Week 48 in review: Infinity-O leaks galore, Realme U1 is official

As we enter the last month of the year we find ourselves in the middle of the race to announce the first phone with a camera cutout in the screen is heating up. Samsung will premiere its Infinity-O display with the Galaxy A8s. Whether that display will be an AMOLED or an LCD manufactured by BOE remains to be seen.

It's also unclear if the Galaxy A8s will become official before the year's. Meanwhile, Huawei swooped-in and declared that it has a phone with a screen cutout that will become official in December. Smart money is on that phone being the nova 4.

Samsung's main focus is still the Galaxy S10, which will premiere early next year (likely around the MWC in February). The anniversary device will pack a screen with smaller bezels (perhaps a cutout for the selfie camera) and Samsung's new 8nm Exynos 9820 chip. The latter made its first appearance on AnTuTu and beat the score of Huawei's 7nm Kirin 980 chip but still came behind Apple's A12 and Qualcomm's 8150.

The final bit of Samsung news this week was about 11 people sued for disclosing company OLED secrets to a Chinese company. Samsung is the dominant OLED maker in the world and has built a serious lead in OLED technology - a lead it will fiercely protect.

Realme released its fifth phone in under a year - the Realme U1 is the first commercially-available device with a Helio P70 and as all Realme phones brings great value for money.

Meanwhile HMD is gearing up to release the Nokia 8.1 to the world. The global variant of the China-based Nokia X7 was detailed this week and will be shown at an event in Dubai next week - on December 5.

Sony and LG also made headlines this week. LG acquired a patent for a phone with 16 cameras - suddenly 3 cameras don't sound like much. Speaking of 3 cameras, Sony's Xperia XZ4 surfaced this week with an extra-tall 6.5-inch screen and, yes, 3 cameras on the back.

ZTE's nubia brand announced the Red Magic Mars gaming phone with a Snapdragon 845, 10GB of RAM and a cooling system featuring dual heat pipes.

And finally, before we let you go, OnePlus announced a partnership with McLaren that will bring a 6T with 10GB of RAM and 256GB storage. So we'll have our pick of the Huawei Mate 20 RS Porsche Design, Oppo Find X Lamborghini Edition and OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition!

The Exynos 9820 chipset beats the Kirin 980 but falls short of the Snapdragon 8150.

These CAD-based renders show that Sony has rethought the placement of the fingerprint reader and the stereo speakers of the Xperia XZ3.

With Snapdragon 710 under the hood, it's the international twin of the Chinese Nokia X7.

Arranged in a 4x4 array, the cameras will be angled so they capture the scene from different perspectives, which can be stitched together.

Huawei will aim to release an Infinity-O display phone by the end of the year.

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A screen pinhole is in the upper-left corner.

The device was spotted in China in a pre-production case.

A Snapdragon 845 chipset is paired with the ICE cooling solution for consistent performance. There are stereo speakers and haptic feedback too.

The Samsung Galaxy A8s could use an LCD, instead of an OLED.

It borrows the screen from the Realme 2 Pro, but replaces the camera in the teardrop notch with a more capable shooter.

The research took Samsung around six years and millions of dollars.

The Galaxy Note9 was also advertised with "up to 1TB storage", but that included a 512GB microSD card.

The company wants to be the first to launch such a phone (ahead of Samsung) and even showed a prototype (on which this render is based). 

Sony only recently adopted the 18:9 aspect ratio, but its early 2019 flagship may tower above the competition.

A new rumor claims this will be the highest-end version of any phone the company has ever made.

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