Top news of 2018: Q4

Premium prices should come with premium quality. There are always issues with large scales mass production though and the Huawei Mate 20 Pro was the latest to experience it – its screen had a green glow seen in the dark. That wasn’t the company’s biggest headache this year, however, as the USA pushed its allies to drop its products.

When the Xiaomi Redmi Note 6 Pro arrived at the office readers were eager to see it unboxed and reviewed. The launch of the Mi Mix 3 was Xiaomi’s other win in Q4 in terms of most-read articles.

However, Samsung dominated the field, creating a ton of buzz with the launch of the Galaxy A8s – its first phone with a punch hole camera. The Galaxy S10 trio is set to adopt this design too, even adding a dual selfie cam in a screen hole.

Speaking of multiple cameras, the Galaxy A9 (2018) became the world’s first quad camera phone. The S10 phones will have multiple cameras too – perhaps a triple camera on the top model, though there were rumors of four cams. Foldable phones aside, 5G phones will have a big marketing push behind them (whether there’s any use for them remains to be seen).

While Apple dominates in mobile chipset performance, Snapdragon has been catching up. Early benchmarks of the Snapdragon 855 came close in multi-threaded speed. Other early tests showed an S10+ version with the S855 chipset beat the Kirin 980 in one benchmark and again in AnTuTu.

Google launched the Pixel 3 duo to a mixed reception and HMD’s Nokia 7.1 reveal shored up pure Android positions. The Nokia X7 announcement brought excitement too, though we didn’t yet know it will become the Nokia 8.1 for the western market.

Here’s the list of our most-read news articles for the October-December quarter (in chronological order).