It was just a year ago that I had my first demo of the Humane AI pin — which was also my last, as it turned out. But another AI gadget at this year’s MWC is trying to take off where Humane crashed and burned, and in ways it’s even weirder than the AI pin. It’s a phone that captures tons of information about you, both past and present, and uses it to create your own AI avatar to act as a virtual assistant. It’s part Rabbit R1, part Gemini Assistant, part science fiction. And oh yeah; there’s some blockchain stuff too. I told you, it’s wild.

The team behind Newnal AI is based in Korea and established itself by creating a blockchain-based vaccine verification method used widely in the country. Early in my meeting with the company’s founder YT Kim, he stressed one thing to me: “We never sold cryptocurrency.” They’re clearly aware of the bad vibes around blockchain right now.

Newnal’s AI phone trains an AI model on you, so it needs lots of your information. The idea is that you go around downloading your personal data history from websites like Meta and Google, and also stuff like your medical records and financial data, then feed it to Newnal’s AI. Kim says the company encrypts this “personal knowledge graph” and breaks it up into pieces stored across multiple third-party cloud servers. In theory, only the owner of the data can access it.

Are there massive privacy implications in all of the above? Absolutely. To its credit, Newnal has published an unusual amount of supporting documentation and technical descriptions on its website in an effort to be transparent about what it’s doing. I can’t verify that the company’s methods are secure as it says, this is just a first look.

But the rabbit hole keeps going: all of this information, plus your appearance and voice, are used to create a moving, talking version of yourself that sits in a little screen above the phone’s main screen. You summon it by pressing a square button on the side of the phone, then you ask it to do things. There’s all the usual stuff we’re used to seeing in these demos: it can help you shop for a new pair of earrings or draft an email. Kim and his team showed me some of these demos and they all went about as expected — and then we got to car insurance.

The request was simple: help me buy a car insurance policy. I could see on screen as it appeared to comparison shop policies. At each of these steps, icons appear to indicate where the model is getting certain information. A policy was decided on, and the next request was to fill out the necessary forms to go ahead and purchase the policy. And it did; I saw it go through pages of forms on the Geico website and fill them in. 

Kim says that they actually bought a used car so they could go through with this demo, which is bananas. And it sure seems like it worked; I watched the model complete each step, showing its sources for the information along the way, and at the end it paid for the policy. It was one of the wildest tech demos I’ve ever seen, and I’m still not even sure I believe my own eyes that it worked.

This is all wrapped up in a simple yet futuristic-looking little phone that Kim says was inspired by the iPhone 5S. It’s a little black-and-silver rectangle with a separate upper screen where your AI sits. Newnal says it runs a “hybrid” of its own OS and Android. The versions I saw were still prototypes, but Kim says the company plans to launch the phone globally on May 1st for $375 each. It’ll ship to customers two months after it goes up for pre-order.

The timing might remind me of the Humane AI pin, but the whole thing gives major Rabbit R1 vibes. It’s an attractive little gadget with a surprisingly low price tag that makes huge promises. We all know how that went with the R1’s launch, and I’m sure the experience contributes to the skepticism I feel about what Newnal is doing. But unlike when the R1 was first unveiled, the demos I saw were convincing and the device completed all of the requests. But “Can AI fill out car insurance forms?” and “Do I feel like I can trust AI to fill out car insurance forms?” are two different questions. The same goes for “Can I train an AI model on all of my private data?” and “Should I train an AI model on all my private data?” So on and so forth.

Whether or not any of it really works outside of controlled demos, and whether or not these are good ideas, I’ve gotta give Kim and Newnal credit for trying something bold. Elsewhere at Mobile World Congress we’re putting DSLR camera lenses on phones, adding more hinges to screens that already fold, and trying to make already thin phones even thinner. Not exactly setting the world on fire. But if nothing else, Newnal is an idea — whether it’s a good one or not is something the company will have to prove outside of a conference demo. And if Rabbit and Humane have shown us anything, it’s that drumming up interest at a tech conference is no substitute for shipping a product that works.

For a phone show, there’s an awful lot of cool non-phone stuff at Mobile World Congress this year. Take Lenovo’s ThinkBook Flip concept, which answers the question: “What if your laptop unfolded, and then unfolded again?” Samsung’s Display group has been apparently thinking along the same lines, because it has some interesting new folding concepts at MWC including a briefcase screen and a foldable gaming handheld, which I want, like, yesterday.

Samsung Display is, of course, a display manufacturer, so these concepts are just that. They’re demonstrations of what its screens could maybe, possibly do in the hands of another manufacturer. But they’re still cool as hell, and they were very popular with MWC attendees who had to constantly be told to stop trying to touch them. That was especially true of this Switch-style portable gaming handheld mockup, which opens fully flat and folds in half for storage when you’re done playing.

I don’t know if it’s the fun colors or the portability aspect, but it’s super compelling and just begs to be picked up. This, again, is not allowed, but I found someone to fold it and unfold it for me.

A PR rep was allowed to handle the gaming handheld, but nobody at the booth was authorized to touch the screen briefcase. So all I could do was look at it from a distance and admire its resemblance to the LG briefcase TV. Except, you know, with a folding screen. It’s not clear exactly how you’d use the thing — do you prop it up on its side? Maybe the briefcase would have a kickstand of some kind? Unclear. Still cool, though.

The other attention-grabbing concept on the booth was this asymmetrical Z Flip-style phone I’ve affectionately named The Claw. When it’s fully open it looks basically like a normal slab screen, but it closes with two hinges to leave part of the inner screen visible. It’s neat, but seems completely impractical and I’d be way too nervous about debris getting to the inner screen since it’s not totally protected. I do like the two-tone finish, though.

Samsung had an assortment of other examples and concepts on the booth, some of which we’d just seen at CES. If you can imagine a screen that stretches, bends, or flexes in some way, then Samsung Display probably has one. And you know what? I love them for that.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

The Nothing 3A phones were just announced with a new take on the company’s “make tech more fun again” ethos. These devices have improved hardware over the Phone 2A, updated cameras, and a new feature called the Essential Space to store and index your miscellaneous screenshots, voice memos, and photographs, all through a dedicated button. Starting at $379 for the 3A and $459 for the 3A Pro, they offer solid specs for their midrange prices — and a look at what Nothing has been working on for this AI-centric moment.

The 3A and 3A Pro are mainly differentiated by their cameras, which you’ll notice just by glancing at the two devices. The 3A Pro’s prominent round camera housing includes a 3x periscope telephoto lens; the 3A offers a standard 2x zoom. Both phones include a 50-megapixel f/1.8 main camera and an 8-megapixel ultrawide. The telephoto cameras on each use a 50-megapixel sensor for lossless crop zoom: 4x for the 3A and 6x for the 3A Pro.

They’re big phones, each with a 6.77-inch display, and the 3A Pro feels especially chunky with the protruding camera housing. Both use Nothing’s striking translucent back panel design for a bold look, which balances an awkward camera bump on the 3A Pro. When I started using the phone I felt like my fingers were constantly bumping against the housing. I’ve adjusted to it after a few days and dig its Pop Socket-esque functionality.

The phones come with Snapdragon 7S Gen 3 chipsets, 12 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of storage, which is generous for the midrange class. They ship with Android 15 and Nothing is promising three years of OS updates and six years of security patches — a decent, if not the best, software policy for a budget phone. They’re being offered in the US through Nothing’s beta program.

Nothing Phone 3A and 3A Pro sample images

The Glyph interface and LED light strips are still present, but Nothing seems to be shifting its efforts toward software features. The Essential Space is a new place to save screenshots, voice memos, and images, like Google’s Pixel Screenshots app. It answers the eternal question: what do I do with this thing?

Is your photo gallery cluttered with pictures of stuff you want to remember? Do you wish you had somewhere to keep all those inspiration photos for your bathroom makeover? Do you yearn for a place to put the information in an email you keep searching your inbox for every time you need it? Then you get what the Essential Space is all about. You save stuff there, it uses AI to pull out relevant bits of information, and it helps organize what would otherwise be left floating around your phone somewhere.

Using the Essential Key to add things to the Essential Space took a little adjustment. It’s right where I’m used to the power button sitting, so I kept pressing it unintentionally. A single press will capture a screenshot, and a double tap opens the app so you can browse through your collections. This feels backwards for reasons I can’t quite explain, but I’ve mostly gotten used to it.

Nitpicking aside, I think Nothing is onto something. I added screenshots of travel information for an upcoming flight that are otherwise spread across emails and apps. The Essential Space keeps it in one tidy spot and is good at pulling key timing and dates from the screengrabs. It’ll even make a little to-do list for you. It didn’t quite get everything right about my connecting flight, but I think that’s because the date wasn’t visible in both screenshots. The software seems to do a decent job when it has complete information to work with.

The functionality is pretty simple right now. Nothing has more on the roadmap like a mode that starts recording a voice memo when you flip the phone over, and the ability to automatically organize related content into collections. It seems like a useful feature with a smart AI layer, rather than something that leans into AI just for kicks.

The 3A is available to order March 4th and ships March 11th. The 3A Pro goes up for order March 11th, and will ship starting March 25th.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Chinese phone brand Infinix is known to show off a flashy concept, and at this year’s MWC the company is looking skyward for inspiration. It’s showing a phone with an integrated solar panel on the back, as well as a solar charging phone case. They’re both in the concept phase, but the demo units I saw at MWC were functional and the idea is plenty appealing.

Infinix calls this SolarEnergy-Reserving technology, and it uses perovskite solar cells like Anker’s beach umbrella and cloak concept. These cells are thinner and cheaper to produce than traditional silicon solar cells. That’s paired with a system that helps regulate voltage called Maximum Power Point Tracking. The idea is to maximize power while managing heat; sitting under a hot sun might be good for solar cells, but it’s generally not great if you want to keep your phone from overheating. As it exists now, this technology can charge a phone at up to 2W, and is intended to pad out a phone’s reserved charge while it’s not in use.

The phone with built-in solar panel on the back is pretty self-explanatory, but I think the case is more interesting. It’s paired with a prototype phone that has a couple of small contacts on the side to deliver power from the case. Being able to swap it out for a regular case when you’re, say, going out at night would make sense. Likewise, having it around during a power outage would be handy.

Infinix is having a little fun at MWC, too, and is also showing off its second-gen color-changing E Ink phone. On the previous version, the back panel only changed color when plugged in. Now, it will run on the phone’s internal battery power, and is more customizable with a range of patterns and palettes.

They all look pretty similar, but in theory you can choose a photo as inspiration for the color palette or set it to change with the weather. Because it’s 2025, it does this with the help of — you guessed it — artificial intelligence.

HMD announced a new set of earbuds today with a case that doubles as a backup phone battery. The aptly named wireless Amped Buds come in a Qi2 charging case that uses reverse wireless charging to boost your phone’s charge. With a slim design and a 1,600mAh battery, it’s a portable case that offers just enough charge to get through the end of the day. They’re priced at €199 (about $206) and will launch in April. We don’t yet know if they’ll come to the US.

The Amped Buds include active noise cancellation and environmental noise cancellation. The case is rated IPX4 for some dust resistance, and the earbuds are IP54 splash-resistant. The case measures 14mm thick, and the buds are designed with a hinge to fit straight into the case for charging. They’re spring loaded, so there’s a satisfying pop when you put them in or take them out of the case. Remove the buds, and you’ll fold the stems forward to fit like standard earbuds.

The case and buds are color-matched and come in cyan, black, and pink. The case’s Qi2 support means it will connect magnetically to Qi2 and MagSafe phones for a secure fit while charging. It can be used with magnetic phone cases, too, or with any plain wireless charging phone (it just won’t stick securely), and there’s a USB port to provide wired charging. Of course, you can just use the case to charge the earbuds themselves — more than ten times over, according to HMD, which gets you up to 95 hours of music playback time before you have to charge the case again.

It’s a clever concept that makes immediate sense. Plenty of us are used to charging and carrying earpods already, so there’s no new behavior to learn. You just carry your earbuds with you as usual, and if you happen to run low on battery, you have a back-up on hand, or you just have a huge battery to keep recharging your buds. Pretty slick.

HMD announced the buds at MWC where it also unveiled an FC Barcelona-branded phone and a safety-focused phone for teens developed with kids’ smartwatch maker Xplora. But the earbuds stand out to me as the most interesting new offering.

The iPhone 16E is everything I love and hate about iOS. FaceTime at your fingertips. A reliable camera. Simplicity. Familiarity. They’re the pillars of the iPhone experience, and Apple’s newest phone has ‘em.

My husband picked up the 16E, concerned that he would have to “learn something new” to use it. He swiped around for a second and said, “Oh. It’s just like my phone.” It is just like his phone — a six-year-old iPhone XR — only updated with a few essential improvements (a faster processor, nicer screen, and a modern camera, that kind of thing) and little else.

That’s the other pillar of the iPhone experience: You get exactly what Apple gives you and nothing more. On Android, you can buy a $500 phone with a fast refresh-rate screen, two rear cameras, seven years of software support, and wireless charging. On iOS, you can buy this $599 phone with one rear camera, a standard 60Hz screen, wireless charging (but no MagSafe), and an ample but unstated amount of software support. Apple has no competition when it comes to phones running iOS. The company can gatekeep these conveniences behind a higher price tag, and that’s simply the way things will be. I’m …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It’s official: the home button is dead. Apple has launched the iPhone 16E with an updated design and killed off the iPhone’s classic Touch ID interface. Instead, the 16E moves to a Face ID-enabled notch and adds the latest A18 chip and support for Apple Intelligence under the surface, with a starting price of $599.

The 16E is a kind of iPhone SE successor based on the design of 2022’s iPhone 14, meaning it fits the front-facing cameras required for Face ID (and selfies) into a notch that cuts down from the top of the phone rather than the Dynamic Island design found on the company’s latest flagship phones. 

With a 6.06-inch OLED display, the 16E is now close to the same size as Apple’s standard 6.12-inch iPhone 16, meaning the company no longer offers a phone significantly smaller than its default model — at least not until the rumored iPhone 17 Air arrives. The 16E’s measurements show it’s about 0.1mm narrower and 0.7mm shorter than the standard iPhone 16.

The 16E includes the customizable Action Button but not the new Camera Control you’ll find on the 16 series. It does swap its Lightning port for USB-C, now a requirement for the phone to be sold in the EU. What it doesn’t have is support for MagSafe accessories or fast wireless charging, as the iPhone 16E only supports Qi wireless charging up to 7.5W, which will power you up more slowly than the 25W charging available on pricier iPhones.

On the inside, there’s an A18 chipset, the same chip as the iPhone 16. That makes the 16E powerful enough to run Apple Intelligence, the suite of AI tools that includes notification summaries. Even the non-Pro iPhone 15 can’t do that, so the 16E is one of the most capable iPhones out there. Apple has previously confirmed that 8GB RAM was the minimum to get Apple Intelligence support in the iPhone 16 series, so it’s likely that the 16E also boasts at least that much memory. The cheapest version has also been bumped to a baseline of 128GB of storage, meaning there’s no longer a 64GB iPhone.

There’s only a single 48-megapixel rear camera; the lack of additional cameras is the biggest downgrade compared to the company’s other handsets. With support for wireless charging and a water-resistant IP rating, there’s little you have to give up elsewhere.

The iPhone 16E is also the first iPhone to include a modem developed by Apple itself. The company has spent years trying to move away from modems developed by Qualcomm, and we’re finally seeing the fruits of that labor. The big questions now are how well the new modem performs and whether Apple is ready to roll out its own connectivity components in the iPhone 17 line later this year.

The new iPhone 16E is available to preorder Friday starting at $599, which is a significant price hike from the $429 2022 iPhone SE — though you get a lot more storage (128GB) in the base model and a much more modern design. The 16E ships on February 28th.

Update, February 19th: Added size details and noted lack of MagSafe support.

Correction, February 19th: Preorders open Friday, not Thursday, as initially stated.

Samsung’s Galaxy S-series is in its software era. Maybe the whole smartphone industry is, too, save for a few phones with hinges (Samsung’s included). But overall, we have exited the hardware-driven innovation cycle and are firmly in the midst of a software-based one. If you want proof, the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus are a good place to start.

These are great phones, which is no surprise. They look, feel, and operate like devices worthy of their $799 and $999 price tags. They’re slated to get seven years of OS upgrades, which amounts to a damn good return on that investment. I used both to take nice photos, play my little games, and generally go about my day without a hitch. 

This was all true of the S24 and S24 Plus and the S23 and S23 Plus. I couldn’t give you a good reason why the S25 stands out compared to Samsung’s last three generations of S-series phones. I don’t think Samsung can, either, because its entire sales pitch for the S25 revolves around software and AI capabilities — much of which will almost certainly be ported to previous S-series phones in short order.

Here’s the kicker: the software improvements aren’t all that great, either. AI can do a few …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple has advanced security features that you can enable to protect more of your data. Among other things, it includes highly secure end-to-end encryption for iCloud backups under the name Advanced Data Protection. This means that essentially only you can access the data stored in your iCloud device backup — Apple doesn’t have the key to access it. This is a strong layer of security, and although it takes a little bit of work to set up and requires you to take more responsibility for recovering your data, it’s well worth the effort if you’d like to make sure that you’re the only one who can access your backed up information.

Here’s how to set up end-to-end encryption for your iCloud backups on your iPhone. You’ll need to be running iOS 16.2, which was released in December 2022, or later versions.

There are two main things you’ll need to do in order to enable Advanced Data Protection: update all of your Apple devices to the latest version of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS (or remove them from your account if they can’t support version 16.2) and set up account recovery. Any HomePods or Apple TVs using your iCloud account also need to be updated to at least versi …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Customers on AT&T’s network are getting one more tool to help them decide when to pick up the phone: an indication of why a business is calling you, right from the incoming call screen. It’s a continuation of the branded calling feature that AT&T and TransUnion introduced last year, and only works on Android phones.

This feature starts with the business making the call, which can choose to display a message like “refill reminder” or “delivery service.” The message will also show up in the call details page. There’s nothing that the receiver needs to do in order to see the message; it’ll just pop up the way verified number badges do now.

In theory, it’ll let you know whether your pharmacy is calling to let you know about a refill or if your DoorDash driver is standing outside your apartment building. Sounds pretty nice.

If this all sounds familiar, that’s probably because Google introduced a similar feature for its phone app a few years ago — though it has since been discontinued. TransUnion’s verification works with the STIR/SHAKEN protocol responsible for helping carriers label potential spam calls as such.

But being limited to Android means a lot of AT&T customers in the US won’t see the message since we’re a notoriously iPhone-carrying people. That might not always be the case; James Garvert, senior vice president of TruContact Communications Solutions at TransUnion tells The Verge “we expect that capability to become standard on all mobile devices over time.”

Correction, February 7th: A previous version of this article stated that TransUnion’s branded calling feature worked as part of Google’s call verification program; it is not related to Google’s program, which has since been deprecated.

The Zenfone 12 Ultra officially launches today, but unlike previous generations, this one won’t be sold in the US.

As expected, the 12 Ultra is a de-gamer-ified ROG Phone 9 Pro with a big screen, a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, and a unique gimbal-like stabilizer in the main camera. It’s the same formula Asus followed with the Zenfone 11 Ultra, which was a fine device but failed to stand out in a sea of other big Android phones. Now, this edition isn’t even making landfall on our shores.

As you’d expect of a phone with gaming DNA, the 12 Ultra offers a big 5,500mAh battery. It supports 65W wired charging and up to 15W wireless charging via the Qi 1.3 standard — no Qi2 here. The 6.78-inch screen is an LTPO panel with variable refresh rates from 1 to 120Hz, and its 1080p resolution is a little low for a panel of this size.

The 12 Ultra, naturally, comes with a load of AI features. There’s AI background noise removal for video recording, AI-powered semantic search in the photo gallery, AI voice memo transcription, and AI document summarization. AI, AI, AI. These are all very familiar and seemingly a pre-requisite for any phone in 2025.

The 12 Ultra’s less familiar feature is its gimbal-like image stabilization, which is in its fourth iteration. Like previous versions, it offers hardware-based shake correction, combined with an updated electronic stabilization algorithm. In previous models, it’s been a genuinely cool feature and very effective at smoothing out bumpy camera footage.

Outside of the stabilization upgrade, the 12 Ultra’s camera hardware is unchanged from the 11 Ultra with a 50-megapixel main camera, 32-megapixel 3x telephoto, and a 13-megapixel ultrawide on the rear panel. On the software side, there’s a set of iPhone Photographic Styles-like color grading adjustments to adjust your preferred preset for color temperature and saturation in your shots.

Asus spokesperson Anthony Spence says that the decision to not bring the Zenfone 12 Ultra to North America “does not rule out the possibility of future Zenfone models being made available in the US,” so maybe this isn’t the end of the Zenfone line in the states. But it does seem to be further confirmation that the small Zenfone is dead. Long live the small phone.

The Zenfone 12 Ultra will start at €1,099 (about $1,145).

When you yell “Can you just Google it?” at your AI assistant, it’s fair to say that the AI assistant is not doing its job.

I was browning some beef on the stove and trying to determine when my husband’s flight was landing. I didn’t have the flight number, but there are only so many direct flights between Detroit and Seattle in a day. So I long-pressed the power button on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and asked Google’s Gemini assistant to find the information for me. It said it couldn’t. So I insisted — loudly — to just Google it, plus or minus an expletive. It couldn’t even do that, so I went to Google myself and had the answer in seconds. AI, everybody.

This wouldn’t matter except AI smarts are supposed to be the big deal with this phone. The Galaxy S25 Ultra is a barely warmed-over version of last year’s device, with some lightly bumped specs and ever-so-slight design changes. That’s fine! The S24 Ultra was a great piece of hardware, and the S23 Ultra was, too. Samsung didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. But it means the company is relying on these “Galaxy AI” features — plus some help from Gemini — to give the S25 Ultra that new-phone zhuzh. …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Windows Insiders will soon see a Copilot icon in one more place: Paint. Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels will see the new button thanks to an update rolling out now, putting AI tools in one location. Clicking the Copilot button in the task bar will reveal a dropdown menu with generative features like Cocreator, Image Creator, and Generative Erase. Microsoft has been on a mission to put a Copilot icon everywhere it can — from your keyboard to the taskbar — and Paint is just the latest place for it to pop up.

Microsoft has been adding AI image generation tools to Paint throughout the past year and change, bringing in the DALL-E-based Cocreator in late 2023 and generative fill options last fall. They’re all going in one place now, so if you’re looking to create some AI-generated clip art, you’ll just look for the Copilot logo. Honestly, a Copilot shortcut probably makes more sense in Paint than it does in Bing, anyway.

With today’s update, Windows 11 Insiders are also getting an update to the AI search opened up in preview earlier this month. Now, the “improved search” will allow you to find photos in the cloud with natural language; previously, AI search was limited to local files. When you perform a search, you’ll see the cloud files show up alongside the local images. This update is rolling out to Windows 11 Insiders in the Dev and Beta channels.

The Galaxy S25 Ultra, announced today, sheds more of its Note roots this year with rounded corners and flat edges that align it more with the rest of the S series. It comes with Qualcomm’s latest chipset, an upgraded ultrawide camera, and not much else, hardware-wise. With no price increase over last year’s model — starting at $1,299 — it’s a light refresh of Samsung’s biggest phone, with a major emphasis on One UI 7.0’s AI upgrades.

Something about the shift from curved edges to flat sides makes the S25 Ultra look hefty in photos, like if the Cybertruck were a phone. But it’s actually slightly smaller and lighter than last year’s device, even with a bigger 6.9-inch screen thanks to slimmer bezels. It’s equipped with a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor tuned for Galaxy devices — that’s true for all S25-series phones sold in all regions, which hasn’t been the case recently. And it still comes with one more strong spec: seven years of OS updates and security patches.

Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

There are some interesting things not on the Ultra this year, though. Bixby is no longer the default virtual assistant. It’s still present and you can summon it through its own app. But Google Gemini will answer when you long-press the wake button on the side of the phone.

The included S Pen, another holdover from the Note era, gets a bit of a downgrade. It no longer supports Bluetooth, so the air gesture controls that previous versions offered are gone. The S25 Ultra’s included S Pen is just a basic stylus, no magic wand tricks up its sleeve. Bummer.

Camera hardware is largely unchanged from the previous model, except for a new 50-megapixel ultrawide, replacing a 12-megapixel module. Samsung claims that an upgrade to the S25’s algorithmic image processing has improved detail in zoomed images. On the video side, Samsung now offers a Galaxy Log profile along with a custom LUT.

Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

The most interesting changes are software-side in One UI 7.0. My colleague Dominic Preston has a good rundown of the new stuff as it also appears on the S25 and S25 Plus models. Unsurprisingly, it all has to do with AI, and much of it we were already familiar with thanks to the One UI 7.0 beta. But a couple of things made me sit up and pay attention.

The first is the ability to use AI across apps to take action, like taking a picture of a flyer and having Gemini add the dates to your calendar and send your spouse an email about it. Maybe this doesn’t sound like much, but some of us have to remember which day is “crazy hair day” at preschool, when conferences are, and the deadline for signing up for this season’s soccer class. A little help would be nice. This will first work across Google Workspace and Samsung native apps, with the addition of WhatsApp and Spotify.

The other thing I’m interested to see in action is suggested routines. In theory, the S25 phones will be able to notice if there are certain settings you tend to use at the same time every day or under certain conditions — like turning Bluetooth on every time you get in the car and turning it off when you get out. When it sees a pattern, it should be able to suggest a routine to take care of those actions for you automatically. You’ll be able to customize the routine parameters to your liking, but you won’t have to go through the tedious work of setting it up from scratch. That could be cool!

The thing is, this stuff isn’t exclusive to the S25 Ultra or even the S25 series. Samsung smartphone product manager Blake Gaiser told me Samsung will bring its new AI features to older devices where possible. The company certainly seems committed to delivering those updates to older phones — but don’t forget that they probably won’t always be free.

We’ll find out soon enough whether this is the AI update that will finally deliver on the promise of AI on our smartphones; the Galaxy S25 Ultra and its S25 siblings ship on February 7th.

I take no pleasure in saying this, but if the rumors about the Galaxy S25 series are true, then these phones look boring as hell. That would be fine, except that Samsung is asking us all to get very excited about them by hosting a big, loud launch event. And I think it’s time for Samsung — and honestly, the industry as a whole — to look in the mirror and ask: do we really need this?

I’m not saying Samsung or any other tech company should throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and cram some questionably useful stuff into their phones just for the sake of it. That helps nobody. It’s just that getting up onstage and declaring that these phones are fundamentally different and new should be a truly special occasion. And that used to be true! But now, it’s just a thing we do every year that feels a lot like the thing we did last year.

In this particular season of mobile innovation, hardware just isn’t as important as it once was. Take the iPhone 16; the launch event centered so much on software features that Apple called...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Samsung is sweetening the benefits for some subscribers of its extended warranty plans with a new deal: unlimited same-day glass repairs at no extra cost. Previously, a busted screen would cost subscribers $29 — and those on Samsung’s less-expensive Care Plus plan will continue to pay that price. But if you’re prone to breaking screens and you’re on the Care Plus Theft and Loss plan, you won’t pay anything extra.

The new policy includes cracked glass on your phone’s outer screen, back panel, and even the inner screens on folding phones, according to Samsung spokesperson Dale Hogan.

That’s a big deal, considering that repairing a cracked inner screen can cost hundreds of dollars without an extended warranty. Just one inner screen repair would probably make the Care Plus plan worth it, though the value is a little fuzzier for slab-style phones.

Image: Samsung

Samsung groups its phones into tiers and sets pricing for repairs based on those groups. You can also pay monthly for a three-year term or once upfront, but your policy will only cover two years. The monthly cost for a Tier 4 device, which includes the likes of the Galaxy S24 Ultra or any of Samsung’s folding phones, is $18. The Galaxy S24 Plus costs a little less, at $15 per month, and the regular S24 is $10.

That’s not exactly cheap, and you’d have to crack your screen a lot to justify the price difference between Care Plus and Care Plus Theft and Loss. A two-year Care Plus plan for the Galaxy S24 Ultra costs $259 if you pay upfront; that’s $90 less than the Care Plus Theft and Loss plan. You’d have to get three screen repairs to break even between the two plans.

Theft and Loss includes a lot of other benefits, of course, like replacing your device for a flat fee if it goes missing. And if you’re worried about your folding phone’s inner screen, the pricier Care plan could certainly give you some more peace of mind. In any case, benefits like these getting better are the kind of inflation we like to see.

Twelve years ago, I could have told you exactly what happened at my first CES and what happened at my third. Each was a chapter with a beginning, middle, and end; the lines between them drawn clearly. But now, 15 years since I attended my first CES, it’s a lot fuzzier. I know I missed my flight home at that first show. I know I saw a lot of cameras at first, and then progressively fewer cameras over the years. I know there were team dinners and early meetings, but I couldn’t tell you what happened when.

What I do know about my first CESes is that I had — and I cannot stress this enough — no clue what I was doing. The same went for CES two, three, and four, to varying degrees. I think I had a Pentax DSLR loaned to me by a colleague. I had a work-issued BlackBerry and, I’m pretty sure, insisted on wearing nice dresses and impractical shoes to evening events. There was no Uber at the beginning, and you could spend an hour waiting in a cab line at the airport. We stayed at the MGM Grand, which housed live lions at the time.

I broke an 11-year streak of not going to CES this year, which gave me a rare opportunity. It’s not often in life that we get to step back and see something...

Read the full story at The Verge.

After several attempts, OnePlus made a great high-end phone.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Lenovo has unveiled two new ThinkPads: the X9 14 and X9 15, both Aura Editions equipped with Intel Core Ultra processors and slim designs. But what they don’t offer might be the most interesting thing about them: namely, Lenovo’s signature red TrackPoint. Instead, they use a haptic trackpad without the ThinkPad’s usual discrete button for a distinctly MacBook vibe.

No doubt, it’s a ThinkPad, through and through. It’s tested to MIL-SPEC 810H durability standards. It offers a Thunderbolt 4 port on each side of the machine, making it easier to arrange docks and displays to your liking. And the design allows access to the SSD and battery to facilitate repairs and replacements.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto

Both the 14-inch and 15-inch versions come with OLED panels in touch and non-touch variations. All versions come with an HDMI 2.1 port and 3.5mm audio jack and can be configured with up to 32GB of DDR5x RAM and 2TB of storage. As Copilot Plus PCs, they’re ready for Microsoft’s AI as well as Lenovo’s “Aura Edition” features including focus mode-like Smart Modes to filter out distractions or optimize privacy.

Still, the missing TrackPoint is probably the ThinkPad X9’s most notable feature (or anti-feature?). In a time when hardware has shifted toward a kind of sameness, the TrackPoint stood out as a quirky carryover from a time when you could try to reinvent something — namely, the mouse. The trackpad won out long ago, but Lenovo kept the TrackPoint around for its loyal fans. Now, it might just be checkmate for the TrackPoint.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto

The ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition will start at $1,399 and the 15 Aura Edition will start at $1,549; both go on sale in February.

Following a teaser last month, Asus’ latest ROG Strix Scar gaming laptops have arrived and they’re leaning all the way into the gamer aesthetic. The 2025 Scar 16 and 18 come with RGB lights all the way around the bottom of the chassis as well as a user-programmable LED dot-matrix display on the lid, as seen on other ROG devices like Asus’ gaming phones.

Beneath the flashy exterior, the Scar 16 and 18 can be maxed out with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU. It can also be configured with up to 64GB of DDR5-5600 RAM and a 2TB PCIe Gen4 SSD. The ROG Nebula HDR display comprises a 16:10 2.5K Mini LED panel with a peak brightness of 1,200 nits and a 240Hz refresh rate. There are two Thunderbolt 5 ports included, and the design allows for easy access to the bottom panel for component upgrades.

The Strix Scar 16 and 18 have all the cooling tech you’d expect from a gaming laptop of this caliber, including an end-to-end vapor chamber and sandwiched heatsink. Combined with the Conductonaut Extreme liquid metal treatment on the GPU and CPU, Asus claims that it can keep fan noise levels to a library-like 45dB, even during extended gaming sessions.

On top of all that, the ROG Strix Scar comes with the aforementioned light show. Asus calls it AniMe Vision, and you can customize it to display personalized animations and sync it with any other AniMe Vision devices you own. Download some prebaked artwork or cook up your own using Asus’ pixel editor — the choice is yours.

The ROG Strix Scar starts at $2,599; Asus says its new gaming laptops will begin shipping in February.