Table of contents for Issue 51 in Android Advisor

Price: £469 inc VAT from fave.co/2x12Z4Z It’s four years since OnePlus released its first phone, and the firm is already on its eighth handset. The OnePlus 6 arrives a point where notches are all the rage and while it might not have every feature a phone can have, it’s still an amazing deal. Design If you’re familiar with the OnePlus 6’s predecessor, the 5T, then this isn’t a huge departure in terms of design and build. It’s largely that phone with a collection of tweaks and improvements. The headline news is that the phone is made from Gorilla Glass 5, but has a metal border with glass on the front and back. Three different finishes are available: Midnight Black, which has the classic OnePlus look; Mirror Black is heavily polished…

Price: £399 inc VAT from fave.co/2J6vrnF Honor has been doing a pretty good job of stepping out of Huawei’s shadow, usually helped by the explosively shiny blue it clads its phones in. The Honor 10 is no different and feels every bit an Honor device despite having its parent company’s name stamped on the back. The phone comes with all the 2018 bells and whistles (Android Oreo, notch, face unlock), high end specs and a price to make OnePlus blush. The Honor 10 could well turn out to be the smartphone deal of the year – as it is certainly the best mid-range phone on offer right now. Design Despite its similarities to Huawei phones, the Honor 10 is pretty unique in look. Also shipping in a grey version, our…

For years now we’ve been drilling into readers’ minds the importance of antivirus software, but times are changing and whereas previously many of their computing tasks took place on a desktop system they now take place on a phone or tablet. Android viruses have hit the headlines before, leading users to think installing some sort of security software is a good idea. And it goes almost without saying: the more popular Android becomes the more of a target it is for the bad guys. But do you really need to install a resource- and battery-hogging antivirus app on your phone that is going to plague you with irritating notifications? In almost all cases, Android phones and tablets do not need antivirus installed. Android viruses are by no means as prevalent…

Price: £599 inc VAT from fave.co/2s0wNKa Hot on the heels of the V30S ThinQ is the G7 ThinQ, LG’s other flagship phone for 2018. There are many similarities between these two, but also a couple of significant differences. First, the G7 has an IPS screen rather than OLED, and it benefits from the newer, faster Snapdragon 845 processor. It also gains the ability to take portrait photos with blurry backgrounds (which the G6 lacked) and has a traditional headphone socket, yet is waterproof. LG has also beefed up the audio with a bigger, louder speaker and used some nifty screen technology to make the screen one of the brightest around. With a sensible price, the G7 could be the Android flagship you’ve been waiting for – though the OnePlus 6…

Price: £144 inc VAT from fave.co/2kDVoQV To get the best tablet you’re really looking at £600 or thereabouts. This sub-£150 tablet is no match for those devices, but it does have a lot to offer those with smaller budgets – particularly in terms of entertainment. The Onda V10 Pro ticks several boxes if movie watching is your thing. There’s a large 10.1in touchscreen with a 2K resolution of 2,560x1,600 pixels that results in a crystal clear pixel density of 300ppi – actually higher than the new iPad’s 264ppi ‘Retina’ display, but a 16:10 aspect ratio that’s less well suited to movies than a 16:9 would have been. There’s also a Micro-HDMI port for hooking it up to a TV, and integrated Cast support. And plenty of storage, too, with 64GB…

Google has had voice search features in Android for years, but when Google Assistant rolled out on the Pixel in October 2016, everything finally came together. You can now get Assistant on all modern Android devices, and Google announced new Assistant features at I/O 2018 that will make it even better (okay, and maybe a little too real, in the case of Duplex). It can be easy to miss the improvements if you don’t obsessively keep an eye on the news, so here they are in one place: the 12 coolest new features in Google Assistant. Sync connected smart home devices Google Assistant supports numerous smart home devices, but you might notice that devices you’ve just added to your account don’t always work right away. That’s because Assistant isn’t constantly…

Price: £449 inc VAT from fave.co/2xzyuDC The Galaxy A range of devices has come a long way in a relatively short space of time and now effectively offers a cheaper and slightly lower spec version of the flagship S range, while keeping some of the key features and design traits. Here we look at the A8. Design Samsung ditched plastic in favour for a combination of glass and metal on the A range back in 2016 and that hasn’t changed here. The Galaxy A8 is really not far off the S8 in terms of look and feel. In fact, it’s easy to confuse the A8 with its premium brother, though there are a few small differences. The display, for example, doesn’t have the curved dual edge, but does have small…

Costing over £1,000, flagship phones are more expensive than ever, but as these get better so too do more affordable models. Indeed, it’s now possible to buy a handset for under £200, and still get a device capable of everything you throw at it. Should you buy a locked phone? You’ll quickly find that some of the best deals on cheap phones are sold via mobile operators. What you need to look out for is whether these phones are sold locked to that operator’s network. This is the case with the EE Hawk (page 96), but if you don’t want to become a EE customer you should look elsewhere on the list for a non-network-branded handset, such as the Moto G5. What about a Chinese phone? An alternative is to…