Someone at LG must have thought: "Leather is so last-year, let’s do something nobody has done – or long quit trying." And here we have the LG G5. It has the looks of a brand new flagship, the heart of a dragon and an adventurous dual camera setup suited for every occasion. But there’s more than what meets the eye, the Magic Slot. The LG G5 is a modular smartphone, which lets you plug a handful of external add-ons: a semi-pro camera grip with shutter buttons and a bigger battery, or an external sound amplifier by B&O.

How long since you last saw the inside of your phone? It seems like while everyone was busy experimenting with designs and mixing up various alloys, there was something unusual cooking in the LG labs.

Brand new or just well forgotten old, innovating for its own sake or trying to defy the impossible, the modular design won't let you upgrade the processor or the camera, but it certainly offers plenty of options. The add-ons will mostly be sold separately but initial prices don't seem too bad. You might even get a bonus camera grip - LG will throw one in the bundle in select markets. Who knows, we might see the return of the xenon flash or some smart docking solutions along the lines of Microsoft's Continuum.

What you do get right out of the box is the base equipment and in the case of the G5, it's anything but modest. Perhaps the star of the show is the camera combo. The 16MP camera borrowed from the LG V10 does top-notch stills, and the secondary 8MP sensor offers unmatched super wide shots while adding a hybrid zoom of sorts to the package.

The HTC 10 is everything an HTC fan has been longing for. A full smartphone package experience without compromise. The problem with this idea is that it doesn't exist, there will always be some phone with a better camera or better battery or a larger display. But we can always look at this idea subjectively and find the right balance between what the phone offers versus compromises you might be making.

It's been quiet in HTC camp lately but it seems the company has been gearing up for its big comeback this year. HTC's relevancy had been slipping away the past couple of years and the Taiwanese company thought it should buckle down and listen to what its customers have been saying for a while. And the fans, on the other hand, are excited to learn that "HTC is back!"

Before the HTC 10, pretty much every iteration of the HTC One series in recent years brought some form of compromise. The HTC One M7 had a great camera, the first of its kind, the problem was only 4MP did not allow any sort of cropping without anyone noticing. The HTC One M8 had the same 4 megapixel camera and HTC made a bad choice to even remove OIS from the flagship.

The HTC One M9 was a step in the right direction, but it was not enough. Even with a bigger camera sensor this time around, the camera performance was still lackluster. The One M9 was also plagued with overheating problems caused by an early version of the Snapdragon 810 which had to be downclocked just to avoid the heating issues. As a result, the HTC's M9 unofficially became the flagship to avoid.