Table of contents for 41 in Android Advisor

Nokia has confirmed its Nokia 8, pitched squarely at content creators with 360-degree spatial Ozo Audio recording, three premium Carl Zeiss cameras, and a new ‘Bothie’ photography mode that lets you capture the entire picture from both the front and rear cameras. Release date It’s due to go on sale in September. Price The Finnish firm has so far only confirmed the Europe pricing, which will be €599. We’d expect to pay around £549 in the UK. New features Carl Zeiss cameras Front and rear cameras are Carl Zeiss branded, with a dual 13Mp camera at the rear that has one colour lens and one mono. There’s also a 13Mp selfie camera on the front, and all three have an f/2.0 aperture. Dual-Sight Nokia talks about ‘Bothie’ photos, which are…

£379 inc VAT from fave.co/2vbN1lM The Moto Z2 Play is the mid-range smartphone you’ve been waiting for: it’s sleek, sexy and offers a range of Moto Mods that extend the functionality of the smartphone. But is it enough to tempt users away from the likes of the flagship-killing OnePlus 5? We’ve spent some time with the Moto Z2 Play, and here’s what we think. Design As we mention above this is a stunning device. Crafted from brushed aluminium, the Moto Z2 Play looks more like a high-end smartphone rather than a mid-range handset, and feels great in the hand too. From the chamfers around the edge of the display to the slight curvature at the edges to make it more comfortable to hold, every design element has been carefully considered.…

There’s an interesting theory that smartwatches are to the smartphone what wristwatches were to the pocket watch. Picture the way the average gentlemen used to have to rummage through his pocket for his watch prior to the 20th century. Now skip forward 100 years and the average smartphone user still has to dive into his/her pocket to check their phone. The kicker now is that your phone holds far more information than a pocket watch ever did, yet all of which is still locked into your pocket. Smartwatches aren’t for making phone calls, although some can do this, but instead they provide a quick and easy way to check what notifications are on your smartphone, so you can decide whether it’s worth delving into your pocket or searching around your…

Few things in life are as annoying as finding that your Android handset refuses to install any more app updates because it’s run out of storage. Unlike many of life’s little annoyances, though, this one’s easy to fix. You can quickly clear out hundreds of megabytes or even a gig or two by sweeping up stale downloads, rooting out offline maps and documents, clearing caches, and wiping unneeded music and video files. There’s even an easy way to find and nix space-hogging apps that you no longer use. 1. Clear out all cached app data If you dig into the Apps storage setting screen and tap on an individual app, you’ll notice that each app has its own stash of ‘cached’ data – anywhere from a few kilobytes to hundreds…

1. Dark mode isn’t coming, so stop asking Google teased us with dark mode on both the Android N and O developer previews, but it’s not making it into the full release anytime soon. The reason? “Reliable and consistent theming is hard.” Numerous questions about themes and dark mode stacked up on the Reddit board, and Android engineer Alan Viverette addressed it thusly: “There are technical and logistical issues with theming. The technical side is largely solved in O with Runtime Resource Overlay support (a Sony framework that allows the system to modify the look and feel of an app while it is running); however, we still don’t have stable APIs for describing what can be themed or adequate ways to verify that existing applications properly support theming.” Instead Viverette…

£129 inc VAT from fave.co/2wPMo07 Nokia is back, and with it comes new Android phones. HMD Global, a Finnish startup, is using the Nokia brand to bring the new phones to the market, as well as a reboot of the famous and much-loved Nokia 3310. Here, we take a closer look at the Nokia 3, the cheapest in the new range. Design The Nokia 3 has a 5in, 1280x720 Gorilla Glass screen housed in a compact polycarbonate body, with a rounded aluminium frame that looks impressively premium considering its price tag, and a soft-touch finish to the back of the body. Obviously that resolution is a little lower than you might hope for these days, but once you factor in the smaller form factor it still delivers 294 pixels per…

If you want to surf the web privately and securely, even when you’re out and about connecting to public Wi-Fi, a VPN (virtual private network) is what you’re looking for. You can also use it to access blocked content such as the American version of Netflix. If you’re looking to do so on your Android phone or tablet, you’ll be pleased to hear that there are plenty of great VPN apps for Android. Please note that it is against Netflix and other blocked content’s terms and conditions to access them using a VPN, so you do so at your own risk. 1. PureVPN Price: From $2.95 (£2.30) per month from fave.co/2pYjebX PureVPN is our favourite VPN right now, and we’re pleased to report that it’s great on Android too. It…

So there you are, doing your best to connect with a friend over a cup of coffee, but you can’t help but notice the pulsing alert on your phone’s touchscreen. What if it’s your babysitter trying to reach you, or a nasty email from your boss? You surreptitiously unlock your phone to see what the fuss is about—and just like that, you become one of those people who can’t keep their hands off their handsets, even when there’s a flesh-and-blood person in front of them. (Oh, and that message on the screen? It was a promo for a half-off sale. Great.) The good news is that your Android phone boasts a series of tools that can help you concentrate on the people who matter, rather than being distracted by random…

£216 inc VAT from fave.co/2gZ7OnD Xiaomi recently updated its giant 6.44in-screen Mi Max with a second version that offers even more battery capacity, more storage, more memory and an improved camera. Price Xiaomi phones aren’t officially sold in the UK, so you won’t find them through any high-street mobile operators. However, they’re easy to get hold of via Chinese importers such as GearBest, which supplies all our Xiaomi phones for review. The only thing is you’ll need to buy them upfront and pair them with a SIM-only deal, but prices are good. GearBest lists two versions of the Mi Max 2: one with 64GB (£216) storage and the other 128GB (£299 from fave.co/2gZeguy). Both are international models, which means they support Google Play out of the box and are easy…

We explain the key differences between the two new budget phones from Motorola to help you choose which is best for you. What’s different? For a start, the price. The Moto G5s is £40 cheaper than the G5s Plus at £219, and if you’re on a tight budget that could make all the difference. Neither phone is on sale just yet (they should be on sale imminently), but Amazon is already listing product pages for the Moto G5s and Moto G5s Plus. Out of the box the first thing you’ll notice is the difference in size. The Plus model is roughly 3mm taller and wider than the G5s, but they are of a similar thickness. Correspondingly, the Plus weighs in a bit heavier at 168g versus 157g. This is because…

Watching YouTube video is one of our favourite pastimes on an Android phone or tablet, but doing so out of range of a Wi-Fi hotspot can place a heavy burden on a mobile data connection. Thankfully, you can use an app such as Tubemate to download YouTube videos for offline watching. Because Google doesn’t approve of you bypassing its platform for watching video (also see is it legal to download YouTube video?), you won’t find Tubemate in Google Play. Nevertheless, it’s a free app that we will show you how to sideload on your phone or tablet. In publishing this tutorial we do not advocate the downloading of copyrighted videos from YouTube, and in our examples (see tinyurl.com/y8o5braa) we are using only video from our own YouTube channel. Tubemate app…