The new iPhone 12 series has been talked about a lot mainly for its compatibility with 5G networks, a first-time experience for Apple, whose advantages we may not see in the immediate future for many reasons – the lack of practical applications (for now) and the network coverage above all – and for the new packaging – the boxes will be thinner and will contain neither earbuds nor wall chargers. Apple justified the choice by saying that it will reduce its impact on the environment, but many people on social media fiercely accused the company of greenwashing – they didn’t actually use this term, but that’s the idea. What we call iPhone 12 is actually a series of 4 models. Two are the extreme opposites of each other – the (tiny) Mini and the Pro Max, with a 5.4-inch and 6.68-inch screen respectively. In between, we find the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro. All of them have an OLED screen, use the Face ID facial-recognition technology, come with iOS 14 pre-installed, and use the brand new A14 Bionic processors, which make them, in a nutshell, extremely fast.
The iPhone 12, as we already knew from the many rumors and news leaks, looks quite different from all the other phones produced in the last years not only by Apple but also by the vast majority of smartphone manufacturers. While Eastern companies bombard us with phones with tapered shapes, rounded edges, and 3D glass screens, the Cupertino-based company is back with a square look that we haven’t seen since the first iPhone SE but was recently reintroduced in the iPad Pro, as told on Domus by Andrea Nepori.  

After using it for a few days, although it is quite thin, the phone feels very much there, whether it is in your hand or your pocket, as if it had regained a presence and materiality that was lost over the years. And if you hold the previous iPhone 11, with its rounded edges like all previous iPhones from the iPhone 6 onward, it feels almost “soapy”. Meanwhile, the new iPhone has a great balance, and it is well-performing, for example when you have to write a text while walking. To make a long story short, it passed the practical test. This greater solidity in the forms is also confirmed by the materials, with the new Ceramic Shield that promises to prevent a lot of screens from breaking.

The iPhone 11 was the first Apple phone to introduce a night mode – one of the best in phones not only when it comes to the final result, but also for the fluidity of the interface, and its wide-angle lens. In the iPhone 12, these improvements go hand in hand, allowing you to shoot wide-angle pictures in night mode. We tested it on iPhone 12 Pro, with excellent results – the typical “iphoneography” quality, where the pictures are extremely detailed, sharp, focused. In low light conditions, many people will find the portrait mode even more useful that the wide-angle night mode, but bear in mind that this only works on iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max – these two phones, in fact, in addition to a little more RAM, have a more refined photographic system than the two-lens system of iPhone 12 and 12 mini, with the addition of a telephoto lens that, in the case of Pro Max, reaches a 2.5x optical zoom against the 2x optical zoom of the Pro. This is another reason why the iPhone 12 Pro is, according to many reviewers, kind of “a grey area” - it doesn’t offer too much more than the basic model, which however costs less than 1000 euros (in Italy, the official price starts at 939). We are still a long way from the amazing optical zoom lenses offered by many oriental brands, but the technologies used by Apple for image optimization, such as Deep Fusion and Smart HDR 3, always provide amazing results. More trivially, the wide-angle lens distortion correction of this new model is quite something.
iPhones continue to be some of the best phones around when it comes to taking videos, although the introduction of Dolby Vision compatibility has been described by many reviewers as a gamble, for example by Roberto Pezzali on dday.it, who criticizes its performance on big screens.

But there is one camera feature in the Pro line, the same as in the iPad Pro camera presented a few months ago, that is the integration of the LiDAR sensor, which maybe should have been talked about more, and that actually someone was already expecting in last year’s iPhones. A technology already present on self-drive cars and drones, related to Microsoft’s FaceID and Xbox Kinect (developed in collaboration with a company, PrimeSense, not surprisingly later acquired by Apple), the LiDAR sensor allows the smartphone to measure distances in the surrounding environment through an infrared system, thus building a map of objects in an environment. This also enables the camera to focus much quickly. But when we use it as the smartphone’s eye on the world, the LiDAR sensor becomes very useful in Augmented Reality, because it allows better integration and interaction between real and virtual objects in space. This is a fundamental step for the creation of new and more advanced AR apps, to create a fertile ecosystem ready for the launch of the next big thing from Apple – those smart glasses that are increasingly talked about and that someone was expecting to see already this year. In short, what the developers needed to create a truly reliable augmented reality. So, dear developers, now it’s your turn.

Roughly beautiful. Wonderfully edgy. Complexly refined. And you could go on for a long time, trying to frame the reborn Razr of Motorola, now also in 5G version, making explicit the feeling that you try to use it. Something that probably does not pass through the many photos and videos that abound on the net for this phone that since its announcement has become a sort of cult. Because in this case the object overlooks the category to which it belongs and maybe even its own project. But let's go by steps. The new Motorola Razr looks like the phone of the future, but not our future. It looks rather like we would imagine today that they could imagine in the 90s an imaginative phone of the future. The shell is a tapered and shiny box, with sharp shapes, whose front surface is largely occupied by the display, which lights up when the device is picked up. It is wide, heavy, affirmative, layered to the point that the internal screen, the one that unfolds when you open the phone, seems to rest on the device, and in turn the frames overlap it, the upper arch that looks like a double lightning bolt, the lower one very thick. To the touch it caresses glass and metal in continuity, the round of the front camera with its flash, the fingerprint sensor on the back. The element that protects the hinge that holds the two halves of the device together, the most delicate part of any foldable smartphone, is brutal, it extends almost a thread beyond the width of the phone, it is an architrave, it looks like the nail in the neck of Frankenstein in his most classic representations. The choice of packaging is illuminating, an echo of the most maximalist Kubrick we have from memory: a black monolith. 

The Razr is in fact a monstrous object in the hyperbolic sense of the term, which with a very particular design language not devoid of a certain amount of arrogance, makes a good show of its rise above the normality of today's smartphones, their tendency to disappear behind the screen, the rounded corners and sinuous curves we are used to and all the rest of that uniforming tendency to immateriality that distinguishes today's technological design. It's a brave act, this phone from Motorola, a historic brand of telephony acquired by the Chinese giant Lenovo a few years ago. And perhaps he is forgiven for some dysfunctionality, such as the lower frame that makes it difficult to navigate when open, a screen that today is perhaps a little narrow for those with big hands, the not exactly effervescent colors of the display compared to many others of the competition, and the feeling that that screen is not in the end exactly straight, but slightly embarked. Excellent, however, on a functional level, the external screen, which allows access to many basic functions without having to open the phone and offers a wide range of possible customizations. Too bad instead that the device can not be used even when open but folded, like the direct competitor sold by Samsung, the Z Flip. But what is missing in functionality, the Razr gains in personality. A phone that we will remember even in several years, just like the predecessor that bore the same name.   

Price: 1559 euros.

OnePlus did not start 2020 in the most convincing way. And not just because the flagship killer company had presented a series 8 that costs slightly less than the flagship models of more prominent companies. You grow and change, especially if you didn’t even exist ten years ago, and changing the price range could also make sense. However, the perplexity arose from a lineup, with 8 and 8 Pro, in which we had lost much of the extremely minimal design language with which OnePlus had always spoiled us, and at the same time gave up the futuristic push of a phone like the 7 Pro, which with the retractable camera and not even the slightest notch on the screen had represented in 2019 something a bit different from the competition (although it was not really the only one to use this solution). Things got better with Nord, the first OnePlus’ midrange phone, a serious but at the same time fun device (see the camera filters, for example). This 8T phone is convincing. It brings the same concreteness to a higher level of performance, without falling into the easy trap of rounded edges, uncomfortable in many ways, but often preferred by manufacturers because perceived as immediately “beautiful” by consumers. It’s got a 120Hz display – many brands seem to be obsessed with this now. Maybe Instagram will scroll too fast or there will be other interface problems, but the rendering on video and games is amazing.

First, some caveats. The bump camera, i.e. the protrusion of the photographic compartment on the back of the phone, in this new Note is so bulky that it compromises its stability when placed on a flat surface, like a table or a desk. And second, the screen is huge, so much so that you’ll have to get used to writing on it, for example – or you can use a keyboard that adapts to the screen according to the user’s preferences like Swiftkey. On the other hand, a display of this size – 6.8inches – is so huge that you’d rather call it a phablet, as Dieter Bohn pointed out when reviewing it in The Verge. It’s great for reading an ebook, watching a movie on the train, or playing games, especially thanks to the compatibility with the cloud version of Xbox Game Pass, which allows you to play a huge variety of games even if you don’t own a physical console. But it is only compatible with Xbox – its Microsoft Office integration truly makes it one of the best smartphones on the market. This version is a refined and improved Galaxy S20, and it has the nib. Right, the nib!

In the variegated and increasingly crowded tribe of 5G phones, this Xiaomi has a special role: it is the cheapest of all, with its 239 euros price. And it' s 239 euros well spent: thanks to the brand new Snapdragon 750G processor, the phone is absolutely responsive; the screen is big, with a 6.67" diagonal, even if probably the LCD panel is the only real weak point of this phone; the camera is a bit slow on autofocus, but the shots are sharp and clean, with good colors, and Xiaomi does everything possible to enrich the photographic experience with a series of options and effects quite funny, like the one that clones a subject several times within a single shot. Also good is the new MIUI 12, and we know how much the interface is often the Achilles heel of Android coming from China. Integrating 5G on a phone of this kind means to emphasize how interesting and varied the mid-end of the smartphone market is, a context where you often see solutions and experiments to be envied to the flagship. Aesthetically it would be a "normal" phone, were it not for the camera on the back arranged in a circular module, which you can not fail to notice.

It's an almost paradoxical sensation when you hold the new Huawei flagship. On the one hand there is the pleasure aroused by one of the most beautiful devices released this year. The display is wide and wide, the rounded edges offer a good grip without compromising too much functionality. The color Mystic Silver is a milky gray and formal tones that then colors the back with a slice of rainbow when the phone is exposed to light. The new circular camera compartment, inspired by Huawei says a black hole, is elegant and well proportioned, and if you turn the phone upside down it almost makes it look like an old iPod. In addition, it's a more sustainable phone, with 90% less paper and 28% less plastic in the packaging, a move with which Huawei is playing a leading role in the latest smartphone sustainability narrative.  

On the other hand, however, you can not help but feel a certain nostalgia. There was a period, in the second half of the last decade, before the Trump administration ban, in which each launch of a new Huawei flagship pushed the idea of what could be done with a smartphone a little bit further. The Chinese giant, in its rise in the cell phone market, which brought it to the throne within a few years, has focused on two aspects, above all: the battery, both in terms of duration and charging speed. And the camera, on high-end models in partnership with Leica, pumped with machine learning strokes and capable, for many years, of night shots impossible for the competition, even if this was Apple or Samsung. A quality, the photographic one, that is also maintained in the new Mate 40 Pro, with that extreme sharpness of the shots that is a sort of trademark Huawei/Leica, with an ultra-wide-angle lens that makes sparks and a final result, especially if you like that tone a bit 'HDR, which remains a landmark. The smartphone is extremely high performance, thanks to the new "homemade" processor Kirin 9000 and the Mate has always been the phone with which in autumn Huawei officially launched its top-of-the-range processor. 

In short, we are in front of one of the best smartphones of this year. Or rather, that it would be, if there was not the famous ban of the U.S. Department of Commerce, as a result of which Huawei can install the Android operating system on its phones, but without Google services. Paradoxically, then, the experience of the Mate 40 Pro in the West is very similar to that in China, where in turn Google is banned. A big problem, however, for all markets far from Beijing, which Huawei has tried to overcome with its own system of services and especially with its own application store, which remains the real weakness of not having Google on board: the lack of the infinite choice of apps of the Play Store is obviously felt. The answer of the Chinese giant is App Gallery, a store that today is the third in the world, within which new applications continue to be integrated, looking both at the global and local market, for example in Italy with Helbiz, UCI Cinema and others. At the moment there are about 96 thousand applications. A great effort that is beginning to make sense also for the end user. Then, of course, the most crafty users know that there are many ways to install applications on Android and if you want also Google Maps. But that's another story.      

From 1249 euros.