Articles by Alex Colon

Everyone’s attention might be on the Lumia 925 and the Lumia 928 right now, but it would be a shame to overlook the Lumia 521. This cute, capable smartphone costs just $29.99 down (or $149.99 in total), and gets you a good mix of performance and features with one of T-Mobile’s inexpensive new Simple Choice plans. It’s not…

If at first you don’t succeed… Well, that might be a little misleading. Nokia’s Lumia 920 for AT&T has been modestly successful as far as Windows phones are concerned. But Nokia is trying again with the $99.99 Lumia 928 for Verizon Wireless. It’s almost the exact same phone as the 920, except it’s been fitted with a…

You might have seen the Alcatel One Touch Idol in Iron Man 3. I haven’t seen it yet, but with its sleek, thin design, I can see how the Idol looks like a natural pairing for Tony Stark’s rich-boy bravado. But I can’t imagine that Iron Man himself would ever use a device that’s so…

Nowadays, when even most feature phones are trying to mimic smartphones, with touch screens and a laundry list of features, it’s refreshing to see an honest-to-goodness simple phone like the Just5 J510. You may already be familiar with its predecessor, the Just5 J509, which is still available, and still one of our top picks for…

The midrange smartphone has come a long way. Whereas $100 once would get you something decent or slightly above average, now you can often find many of the same specs and features in phones that cost half the price of their high-end competition. The Pantech Perception is a $99.99 case in point. It gets you speedy…

With so few keyboarded smartphones available, putting a good one out there should be a no brainer. And for a manufacturer as big and popular as Samsung, how hard can it be? How about this: Take an aging Galaxy S III, stick a sliding keyboard on it, and boom, you’ve got the best keyboarded Android…

The ZTE Director is proof that nothing is truly free. This Android smartphone for U.S. Cellular may not cost a dime, but you’re sure to spend a lot of time feeling frustrated with it. It would’ve been a perfectly decent phone a couple of years ago, but now it’s hampered by slow performance, a small, unattractive…

Huawei’s second phone to sound like a brand of yogurt, the Premia 4G is much better than the first, last year’s Activa 4G. And for as low as $99, it’s the best deal you can get on a contract-free smartphone from MetroPCS right now. That doesn’t mean the Premia 4G is perfect—it doesn’t run the latest…

The unlocked Xperia ZL is Sony’s best smartphone yet. It’s also the best-size big-screen phone we’ve tested. It has a 5-inch screen, which means that it technically meets our definition for phablet (which is a phone the size of a small tablet). But unlike every other phablet out there, the Xperia ZL doesn’t feel huge. It has a beautiful…