Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

TECNO’s Lamborghini Phone Draws Its Logo in Light Using 177 Mini LEDs

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TECNO POVA 8 Pro 5G Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition

The most expensive Lamborghini phone ever made was a $6,000 slab of hand-stitched leather and gold plating called the 88 Tauri, and it ran Android KitKat on a Snapdragon 801. That was CES 2015, peak era for buying two-year-old silicon at four times the price because someone put a bull on it. Tonino Lamborghini made three of those phones between 2013 and 2017, then went away. The name has now resurfaced on the back of a TECNO POVA that costs about $490, and the badge is finally earning its position. It gets drawn in light instead of stamped in metal.

On the POVA 8 Pro 5G Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition, the Italian brand’s “L” is rendered by 177 individually controlled mini-LEDs in TECNO’s Alive Matrix panel, and the red Pulse Line down the center of the back is a passive optical effect built from internal mirror structures sandwiched between two coating layers at different physical heights. Rotate it and the red rises out of the black, then drops back in. The phone is spec-identical to the standard POVA 8 Pro, so every difference you are paying for is a surface decision. Thai prices start at 15,999 baht for 8GB and 256GB, topping out at 19,999 baht for 12GB and 512GB. There is no US release and no US carrier certification.

Designer: TECNO Design Team, in collaboration with Tonino Lamborghini S.p.A.

Mechanical Grammar, Translated

The brief TECNO gave itself was to take a vocabulary that belongs to cars and make it belong to a slab of glass and aluminum, and the way in usually decides whether that kind of project reads as clever or as a paste job. The team started with the visual codes of mechanical design rather than the logo itself: body lines, cooling grilles, honeycomb patterns, exhaust-inspired detailing. That’s the right instinct. A shield pasted onto a black rectangle says nothing. A shield built from the same geometric logic as an engine bay at least has a reason to exist there. The result is the Signature Shield pattern ringing the Pulse Line, a hexagonal structure lifted from Tonino Lamborghini’s own emblem and mechanical detailing rather than invented fresh for the phone. It gives the back of the device an actual sense of depth and structure instead of a flat decal sitting on top of a chassis that was never designed with it in mind.

The Manufacturing Problem Nobody Sees

The interesting part isn’t the pattern, it’s how TECNO built it. Getting that Pulse Line to shift color under different lighting angles required internal mirror structures processed to redirect light the way a curved mirror does, stacked underneath a brightness-enhancing first layer that behaves closer to a lacquer finish than a printed graphic. Between the two layers sits a real, physical height difference, which is what gives the effect actual depth rather than the flat printed texture you get on most co-branded rear panels. TECNO describes this as one of the most complex rear-cover processes it has run on a POVA product, and the harder problem wasn’t making one unit look right, it was getting thousands of units to look right consistently. That’s a legitimate manufacturing achievement on a phone priced well under $500, and it’s the kind of detail that gets lost entirely once a press release compresses it down to “premium finish.”

POVA 8 Pro 5G Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition with a 144Hz Display

A Skin That Goes All the Way Through

TECNO didn’t stop at the shell, which is the part most co-branded phones treat as optional. The software carries the same black-and-red system with reworked icon outlines, nudging soft rounded shapes toward hexagon and shield silhouettes so the interface reads as an extension of the hardware rather than a wallpaper slapped over stock Android. TECNO says the software work alone took close to four months, covering the boot animation, dynamic wallpapers, ringtones, and the Alive Matrix “L” effect. The accessories continue the bit: a braided black-and-red cable, a case built from TPU and polycarbonate carved with a Kevlar-inspired carbon fiber texture. None of it is essential to how the phone functions, but all of it is the difference between a badge and a bit that someone actually thought through.

What a Tonino Lamborghini Badge Used to Cost

Worth sitting with how far this pulls the brand from its own history. This partnership started back in March at MWC, where TECNO and Tonino Lamborghini unveiled the POVA Metal Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition alongside a water-cooled mini gaming PC concept carrying the same red-and-gunmetal language into laptops, tablets, and earphones. That first phone felt closer to the old playbook than this one does. The 88 Tauri and its 2014 sibling, the Antares, were built around leather, gold plating, and price tags that assumed the badge alone justified the markup. The 2017 Alpha One dialed the ornamentation down but kept the price near $2,100. Automobili Lamborghini’s own collaborations, including the Oppo Find X Automobili Lamborghini Edition at €1,700 against a €1,000 base phone, followed the same math: better materials, a visible badge, a premium that tracked the logo rather than the manufacturing. This is the first Lamborghini phone where the badge shows up as a production process instead of a price justification, and it happens to be the cheapest one the family has ever put its name on. For the full spec rundown on the rear panel construction, we’ve covered the hardware side of this phone in detail already.

Close-up of the TECNO POVA 8 Pro 5G Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition phone's camera bump

Price, Availability, and the Fine Print

Thailand has this now, sold through BaNANA, IT CITY, Jaymart, and other retailers since August 21, with early buyers getting a Tonino Lamborghini backpack and a Tecno Watch 3 Active thrown in. Pricing for India and other markets hasn’t landed yet as of this writing. If you’re reading from the US, this one isn’t coming your way in any official form. TECNO has no FCC certification and no carrier partnerships stateside, so anything that turns up on a resale site is a gray-market import with no warranty support behind it. Worth knowing before anyone gets attached to a color they’ll never see in a carrier store.

The Badge, Recalibrated

TECNO didn’t need Tonino Lamborghini’s name to sell a $490 phone with a good screen and a big battery, which makes the choice to spend four months on software and reinvent the rear-cover process for a mid-ranger feel almost backward by traditional luxury-licensing logic. Usually the name does the selling and the hardware coasts. Here the hardware earns the attention and the name rides along for once. Whether that model survives past a limited run is a separate question, since Tonino Lamborghini’s own history with phones has always run in short bursts before going quiet for years. For now, the badge looks better on a light source than it ever did on leather.

The post TECNO’s Lamborghini Phone Draws Its Logo in Light Using 177 Mini LEDs first appeared on Yanko Design.

Foam Earplugs Haven’t Changed Since the 1970s — This Spiral Design Just Made Them Obsolete

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The humble foam earplug has been functionally unchanged since the 1970s: roll it down, jam it in, hope it expands to a seal, and find it somewhere in the sheets by 2 AM. It’s one of the few everyday objects that design culture has genuinely never come for, maybe because the attenuation numbers technically work, or maybe because nobody with enough resources was annoyed enough to fix it. The Ears 360 Silence, a CE-certified soft silicone earplug from Paris, is a structural redesign of that whole idea. Its retractable spiral wraps into the outer ear’s helix rather than anchoring in the canal, locking the plug flat and flush against the head with 24 dB SNR measured to EN 352-2:2020 and a peak of 29.9 dB at the frequency range where snoring and human voices live. The foam never had a chance.

Youcef Abdaoui runs a studio near Paris and started prototyping the Silence in 2024 with a bent wire and a bit of putty, just to test whether a helix-anchoring spiral could hold in an ear. It did, and the dozens of iterations that followed produced a product France voted Product of the Year 2026, consumer-elected rather than jury-awarded, which tells you something about how it performs in actual ears. Ears 360 has since shipped to more than 120,000 customers through their store, 500+ pharmacies, and B2B partners before going international. The Silence is not a prototype. It is certified to EN 352-2:2020, mass-produced, and more than 14,000 units are already in stock. I got to see a pair in person, and the silicone finish reads as serious product, not a health-aisle impulse buy.

Designer: Youcef Abdaoui

Click Here to Buy Now: $21 $35 (40% off). Hurry, only 57/300 left!

The ear is already a spiral. The outer rim of the pinna is anatomically called the helix, a curved ridge that traces a partial revolution around the auricle, and deeper inside, the cochlea completes that geometry: a full spiral chamber, coiled like a snail shell, that converts sound pressure into neural signal. Nature returns to the spiral repeatedly because it distributes force without concentration points, the same structural logic behind a nautilus shell or the tight coil of a fern fiddlehead before it unfurls. The Ears 360 Silence works with that architecture: the spiral holds, not the tip. Instead of pressing into the canal and trusting friction, the retractable spiral wraps laterally into the helix and locks there through geometry, bearing almost no canal pressure, which is the whole reason the plug sits flush rather than protrude. If you know how spiral springs work, think of the way the spiral on the earplug expands to fill your ear canal. Along with friction, this physical detail helps the Silence adapt to pretty much any ear shape or size.

The flatness is perhaps the most impressive detail, setting it apart from every earplug you’ve seen in the past. The loop-style reusable earplugs that have become popular over the past few years make a design virtue of their visibility, with a circular protrusion sitting outside the ear canal as a deliberate aesthetic statement. That works at a concert, but it becomes a pressure point the moment you roll onto your side in bed, which is the situation most people are buying earplugs for in the first place. The Silence’s spiral body measures 18.44 mm by 15.49 mm, slim enough that there’s nothing significant pressing against a pillow. The profile looks almost deceitfully small for what it’s actually doing… and yes, Youcef did mention that the earplugs work perfectly well in concerts too.

One spiral body, two protection levels, switchable in seconds from 24 dB to 29 dB. The standard silicone tips, available in three sizes (9.9 mm, 11.9 mm, and 12.9 mm diameter), deliver 24 dB SNR, enough to take a busy street down to library territory without muffling conversation entirely. The Swim & Work Kit clips on triple-flange tips that push attenuation up to 29 dB, entering genuine worksite and industrial territory. User satisfaction data from Ears 360 puts concert approval at 91% and commute approval at 97%, and an IPX7 waterproof rating keeps the spiral itself pool-ready alongside the kit’s triple-flange seal.

One Silence replaces hundreds of disposable foam earplugs. The earplug’s body is made to last for years, the silicone tips are replaceable instead of throwing the product away, and the packaging is compact by design so every shipment travels as a slim letter, not a parcel. No separate carbon offset claim required. Pricing starts at €24 (roughly $28) for a single unit with carry case and all three tip sizes, with the Silence and Swim & Work Kit bundle at €27, and a Duo Pack at €39 for two. Current colorways are Black and Pink, with Green planned as a future addition. Delivery is November 2026, and no specific warranty period is stated on the product page, though the replaceable-tip architecture makes longevity something you can actually act on rather than just take someone’s word for.

Click Here to Buy Now: $21 $35 (40% off). Hurry, only 57/300 left!

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No Switches Needed. Just Press, Pull, or Bop These Silicone Lamps: Behind The Design with YD

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Here is a fun little contradiction to chew on before we get into the actual lamps. The whole point of Call It a Day, Tongqi Design’s new lighting collection, is that you barely have to try. You bop it, you tug it, you flop your hand near it, and it turns on. Zero precision required, zero thinking involved, which is exactly the pitch when you have just walked through the door after a day that emptied you out. But get this. The less effort the lamp asks of you, the more effort someone else clearly put into making that possible. That is the trade we are here to unpack.

Shanghai-based designer Tongqi Lu built the collection, a table lamp, floor lamp, and pendant, around soft silicone shades with zero switches anywhere on them. Every gesture works because the material itself is doing the sensing, not a button hunting for your finger. It sounds simple sitting in your living room. It is not simple to make, and that gap between the two is basically our whole story today.

Designer: Tongqi Lu

Click Here to Know More

The Design

Call It a Day is a three piece lighting collection, a table lamp, a floor lamp, and a pendant, and every one of them is dressed in soft, translucent silicone instead of glass or fabric. That alone is a break from convention, since silicone shades are usually reserved for LED strip diffusers rather than the whole visible body of a lamp. But the real departure is that none of these lamps have a switch. You bop the table lamp, you tug the pendant by its cord, you press the floor lamp wherever feels natural, and the light responds. There is no correct spot to find in the dark. The entire shade is the input, which sounds like a small shift until you realize how much of lamp design has always been built around finding one tiny precise point.

Lu frames the whole thing around the moment you get home and your body checks out before your brain does. She has talked about dropping onto the sofa and reaching out to press, pull, or tap without really thinking about it, and the light turning on not because she followed a rule but because she did not. That is a genuinely sharp way to think about interaction design. Most lighting asks you to be at your most coordinated right when you are at your least. Call It a Day flips that expectation, and the coiled yellow cable running through the collection is a nice touch too, borrowing the old pull chain gesture without being precious about it.

The Process

Here is where things get interesting, because the studio itself is not some slick production facility. It is an office in Shanghai with a plastic sheeted folding table, jerrycans of liquid silicone lined up against the wall, and a window looking out over the skyline. Before any of it was cast, the whole collection existed as full scale cardboard mockups, a pendant hung from a coiled cord and a table lamp balanced on a paper cone, sitting in the corner of the room like a rough draft nobody threw away. That is a genuinely useful thing to see, because it shows the gesture and the proportions were locked in long before the material was.

The shades themselves come out of large block molds with a fine grid texture cut into the cavity, which shows up on the finished silicone as a soft woven pattern once the lamp is lit. Getting silicone out of a mold cleanly is trickier than it sounds, since silicone tends to bond to itself, so getting a cast shade out of a cast mold without either tearing or fusing takes real care with release agents and material choice. Pouring it clean adds another layer of difficulty, since bubbles trapped in a translucent material show up as visible flaws once the light hits them. In the photos, you can see two people pouring together, one holding the bucket steady, the other running a palette knife across the lip so the silicone comes down in a thin ribbon instead of glugging out in one shot, which is a simple trick for keeping air out of the pour. It is not a factory process. It is a hand process, done carefully, on a folding table, gallon by gallon.

The Perspective

What I like most about Call It a Day is that the ease on the user’s end is clearly paid for somewhere upstream, and that upstream cost is visible if you know where to look. A switchless lamp sounds like a simple idea until you have to actually engineer a material that can be grabbed, twisted, and mistreated without breaking or losing its shape, and then cast that material cleanly at scale in a small studio. That gap between the lived experience and the labor behind it is exactly what a lot of good product design tries to hide, and here it is sitting right out in the open in the process photos.

It also helps that the whole thing traces back to something real. Lu’s early work, the lemon shaped Citron lamp, her furniture line built around trees and water lilies, all of it circles the same idea of pulling people back into their bodies after a long day in a city that does not really let them slow down. Call It a Day feels like the most literal version of that idea yet, a lamp built entirely around the ninety seconds when you have officially given up on being careful. Whether or not the gesture control holds up over years of actual use is a question only time and daily wear will answer, but as a piece of intent, this one lands.

Click Here to Know More

The post No Switches Needed. Just Press, Pull, or Bop These Silicone Lamps: Behind The Design with YD first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Color E-Ink Art Frame Lets You Talk to Your Wall and Watch It Paint New Art

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There’s something wonderfully strange about walking up to a framed picture on your wall and telling it what to paint next. Say “paint my dog as a Japanese ink painting,” and the frame generates and displays a new piece. No file transfers, no app navigation, no creative software required. Jitrainno’s Smart Canvas runs on this premise: a voice and text-prompted AI art frame built around an E-Ink Spectra 6 color display, the matte, paper-like panel technology that draws zero power in static mode and reads under ambient light the way a canvas does. It comes in three solid-wood sizes, 7.5, 13.3, and 31.5 inches (named the Echo-7, Echo-13, and Echo-31 respectively), all with built-in batteries and Wi-Fi.

Jitrainno is a Hong Kong-based multidisciplinary team with in-house expertise spanning hardware R&D, E-Ink engineering, AI integration, firmware, and cloud services. They developed a proprietary color rendering layer on top of the Spectra 6 panel, tuned specifically for skin tone accuracy, landscape depth, and smooth gradient transitions. That kind of layered engineering, building custom display algorithms rather than shipping a panel with factory defaults, is what separates a team that genuinely understands display science from one that simply sourced a good component. The project moved from inception and industrial design in June 2025 to a production validation run by May 2026, a fast but not reckless pace for hardware at this scale. Global fulfillment is estimated for November 2026.

Designer: Jitrainno

Click Here to Buy Now: $289 $469 (38% off). Hurry, only 157/250 left! Raised over $132,000.

E-Ink Spectra 6 is the most capable color e-paper panel currently available to consumer product makers, using six primary pigments: black, white, red, yellow, blue, and green. It achieves up to 200 pixels per inch and draws zero power in static display mode, meaning the canvas can stay on your wall for days between charges. The paper-like surface reflects ambient light rather than projecting it, eliminating the glowing-rectangle problem that has defined every LCD-based digital art frame since the Kodak EasyShare era. Jitrainno’s self-developed rendering and color optimization layer is designed to preserve the subtle details that make an image feel closer to paper art. Based on early reviews, it reads more like a framed print than a screen, which is the bar the whole product needs to clear.

Speaking a prompt aloud and watching a new image materialize on the wall is a genuinely new behavioral ritual, and I think it’s the feature that will hook most people. Users can create images from text or voice prompts, explore different visual styles, and generate variations of their ideas, with AI used as a creative tool within the artwork creation experience. The product page demos a prompt like “a cute green dinosaur in a sunny prehistoric scene, soft watercolor and colored-pencil storybook style,” which apparently renders accurately enough to land on a kid’s wall. The AI side routes through third-party commercial image generation services via official APIs, supporting text-to-image and image-based creative generation within the experience. They also confirm they do not use user content to train their own foundation models, a meaningful distinction in a market where that commitment is far from universal.

AI generation is only one of several ways to populate the canvas. The app supports content from AI-generated art, a free art gallery called Daily Drops, the phone camera, the user’s photo library, and personal collections. Daily Drops streams a rotating selection of curated artwork that users can filter by mood or scene type and push directly to the display. The phone camera connection opens the obvious use case of photographing a physical painting, a landscape, or a face and sending it to the frame instantly. That breadth of sourcing makes the Smart Canvas a capable display platform in its own right, with AI generation sitting as a feature rather than a crutch.

Gallery proportions, tactile materials, and Auto-Rotation are deliberate choices to help the Jitrainno Echo series belong in the room like framed art. From the product photography, the proportions are gallery-standard, the profile slim enough to recede into a wall, and the matte panel surface does the visual work of making it belong. A built-in sensor detects whether the frame is in portrait or landscape and automatically switches the artwork’s aspect ratio, with no manual setting required. Connectivity runs in two modes: full cloud-connected (remote upload, AI creation, gallery sync, multi-user sharing) or completely offline (no account, no internet, direct phone-to-frame transfer). The offline option is a genuine design stance in a category where “smart” has almost universally meant always routing through someone else’s server.

The Jitrainno Echo-7 at 7.5 inches (1024×600, 170x236mm) is the tabletop model. The Jitrainno Echo-13 at 13.3 inches (1200×1600, 316.3×416.3mm) works both on a desktop stand and wall-mounted, making it the most flexible of the three. The Jitrainno Echo-31 at 31.5 inches (2560×1440, 603x903mm) is wall-only, the model that reads as a proper statement artwork rather than a gadget trying to pass itself off as one. All three run on E-Ink Spectra 6 full-color panels in solid wood frames, with built-in batteries and USB-C charging. The Jitrainno Echo-13 retails at $469 and the Jitrainno Echo-31 at $1,499, both covered by a one-year manufacturer’s warranty, with global fulfillment estimated to begin November 2026.

Click Here to Buy Now: $289 $469 (38% off). Hurry, only 157/250 left! Raised over $132,000.

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Pingu Is Getting A New Show, And Now LEGO Fans Want In Too

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Here’s a fun fact for you. Pingu is getting a brand new show. Yes, that Pingu, the clay penguin from 1990 who talks exclusively in honks and mumbles, is being revived by Aardman, the actual Wallace and Gromit people, because apparently a 35 year old Swiss show about a penguin family still has enough juice left to warrant a full stop motion comeback. Turns out the internet never really let go of the guy. Between viral memes, nostalgic TikToks, and a fandom that treats “noot noot” like a secret handshake, Pingu quietly became one of those characters who refuses to stay retired. Honestly, respect.

So it tracks that LEGO fans want in on the revival too. The Pingu! LEGO Ideas project rebuilds the penguin and his sister Pinga in brick form, sledding across a snowy landscape with all the charm of the original show packed into just 314 pieces. It’s a small, sweet tribute to a character who somehow keeps finding new ways to stay culturally relevant, decades after his first noot.

Designer: ericleg0321

What gets me about this build is the restraint. No sprawling igloo compound, no minifigure army, just Pingu and Pinga mid glide on a tan sled, carving through an Arctic scene rendered in soft tans and greys. The designer kept the piece count low on purpose, saying it lets more people actually afford and enjoy the set, which is a refreshingly un-greedy way to approach a LEGO Ideas submission. Pinga rides up front bundled in red with her stubby orange feet poking over the edge, while Pingu leans in behind her looking every bit like he’s steering, or possibly just along for the ride and taking credit for it.

My favorite detail, though, has to be Pingu’s beak. It’s built from a rounded red piece with a darker ring at the center, and if you squint it looks exactly like his beak mid honk, that iconic megaphone shape he makes right before unleashing a noot. Whether that was intentional or a happy accident of available bricks, it’s the kind of small touch that separates a good tribute from a great one. The build also leaves room to grow, with the designer floating ideas for an extra base, a snowman, or even Robby the seal joining the scene down the line.

Now, the tricky part. Pingu currently belongs to Mattel, which happens to be LEGO’s chief rival in the building block business these days, and LEGO Ideas has historically steered clear of properties owned by competing toy companies. So don’t get your hopes up for a retail release just yet. That said, the project recently landed a well deserved Staff Pick and is climbing steadily toward its next milestone, so if you want to see this noot noot squad become an actual set, or just want to give a fellow fan some love, head over to LEGO Ideas and cast your vote. The penguin, and the internet that refuses to stop making memes about him, would appreciate it.

The post Pingu Is Getting A New Show, And Now LEGO Fans Want In Too first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Tiny Beijing Flower Shop Looks Like a Giant Mushroom Sprouting From the Woods

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If you have been reading Yanko Design for a while, you might remember the LUO studio project where they turned an abandoned bike share bicycle into a ladybug shaped mobile library. That is basically this studio’s whole personality in one sentence, take something humble, add almost no material, and make it do way more than it should. Their newest project scales that same instinct up into an actual building. West Garden Florist is a small flower shop and coffee counter in Beijing’s Haidian Park, and it looks like a giant mushroom sprouted out of the woods, all curved timber and a grassy green cap. It is also a pretty direct descendant of a couple of LUO studio’s earlier, smaller experiments in bent wood and minimal material use.

Architect Luo Yujie founded LUO studio in 2017 around the idea that you can build serious architecture with barely any material if you are clever about how you bend it. West Garden Florist, an 84 square meter pavilion completed in 2025, takes that same thin timber logic the studio tested on a rural library and a flower display shelf and blows it up into a full building with a planted roof and a wraparound veranda. The project recently won a Green Good Design Award from The Chicago Athenaeum. It is a small building, but it reads like the studio finally got to build the thesis statement they had been sketching out in smaller projects for years.

Designer: Luo Yujie, with Wang Beilei and Hong Lun of LUO studio

The site sits where three park pathways meet, right next to the lawn that has become the busiest patch of green space in the district, packed with kite flyers, picnickers, and the occasional soccer game. Instead of drawing a floor plan and asking the trees to deal with it, LUO studio flipped the process. The team mapped every trunk already standing in the grove and let the gaps between them dictate the building’s outline, which is why the footprint reads as an irregular blob instead of a tidy rectangle. That decision alone tells you a lot about where this studio’s priorities sit.

The structure itself is the real party trick. Thin timber slats, all cut to standard dimensions, get gathered into bundles that flare outward to form a ring of columns, then fold inward and interweave to build the curved canopy overhead. The gaps between the slats let light, shadow, and glimpses of the surrounding woodland filter straight through the walls, so the building never fully blocks the grove behind it. Circular skylights punched into the roof scatter changing patterns of sun across the floor all day, doing a passable impression of light falling through actual leaves.

Because this is a public park and not a construction site with unlimited access, LUO studio also had to think small on the build side. No heavy machinery could get near the site without tearing up the paths, so every component was sized for a crew to carry and assemble by hand. The foundation follows the same logic. Ground screws replace poured concrete, which spares the soil and means the whole pavilion could theoretically be unscrewed and moved somewhere else if the park ever needed the spot back.

West Garden Florist is not trying to out flex the rest of Haidian Park, which has spent recent years leaning hard into smart benches and AI branded amenities. It just sits quietly under the canopy doing its own thing, selling flowers and coffee to people who wandered off the lawn. Sometimes the most interesting building in the room is the one that skipped the upgrade entirely.

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Ford Keeps Teasing an Off-Road Mustang. This Orange Beast Just Showed Up Instead

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Porsche did it with the 911 Dakar. Lamborghini did it with the Huracan Sterrato. Ford keeps teasing an off road Mustang that may or may not ever leave the design studio. The lifted sports car has quietly become one of the most fun corners of the car world, proof that you do not need a crossover shape to go play in the dirt. Motomuzi looked at that trend, looked at the most famous orange muscle car in television history, and figured the General Lee deserved an invite to the party.

The result ditches the flag and the door numbers but keeps every ounce of swagger, riding on a widened stance with fender flares that look torn open just to make room for serious rubber. Cooper STT Pro tires wrapped in old school raised white lettering wink at the raised white letter rubber that actually rode under muscle cars back in the day. A roll cage, a whip antenna, and a dark sunstrip finish off the rally car cosplay. Somewhere in Hazzard County, Boss Hogg would have needed a lie down just looking at it.

Designer: Motomuzi

Look closely and the GL plays a fun little identity game. The long hood, the power bulge, and the hood pins all scream late 60s Mustang fastback, right down to a C-pillar quarter window that has no business appearing on a Charger. Then your eye drifts to the back and suddenly you are looking at a proper 69 Charger, thanks to that blacked out full width tail panel with a glowing strip running corner to corner. It reads less like a faithful recreation and more like a highlight reel of muscle car greatest hits, compressed into one orange body. Somehow it works, mostly because both cars share the same DNA of aggression and swagger to begin with.

Underneath all that nostalgia is where things get genuinely interesting. The front overhang has basically vanished, replaced by a stubby tubular bumper and a trapezoidal skid plate that hangs low enough to mean business. Peek behind the front tire and you can spot long control arms and a coilover setup that has nothing to do with a stock Charger’s leaf springs and everything to do with a desert racer. This is the kind of suspension geometry built for eating whoops and washboard gravel at speed, not cruising down a boulevard looking for a burger joint.

The cabin backs up the tough talk outside. A full roll cage runs through the side glass, and a window net stretched across the door opening tells you this car expects to catch some air occasionally. Add in the roof mounted antenna and that sunstrip slicing across the top of the windshield, and the whole thing reads like something that just rolled off a rally stage rather than a soundstage. Even the wheels lean utilitarian, more function first than showroom chrome, which fits a build that clearly prioritizes traction over polish.

What makes the GL worth a second look is timing. Ford has spent the better part of this year teasing an off road Mustang without committing to one, while tuners like Loder1899 keep building their own versions of the idea just to see who blinks first. Motomuzi’s General Lee slides right into that gap, less a fantasy render and more a preview of where muscle cars might actually be headed if manufacturers keep chasing the Dakar and Sterrato money. The General spent its entire television career getting destroyed trying to fly through the air. This version finally looks built to land.

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This Single UI Trick Might Sell More iPhone Duo Units Than Any Android Foldable

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Let me be clear. There’s no universe in which I think 2 thousand dollars is the right price for a smartphone. The fact that it folds, or that John Ternus called it an ‘intelligent hub’ doesn’t justify a price tag that’s reserved for gaming laptops. However, when I saw the Duo open for the first time in Apple’s keynote, I definitely sat up a bit and embodied the Leonardo DiCaprio meme where he snaps and points at the screen. Something caught my eye, and in those brief seconds, I forgot that the iPhone Duo costs $1999 USD.

Go to the comments section of any tech blogger interacting with the iPhone Duo and you’ll see the same response – “Whoever designed that opening closing UI animation deserves a raise.” Apple managed to do something so fundamentally different from any smartphone out there, it made the iPhone Duo truly feel a class apart. Open (or close the phone) and a section of the display magically disappears and reappears from a digital ether. It doesn’t feel like your phone’s screen is expanding the way it does on the Pixel Fold or the Galaxy Z Fold 8. It feels like the flap of your phone is basically a piece of frosted glass, overlaying over a phone screen that’s already there. Words fail to describe how beautiful it looks, but literally everyone had the same visceral reaction for the first time seeing Apple pull off this digital optical illusion. It’s gorgeous, and for some people it might just be the deciding factor between buying an Android foldable or the iPhone Duo.

Designer: Apple

Royole debuted the first foldable phone in 2018. The Flexpai didn’t push too many units, it wasn’t from a reputed brand either which meant zero brand recall or trust. Still, it made waves for being the first to crack the foldable format. Samsung soon followed, with their first foldable the following year. So, effectively since 2019, the world has asked itself A. whether Apple will ever launch an iPhone… and B. What will Apple do so differently that it’ll absolutely capture the minds and hearts of the entire market. We found out the answers to both yesterday.

The “Different” manifests itself in a few ways. For starters, the iPhone Duo is much wider than most foldables, which opt for a tall design that results in a weird square-ish screen when opened. The Duo’s approach is a more passport-style aspect ratio, with a 1:1.4 format which sits right in the middle of a 2:3 and a 3:4 design. This wide body means a more usable screen experience in both closed and open variants, with the same aspect ratio carrying across open and closed formats – something every interface designer will cry tears of joy over.

This unique form factor required designing the OS to operate differently too. While every iPhone, iPad, and even MacBook has centered itself around the bottom horizontal app dock, the Duo shifts the dock to the right, making it vertical instead. The dynamic island becomes vertical too, and the entire experience (while it requires a learning curve) is designed for seamless single-hand use, or even double hand use without needing to switch hand position. The power button on the right edge packs TouchID too, pretty much consolidating every important hardware and software detail to the right of the screen now. Great for right-handed folks, but the lefties might object to this strange exclusion.

The most impressive “different,” however, is how your phone responds to you opening it. Every foldable till now has resorted to the simple trick of either A. having the folded screen power on when unfolded, or B. having the screen on, but the icons/elements arrange themselves to match the new layout. Apple’s approach was different, leaning heavily into its use of the glass effect from last year’s iOS 26 rollout. The animation feels almost like flipping a piece of frosted glass, revealing the iPhone’s screen once the phone’s folded all the way open or closed. Technically, there’s nothing Apple did that was groundbreakingly different with the interface – but this one little animation was enough to really captivate the hearts of every single person who saw the keynote.

Will the Duo be a runaway success? It’s difficult to predict this early, but the iPhone Air and the Vision Pro were (by Apple’s own standards) extremely underwhelming. Pair that with the fact that people already trust foldables less and you get a pretty bleak forecast for the iPhone Duo. But here’s where I’m inclined to believe that it might sell well. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 is currently outperforming its Ultra counterpart. People REALLY seem to enjoy the flat and wide foldable, and the Z Fold 8’s $1899 price tag hasn’t been an overwhelming deterrent so far. For anyone who has the money and the appetite for a foldable, the iPhone Duo might just end up blowing demand for the Z Fold 8 (and the Xiaomi 18 Fold) out of the water. At just hundred bucks more than Samsung’s counterpart, the Duo really packs a one-two punch with a competitive price match, and more importantly, that gorgeous glasslike open/shut animation. I’m not saying the animation is the reason people will buy this phone, but it’s easily a compelling reason for anyone looking to throw near 2K on a folding device.

The post This Single UI Trick Might Sell More iPhone Duo Units Than Any Android Foldable first appeared on Yanko Design.

Nomad’s Leather Folio Turns Your iPhone Duo Into A $1999 Bifold Wallet

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The folio case for smartphones remains an entirely boomer product offering. Having a case with a flap that covers your screen and needs to be folded open like a book to answer calls or use your phone is an innately ‘old-soul’ experience. The flap protects your screen but it also obscures it. Fold the flap to the back and it reveals your screen but blocks your camera. It isn’t for millennials or Gen-Z phone owners, but for anyone who wears reading glasses, this folio style case is as addictive as their generation’s Candy Crush habit. With Apple launching the iPhone Duo just yesterday, Nomad developed a similar folio style case for the Apple foldable.

Nomad’s Folio case for the Duo is a strange little thing. While most folio cases turn candybar phones into bifolds, Nomad’s case sort of turns it into a trifold, if you will… or a bifold with a partition. The case is a single-piece leather and plastic design, created to wrap your phone not just from the back but also the front. The front flap magnetically snaps to your phone’s outer display, and lets you open your phone in two ways – firstly, by just disengaging the flap to see the outer screen, but also by disengaging the flap and outer screen together to see the inner screen… and like any good folio case, the flap’s inside packs a card-holder for your payment, ID, and access cards so you don’t need a MagSafe wallet ruining your iPhone Duo’s design.

Designer: Nomad

Like all of Nomad’s leather cases, this one’s made from Horween leather, crafted from a single piece of hide that’s been tanned, bent, crimped, and buffed to absolute beauty. The leather gracefully wraps around the edges, keeping the buttons exposed and accessible, while also covering the hinge in a way that creates that bifold feeling. The leather then transitions upwards ever so slightly before cutting off to a plastic lip around the camera bump, cushioning your phone’s precious shooters from accidental drops and bumps.

On the inside, the leather’s reinforced by a microfiber layer that protects the iPhone’s glass panels from damage. Sure, Apple touts Ceramic Shield on both the front and back, but nothing breaks your heart faster than seeing a cut or a scratch running down the glass body from abrasive action caused by objects in your pocket or even your table. Meanwhile, a slot on the front stores two cards from the looks of it, so your iPhone Duo doubles as a card holder beyond what Apple Pay already lets you do.

Like all good leather cases, this one’s designed to age gracefully with time. Chances are, if you’re an iPhone Duo buyer, you will probably use this phone as your ride or die for another 2 years. In that time, Nomad says the case will patina gorgeously with time, aging uniquely based on how you use the phone. Luckily, the case isn’t too expensive. Priced at $129, you can grab the Nomad iPhone Duo Traditional Folio in one of three colors – Saddle, Rustic Brown, and Black, with global shipping starting November 14th.

The post Nomad’s Leather Folio Turns Your iPhone Duo Into A $1999 Bifold Wallet first appeared on Yanko Design.

Your iPhone’s Portrait Mode Was Fake for a Decade – The iPhone 18 Pro Changes That With A Real Aperture

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Would you be shocked to hear that the “Portrait Mode” on your iPhone all these years was ‘fake’? Well, it’s real as in the background is actually blurred, but it isn’t blurred because the camera captured it that way, it’s all been software trickery for the past decade… until now. Six laser cut blades, each thinner than a human hair, are about to change that. The iPhone 18 Pro’s new main camera can physically open and close its lens for the first time in iPhone history, and that single mechanical change rewrites how the blur behind your subject actually gets made.

Here’s the quick version of how Portrait Mode has worked since 2016. Your iPhone takes the shot, uses a second lens or depth data to figure out roughly where you end and the background begins, then runs software over the image to blur everything behind that outline. It’s a clever guess dressed up as photography, and it’s why hair strands sometimes disappear into a smudge or a stray earring gets blurred along with the wall behind it. The new aperture system skips the guessing entirely. The lens itself controls how much of the scene stays sharp, the same way it’s always worked on a real camera.

Designer: Apple

So how does a phone this thin pull off something that usually needs a chunky lens barrel? Apple built a system of six laser cut blades, each one thinner than a strand of hair, arranged around the main lens and moved by a tiny rotor mechanism. Together they shift the aperture through four stops, all the way down to f/1.48, with the camera defaulting to a f/1.8 for everyday portraits and opening or closing automatically depending on what it’s looking at. In low light it opens wider to pull in around 50 percent more light, which should mean cleaner night shots and sharper astrophotography without cranking up the ISO and adding grain.

Because this is optical now instead of computational, the depth falls off the way it would on an actual camera lens. Hair, glasses, jewelry, the fine stuff that always tripped up the old software blur, should render properly instead of getting smeared into the background by accident. Close the aperture down and you get more of the scene in focus for group shots, which is the same tradeoff photographers have been making with real cameras for a century. It’s just that now your phone gets to make that tradeoff too.

Apple didn’t stop at making the hardware smarter, it also handed a lot of that control directly to you. The redesigned camera app now includes Pro Controls, letting you manually pick one of the four aperture settings yourself, check exposure with an actual histogram, dial in white balance, and adjust shutter speed for motion blur or freeze frame shots. Third party camera apps are getting access to the same aperture system through an updated API, so this isn’t going to stay locked inside Apple’s own app for long. Photography folks who like getting hands on with their settings finally have a real reason to poke around the camera app instead of leaving everything on auto.

The upgrade carries over into video too. Cinematic mode effects can now be applied after you’ve already shot the footage, and it supports 60fps for smoother half speed slow motion. Time-lapse jumps to 4K with Dolby Vision HDR. None of that depends directly on the aperture blades, but it’s part of the same larger push this year to hand serious creative control to people who just want to point their phone and shoot something that looks intentional.

All of this sits inside a redesigned Pro body that now uses color matched aluminum and back glass, available in Black, Silver, the new Glacier, and a genuinely gorgeous Burgundy that photographs beautifully next to the camera module. The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199 and the Pro Max at $1,299, both up for preorder September 12 and shipping September 18. For a feature that lives entirely inside a few hair thin blades you’ll never actually see moving, it might end up being the most noticeable camera change Apple has made in years.

The post Your iPhone’s Portrait Mode Was Fake for a Decade – The iPhone 18 Pro Changes That With A Real Aperture first appeared on Yanko Design.