Table of contents for Issue 53 in Android Advisor

Price: £259 inc VAT from fave.co/2v610Jt Samsung’s A range of more affordable phones has been a big success for the firm. The latest to join the family is the Galaxy A6, bringing flagshipesque features at an almost budget level price. Design From the front, the A6 looks very similar to its bigger brother – the A8 (£449 from fave.co/2v1OKJV). That is to say it’s plain-looking. It doesn’t even have a Samsung logo, so it’s not instantly recognizable as a Galaxy phone. Switch the display on and this resemblance is even more apparent, as are the small bezels that run around the display. They are similar in size to the A8 and mean that the device is comfortable to hold yet has a decent amount of real estate. The bezels are…

Price: £299 inc VAT from fave.co/2vcBPot If you are looking for a tablet that costs less than an iPad, has a great screen and good performance then the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Plus is well worth a look despite the terrible name and odd design. It has a built-in stand that gives it a lopsided look when in portrait, but provides a spine to hold onto one-handed. Turned landscaped it becomes symmetrical and the pop-out stand solves an issue many with regular shaped tablets have to buy cases for. You can even hang it on a hook to watch it in landscape, if you want. With a decent screen and above-average speakers, the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 Plus is a nothing if not versatile. We review it here to see…

In a landmark ruling last month, the European Union has hit Google with a record £3.9 billion antitrust fine over the way it distributes Android. In the decision, the court ordered Google to change the way it bundles its own apps into its mobile operating system, specifically Google and Chrome, within 90 days in an effort to give its “rivals the chance to innovate and compete”. Google, of course, disagrees and has vowed to appeal the decision. But while the case will likely stretch out for years before any final action is taken, the ruling is almost certain to affect the way Google makes and distributes future versions of Android. A fine this large is unlikely to be fully reversed on appeal, so there’s a good chance that Google will…

A broken power button does not have to mean it’s the end for a phone or tablet. Here are some tips that will help you turn on your phone without the power button – and to continue using it as normal. If your phone is still turned on Do NOT let it switch off. Keep it charged, carry a power bank, and if you need to reboot make sure you select that option rather than power off. Install some apps that can help. Power Button to Volume Button lets you use your volume button instead of the power button. Gravity Screen wakes your phone screen when you pick up the device, and Shake Screen On Off does something similar. Proximity Actions can wake the screen by gesturing to the proximity…

Price: £438 inc VAT from fave.co/2AvaEdD At Xiaomi’s launch event in May three new Mi 8 smartphones were announced, of which the handset we review here is the standard model. There’s also an SE version, lower-specified and cheaper with the Snapdragon 710 headlining, plus the Explorer Edition, which has a cool transparent rear cover and an in-display fingerprint sensor. The latter is something of a sore point: in common with many Chinese phones the standard Mi 8 has an amazing specification at a crazy-low price, but it lacks some of the features we were so looking forward to in the lead up to its announcement. Thus the standard model gets no in-display fingerprint scanner, which would have given it a lead over better known rivals such as Samsung, Apple and…

Flagship phones have got to the point where raw performance doesn’t really need to get much better, and so they are differentiated by their design, battery life, unique features, and photography capabilities. We’re focusing on the latter here, given that for many people a smartphone now replaces a physical camera. Our aim: to discover what is the very best phone camera money can buy, for photos, videos and even selfies. We’ve tested and compared four phones with the best cameras currently available: Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, Google Pixel 2 XL, HTC U12+ and the Huawei P20 Pro. You won’t find every flagship phone here, as we’re including only those phones which have cameras good enough to be called ‘the best’. That isn’t determined by specifications or features, it’s judged by…

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. 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 of megabytes, or even more. These caches of data are essentially just junk files, and they…

Price: £99 inc VAT from fave.co/2v7VuWA The Honor 7S is an Android smartphone that tries to cram everything good about a phone in 2018 into a sub-£100 package: a slim attractive design, an 18:9 screen and Android Oreo software. But it turns out – unsurprisingly – that £99 is not enough to make a cheap phone great. Honor has a great track record of affordable smartphones that perform much better than their price suggests. The firm says this is a handset for ‘new smartphone users’ but unless your demands for a smartphone are very low, the 7S is a price-cut too far. Design The 7S is a nondescript black (or blue) all-plastic smartphone. It has a 5.45in 18:9 display, the aspect ratio meaning it’s a tall and slim device despite…

The first Smart Display for Google Assistant has launched in the US and is set to reach these shores soon – we’ll have a full review next month. A joint effort between Google and Lenovo, it kicks off a new wave of screen-centric smart speakers that look good on a counter, sound good when playing music, and make the Echo Show less good by comparison. But the best part of the Lenovo Smart Display isn’t the industrial design or 10in Full HD display. It’s Google’s interface. Where the Assistant and Alexa interfaces on Android phones and the Echo Show are rudimentary visual representations of our queries, the Smart Display doesn’t just let you see what Google Assistant is thinking – it expands and enhances Assistant’s abilities with an intuitive marriage…

If you’re selling or giving away your old Android phone or tablet, suspect some malware is at play, or simply want to boost its performance to its original condition then a factory reset is the best option. However, it’s not something you can easily come back from if you accidentally delete something you wanted, so you should make sure you’ve properly backed up your device first. Hard reset A hard reset will clear the memory and delete all your files, returning your device to its factory settings. Unless you are getting rid of the phone and tablet, it’s typically used as a last resort for a misbehaving device. 1. Ensure your phone or tablet has at least 30 percent charge. 2. Open the Settings app. 3. Scroll down to and…