The new phones of the week

It may be summer break for some, but for smartphone companies, it was quite busy with new hardware flying left and right. After last week’s big events from Xiaomi, Samsung, and Honor, this week we saw another crop of new devices, although mostly in the mid-range and entry level. Here are all the smartphones unveiled in the past seven days, along with a laptop worth praising.

Motorola Edge 20 series got two new additions to its portfolio. First, it was the Motorola Edge 20 Fusion - it is an Edge 20 Lite smartphone with a slightly more powerful Dimensity 800U chipset. Dedicated to the Indian market, it costs slightly over $400.

In the United States, Motorola did the opposite thing - kept a well-known name but brought a whole new set of specs. The Motorola Edge looks like the Edge 20 but is actually taller and heavier. It also ditched the 8MP telephoto camera and replaced it with a 2MP depth sensor, while the ultrawide cam got downgraded from 16MP to 8MP. With more room on the inside, the battery grew to 5,000 mAh.

Tuesday also saw vivo introducing the iQOO 8 duo - two flagships with Snapdragon 888 and 888+ processors, but the Pro variant also brought a new fingerprint scanner that is ultra-fast, works with more than one finger at the same time and is massive in size compared with any other smartphone on the market.

The Indian division brought a phone called vivo Y21, an affordable handset powered by a Helio P35 chipset, with a basic 6.5” LCD of HD+ resolution and a waterdrop notch.

Samsung also joined the fun with two separate launches of two different devices. First, it was the A52s 5G in Europe - it is like the A52 5G, but with one improvement in the chipset department. The Snapdragon 778G is faster, more power-efficient and should run for a long time on the 4,500 mAh battery.

The Samsung Galaxy A03s continues the Galaxy A02s legacy. It has the same body, same 6.5” HD+ LCD and 13MP + 2 MP + 2 MP camera setup. Like their A52 siblings, the change is only in the chipset - now Samsung has brought a mightier Helio P35.

Xiaomi launched the Redmi 10 on Wednesday, and it brings a lot of upgrades to the lowest standing member of the lineup. It comes with a Full HD+ screen of 90Hz refresh rate and a 50MP main camera. There’s a 5,000 mAh battery with 18W wired fast charging and a 20W charger in the box.

The Redmi 10 also brings a side-mounted FP scanner, a 3.5mm audio jack, and Android 11. Just the package for $220.

Then there's the Google Pixel 5a 5G, which is a mild refresh of the Pixel 4a 5G. It still has the old Snapdragon 765G chipset, LPDDR4X RAM and 12MP main camera. The screen is ever so slightly bigger at 6.34" in diagonal, while the battery grew 20% to 4,680 mAh.

Next up: two new ROG phones by Asus - the 5s and 5s Pro. Unlike the plain 5 series, here we don't have an Ultimate version, but the 18 GB RAM version is simply now part of the Pro selection of memory variants.

These two phones now come with the Snapdragon 888+ chipset instead of the SD888. They retain the 6.78" Super AMOLED display which now supports an even lower touch latency of just 24.0 ms thanks to the improved 360Hz touch sampling rate (20% better than the ROG Phone 5 series).