that background noise, since it can predict the pattern that’s coming up next. However, when it comes to cancelling out voices or unexpected sounds that don’t have a pattern, you’ll still be able to hear them, just not as loud. But I can definitely say that when I’m waking on the street and I have my AirPods Pro in, with Noise Cancelling on, it just immerses me so much in the music or the podcast that I’m listening to. It’s a world apart from the regular AirPods and even when I’m outdoors it sounds like I’m still in my bedroom with zero background noise.

The three new modes for the AirPods Pro allow you to control how much noise cancellation you want to have

Now, some of you might be like, “oh, well , we actually preferred the regular AirPods, since you can still hear your surroundings, rather than being cut out from the world entirely”, and I agree, I’m actually like that as well. But the good news is that you can still do that. You can actually turn off Noise Cancelling mode and just have the passive noise cancelling, but if that’s not enough and you want that regular AirPods open back feel to them, you can actually enable a third mode called Transparency Mode. What this does is that it uses the external microphones I talked about before, to literally let background audio in this time, so that you can hear everything that’s happening around you. To be fair, it’s pretty amazing! It’s not as open backed as the regular AirPods were, but it’s very close. My slight issue with it is that you can hear some distortion since the sound is picked up by the microphone rather than your ear, so you do feel like a cyborg in a way.

But to give you an example of how useful Transparency Mode is, I was able to go into a store, order some food and speak to the store assistant without even removing my AirPods Pro. I had them in my ear and I just held the side button which switches between Noise Cancelling and Transparency mode, and I was easily able to hear what the other person was saying, and when the conversation was done, I just re-enabled Noise Cancelling and boom, I was in my own world again. It was just amazing, this is something we do not have on any other headphones on the market right now, and it’s actually my favourite feature in a product of this year.

COMFORTABILITY

So as important as sound quality is, if a pair of in-ear headphones are not comfortable to wear they are near useless. So how comfy are the AirPods Pro?

Well, surprisingly, they’re more comfortable than the original AirPods, thanks to the silicone eartips. With these they just float in your ears so nicely, and they also fit so much better than the regular AirPods did, so that’s great!

Now when you open up the box you actually get three different pair of eartips; small, medium and large, with the medium ones pre-installed. This is something that you get with pretty much every single pair of in-ear headphones, but what’s unique about Apple’s eartips is that they have a brand new attaching mechanism. This means that they are extremely difficult to remove, to the point where I actually though that I was going to break them, but they are extremely easy to put back on, as they just click in place. The downside of this first party fitting mechanism is that you have to use Apple’s own eartips, which are good, but I would’ve loved to have the option to test some foam eartips as well, that expand in your ear and provide and even better seal. I’m pretty sure that third party manufactures will start selling those at some point, but until then you have to stick to Apple’s own eartips.

The Ear Tip Test lets you know if the tips you have attached are the right ones for your ears

Now, when you buy any other in-ear headphones, you need to try multiple eartips for each of your ears and see which ones fit best, which is fine. But the AirPods Pro have this really amazing feature where, they will emit some sound and tell you in the setup process itself, if you have a good fit or not. This is thanks to the external microphone which is able to pick up the amount of sound that escapes from your ear and if that amount exceeds a certain level, it will tell you to change the eartip. Nice!

Also, one of the main complaints that some people had with in-ear headphones is that some of them isolate so well, that they create this pressure in your ear canal and they actually hurt. But, I’m glad to say that the AirPods Pro do not have this issues, and that’s because the top grill is actually an air vent that helps equalise the pressure. I have to say, it’s not as good as not having overheads that don’t go in your ear, or even the regular AirPods, as you’ll still feel a bit of pressure but nowhere near as much as you would with any other in-ear headphones. So I really do like that.

So overall, they’re definitely more comfortable than the original AirPods, just with a tiny bit more air pressure, especially when Active Noise Cancelling is enabled.

BATTERY LIFE

Ok, pretty good so far! Great sound quality, great comfortability so now, how’s the battery life?

Well, it’s similar to the regular AirPods, as in we get 24 hours with the charging case on both, but the battery life on the AirPods themselves is a bit different. So rather than five hours like we get with the regular AirPods, we get four and a half hours with the AirPods Pro. But this is actually with Noise Cancelling turned on. If you turn it off, you would get five hours, which is the same as before. However, we do get up to three and a half hours of talk time compared to three hours on the regular AirPods, so talk time has actually been improved.

But I do have two small complaints in terms of the battery life. The first one being that they still have a lightning port, and I do get why, because the iPhone 11 Pro’s still have a lightning port. But the MacBook’s have USB C, the iPad Pro also has USB C, and USB C isn’t even the future anymore, it’s the present! If Apple does finally switch to USB C next year, the AirPods Pro would be the only one that would be left behind. So, that’s quite inconvenient.

Also, whilst they do support wireless charging, which is great, the iPhone 11 Pro max does not support reverse wireless charging like the Samsung Galaxy S and Note series, or Huawei phones do, meaning that you cannot charge them from the back of the iPhone, like you can with Samsung’s Galaxy Buds or even the AirPods Pro, if you do have a Samsung phone. But that is more of a complaint towards the iPhone 11 Pro’s, not necessarily the AirPods Pro themselves.

SPECIAL FEATURES

Now, what special features do the AirPods Pro have that make them stand out from the competition, I hear you ask?

Well, aside from things such as the Transparency mode and the vent and the EarTip test, which are all unique to the AirPods Pro, we do get quite a few new special features.

First, they’re sweat and water resistant now with an IPX4 rating. Unfortunately, this means that you can’t swim with them in, but if you’re outdoors running and it’s raining these would last fine, whereas the previous AirPods might have broken. Also if you do go to the gym, these are now even better thanks to the sweat resistance and the added rubber seals, which make them stay in place unlike the original AirPods.

Secondly, we have the Hey Siri support. This is something that the AirPods 2 came with, which were introduced back in March 2019. But it’s pretty awesome being able to just say the Siri command and play any song that you want, read messages, news, do anything that you would do with Siri on your iPhone, without having to take your phone out of the pocket. This is extremely useful when you’re running outdoors.

The small indentation seen here is the new control button for the AirPods Pro

Thirdly, you do have a brand new control button. So before, with the regular AirPods, you had to double tap on the stem in order for the accelerometer to detect the tap, which was quite bad because most of the times it didn’t work. With the AirPods Pro, we have a long button which you have to physically hold and then press. Then if you press it once you play or pause a song, if you press it twice you swipe forward, press it three times to skip backwards and then you press and hold to switch between Active Noise Cancelling and Transparency Mode. Also, something quite cool is that when you tap on the control button, you can feel and hear it click but it doesn’t move at all. Instead, the AirPods Pro create this sound that mimics a click.

Overall, it’s definitely an improved control system over the original AirPods, but I would’ve loved to see a volume control. You see, every time I need to change the volume, I have to either take my phone out to do it, or ask Siri which is awkward if you’re in a public space, or use the Apple Watch which does work very well but you need to have an Apple Watch as well in that case.

Then finally, what I consider to be the best special feature about the AirPods Pro is the Apple ecosystem. You just open up the lid and they instantly connect to your iPhone, and then you can easily switch to using them on your iPad, your Mac, your Apple Watch, your Apple TV, pretty much any Apple product and that’s just amazing! Now, I have had issues in terms of connecting to my Mac, which is something that I’ve had issues with with the previous AirPods as well. So while iOS connection is very smooth, connecting and switching to a Mac still has some occasional glitches. You can indeed connect them to any other non-Apple product as well, Android phones, Windows laptop and any other smartTV that has Bluetooth.

However, I would say to not buy these if you don’t have a least one Apple product you plan on using them with, because outside of the Apple ecosystem, the volume is extremely low on these for some reason, and the equaliser is all gone so they don’t sound as good. Noise Cancelling does work but you lose many of the Apple functionality like auto-play and pause when you put them in your ears and take them out.

DESIGN

Now, if a pair of headphones has nailed all of these categories, which the AirPods Pro have, then the last thing aside from the value that I care about, is the design.

A design comparison between the AirPods Pro (Left) and the original AirPods (Right)

Well, first off these are very different from the original AirPods design wise. They’re now short and fat, compared to long and thin, but they still have the same AirPods look where they just look odd and unlike anything else on the market right now. This means that they will definitely stand out in public, if that’s what you’re after. I personally don’t think they look bad, just unusual.

The same goes for the case itself, it’s short and fat compared to long and thin like the previous one was. It is noticeably wider, but at the same time it now opens horizontally, rather than vertically. So, if you put both of them side by side, vertically, there isn’t that much of a difference between the two. The Pro case is thicker and taller but it still fits in my pocket so I’m fine with that. It’s still noticeably smaller than any other wireless headphones case on the market, including the Galaxy Buds which already has one of the smallest cases.

They come in the same glossy white plastic, but personally I would’ve loved to see these in matte black. I’m guessing Apple is keeping that for a special edition or something, so that they can sell more but until then we only have white.

VALUE

Then last, but not least, the value, are the AirPods Pro worth it? Well, at $250/£250 in the UK they are quite expensive. They are a very similar price to the Sony WF-1000XM3, which do sound better, but have a gigantic case which isn’t pocketable by any means. But if you have an Android phone then get the Sony’s and not the AirPods.

Otherwise, they’re a very good pair of headphones, definitely the best option for any Apple user. But if you already have a pair of AirPods, unless you have the 1st gen and the battery life is really bad, I wouldn’t suggest upgrading to the Pro’s.

But if you do have the original AirPods or a different pair of headphones and you plan on getting the AirPods Pro, you won’t be disappointed in any way.

Google Pixel 4 XL - The ZONEofTECH Review!

---

This is the Google Pixel 4 XL and you see, although the Google Pixel isn’t that popular of a phone, at least not when compared to Samsung, Apple or even OnePlus or Huawei, it’s actually one of the most interesting smartphones on the market right now.

You see, the reason why iPhones are so successful, why the UI is so smooth, why they get day one updates, and why they integrate so well in Apple’s ecosystem is that Apple makes both the hardware and the software. Then on the Android side it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to do that aside from Google because they make Android, and if Google made their own hardware they would be the only direct competitor to Apple’s crown.

And they have been making their own hardware for the past three years now, with their Pixel phones. This is their brand new fourth generation of Pixel phones that just came out in October, and this is my full in-depth review, and I have mixed feelings about this. You’ll see why in just a second!

---

DESIGN

Ok, so starting off with the design, let’s be honest. Google hasn’t really been the best at designing things.

The Pixel 1 which came in 2016, looked like an iPhone 7 did, but we did have a massive on-screen navigation bar, which actually made the bottom bezel look even bigger so it wasn’t the best looking phone. Then back was equally as bad as we had a dual tone metal and glass back, but it was all dark grey and looked very odd. I was never a fan of the first Pixel’s design.

Then the Pixel 2 came out in 2017, and this was the year when smartphones drastically changed their designs, with the iPhone X and Samsung Galaxy S8, which removed the home button and shrunk down the bezel considerably, in favour of a full-screen display design that we were all wishing for. But rather than doing that, Google gave the Pixel 2 massive bezels again, it was an improvement over the Pixel 1 but still pretty outdated when compared to the competition. However, I did really like the Pixel 2’s Panda look, I think that back was one of the best backs on any smartphone but the front was still outdated.

The design of the Pixel 1 (Left) 2 (Middle) and 3 (Right)

When the Pixel 3 then came out in 2018 we had that very deep notch, which was even uglier and deeper than the iPhone’s. But the Pixel 3 didn’t really have any smart tech inside of that notch, aside from a more powerful speaker and a wide angle camera module, which was just a single module. The back was improved again, so now it had a dual tone look, but all of it was glass. The top portion was standard glass, whilst the bottom portion was now frosted glass which had a really nice touch to it. The frame had a ceramic feel even though it was just polished metal, but overall the Pixel 3 had the most amazing back I’ve ever felt on any smartphone. Design wise and feeling wise, from the back at least, the Pixel 3 was just amazing. So things were getting better.

Now we have the Pixel 4, which is pretty much the same recipe as the previous Pixels. From the front it reminds me a lot of the Pixel 2XL from 2017, which wasn’t a bad design by any means, but we’re in 2019 now and phones have very thin bezels, and large and bright displays, but the Pixel 4 still looks like it came out three years ago, from the front at least. When you remember that the Pixel 5 will come out in October of 2020 which will make the Pixel 4 look even worse and even more outdated in the meantime.

So that’s the front, but the back is a completely different story. We now get a much bigger camera module than on the other Pixels, but don’t be fooled because even if this camera module looks extremely similar to the ones on the iPhone, the Pixel 4 only has a dual camera module rather than the triple one that, most other smartphones received in 2019. So Google’s again behind the competition in terms of the number of camera modules, more about that in the camera section of this video.

The Clearly White Pixel 4XL and the Oh So Orange Pixel 4

But I have to say, if the Pixel 3 had the best back on any phone for me, the Pixel 4 is even better! We now have a single smooth piece of glass, so no more dual tone this year, which is a bit unfortunate, but this glass is again frosted glass which feels absolutely amazing. You see, it leaves no fingerprints, yet it still has that glass feel to it. Then the frame of the phone has a matte plastic-like texture to it, but it’s not plastic it’s actually metal. It is hard to describe it, but in a way, it feel like paper. So overall, this is by far the best looking and feeling back I’ve ever seen and felt on a phone. The power button is also made of a different colour, which adds a very nice touch to it.

The Pixel 4 now comes in three colours. We have ‘Just Black’, which I’ve personally never held in my hands or even seen one in person, but that’s the only one that has a glossy back. The others, ‘Clearly White’ and ‘Oh So Orange’ have the same matte texture on the back, and yes, I’m absolutely in love with how the phone looks from the back. It’s got that Nintendo feel and look to it so to say, love it!

DISPLAY

Moving on to the display, the Pixel 4 comes with a 6.3” 3040x1440 resolution OLED display, which is actually pretty good. It’s very sharp at 537 PPI, it’s got a 100% DCI-P3 coverage, so it’s actually very colour accurate.

A colour comparison between the Note 10+ (Left) and Pixel 4XL (Right)

Now I do have two complaints regarding this display. The first being that the colours are a bit dull when compared to the Galaxy Note 10+ for example, but that’s more to do with Google’s colour profile than the display itself. Then my second complaint is the brightness of this display. So it’s just over 400 nits which is ok, it’s actually brighter than the OnePlus 7T Pro’s display by a tiny bit, but noticeably dimmer than the Samsung Galaxy S10, Note 10 or the iPhone 11 Pro Max. Now this is not necessarily a big issue, but if you use your phone outdoors a lot in bright sunlight, then this is something to consider.

However, my favourite part about this display is that just like on the OnePlus 7 Pro and 7T’s, we now have a 90Hz refresh rate! The means that everything you do on this phone, the UI, and all the animations are 50% faster and more fluid than on any other phone with a standard 60Hz refresh rate display. Also, after a recent software update, the Pixel 4 is pretty much at 90Hz all the time, compared to just when it had over 60% brightness, like it was when it was released.

Then something else that I really like about the Pixel, is that they’re are pretty much the only phones that come with an Always-On Display, aside from Samsung and some LG phones. For me, being able to see the time and notifications all the time, is a huge plus.

So overall, while the display is pretty good, I would’ve loved to see thinner bezels alongside a slightly brighter display.

CAMERA

The camera is an interesting one, because you see, Pixel phones have always been considered as one of the best if not even the best device, for mobile photography.

The Pixel 4, just like the 3 and 2 before it, has an incredible camera, but not as good as I would’ve hoped. You see, firstly the main back camera uses the exact same sensor as on the Pixel 3. It does however have a larger f/1.7 aperture compared to f/1.8 on the Pixel 3, so it does let more light into the sensor, but other than that it’s the same camera from the Pixel 3, which is quite disappointing. I was hoping Google to make some big changes with the Pixel 4’s main camera.

An example of the SuperRes zoom from the Pixels (Source: Slash Gear)

So whilst they haven’t changed the main camera they have added a second module. However, rather than Google adding a wide angle module, like everyone else is doing in 2019, Google decided to finally add a telephoto module, like everyone else was doing in 2017! Now, I’m not implying that Google should be up to date with the latest trends here, no. My point here is that the wide angle module is technically more useful than a telephoto module. You see, whilst you can zoom in digitally, you cannot take a wide angle photo without a wide angle lens. Google even had their SuperRes zoom before, which actually did a very good job, for a digital zoom, even rivalling some high end smartphones that had a dedicated zoom module. But what’s worse is that it’s not even a 5x telephoto module, it’s just a regular 2x optical zoom.

Also, I’m very disappointed with the video on this phone. The Pixel 4 still cannot do 4K60 video recording, which the iPhone added in 2017, again two years ago. All the major smartphones can do 4K60 now, even most of the mid-ranged ones can.

The front camera is good but Google has now removed that wide angle module, meaning that you cannot take group selfies anymore, since the front camera isn’t as wide. However, they have made the regular lens wider than the previous regular one, meaning that you still get an overall wider field of view, which is good! But what’s not good is that the front camera can only shoot 1080p 30fps, which compared to the iPhone 11 Pro’s 4K60 or the Note 10’s 4K30, is just terrible.

An example of the Astrophotography capabilities of the Pixel 4 (Source: Google AI Blog)

Night mode is great, same exact one as we have on the Pixel 3, however I did find the Pixels to add a lot of noise in some of the shots, so overall I actually ended up preferring the iPhone 11 Pro’s night mode and the OnePlus 7T Pro’s night mode, over the Pixel’s. But what Google has added with the Pixel 4, is a brand new Astrophotography mode, which is huge! You can now take photos of the night sky, similar to what you can take with a DSLR camera.

But that’s pretty much it. Aside from the Astrophotography mode, the camera is pretty much the same as before, even a downgrade on the front. I’m genuinely disappointed, and because of those issues I just cannot recommend the Pixel 4’s camera, as the competition offers a much better camera overall, with significantly better video, a significantly better front camera and a wide angle lens on the back.

PERFORMANCE

Performance wise, the Pixel 4 is ok. It’s very fast and fluid, I give it that. In our Ultimate Speed test between the Pixel 4 and the Note 10+, the Pixel 4 loaded apps just as fast as the Note, even-though the Pixel 4 has a much slower UFS 2.1 storage, compared to the twice as fast UFS 3.0, like the OnePlus 7T & 7T Pro or the Note 10+.

CPU wise, we don’t get the Snapdragon 855+, just the 855 which is almost a year old at this point. The 865 is now official, so Google’s already a year behind in terms of the CPU. This is down to their weird release cycle, where they release their phones in October, whereas Qualcomm announces a new CPU in December.

RAM wise, we do get a bump to 6GB of RAM from the Pixel 3’s 4GB of RAM, but even that’s still half of the 12GB of RAM that Samsung or OnePlus offer and that definitely shows. RAM management is pretty poor on this phone, it could barely keep any apps open in the background when compared to the Note 10+.

However, we do get day one updates and software support for around three years. The Pixel 1 from 2016 is still fully supported which is great. You cannot really get this level of customer support, unless you go with an iPhone. OnePlus is another great option, but they don’t offer you day one updates, you do have to wait a few weeks or months in order to get those.

SPECIAL FEATURES

Face Unlock is now available on the Pixel 4 XL

Now, when it comes to the Special Features, we do get one that stands out from the competition, and that is FaceUnlock. This is actually the reason for that big forehead, since that’s where all the 3D depth mapping sensors are housed. It’s essentially the same system that Apple uses for FaceID on their iPhone X and newer. But the difference is that Google also added a small Radar chip, which is from their Project Soli, that can detect your movement much more accurately than a camera could. This chip works in conjunction with the FaceUnlock system, in order to make the FaceUnlock process insanely fast. Literally, from the moment you pick up the phone, the Pixel lights up the display and in less than a second, it’s already unlocked. Which is pretty nuts! It’s noticeably faster than the iPhone’s FaceID system but it’s far from perfect. You see, third party app support is non existent at this point, so if you’re thinking of using your face to access your banking apps or anything like that, you cannot do it yet. Another slight issue is that it also works when your eyes are closed, which Google said that they will fix but we just don’t know when that’s going to be.

Now that Soli Radar chip I mentioned also allows you to control your music and interact with the Pixel by using your hand gestures, which is a really cool party trick, but in practice it just doesn’t work. It’s the Samsung Galaxy S4 from 2013 all over again and it just does not work the way it should, and the way maybe Google was hoping it would work. While you can indeed swipe left and right to go back now, it seems like Google forgot about the case where some apps use swipe gestures to bring the Menu up and the new Pixel Gestures are messing up with app menus because of this.

The speakers are no longer front facing, like on the Pixel 3, they do sound good, not as good as on the iPhone 11 Pro Max or the Note 10+, but still pretty good.

Apart from that, we don’t have WiFi 6, or reverse wireless charging, or a microSD card slot, or even more than 128GB of storage, which is the maximum amount that you can get on this phone. In fact Google has even removed some of the features that the Pixel 3 used to come with, such as the unlimited photo and video storage at full resolution for free, with Google Photos. That was one of the key selling features of the Pixel phone and Google removed it! What are you doing Google?

BATTERY

So you have probably seen a pattern so far in terms of how I feel about each section of the Pixel 4, and the battery is the same, it’s decent.

It is far from what the competition offers, and that’s because the battery itself is quite small, at just 3700mAh on the XL and 2800mAh on the regular Pixel 4. When you take into account that 90Hz turn on, it’s noticeably worse than on the OnePlus 7T Pro, which wasn’t that great already. So overall the Pixel 4 XL has an ok battery life with a decent fast charge of up to 50% in just 34 minutes, which is right on par with the competition, so there’s that at least.

VALUE

So the final question, is the Pixel 4 worth it? Sorry Google, but it’s a no from me.

It costs £830 or $900 which is cheaper than the Note 10+ which costs £1000 ($1100) and the iPhone 11 Pro which costs £1150 ($1150), but if you compare the Pixel 4 to the OnePlus 7T Pro which costs £700 or $550 for the OnePlus 7 Pro in the US there’s no competition, they are much better phones! The 7T Pro for example has better performance with the Snapdragon 855+, up to 12GB of RAM, up to 256GB of Storage, a more modern design, a larger display, a larger battery.

The cameras are worse on the OnePlus but not really by that much, and you can even install the Google Camera apk and get a much more improved camera that way. I was honestly bored with the Pixel, so much so that I just could not use it as my daily driver, because it was a downgrade from my iPhone, my Note and even my OnePlus.

So Google, I’m guessing fifth time’s the charm?

OnePlus 7T Pro Review - The PERFECT Android Phone of 2019!

---

This is the OnePlus 7T Pro. It’s definitely not the best name in a smartphone, but hey I’ve seen worst. Before I get into this I do want to say that the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ is the best Android phone of 2019 in terms of the amount of features that you get, there’s absolutely no denying that. We did a full review video after over two months of use. So feel free to check that out here.

But the OnePlus 7T Pro is the best Android Phone of 2019 in terms of value. You get pretty much everything you could ask for in a phone, at a much much lower price than the Galaxy Note 10+.

So without any further adieu, here is my full review covering my final thoughts on the OnePlus 7T Pro!

---

DESIGN

Ok, so most of you reading this are probably familiar with OnePlus as a company and what their vision stands for. In case you’re not, they’re basically trying to make flagship smartphones at affordable prices.

A design comparison between the OnePlus 7T Pro (Top) and the OnePlus 7 Pro (Bottom)

Now they do have to cut some corners in order to achieve that, which I’ll talk about in this review. To give you one example the OnePlus 7T Pro pretty much takes the crown when it comes to the least amount of changes from the previous generation ever. The OnePlus 7T Pro which came out in October is almost an identical copy of the OnePlus 7 Pro that we got back in May.

But it is still an incredible phone, and that’s because the 7T Pro is still one of the only phones in 2019 that does not have a notch or even a camera cutout at all. We get is a full screen display with zero interruptions for you to watch your content, which is just incredible! 

Now, the screen-bezels, or should I say the frame of the phone, is indeed thicker than on other phones such as the iPhone 11 Pro Max or the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, but considering that you don’t get any cutouts in the display itself, I’m very happy with this tiny trade-off. The 7T Pro simply looks like a phone that came from the future, 2020 or even 2021, where smartphones are just a full-screen display. It looks incredible and I’m absolutely in love with the design of this phone!

The back is made out of glass, but it does have this frosted glass texture, same as the iPhone 11 Pro’s or the Google Pixel 4, so it’s this very soft glass that doesn’t catch any fingerprints at all. This is therefore another plus for the OnePlus.

The 7T Pro only come in Haze Blue, and then also has a McLaren edition

Now, unlike the OnePlus 7 Pro which came in Mirror Grey, Almond & Nebula Blue, the OnePlus 7T Pro only comes in Haze Blue and then there’s also the McLaren Edition which has a more unique look to it on the back, which I do like a lot. However, if you’re looking for just a standard black or even the gold, you’re out of luck. I have to say, I actually do prefer the old Nebula Blue over the 7T’s Haze Blue, since it is a bit darker and feels more mature than the Haze Blue, to me at least.

The sides are made out of polished aluminium so they do look very premium but something that I don’t like about the 7T Pro design wise is just how bulky and big it feels in the hand. You see, at 8.8mm thick the 7T Pro is noticeably thicker than the 7.9mm thick Note 10+ and the 8.1mm iPhone 11 Pro Max. So overall this is a pretty chunky phone. Luckily the sides do curve, so it doesn’t feel that fat, but it does feel thick when holding it in the hand. When you also consider that the display is also quite large, at 6.67”, you can tell that the 7T Pro is definitely not a phone that you can easily use with one hand. 

Finally, even-though the 7 Pro and the 7T Pro basically look identical, aside from the different blue colour, there is one visual identifier and that is the Laser Autofocus is now outside of the camera module rather than inside of it, like it is on the 7 Pro. Also, the ring surrounding the camera module is now shinier and the megapixel count is now gone, but other than that, these phones are identical. 

DISPLAY

Moving on to the display and it’s good. Overall I would say that this is the best display on a smartphone but it doesn’t nail that in every single category and you’ll see why in just a second.

The 7T Pro has the exact same display as the 7 Pro did. So that’s a 6.67” Samsung made AMOLED display panel, with a resolution of 3120x1440 which translates to a PPI of 516. It’s a very sharp display, the black levels are perfect, the colours pop. It features a DCI P3 colors gamut with 100% coverage, so if you’re into photo or video editing on the go this is a amazing choice for that. Also, if you’re into consuming media, the 7T Pro does support HDR 10+ content. In addition, since there is no notch or display cutout, I actually crown the OnePlus 7T Pro the best phone for watching and viewing content!

But wait there’s more!

The 7T Pro comes with a 90Hz refresh rate panel, meaning that everything you do on this phone is 50% more fluid than on any other smartphone on the market right now that come with a standard 60Hz panel.

When you put the 7T Pro next to the Note 10+, or even the iPhone 11 Pro Max, you can see how much smoother the animations and UI really are. To see this in the video jump to 6 Minutes and 21 Seconds 

Games can also run at a much higher frame-rate, which they already do on other phones, but you would not be able to see frame-rates higher than 60. Whereas on the OnePlus 7T Pro, you can see up to 90fps.

A brightness comparison between the Note 10+, 11 Pro Max, Pixel 4XL and 7T Pro

So, the display on the 7T Pro seems like the best display ever on any smartphone and so far. But you see there is one complaint that I have, which might be a big issue for some users, and that is the brightness. We’ve actually used a professional colour and brightness measuring tool and on a pure white full-screen window, the OnePlus 7T Pro only achieved a maximum brightness of 457 nits, which whilst still higher than the Pixel 4 Xl’s 443 nits, it was significantly lower than the 723 nits on the Note 10+ or the 785 nits on the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

CAMERA

This is where the OnePlus 7T Pro gets really interesting, because you see, when I said that OnePlus had to make some trade-offs to keep the price low, the camera is usually the biggest trade-off in pretty much every single OnePlus phone.

But then, the OnePlus 7 Pro came out in May and it was OnePlus’s first premium smartphone, so to say. It had many innovative features from the design, to the popup front camera module, to the 90Hz refresh rate display and it also had a triple lens camera module, which was supposed to be great. But in the end it was only okay. It was better than the OnePlus 7’s camera but still nothing close to an iPhone’s camera, or a Samsung Galaxy S, Note, or even a Google Pixel. It was just a better mid-range camera, that was it.

And the 7T Pro has the exact same camera for the most part that the 7 Pro does. So does this mean that the camera is bad? Well, actually since the 7 Pro launched in May OnePlus has just slammed us with constant updates and improvements to their camera app, to the point where now, in our latest Blind Camera Test between the 7T Pro, the Pixel 4 XL, the iPhone 11 Pro Max and the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, the OnePlus 7T Pro got 2nd place, after the iPhone 11 Pro Max! I gave it the same score as the Pixel 4 XL and an even higher score than the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+.

In a lot of cases, it had the best night mode out of all 4 phones. Stabilisation was great, HDR was very good. So OnePlus have managed to turn mid-range camera hardware into pretty much a flagship level camera and I’m very surprised. The pop-up front camera module was very good as well, with perfect exposure, a wide viewing angle, and even the low light shots with the front camera were very good and my favourite out of all these 4 phones!

So what’s the catch? Well, the front camera can only do 1080p video at 30fps compared to 4K30 on the S10 and Note 10, or even 4K60 on the iPhone 11 Pro Max. Also the wide-angle lens isn’t as wide as on the iPhone or the Note and it’s also fairly soft and pretty bad in low light. But aside from that it’s very good, especially after the recent software updates.

The 7T Pro does have a Macro mode now, which is actually a hardware feature where a mechanism inside the phone adjusts the focus motor to focus up close. You can actually see how much of a difference this makes. If you take a look at the image you can see how sharp the coin is on the 7T compared to all the other phones which don’t have a macro mode. So, that’s pretty awesome and this is something that we didn’t have on the 7 Pro before.

PERFORMANCE

If you’re not yet convinced on getting the 7T Pro, this is the section that will definitely convince you. The OnePlus 7T Pro is by far the fastest and most fluid phone that I’ve ever used. Faster than the iPhone 11 Pro Max, faster than the Note 10+, the Pixel 4 or anything else.

But what do I mean by this? Well, spec wise, we get the Snapdragon 855+ processor, which is an overclocked version of the 855 that we got in the 7 Pro a few months before. The GPU is now 15% faster than on the 855 and the CPU is about 5-8% faster, so you should see a few extra frames in games, but nothing major.

But where it gets interesting is when we look at the RAM. You see the OnePlus 7 Pro came in 6GB, 8GB and 12GB of RAM options, however the 7T Pro only comes in 8GB. This is also a reason why the price has actually gone up by quite a bit now. However, if you do get the McLaren edition of the 7T Pro, that’s when you get 12GB of RAM.

But the reason why this phone feels so fast is because of that 90Hz refresh rate display and that UFS 3.0 storage, which neither the S10 or Pixel 4 have. The Note 10+ does have UFS 3.0 but it doesn’t have a 90Hz refresh rate display, same goes for the iPhone which has NVMe flash but no 90Hz. So the 7T Pro just flies through everything and OnePlus also has their Oxygen OS skin which is an extremely light skin. Pretty much stock android with just a few nice modifications, such as the ability to change the background colour of your UI, the accent colour of your buttons, you can re-order the menu buttons as well, and things like that that just give you more customisation options compared to a Pixel 4 for example.

Also OnePlus is the 2nd manufacturer, right after Google in terms of releasing software updates and it’s not that they’re fast with updates but they’re also supporting their devices for a really long time. Take the OnePlus 3 that came out in 2016 for example, that device is still receiving updates from OnePlus, and the OnePlus 5 & 5T which came out in 2017 will both be receiving an update to Android 10 in Q2 2020. 

So yeah great performance, day 1 updates and years of software support. Pretty happy so far! 

SPECIAL FEATURES

Like I mentioned at the beginning, the 7T Pro takes the crown when it comes to the least amount of changes from the previous generation ever, but unfortunately that means a lack of special features that make this phone stand out.

The 7T Pro still lacks wireless charging, which is something that all of OnePlus’s competitors have put into their flagships. OnePlus did say that the reason why they didn’t add wireless charging is because it’s not fast enough yet but that’s not strictly correct. The Note 10+ supports up to 15W wireless charging speeds, which is 3 times faster than the stock 5W iPhone charger.

In addition to the lack of wireless charging, there is no official IP water resistance rating or even dust resistance. OnePlus did add a rubber seal to unofficially add water resistance but they haven’t paid for the rating itself. I have seen cases where people submerged their OnePlus 7 Pro in water and it survived but at the same time, I’ve also seen cases where it didn’t. Considering the fact that we have that pop-up camera module now I wouldn’t submerge this in any way!

The 7T Pro follows the trend of other smartphones by no longer having a headphone jack

The headphone jack is also gone now. The speakers are good but not great.

There’s no microSD card slot, no crazy features like an S-Pen or anything like that, so yeah, it doesn’t look that great so far. 

But I do have two very positive things to say here. The first is that the in-display fingerprint reader on the 7T Pro is the fastest in-display fingerprint reader on any phone. It’s crazy fast. Then the second thing is that the 7T Pro has a haptic engine, similar to the one inside the iPhone 11 Pro Max, which brings haptics to the entire UI and it’s one of the best on any android phone, right on par with the Note 10+ and the Pixel 4XL. 

BATTERY LIFE

Now, when it comes to the Battery Life it’s good but not great. The 7T Pro comes with a 4085mAh battery, which is slightly larger than the 4000mAh battery that the 7 Pro had. However, now that we have a large 6.67” display that’s also 90Hz, the battery lasts noticeably less than on the Note 10+, the iPhone 11 Pro Max or even the Samsung Galaxy S10+. 

You can switch to 60Hz refresh rate to improve battery life

You can indeed switch to 60Hz on the display, which will improve the battery life but considering that 90Hz is one of the main key selling points of this phone I don’t think the trade-off is worth it really.

You do get a 30W charger inside the box, which is 6 times more powerful than what Apple used to ship until the iPhone 11 Pro’s. In our fast charging speed test, the 7T Pro charged to 50% in just 24 minute and up to 100% in just 1 hour and 7 minute. Insanely fast for a 4085mAh battery!

But, like I mentioned in the last section it doesn’t have wireless charging. 

VALUE

Now we finally come to value. Is the OnePlus 7T Pro worth it?

Well, the OnePlus One used to cost $300 back in 2014. The 7T Pro now costs £700, or $910 if you convert, because interesting enough it is not available in the US this time around. 

So whilst the 7T Pro is 3 times more expensive than what the first OnePlus phone used to cost, it’s still cheaper than the Note 10+ which costs £1000, and the iPhone 11 Pro Max which costs £1150.

And for the most part, you get the same experience. Just no wireless charging, no official water or dust resistance rating and a slightly worse camera. But considering that you do get faster performance, a full-screen display, a pop-up front camera module which is a great party trick, I do think that the 7T Pro is worth it so much more than any of the competition. The only exception being the non-Pro OnePlus 7T, which actually offers the exact same specs, same exact camera, just a slightly older looking design that still looks great and that starts at £550. So I do think that that phone is actually worth it even more than the 7T Pro is.

The 4 New iPhones for 2020!

---

The iPhone 11’s are now out, the reviews are in ours included and the iPhone 11 Pro Max that I’ve been using since September has been very good. The battery life has just been outstanding, the camera is great. I really don’t have any complaints at all, aside for the fact that we have the same design as on the 2018 iPhone XS and 2017 iPhone X.

This is the iPhone that we’ll have until September 2020, meaning that for the past 3 years, Apple hasn’t made any design changes to their iPhones at all, at least not from the front.

But the 2020 iPhones will be one of the biggest changes yet and they will feature a brand new design this time, so considering that I haven’t talked about the 2020 iPhones in a while now, here’s everything new you need to know!

---

The report on CNBC by JPMorgan Analyst, Samik Chatterjee where they predicted four new iPhones (Source: CNBC)

So the biggest leak in terms of the 2020 iPhone 12 (that’s just what we will call them for now) comes from JPMorgan analyst Samik Chatterjee, who claims based on information from supply chain sources, that Apple will be releasing four new iPhones in 2020, rather than three like they did in 2019 and 2018.

The smallest model would be a 5.4” iPhone, then we would have not one but two 6.1” iPhones and finally a massive 6.7” one. But which models would be the Pro’s? Well, Samik does report that one of the 6.1” models and that 6.7” model would both be Pro’s, while the 5.4” one and the other 6.1” iPhone would be lower entry models.

But then we have reports from Ming-Chi-Kuo, who’s had an outstanding track-record in the past, saying that Apple would only be releasing three iPhones in 2020. There would be one 5.4” model, one 6.1” model instead of two, and 1 6.7”. And the Pro models, according to Ming-Chi-Kuo, would be the 5.4” and the 6.7” variant.

Personally, I do think that the best approach for Apple would be to stick to just three models and offer the smaller and the bigger variants as Pro’s. This way, people who want to the performance and features of the biggest and most expensive iPhone that Apple offers can still get all of that in a much smaller form factor.

But according to pretty much every other report that we’ve seen, all four 2020 iPhones will now come with OLED displays. After so many years, we’ll finally get OLED on the entire lineup. However, the Pro models are still said to have a slightly more superior display, which is very likely to be the Pro-XDR display that Apple introduced with the iPhone 11 Pro’s, while the lower end models will likely have the iPhone XS’s display panel, which is still an OLED just not a bright and the 11 Pro’s display. 

Samik also said that all the four iPhone models in 2020 will support 5G, which has also been confirmed by Nikkei. Qualcomm’s President Cristiano Amon, did say earlier this week at their conference that their number one priority of their Apple relationship is launching their 5G phone as fast as they can. So 5G will definitely be one of the main focuses of the 2020 iPhones. However, it seems like the 5G speeds would not be equal on all these iPhones, Smik did say in his JPMorgan report that the lower end non-Pro iPhones will be limited to sub-6GHz 5G networks, which would not support the mmWave 5G which is the fastest 5G available at the moment. Personally I don’t really see this as an issue at all, since 5G is still very limited to just a few cities and you need to have a 5G phone plan as well. 

The new 0.25mm capacitors being produced by Murata Manufacturing (Source: MacRumors)

Also, speaking of 5G Nikkei reports that Murata Manufacturing, which is already a supplier for Apple, will start mass producing new tiny capacitors that take one fifth of the space of the current capacitors but offer ten times the electrical storage capacity. They’re absolutely tiny, at 0.25mm and by Apple using these capacitors it would allow them to free up some more space inside their iPhones, for those 5G antennas, which would indeed require some extra space.

Ok, what else? Well, Barclays analyst Blayne Curtis reported that he and his associates travelled to Asia recently to meet with manufacturers within Apple's supply chain and based on the information that he received it seems that both the iPhone 12 Pro and the 12 Pro Max will feature 6GB of RAM, up from the 4GB that the iPhone 11 Pro’s had, while the lower end models are still expected to come with 4GB of RAM. This is a bit disappointing because I’ve personally had RAM management issues with the iPhone 11 Pro Max, so that one should have definitely been upgraded to 6GB of RAM and then 8GB in the 2020 iPhones, but it seems like Apple will once again be behind in terms of RAM.

Some Android phones like the Note 10+ come with 12GB of RAM compared to the proposed 6 for the 2020 iPhones

Some Android phones today even have 12GB of RAM and yes, it’s not about the amount of RAM, it’s about how optimised a phone is to deal with that amount of RAM. Like I said, with 4GB of RAM I am having issues with my 11 Pro Max, even after the recent updates. Hopefully 6GB will solve that, but why not give it 8 Apple, just to be safe?

Barclays also reports that the two Pro models of the iPhone 12 will indeed feature a 3D time-of-flight camera. This is something that we’ve seen reported before by Ming-Chi-Kuo, back in July 2019. A TOF camera is essentially two small extra modules that include an IR receiver and an IR transmitter. The IR transmitter will beam a ray of IR light which will reach and object, bounce back and the IR receiver will calculate the distance between the camera and the object, based on the amount of time it takes for the IR light to be reflected back. This will allow the camera to map 3D objects in real time. This is actually how the FaceID camera maps your face as the FaceID camera on the front is already a TOF camera. 

So we’ll pretty much be getting the same thing on the back, which will have a noticeable benefit in AR apps. This means, significantly improved tracking which is already very good, and also the ability to scan objects or even small rooms possibly in 3D. It is likely to be something similar to what the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ can already do. Mark Gurman from Bloomberg has indeed detailed a road map of Apple’s AR and VR future, saying that they will be releasing a new iPad Pro in the first half of 2020, with this new 3D sensor followed by new high ends iPhones in late 2020 with the exact same cameras. 

Also, speaking of the new iPad Pro 2020, Sony Dickson sent over a model of that upcoming iPad and we’ve even made a separate hands-on video with that, which you can watch here.

Ok, so we’re getting 5G, the camera is getting another module with 3D TOF capabilities, we’re getting more RAM and possibly four rather than just three models. But what changes are we getting design wise?

Well, we’ve had many contradictory reports on this, from all the major sources. Some are saying that Apple will remove the notch entirely, and switch to an In-Display fingerprint reader, some are saying that they will actually use both, and that FaceID will now be included into the top bezel, so no notch, just a thicker bezels surround the phone, and some are saying that we’re still getting FaceID, just with a smaller notch.

The ZONEofTECH Concept for the 2020 iPhone

Personally, I don’t see Apple removing FaceID that quick. They’ve spent so much time perfecting it, and we also have Animoji’s and apps that are using the 3D depth tracking capabilities of the FaceID camera on the iPhones. I do believe the reports however, that are pointing towards the notch being made thinner and smaller and that is how we’ve actually modelled our concepts, which I actually think look really good!

Now, the second design change which is something you’ve probably already noticed from our concept, is the frame of these iPhones.

Rather than this being that rounded shape that iPhones have had since the iPhone 6 in 2014, the 2020 iPhones are rumoured to bring back that old iPhone 4 look, with a more square off frame. The iPad Pro 2018 brought this design back, so we’ve actually modelled our concepts based on the iPad Pro 2018’s frame and I’m absolutely in love with how it looks! The iPhone 4 was by far my favourite design of any phone and this seems to top even that. 

And Korean website TheElec, reports that Apple will be using LTPO displays for the 2020 iPhones. The same technology that Apple is now using in the Apple Watch. This will allow to iPhones to have a variable refresh rate, which could go down to even 1Hz, again, just like on the Apple Watch Series 5. This means that the 2020 iPhones could finally be getting an Always-On Display, something that we’ve had on Android phones for many years now and this has been one of my favourite feature ever in a phone. Being able to see the time and your notifications on screen all the time without having to unlock the phone is just amazing! Apple did add wireless charging to the iPhone X and 8, again a feature that was available on Android phones for years, and now there’s finally a very likely possibility that they’ll also add an always on display.

But this display could be more than just what the Apple Watch Series 5’s display is, which can go from 60Hz, to as low as 1Hz. You see, the iPad Pro’s have something that’s a bit better. They have 60Hz panels that can go as high as 120Hz and as low as 24Hz. They’re called a ProMotion display and I believe that this is what Apple would be including in the 2020 iPhones, at least on the Pro’s. Many smartphones today have started including 90Hz refresh rate displays, some even 120Hz, which make the entire UI experience 50-100% more fluid than what we currently have now.  IceUniverse, a very well known leaker at this point, reported that Apple is actually considering a switchable 60/120Hz refresh rate screen, for the 2020 iPhones and that they’re currently in discussion with Samsung and LG for this. 

Apple Patents hinting towards a full-screen fingerprint reader (Source: AppleInsider)

And speaking of the display, here’s something interesting. Economic Daily News Taiwan, who do have a good track record, reported that Apple will be holding meetings with Qualcomm to discuss adding an in-display fingerprint reader to at least one of their iPhones. The reason this is interesting is because when we look back at Apple’s patents they show an iPhone using full screen TouchID, which is something that we do not currently have. Now Qualcomm has recently shown us their new generation of In-Display fingerprint reader, which is 17 times larger than the one on the Galaxy S10 and the Note 10. So it’s likely that they’re in talks with Apple, to turn that into possibly a full-screen fingerprint reader.

Then finally a very surprising report from DigiTimes Taiwan which was picked up by MacRumors, claims that Apple is actually considering bundling AirPods inside the box of the 2020 iPhones. Now, I’m a bit skeptical about this report but when the iPhone X came out, I even said in my full review, that for how much it costs, $1000, Apple should definitely bundle AirPods with this phone, but of course that they didn’t and the prices went up even more. With the introduction of the iPhone XS Max and 11 Pro Max and AirPods became even more expensive, with the 2nd gen and the AirPods Pro. So because of that, it seems to me like Apple’s prime motive is again, to make as much profit as possible, so bundling free AirPods inside the box? I just don’t see them doing that.

Now, this DigiTimes report did claim that smartphone vendors, including Samsung and Xiaomi, so not just Apple, are all considering bundling truly wireless headphones in the box of their upcoming phones. And I do see Samsung doing this, I really do. But Apple? I don’t think so. If they do do it, I don’t see them being the first ones on the market to do it. Probably in about two years time but maybe not even then.

PS5 - MAJOR Leaks Update - Price, Graphics and more!

---

Over the past couple of months we have done a couple of videos and articles on the upcoming PS5 from Sony.

A couple of weeks ago we did a video and article surrounding the PS5 Controller and everything we knew about it, as there had been quite a few leaks regarding it. Then a couple of weeks before that we did a massive video and article covering an exclusive picture that we received of the PS5 developers kit. This was a never seen before image and it basically showing the PS5 that we had seen in previous patents, and we actually got picked up by quite a few tech website thanks to this.

But what will we be covering in this video and article? Well, we have a ton of major updates to cover, from insane spec updates, to some more controller leaks and a direct comparison between the PS5 and Xbox 2. So get those snacks ready and here’s the latest updates on the PS5!

---

SPECS

The PS5 will have some truly next generation graphics, 4K at up to 120fps and even 8K at 30fps, these have both been officially confirmed by Sony so they’re not even leaks anymore. 

But one of the main upgrades to the PS5, and this is something that some of you might be familiar with would be the HDD. You see, rather than the PS5 using a traditional HDD, like we’ve had in pretty much all modern consoles, both the PS5 and the Xbox 2 will be using SSD’s (Solid State Drives). This is very similar to what you find in modern laptops as SSD’s are up to 10 times faster than HDD’s, offering speeds of around 500MB/s from the standard 50MB/s that a HDD offers.

NVMe or PCIe flash storages are usually found soldered to the motherboard as seen in the image above

However, the PS5 will be using something even more powerful than a SATA based SSD. Sony did say that they’ve developed a custom storage option that would offer speeds of up to 19 times higher of what the HDD inside the PS4 could achieve. So 19 times 50 is 950MB/s which is pretty much in the territory of NVMe and PCIe based Flash Storage. These are flash modules that are soldered onto the motherboard, that offer much much higher speeds that what a SATA based SSD would be able to offer, which is always limited to between 500 and 550MB/s. Now if you do get a high end laptop that’s aimed at creatives today, such as a Dell XPS or the MacBook Pro, these have read and write speeds of well over 2GB/s. So while the PS5 won’t have speeds as high as a high end laptop’s storage has, it will still be much faster than the HDD inside the PS4 was.

Also, Sony did showcase a demo of Spiderman running on the PS5, and the entire game loaded in just 0.8 seconds! The PS4 Pro was still extremely fast and it only took just over 8 seconds to load the game, but the PS5 took 10 times less than that, and also keep in mind that this game was not optimised fully and not even developed with the PS5 in mind. 

Ok, so this is a standard mid-range laptop NVMe flash module that you can find in any laptop, right? Well, not really. You see, Mark Cerny, the lead system architect for both the PS4 and the PS5, did say that the RAW bandwidth of the PS5’s SSD is higher than of any other SSD’s on the market right now. But what benefits would an SSD bring to the PS5, other than just loading the games really fast? Well, in the Spider-Man demo for example, Sony also showed us the maximum speed that Spidey can swing on webs at, and on the PS4 Pro, once you hit a certain speed the system cannot stream the data fast enough from the HDD and therefore the game freezes and Spidey cannot swing any faster. Then with the PS5, they stared off at the same speeds as before, but everything was much smoother. Then when the speeds are increased, everything is remains perfectly fluid and Spidey can swing insanely fast! Imagine how amazing racing games will be on the PS5 thanks to this new storage. This is huge!

So you see, it’s not just that games will load faster, it’s also the experience inside of a game that would be dramatically improved. And we’ve actually had a few big leaks in terms of the PS5’s SSD recently.

An Infographic from Samsung’s event showing system boot and game launch speeds (Source: TechTastic)

According to TechTastic, Samsung had a presentation in Tokyo where they showcased their upcoming SSD for game consoles in 2020, ‘SSD era in games console 2020’, that’s what it was called. And what they showed was how improved the system boot and the game load times were. For example, with the standard HDD it would take a game console around 49 seconds to boot, and with a standard SSD it would take them around 29 seconds. However, their upcoming Optimised NVMe modules can boot the system in less than half of that, around 10 seconds. Then when it comes to game launch speeds a HDD took 38 seconds to load compared to 13 seconds with an SSD and then less than 6 seconds with the new Optimized NVMe drives. Monster Hunter was the game that these tests were being done with, just so you know.

And Mark Cerny did actually say in his interview with the Wired that the PS5 will indeed come with optimised flash storage, rather than standard modules that laptops use. So it makes a lot of sense for Sony to use Samsung’s brand new “Optimised NVMe” modules in the PS5, which means that this will be a proprietary module, specifically designed for the PS5, rather than something that you would be able to find in stores. However, there is a pretty big issue here. You see, if all the games are optimised to work with Sony’s new flash module, it won’t be cheap to manufacture by any means. I mean if you look at NVMe modules today, a 1TB Samsung made M.2 drive costs around 150-300 pounds in the UK, which is more than half of what the PS5 will cost. 

PSErebus’s tweet regarding the release date and price of the PS5

Speaking of this, twitter leakster PSErebus who’s had a pretty good track record in the past when it comes the accuracy of his leaks posted that the PS5 will be launching on November the 20th 2020, at a price of $500 which is actually the exact same price that the Xbox One X costs. Considering how powerful the PS5 will be, even when compared to the Xbox One X, I would say that $500 is an outstanding price. It’s less than a mid-range smartphone, and this is a console that will last you for 5-7 years, compared to a smartphone that most people change every 2 years or so. 

Ok, so going back to the SSD. I was saying that one issue is the high cost of the SSD itself as the PS5 is very likely to ship with a 1TB NVMe flash module. However games today have become massive and most people will need an external drive, which are supported on the PS4 and will most likely still be supported on the PS5. So the question here is, if you need more storage and you plug in an external HDD, wouldn’t this impact the games heavily, since that storage would be significantly slower than the internal storage? Keep in mind that all games will be made to take full advantage of the extremely fast internal storage.

Well, one solution to this is that Sony could indeed limit the use of external SSD’s only and drop HDD support entirely, but even those, only reach 500MB/s or so. Therefore you would need something like an external m.2 module in order to even reach speeds close to the internal module and those ones pretty expensive. However, I do have some good news here, there have been reports that Sony is planning on developing the flash module as a modular system, so that you can easily swap it out for a higher capacity modules, when you need to.

This means that Sony will very likely sell these modules alongside the PS5. They will be more expensive than what an entry level m.2 drive will cost, but they should be perfectly compatible with the PS5, and games will still make full use of those modules as well. So, if at some point in time you want to upgrade the storage to maybe 4TB you should be able to easily do that by buying one of these modules. Also, it’s very safe to assume that the PS5 will also let you connect these modules externally, so that you can also expand your internal storage.

Renders of PS5 Cartridge concept by LetsGoDigital

A brand new Sony patent uncovered by LetsGoDigital shows what looks to be a cartridge. Maybe the module 1st party SSD module that you would use to expand your PS5’s storage? Well that’s what it looked to be, and LetsGoDigital even made some renders of it, but unfortunately it turns out that its actually just a cartridge for a completely different Sony product a kids tablet/toy that you use to control some cars.

Anyway, the point is that this is completely unrelated to the PS5 unfortunately. However, like I said before, it is still very likely that Sony will indeed offer SSD modules themselves, that will extend your internal/external storage on the PS5.

Now, in case you’re worried about the storage or the price of these expansion modules, I do have some good news. Mark Cerny did say in his interview with Wired that the PS5 will support a new way of installing and playing games. You would now be able to select if you want just install the Campaign of a game, or just the Multiplayer and you can even delete parts of a game that you’ve already played and no longer wish to play. In Call of Duty Modern Warfare for example, you would be able to uninstall the Campaign right after you’ve finished it and only then install the multiplayer, which would save you around 50GB or so. 

Also, Mark Cerny did say that because of how slow the HDD was on the PS4, some developers had to make copies of the game textures multiple times so that they can load them simultaneously, since it was faster to load them this way. However, this resulted in a lot of space being wasted.

So not only will the PS5 games occupy way less storage, but parts of the games will be able to be uninstalled as we wish, which means even more free space. 

CONTROLLER

Now, something else that we’ve had recently in terms of the PS5 leaks, are some updates on the PS5 controller.

This is something that I’ve covered extensively in our last PS5 video and article. In that one I talked about some leaked PS5 development kit controller photos and showed the PS5 controller with the built-in display that replaced the touchpad. We also got the options and share buttons inverted, so they were horizontal rather than vertical. We also had microphones or dual speakers on each side of the screen and also a very weird shape that had the bottom portion of the controller indented which from the looks of it would feel very uncomfortable, but it might actually be the opposite, when holding this in person.

A design comparison between the new PS5 Controller patent (Left), the Nintendo Switch Controller (Middle) and Xbox controller (Right)

Then just last week, we had a new patent filing by Sony on what appears to be a new controller that looks very similar to the PS4 one. We have a shape that now matches the Xbox and Nintendo Switch Pro controller a bit more, which were known to be the most comfortable gaming controllers on the market, so that‘s great to see.

The TouchPad is quite a bit larger than the one we had on the PS4 controller. Also it doesn’t curve anymore but instead it’s now completely flat, which is interesting because you know what else is flat? Touchscreens. I mean yes, there are curved touchscreens and displays but those are very expensive to manufacture. So I believe that because of how this patent looks and because of the leaked PS5 controller dev kit images that we’ve seen before, the PS5 controller will indeed replace the touchpad with a full touchscreen display. And we would be able to use this in games and most importantly see the chat and friends menu. This would be great because if you want to type a message on the PS4, you either have to use the joystick, which will take you a year to type a single sentence, or you’ll have to use your smartphone which isn’t as convenient since you need to connect it to your PS4 first.

Aside from this we still seem to have 2 ports that both look to be 3.5mm headphone jacks, and we are getting a USB C port for charging, Mark Cerny did confirm that, we cannot really tell if that’s the black spot right below the headphone jack or if that’s on the back where it used to be on the PS4 controller.

The weird hole on the controller that, as of now, we are unsure what it is for

The speaker is in the exact same place, the options and share buttons are also in the same place and in the same orientation. So really, aside from the shape, USB C and the screen, the only thing that looks changed to me is that weird hole right below the PlayStation button.

When Mark Cerny had his October interview with Peter Rubin from the Wired, Mark did actually hand Peter a PS5 controller. He wasn’t allowed to share any photos or videos of it, but this is what Peter had to say: “Cerny hands me a prototype of the next-gen controller, an unlabelled matte-black doohickey that looks an awful lot like the PS4’s Dualshock 4. After all, there’s a little hole on it, and a recently published patent points to Sony developing a voice-driven AI assistant for the PlayStation.” 

If you want to look at the patent that Peter was referring to you can see it here, but from the sounds of it, the one that we’ve seen in the patent sounds like exactly the controller that Peter was given by Cerny. And that mysterious hole would then indeed be for the microphone which would be used for Sony brand new AI assistant.

So there you have it, the latest updates on the PS5. What do you think so far? Are you going to buy one?

THIS is the Samsung Galaxy S11!

---

The Samsung Galaxy S11 has been leaked and it is going to have that massive Penta camera module on the back which seems to be even bigger than the on the iPhone 11 Pro Max. So without further adieu, these are all the latest Leaks & Rumors on the Samsung Galaxy S11!

---

The S11 has been leaked quite heavily and we even did a full video and article about two weeks ago, covering everything we knew up until that point. That video and article was split into eight different sections covering everything from; Display, Display, Battery, Special Features, Camera & more. So if you want to get a very detailed look at the S11, do check those out first, since this one is mostly focused on just the more recent leaks.

Recently the biggest leaks have been coming from OnLeaks. OnLeaks has had some pretty outstanding track record in the past, up to the point where if does post a leak or especially a full render, we can probably bet that that’s exactly how that phone will look like, and the S11 is no exception. 

A concept render of the S11e (Source: OnLeaks & Pricebaba)

On November the 23rd, OnLeaks teamed up with Pricebaba to give us a first look at the Samsung Galaxy S11e, the lowest end model of the S11 lineup. As you can probably tell, the S11e is a gigantic departure from the S10e that we got last year. We no longer get thicker bezels and a flat display, but instead, some very thin bezels and a curved display as well. Then on the line of the display, the size of it got a pretty big bump, from 5.8 inches to 6.2, making the S11e even bigger than the regular Galaxy S10 was last year. The aspect ratio has also been increased to 20:9, from the previous 19:9. This means that it will be noticeably taller than the S10e. In addition, the camera cutout is now in the middle, similar to how it is on the Note 10, rather than to the right like the S10’s had it. We also seem to be getting a triple lens camera module, from the dual lens one that we had before. The Bixby button has been removed, so the only buttons that we now have are the power button and the volume buttons. Now, on the S10e we did have an fingerprint reader built into the power button, rather than the in-display fingerprint reader that the more expensive S10 and S10+ had. But I cannot see any fingerprint reader embedded into the power button, which means that the S11e will very likely get an in-display fingerprint reader. 

Also, I really really love this blue colour from OnLeaks’s render. Considering that it’s in the render itself, it’s very likely that this will indeed be one of the colour options that Samsung will have for the S11e. Personally, I actually think that that is my favourite shade of blue that I’ve ever seen on a smartphone. But of course that is just a render, so that shade of blue will most certainly look a bit different in real life.

So, the S11e looks pretty stunning. If Samsung prices this well, then this will be one of the best selling smartphones of 2020, because it just nails everything so so well.

Now, on November the 22nd, OnLeaks teamed up with another tech website, in this case 91mobiles and showed us the Galaxy S11, which would be the second offering in the S11 lineup. This is actually the one that we based our own concept on, and the S11 does have a few changes from the S11e. 

A concept render of the S11 (Source: OnLeaks & 91Mobiles)

First, the bezels do appear to be thinner than on the S11e. Especially if you take a look at the side bezels, there seems to be a very noticeable difference there. In addition, the top and bottom bezels also appear to be a bit thinner than on the S11e. The edges do seem to be a bit more curved on the S11 compared to the S11e. Overall, while I think the S11e still looks amazing, design wise the S11 does have a slightly more modern design. 

Like the S11e we also get a larger display now with the S11. We get a 6.7” panel up from the 6.1” that the S10 came with, so that’s a gigantic increase in the display size. This makes the S11 even bigger than the S10+ was last year and actually the exact same display size as the gigantic S10 5G had. 

But then on the back is where we get the even bigger changes. Rather than three camera modules, we get five modules as the one on the bottom right is actually for the microphone. This means we get a penta camera module, and a microphone, and a flash all in that gigantic camera set up on the back. Personally, I don’t really have a problem with this as long as the camera quality is improved, and the good news is that it will actually be significantly improved! So the main camera module would be upgraded from the S10’s 12MP module to an insane 108MP one! This is Samsung’s latest and greatest smartphone camera sensor, at least in terms of resolution. This new sensor is quite massive not just in terms of the resolution but also in terms of its physical size. Compared to the previous sensor which measured in at 1cm diagonally, this one is 1.91cm, so pretty much double the size which could easily be the reason as to why Samsung has such a gigantic camera module on the back of the S11. But as most of you know, or at least hopefully know, that megapixels don’t means quality. They just mean more resolution so you can zoom in more, that’s it.

Think of a sensor as a chess board, a grid where the size of the board is the size of the sensor and each squares inside are actually the pixels. If you increase the number of pixels, you need to make them smaller, otherwise they won’t fit on the board. But here’s the thing, pixels capture photons or light particles and the larger the pixels are the more photons or light they can capture. Therefore, if you want a sensor to be good in low light you need to have a few mega pixels as possible, otherwise the pixels would be so small that they would barely be able to capture any light and the images would be extremely soft and blurry in low light. This is why high end phones such as the iPhones, the Samsung Galaxy phones, even the Google pixels have always had a 12MP camera, and why mid-range phones from Xiaomi, OnePlus, Oppo added 48MP, 64MP and now even 108MP modules with the Xiaomi Mi Note 10, because just having a larger mega-pixel count does make it sound better which is extremely important to have in the mid-range category, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is better.

So I am a bit worried in terms of the low light performance on the S11, considering that the Xiaomi Mi Note 10, which has the exact same 108MP sensor by the way, didn’t really have the best results in low light or even day light. What I mean by this is that if it was slightly cloudy, the results weren’t that great. So I do hope that Samsung optimises this heavily in software.

We’re also getting 8K video recording in up to 30 fps. Yes, 8K video on a phone, we barely even have any professional cameras that can do 8K and Samsung will be the first to support it on a phone! I guess that this is also a way for Samsung to promote and sell their new 8K TV’s now that they also have a phone that can film content for that TV.

Now, so far I’ve only talked about the main module, but we do have a few more modules. So the top and bottom ones would be the zoom and the ultra wide angle modules. The zoom module is actually expected to offer a 10x optical zoom, or lossless zoom, in combination with that 108MP sensor which is pretty impressive. We would then have a digital zoom of up to 50x, so this camera would be very similar to the zoom capabilities that we got with the Huawei P30 Pro. Then we also have two more modules which we don’t yet know what they are for. Some of you might think that they’re TOF, or time-of-flight sensors, similar to what the Note 10+ had, but you’ll see why that’s very likely not the case in just a bit.

So I personally think that one of them is a Macro lens, as quite a lot of mid-range smartphones did include a macro module in 2019, so I do see Samsung including one in the S11 as well and then the second one could be a depth sensor, for improving portrait mode photography with the back facing camera. So that’s what I think, and the reason why I believe that these are not TOF sensors is because OneLeaks also leaked the big S11+.

With the S11+ we get the same design on the front as the regular S11, just with an even larger 6.9” display, making this even bigger than the Note 10+, so this will be a mammoth of a phone.

A concept render of the S11+ (Source: OnLeaks & CashKaro.com)

Then on the back, the camera module itself will be even bigger than on the regular S11 and the camera modules themselves are arranged in a very different way than they are on the S11. We get five main modules, just like on the S11, but then we also get two dots which to me look to be either dual microphones or two TOF sensors. They’re a bit small to be time of flight sensors, but at the same time, there is no cutout in the glass itself for them to be microphones, so they could be either or. Now, when it comes to the front facing camera, this will very likely be upgraded to a 4K 60fps camera so that it matches frame-rate that the iPhone 11 Pro can do, as at the moment the S10 can only do 4K 30fps with the front camera.

The headphone jack will also be removed from the S11’s, just like with the Note 10+. This means that if you want to used wired headphones you would either have to use a dongle, which will probably not come bundled in the box, or you can also use wireless headphones such as the Galaxy Buds 2, which will also be launching alongside the S11. 

Speaking of sound, the top speaker grill is expected to be even thinner than on the Note 10+, which was absolutely minuscule. It was so thin you could barely see it and since the headphone jack is being removed we might be getting dual speakers on the bottom. However, on OnLeaks’s render we only have one speaker grill and one microphone port. In our render, we did add a second speaker grill though. 

Now as a complete 180 on all of that, IceUniverse who’s also a pretty well known leaker at this point, did say that OneLeaks’s rendeers are not 100% correct. He says that the final version will be more beautiful than this so we’ll have to wait and see. OnLeaks has had a very good track record in the past, so my guess is that it will the final design, it’s just that Samsung will be making some more tweaks here and there, until February, shrinking down the camera module a bit for example, or maybe even re-ordering the camera lenses, but the main idea of its design should be very similar to the one we’ve seen.