Enlarge / The auction ran from June 30 to July 16. (credit: Getty )

If you shopped for a new smartphone today and were offered a model with 4GB of storage, you'd probably laugh. That's what most shoppers did when seeing the original iPhone, considering that the 8GB model was only $100 more. Nowadays, you can get an iPhone with a whopping 1TB of storage. But that didn't stop a collector from shelling out $ 190,372.80 for an original 4GB iPhone at an auction that closed yesterday.

Before yesterday, the highest a 2007 iPhone ever sold for was $63,356.40 . The sale occurred through LCG Auctions and was for an 8GB model, which originally went for $599.

The smaller-storage model just beat the first-generation iPhone's auction record by 200.48 percent, selling for an astounding 38,050.86 percent more than its original $499 MSRP. After 28 bids, the outrageous final selling price includes a $158,644 final bid, plus administration costs. LCG Auctions thought the phone would sell for $50,000 to $100,000, but the collectible surpassed expectations.

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Selling a new smartphone is the hardest it has been in years. Rising device costs, limited differences between model upgrades, and economic and environment-related desires to keep electronics alive as long as possible are making people turn to refurbished phones, data shared this week by analyst Counterpoint found. And if someone is buying a refurbished phone, there's a good chance it's an iPhone.

According to Counterpoint, Apple represented 49 percent of refurbished phones sold worldwide in 2022. The number of refurbished iPhones sold increased 16 percent year-over-year, with the overall used smartphone market growing 5 percent year-over-year, Counterpoint said. The numbers would be even higher, but a reported 17 percent drop in refurbished smartphone sales in China—driven, the firm said, by an increase in COVID-19 cases and related policies—was detrimental.

By Counterpoint's measures, Apple grew its market share here from 44 percent in 2021 to 49 percent. Samsung is the biggest competitor, but it lost market share.

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The end is near for a bunch of old telecommunications tech in China. On Monday, the country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced that as of March 1, it will no longer issue permits for fax machines, pagers, or integrated services digital network (ISDN) terminals to access Chinese networks.

The announcement, spotted by The Register , also applies to "fixed telephone terminals, cordless telephone terminals, [and] group telephones," as well as modems, "multimedia terminals connected to mobile communication networks," and "frame relay for 11 types of telecommunications equipment," including switches and call center equipment, per a Google translation.

While existing products will still be able to connect to Chinese networks, the country will not issue permits for new products that rely on these dated technologies.

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  The Pixel 7 Pro innards (bottom) look a lot neater than those of the Pixel 6 Pro (top). The graphite thermal tape (the shiny black stuff on the Pixel 6, the matte black sticker on the Pixel 7) has a larger surface area over the hot parts of the Pixel 7. [credit: PBK Reviews / Ron Amadeo ]

The Pixel 7 is still on its way, but that isn't stopping the Internet from tearing it down already. In what's becoming a tradition , PBK Reviews is the first to rip apart the device, specifically the Pixel 7 Pro. Now we can do some fun comparisons between this teardown and last year's.

Just as it looks on the outside, the Pixel 7 Pro is pretty close to the Pixel 6 Pro, but you can spot some refinements. Google has done a much neater job with the graphite thermal tape this year. The Pixel 6 Pro had three different sections of thermal tape, but there's now one monolithic block of graphite covering the cameras, SoC, and battery.

On the Pixel 6, the graphite sticker had to be multiple parts because Google didn't want to cover up the mmWave antenna wire, which last year ran overtop of the battery. On the Pixel 7 Pro, the mmWave antenna cable is way longer and runs around the perimeter of the battery under the metal mid-frame. With no cable in the way, the thermal tape can have a way larger surface area overtop of the battery, camera, and SoC. Google removed some thermal tape that was previously close to the USB-C port, but with the process node reduction and more tape concentrated around the SoC, this should hopefully lead to a cooler phone.

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The Android update treadmill continues with the release of Android 13. It's one of the smallest Android releases in recent memory, with barely any user-facing features to point to. Keep in mind, though, that this update follows the monster Android 12 release from last year. This is also the second Android OS release this year, the previous one being the tablet-focused Android 12L update that was rushed out the door in March.

We would have a bit more meat to work with if Android 12L was part of this release, but as it is, we're left with a grab bag of features for Android 13. It includes many foundational features for Android tablets and smart displays, but there's not much here for phones.

Even so, there are things to discuss, so let's dive in.

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Apple has officially confirmed the date and time for this year's iPhone-centric product launch event: September 7 at 10am PDT (1pm EST).

This is the same date that was leaked in a Bloomberg report last week , though members of the media are being invited to the Steve Jobs Theater on Apple's campus to cover the event and go hands-on with devices in person (the report suggested it would be entirely livestreamed, as many of Apple's pandemic-era product reveals have been). Apple's invitation was characteristically cryptic, but it's safe to assume that the company plans to announce an updated iPhone lineup and a release date for iOS 16.

The Bloomberg report said that Apple would be discontinuing the "mini" iPhone size for the iPhone 14 lineup, and it would be launching a less-expensive 6.7-inch iPhone 14 Max for people who want a large screen but don't want to step all the way up to the Pro iPhones. It sounds like the best new features are being reserved for the higher-end phones, including a notchless display with smaller cutouts for the front-facing camera and sensors, an all-new processor, and a new main camera with a 48-megapixel sensor.

Enlarge / The green Pixel 6. (credit: David Urbanke )

Canalys' North American smartphone market share numbers are out, and the big mover for Q2 2022 is once again Google, which is seeing huge growth numbers thanks to the Pixel 6. Last quarter , Canalys had Google up 380 percent year over year, and this quarter, the company is up 230 percent!

That sounds incredibly successful, but this is Google's tiny hardware division we're talking about, so it's all relative success. The company is now at 2 percent North American market share, having shipped 800,000 devices for Q2 2022. Along with last quarter, Google is now regularly hitting whole-digit market share numbers. That's good enough for fifth place, behind Apple (52 percent), Samsung (26 percent), Lenovo/Motorola (9 percent), and TCL (5 percent).

Canalys also has a list of the best-selling models. The top five are all iPhones, of course, with the base model iPhone 13 taking the top spot, followed by the super-cheap iPhone SE. The iPhone 13 Mini, which is rumored to be selling so poorly that there won't be an iPhone 14 Mini, took the ninth spot. The first Android phone on the list, the flagship Galaxy S22 Ultra, clocks in at No. 6.

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Motorola, somehow the #3 smartphone manufacturer in the US after Apple and Samsung, is taking on the Pixel 6a. The company announced the Moto Edge 2022 (not to be confused with the $1,000 Edge+), and at $500, the mid-ranger is going right up against Google's latest phone . The two companies are definitely taking different approaches to the ~$500 price tag.

Motorola is throwing most of its budget at an eye-popping 144 Hz, 6.6-inch, 2400×1080 display, which is a powerful spec-sheet line item versus the lowly 60 Hz display in the Pixel 6a. The SoC is the brand-new MediaTek Demensity 1050, and the phone has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, an in-screen fingerprint reader, a 5000 mAh battery, and 30 W charging.

That MediaTek SoC is an interesting choice. It's a 6 nm chip with two ARM Cortex A78 CPUs and six Cortex A55 CPUs, so it's not going to set the world on fire. It's not out yet, but pre-release Geekbench tests turned in a score of 2142, which makes it quite a bit slower than the Pixel 6a's flagship-class Google Tensor SoC (around ~2850 points). Putting aside the issue of whether you even want a 144 Hz display in a budget phone, is this Mediatek SoC able to render Android at a stable 144 FPS? Motorola is no stranger to negating its fast displays with underpowered SoCs, so this should be a major concern if you view 144 Hz as a selling point.