Top stories of 2021: Q4

Welcome to our recap of the top news articles of 2021. This is Q4, you can also take a look at the top stories of Q1, Q2 and Q3.

We're at the closing fourth quarter of 2021 and the tide of interest is shifting towards the Galaxy S22 series, expected in January, and at the new Snapdragon 8 Gen1-equipped phones.

The new Qualcomm flagship chipset was announced, based on a 4nm node, with a Cortex-X2 core that can run at up to 3.0GHz, three performance Cortex-A710 cores at 2.5GHz, and four Cortex-A510 for efficiency, running at 1.8GHz.

The first official phone to get the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was Motorola's Edge X30.

Xiaomi ended the year with its 12 series - the 12 and 12 Pro on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 platform, and the 12X with a SD870 chip.

But it was the unofficial Galaxy S22 that dominated the news feed in Q4. Every leak, whether it was a rumor of a specification, an image of reported screen protectors, or a proposition from an insider, was immediately interesting to our readers.

We now have a pretty good idea of what the Galaxy S22 series will be when they are official in January. But throughout the months of October, November, and December we found out the camera details of the three upcoming phones, their design, and their general specs.

It was confirmed that the Galaxy S22 Ultra would have an in-body S Pen. We learned that the Galaxy S22 and S22+ will get new 50MP main cameras and a conventional (read, non-binning) 10MP 3x telephoto, while the S22 Ultra would retain the 108MP, 12MP 0.5x, 10MP 3x and 10MP 10x, but with a big improvement in computational photography.

We saw images of Galaxy S22 series dummies, stacked against current phones, like the Galaxy Note20 Ultra and S21 Ultra. It appears that the Galaxy S22 Ultra will be bigger than its predecessor.

There were a few other major phone announcements in Q4. Google's Pixel 6 duo came out alongside the new in-house Tensor chip. The Pixel 6 duo also ushered in a high-megapixel main camera for the first time in a Pixel.

Huawei's P50 Pocket arrived to challenge the Galaxy Z Fold3. It flaunted a gapless clamshell folding design, a 6.9-inch 120Hz main screen, and a 1-inch circular cover screen, as well as a Snapdragon 888 with 4G.

Finally, the Oppo Find N, the company's first foldable was aimed at a new crowd - those that wanted a phone that unfolded to a big inner display but folded to a small, usable outer one. It was an instant hit. Indeed, it's smaller than the Galaxy Z Fold3 but still has a fairly huge 7.1-inch inside display. While its outer display is a perfectly-usable 5.49-inch 18:9 AMOLED. It only makes it more of a shame that the Find N isn't expected outside of China.

That will do it for 2021. We're eager to get 2022 started, see you there - front page!