A hairline crack, a cheap orange case, slow data speeds. While tooling around Hong Kong, nothing could be dearer to me than a particular phone that in most other circumstances would earn my disdain. It’s called the Handy phone, and docked in 25,000 hotel rooms across Hong Kong (and 12,000 in Singapore), it greets weary …

I spent the day at an analyst summit in Shenzhen, China. The company: Huawei, which invited me along for a chance to interview some executives and learn more about the world’s third-largest phone brand. The objective: get to know how the maker of gadgets and networking equipment is doing. As the presentations droned on, it dawned on me that, while …

Well, I knew it would be hard to share stories of my on-the-road diary of seven cities in Asia once I crossed over from Hong Kong, which has an open Internet environment, into China, which is infamous for The Great Firewall that blocks a lot of services I take for granted, like Google, Facebook and Twitter. But I didn’t know …

Wallet-watchers: AT&T has just announced three new Samsung Galaxy phones that come in for well under $200. Their entry-level features won’t bowl you over, but they’re not meant to — these are strictly low-price plays. The $130 Samsung Galaxy Express Prime GoPhone goes on sale today, followed on May 6 by the $170 Samsung Galaxy J3 and $80 Galaxy Express …

Do you ever wish you should just show a customer service person your acting-up phone instead of trying to laboriously describe the problem and then try to fix it yourself? A new feature for Samsung+, a customer service app you can download on compatible Galaxy phones and tablets, now grants remote access to the very people who can troubleshoot your …

“Sorry, ma’am, you can’t use NFC payments over 30 quid.” That from the pimply young waiter at a London restaurant too hip for its own good. I just smiled, placed the Samsung Galaxy S7 I was testing over the handheld payment card portal, and said “Let’s see what happens.” What happened was that a little blue check-mark animated out of …

If your eyes glaze over and your senses go numb at the mere mention of virtual reality, this is a message for you. Because I think you’ll come around, and you’ll thank me when you’re prepared for the rush of VR experiences to come. Maybe not today, but in the next couple of years when it becomes part of your …

It doesn’t take much scrutiny of the event invitation we received from HTC Tuesday morning to decode that HTC is finally unveiling this year’s flagship Android phone, presumably the HTC One M10, on April 12. The invitation defines an online event — a streaming presentation, really — in which the Taiwan-based company will unveil the “power of 10.” In this …

Congratulations to Peter G. of Galloway, New Jersey, for winning a Reeljuice 5X portable charger in last week’s giveaway. Now, for this week’s prize. You can’t buy the ultimate Android lover’s bragging rights in any retail store. But you can win the entire set of 86 Google Android collector pins in this week’s giveaway. Google made these specifically for conference-goers …

So there I was, minding my own business, when all of a sudden — and I’m still not sure how, but I’m klutzy, so that’s probably answer enough — the Samsung Galaxy S7 fell from my hand to the floor with a slam. And cracked its glass backing. Badly. “Well, duh”, you’re probably thinking. “That’s what happens when you drop …