Samsung Galaxy S7 edge wins by a mile 

Boy, we knew that the Galaxy S7 edge had a real chance of winning this one, but we didn't expect it to lead by that much! Our blind camera comparison featured six different scenes and generated a total of 26,475 reader votes. Impressive, surely, but not as much as the fact that Samsung's curvy phone won in four out of the six rounds. With a total of 12,459 votes, it had more than twice the reader support compared to its opponents.

In second place is a phone we had high hopes for – the iPhone 7. Apparently, its images couldn't wow our readers as much, although it still managed to win in two out of the six scenes. With a total vote count of 5249, the iPhone 7 is far behind the Galaxy S7 edge.

As for the iPhone 6s and LG G5, they both finished closely behind the iPhone 7. The images from the former received 4749 votes in total, while the latter won the hearts of 4006 of our readers.

And that's a wrap, folks! In our opinion, the cameras of all four handsets performed splendidly, but at the end of the day, our readers chose the Galaxy S7 edge as their favorite. Rest assured that another grand camera comparison is coming really soon, and we'll see how it fares in that challenge. Until then, feel free to give the sample images another look – we've embedded them in the galleries below. 

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 still popular in South Korea despite global recall

The Galaxy Note 7 global recall commenced earlier this month, but not all potential faulty units have been returned by customers yet. However, Samsung hopes to finish with the Galaxy Note 7 exchange program by early November when the smartphone's sales should be resumed across the globe.

After a series of negative news about Samsung's newest flagship smartphone here is some good news for a change. According to Korean media, the Galaxy Note 7 remains popular among customers in Samsung's home country.

All three major carriers in South Korea, SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus, have recently resumed activating Galaxy Note 7 units sold via pre-orders last month. Around 16,000 phablets were activated in the country, which is a great number for a new smartphone marketed in South Korea.

More than 400,00 Galaxy Note 7 units were sold via pre-orders in South Korea, beginning August 19, but 20-30% have yet to be activated.

An authorized reseller was quoted saying that “consumers seem to have no special antipathy toward the Galaxy Note 7. They seem rather insensitive to the recall case.”

Exactly 73% of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphones sold before September 15 have already been exchanged in South Korea. Around 23,000 units were exchanged on September 28 alone, but there's still time for customers to return their faulty units.

According to Samsung, the ordinary sale of the new, safe Galaxy Note 7 phablets is expected to resume on October 1, but only in South Korea. Some retailers estimate that Samsung will sell around 20,000 phones during the day the sale is resumed.

Alcatel Idol 4S Review

Introduction

The smartphone market is all too often one of extremes. It's easy to throw down $700 on a new phone and expect screaming performance, innovative new features, and an attractive design incorporating plenty of premium-feeling materials. It's also easy to cut every corner you can find, delivering a phone that captivates shoppers with its incredibly low price tag – while leaving them wanting just about everywhere else.

What's much trickier, though, is setting proper expectations in the middle-of-the-road $200-to-$500 space. Which aspects of the phone do we still demand a lot from, and which are we willing to let slide in the name of value? And dare we even ask for a few extra bonuses along the way?

With the new Idol 4S, Alcatel is attempting to walk that tightrope, giving us a $400 smartphone that's well built, offers competitive performance, and can hook shoppers up with extras like the custom-designed VR headset it comes contained in. 

In the box:

• Alcatel Idol 4S
• Micro USB cable
• Fast charging adapter
• Feature guide
• SIM tool
• JBL earbuds
• Alcatel VR goggles

Design

Alcatel's really intent on drawing attention to those speakers

One of the first things you're likely to notice about the Idol 4S's design is that the phone's glass (which you'll find both front and back) doesn't quite stretch all the way to the handset's top and bottom edges. Instead, you have a few millimeters of metal frame sticking out, housing the phone's stereo speakers. Oddly, the speaker grilles are visible on the phone's front and back alike, though the speakers themselves only face forward.

The other component that really screams for attention is the phone's side-mounted circular “Boom key” button, a multi-purpose interface for calling upon a number of software features. Its look is reminiscent of the power button on older Xperia models.

Those two idiosyncrasies aside, the Idol 4S is pretty standard-looking smartphone fare. You've got a raised camera bump on the back, flanked by its LED flash and sitting atop a rear fingerprint scanner. Down on the bottom edge there's your (oddly off-center) micro USB port; the headphone jack lives up top. On the phone's right side, above the Boom key, resides the volume rocker, while the left edge is populated by the power button and combo SIM/microSD tray.

 

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Front view | Side view

Display

Quad HD on a mid-priced phone is nothing to shake a stick at

We love it when mid-rangers share the same sort of components we see in high-end flagships, and Alcatel is giving us just such a high-quality part in the form of the Idol 4S's 5.5-inch quad-HD (1440 x 2560) AMOLED panel. It's bright, and offers just the sort of overblown-but-still-quite-nice-to-look-at (if somewhat less than accurate) saturation OLED screens are known for.

What's a little less successful is Alcatel's attempt to give the Idol 4S a curved-at-the-edge “2.5D” glass effect for its screen. The handset's lines, pinching in down the long edges, sure evoke the general style of phones like the Galaxy S7 edge, but that's not quite what we actually have here. Instead, a thin seam around the periphery reveals a sandwich of multiple glass layers, apparently designed to mimic a curvier phone. Technically, it's a pre-installed 2.5D screen protector, but it's not like anyone's about to pry it off and risk ruining their brand-new phone. Ultimately, it looks OK, but we can't shake the feeling that the Idol 4S is trying too hard to be something it's not.

Display measurements and quality

• Screen measurements
• Color charts

	MAXIMUM BRIGHTNESS(nits)HIGHER IS BETTER	MINIMUM BRIGHTNESS(nits)LOWER IS BETTER	CONTRASTHIGHER IS BETTER	COLOR TEMPERATURE(Kelvins)	GAMMA	DELTA E RGBCMYLOWER IS BETTER	DELTA E GRAYSCALELOWER IS BETTER
Motorola Moto G4 Plus	680 (Excellent)	2 (Excellent)	1:1412 (Excellent)	6820 (Excellent)	2.32	4.95 (Average)	3.54 (Good)
Alcatel Idol 4s	634 (Excellent)	6 (Good)	unmeasurable (Excellent)	7366 (Good)	2.16	4.44 (Average)	4.73 (Average)
Sony Xperia E5	508 (Excellent)	4 (Excellent)	1:1915 (Excellent)	6618 (Excellent)	2.14	3.74 (Good)	5.2 (Average)
Samsung Galaxy J7 (2016)	423 (Good)	4 (Excellent)	unmeasurable (Excellent)	6820 (Excellent)	2.03	4.19 (Average)	7.33 (Average)

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Moto Z Play Droid Review

Introduction

Earlier this year, Lenovo started something special. It launched a modular smartphone hardware program that wasn't just a bunch of accessories for one phone (with the promise that hopefully, maybe, some of that hardware might also work with some future handset). Instead, it was an ecosystem: multiple add-on modules, and multiple phones, for users to mix and match as they desired. With support for just two phones and a handful of modules, it was still in its infancy, but it felt like what really could be the beginning of a lasting modular platform.

Moto Mods may have gotten rolling with the Moto Z Droid and Moto Z Force Droid, but that's just the first chapter of this modular story, and now Lenovo's back for round two, bringing us the third Moto Z phone to take advantage of Moto Mods expansion – and one without a flagship price this time around. 

Does the new Moto Z Play Droidgive you everything you need to enjoy the exciting new world of modular smartphone hardware while also helping to keep costs down? Or will you ultimately find yourself wishing you held out for a full-fledged Moto Z Droid flagship? We're putting the most affordable Moto Z through its paces in the hopes of finding out.

In the box:

• Moto Z Play Droid
• Style Shell
• USB Type-C 15W fast charging adapter
• SIM tool (pre-installed Verizon SIM)
• Introductory guide
• Safety notice

• Design

  The Moto Z Play's new tricks find a home in a familiar package

  
  
  
  When you're doing modular smartphone hardware like Lenovo is, you quickly find yourself locked in to one phone design; for all Moto Mods to be compatible with every Moto Z family member, we're looking at handsets that need to share the same basic layout.
  
  As a result, the Moto Z Play Droid is one heck of a familiar-looking unit, borrowing the same basic styling as the Moto Z Droid and Moto Z Force Droid. And while it's not anywhere close to the super-thin construction of the Moto Z, the Play comes in with nearly the very same dimensions as the thicker Moto Z Force – a fraction of a millimeter of wiggle room here and there, but basically the same size and shape. 

While that might have you thinking that Lenovo took the Force and swapped out a few components for the Play, the truth is a little more interesting, and we see a number of changes to how the phone's put together.

For one, screen placement shifts, with the display resting slightly lower down on the Play than the Force, and at the same time, the “Moto” logo jumps from below the screen to up top. As a result, the Play is slightly more one-hand-friendly than the Force. 

Front-facing camera and flash components swap locations on the Play, but that's a change of little consequence. More interesting is the revised take on the handset's edge design, and while the Force has a nice little pointed ridge that runs all around its edge, the Play goes for a smooth ridge-free curve.
Finally, and maybe the most impactful of the differences between the Play and Force's layouts, the Play arrives with an analog headphone jack on the phone's bottom edge, adjacent to the USB Type-C port (the very same one the Force used for audio output – with the included adapter). Why there's room here and there wasn't on the Force is only for Lenovo to say (and we wouldn't be surprised if there was room previously, but the jack's absence was a strategic decision), but we're happy to see it back here.

No matter which Moto Z phone you go with, you're looking at a 5.5-inch display. But already with the Moto Z and Force we saw some variation, as the Force picked up a shatter-proof screen. Those differences continue with the Moto Z Play, as it swaps out the quad-HD 1440 x 2560 panel of the previous two Moto Z phones for a lower-res 1080 x 1920 screen.

It's still a nice, crisp AMOLED display, and especially with the phone's “vibrant” color-enhancement mode engaged, one with some really bold, satisfying hues. Testing revealed the screen to be about as bright as the displays on the Moto Z and Force when manually setting the brightness, though those two models were capable of significantly brighter output in auto-brightness mode – and as a result, have a leg up over the Play in outdoor readability. 

Sony Xperia X Performance vs Samsung Galaxy S7

Introduction

Sony made headlines at this year's MWC edition by announcing a trio of phones aimed to form a completely new X-line portfolio, bidding adieu to the Z-line that has been shaping its Android strategy for a few years now. Top of the line here is the Xperia X Performance, and that's exactly the handset we are going to clash with Samsung's finest in the category – the Galaxy S7. Both fit in the 5” display realm, sport the latest Snapdragon chipset, have powerful cameras, and cost a similar amount, so which one takes the cake? Let's see...

Design

Fatboy X in metal against glass Slim Jim, not much of a water gun fight here

We aren't going to mince words here – while the new X-series is a departure from the familiar Sony Z design, it's not much of a change in form, just the glass back got replaced by other materials. The fairly chubby and rectangular X Performance has a back panel made of metal, but it rings somewhat hollow when you tap on it, and the keys all around the phone are shallow, with poor tactile feedback. The SIM card tray is all-plastic and rather flimsy, too. 

The S7, on the other hand, is slim and fashionable in its glass-and-metal chassis, with sturdy, easy to feel and press buttons. It also fits much more comfortably in the hand, not only because it's slimmer, but also on account of the tapered backsides.

Despite that the fingerprint sensor is moved to the side of the Sony phone, embedded in the lock key, its screen-to-body ratio remains poor, and the 5” display barely occupies 67% of the front surface. That's largely thanks to the two front-facing speakers, which, let's face it, aren't going to produce much of a stereo sound at that spacing anyway. The Galaxy S7 has a finger scanner that is housed in the home key beneath the display, and still returns way better screen-to-body ratio.

The Sony handset has an IP68 water resistance rating, meaning that you can dip it in up to three feet of water for at least half an hour. The same is valid for the Galaxy S7, yet it feels downright elegant in its thin glass-and-metal chassis, when compared to the X Performance.

Display

On par at the beach, more credible indoors – the Quad HD AMOLED takes the cake

Sony decided to stick with 1080 x 1920 pixels of Full HD resolution on the 5” LCD panel of the X Performance, and we are totally fine with that, as the pixel density is more than enough for the screen diagonal. Samsung's 1440p Quad HD AMOLED screen is a bit of overkill for the 5.1” size, but the more the merrier, we suppose.

Sony again went with very, very cold colors and way oversaturated greens for the screen's color balance. While it argues that this setup aids outdoor visibility, we'd rather have a more natural color mode to choose instead. The X Performance has a very good peak brightness of 547 nits, and the display is easily visible outside, with low reflections – a tad better than the Galaxy S7's panel.

Samsung's display, on the other hand, has a Basic mode that returns colors which are pretty close to the standardized gamut in terms of temperature and saturation. The default Adaptive mode goes on the cold and saturated side of the spectrum still, but not as much as the X Performance.