There's something liberating about traveling without your computer. Your load is lighter, your battery needs are fewer, and you don't have to risk damaging or losing one of your most important and expensive devices. Besides, most of us are already carrying around a pretty powerful and conveniently compact computer 24/7: our smartphones.

My problem, though, is that I prefer doing most things on a laptop rather than on a phone. Whether working, writing a detailed email, or shopping around for something online, I can complete my task quicker and more accurately if sitting at a table, typing on a physical keyboard, and navigating with a mouse.

So, in the interest of having my cake and eating it, I've gathered a collection of gadgets that help me get the most out of my iPhone when traveling. With these accessories, I can use my iPhone as if it were a desktop PC, peripherals and all. See you later, laptop.

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• Many parents struggle with putting their smartphones down and paying full attention to their kids.
• Glassdoor CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong told CNBC that he stays offline around his children.
• He only works in his home office, going in there for emergency calls or after his kids go to bed.

Teens aren't the only ones who are heavily enticed by smartphones; plenty of parents struggle to put their devices down, too.

A 2024 Pew Research Center report found that 46% of teens said their parents are "at least sometimes distracted by their phone" when they try to talk to them.

That's why Glassdoor CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong has a simple rule at home: he doesn't answer texts or emails in front of his kids.

"I want to lead by not having digital products all around," Sutherland-Wong, 44, said in a CNBC interview. He said he doesn't want to be "distracted by my email and text messages all the time" and gives his kids his undivided attention.

He stays offline when he's around his kids

Smartphones aren't just magnetizing because of work emails and apps like Slack; parents often use phones for everything from scheduling playdates to managing extracurriculars.

To reduce his chances of getting sucked into his phone, Sutherland-Wong gets fully offline when he spends time with his kids. He works remotely from his home office, which makes it easier to pick up on work once the kids are asleep.

Otherwise, he makes it a point "to be there when my kids come home from school, to be able to get offline, spend quality time with them, put them to bed, and then get back online."

He models clear boundaries around work

Not all work emergencies happen between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. To create "space" between his role as a father and as a CEO, Sutherland-Wong returns to his home office when an urgent work task arises.

He feels his kids "pick up on" how he takes work calls. Privately firing off emails not only helps him maintain a work-life balance as a father but also models healthier habits around technology for his kids.

• Huawei is set to launch its new line of Mate 70 phones on Tuesday.
• Its software and hardware have been developed with domestic expertise.
• It marks a new era of self-sufficiency at a moment of tech division between the US and China.

Look no further than Huawei to get a sense of just how far apart the US and China are heading into a second Donald Trump presidency.

On Tuesday, the Shenzhen-based tech giant is set to unveil a slate of new smartphones — the Mate 70 series — that will be the most free they have ever been of Western software and hardware.

During his first term in the White House, the president-elect moved to block what he saw as a national security threat by wielding export controls and an executive order to cut the Chinese firm's ties to crucial US partners and suppliers.

President Joe Biden's outgoing administration continued this approach, which meant Huawei had to look closer to home for chips, operating systems, and apps.

This term, Trump will stare down a Huawei that's showing it's doing just fine without its US suppliers.

On the software side, all lingering remains of Huawei's former dependence on Android look set to be excised on the Mate 70 devices as they launch with HarmonyOS Next, an operating system built to run apps specific to Huawei's system.

Huawei first launched HarmonyOS in 2019 after being cut off from Google's powerful Android system. Early versions of the platform contained code from the Android Open Source Project, but HarmonyOS Next removes it all, making it a product solely of Huawei's own making.

Meanwhile, on the hardware side, Huawei is looking to raise the bar on performance by introducing a new made-in-China smartphone chip in some of the new Mate 70 models, according to the Wall Street Journal.

A performance leap with a domestic chip would be a big deal. The top-end version of the Mate 70 predecessor — the Mate 60 — stunned policymakers last year as its launch showed off capabilities that were once only possible to accomplish with equipment sourced in the US.

The Mate 60's pro model was reported to have an advanced chipset called Kirin 9000s, designed by Shenzhen-based HiSilicon and manufactured by state-backed semiconductor firm SMIC. It gave the phone 5G-like cellular capabilities, per a teardown by Bloomberg.

Together, the software and hardware advances are a symbolic moment that shows how little effect efforts in Washington have had on squeezing a company dubbed a "national champion" by Beijing's mandarins since the 1990s.

Bad news for Apple

This growing self-sufficiency isn't going unnoticed.

Apple, which considers China its most important international market beyond the US, has seen iPhone sales suffer in the region as local consumers have gravitated toward handsets that are aggressively priced and give them a sense of national pride.

According to figures from research firm Counterpoint, Huawei held an 18% share of the Chinese smartphone market in the third quarter of this year, while Apple had a 14% share. Depending on the success of the Mate 70 phones, that gap could widen in the months ahead.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, for his part, wants to ensure that Chinese consumers remain dedicated to the iPhone maker, which has sold its smartphones there since 2009. This week, he is visiting the country for at least a third time this year to attend an industry conference.

During his trip, he will be acutely aware that iPhones face stiff competition in China. Back in 2009, no Chinese company had an answer to Steve Jobs' creation, and even if they did, they'd need to package it up with US technology. Huawei's Tuesday launch could well change that.

Last week, Niantic announced plans to create an AI model for navigating the physical world using scans collected from players of its mobile games, such as Pokémon Go, and from users of its Scaniverse app, reports 404 Media.

All AI models require training data. So far, companies have collected data from websites, YouTube videos, books, audio sources, and more, but this is perhaps the first we've heard of AI training data collected through a mobile gaming app.

"Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System (VPS), which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse," Niantic wrote in a company blog post.

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