This Modded Android Phone Runs The Witcher 3 at 1080p Ultra Settings

The boundary between a smartphone and a desktop computer has been narrowing for years. Modern flagship phones carry processor configurations, RAM capacities, and GPU performance that would have qualified as desktop territory not long ago. Most of the time, that hardware sits underutilized inside a slim glass slab, throttled by thermals the moment any sustained workload asks it to perform at its actual ceiling.

One modder decided to find out what a flagship Android phone such as the nubia Z70 Ultra could actually do if thermal throttling was removed from the equation. The answer involved relocating the screen to the front of a custom acrylic case and sandwiching the phone itself between two desktop-grade CPU coolers with direct contact against the Snapdragon chip’s shielding. The result doesn’t fit neatly into any existing product category.

Designer: ntsow

The Nubia Z70 Ultra carries a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor with a maximum clock speed of 4.32 GHz and 24 GB of RAM. Removing the screen was the key step: the CPU coolers need direct access to the chip’s shielding for full thermal contact, so the display had to migrate to the outside of the case. A power bank handles the energy supply, completing the self-contained build.

On the software side, the build runs a full XFCE Linux desktop through Termux with GPU acceleration, layering Windows application support on top via Wine and Box64. The Android system remains fully intact underneath, making the device simultaneously a phone, a Linux workstation, and a Windows gaming machine. The stated end goal is one device that handles everything, including native Linux work and full Windows game support.

The cooling changes what the hardware is capable of sustaining. In 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme Stress Test, the modified phone achieved 99% stability across 20 loops, outperforming the newer Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Apple A19 Pro, and Dimensity 9500 on the consistency metric. That sustained performance is the point: most mobile chips can briefly hit impressive scores, but they thermal-throttle within minutes under continuous load.

The Witcher 3 runs at 1080p with Ultra graphics settings, hitting 20 to 30 fps and occasionally exceeding 30 fps when the phone operates in its maximum-performance overclocking mode. The Adreno GPU runs at 99% utilization during those sessions, and the build connects to an external monitor with keyboard and mouse support for a genuine desktop gaming setup. For an Android phone, the performance is difficult to dismiss.

What the build demonstrates is less about running The Witcher 3 at any particular resolution and more about how far the gap between a phone and a desktop has actually closed. Adequate cooling was the only thing separating the Snapdragon 8 Elite from sustained desktop-class workloads. The question the project raises isn’t whether phones can replace PCs but how much work remains before the hardware inside them can already handle it.

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Most Active Stools Just Wobble, but This One Runs on Skateboard Trucks

The active sitting market has been trying to solve the same problem for years by adding instability to an otherwise conventional seat. Balance boards, wobble stools, and kneeling chairs attempt to make sitting less sedentary through varying degrees of discomfort and compromise. Most solutions lean toward one extreme: either too unstable for focused work, or barely different from a regular chair once the body learns to compensate.

Ollie is a concept that emerged during the pandemic, when the question of how to stay physically active without leaving home became unusually pressing. Developed in collaboration with Italian furniture brand Magis, it approaches active sitting from an unexpected direction: the same equilibrium-based mechanism that makes a skateboard respond to a rider’s weight shifts turns out to be an ideal platform for a seat that keeps the body in motion.

Designers: Heitor Lobo Campos, Alessia Pinna

The connection to skateboarding goes beyond metaphor. The mechanism uses two skateboard trucks connected in parallel below the seat, with a central point pivoting on an axis controlled by a bearing. What lets a skateboard maneuver through a turn becomes what lets a seated person shift their weight, tilt, and continuously engage their core without interrupting what they’re working on.

Resistance is tunable. The tightness of the bushings, the rubber rings that skaters adjust to control how stiff or responsive a truck feels, determines how much effort the seat requires to tilt. Tighten them for a more stable platform that still allows movement; loosen them for a seat that demands continuous micro-adjustments. That range makes Ollie adaptable to different users and different tasks without changing anything fundamental about the design.

At a standing-height desk, Ollie puts the body in a middle position between sitting and standing, where the core and lower back engage in small amounts of stabilizing work throughout the session. The movement it introduces isn’t dramatic; it’s subtle enough that focus on work isn’t interrupted, but persistent enough that it adds up over the course of a day, particularly for anyone spending several hours at a screen.

The seat is a bent plywood saddle that screws to the truck hangers through threaded inserts, making it removable with standard metric fasteners. The base uses bent steel pipes welded to the mechanism, keeping the frame visually minimal despite the mechanical complexity at its center. Three colorways, green, black, and red, give the frame character that ergonomic seating rarely attempts, preferring to disappear behind neutral plastics and black foam.

Repairability is a design principle rather than an afterthought. Every component on the Ollie can be removed and replaced individually, mirroring how skateboard culture has always approached maintenance. A worn bushing or a cracked seat doesn’t require replacing the whole stool, only the failed part. That approach extends the product’s useful life considerably without adding design complexity, and keeps manufacturing costs down on components that see the most stress.

The name explains the concept more precisely than most product names manage. An ollie in skateboarding is the foundational jump, the first trick a skater learns and the prerequisite for everything that follows. The same equilibrium-based logic that gives a skateboard its flexibility in maneuvering gives Ollie its range of active response, which is a more direct lineage than most furniture carries from its sources of inspiration.

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8BitDo Made the N64’s 30th Anniversary Keyboard Every Millennial Wants

Nintendo’s “Funtastic” translucent plastic era tends to provoke a specific kind of nostalgia. The see-through consoles and controllers from the late 1990s made the hardware itself part of the aesthetic, and the ice blue variant of the N64 in particular developed a cult following that outlasted the console’s commercial run by several decades. The transparency wasn’t a gimmick then, and it still doesn’t feel like one now.

The 8BitDo Retro 87 Keyboard in Clear Blue arrives as part of the N64’s 30th anniversary and borrows that translucent blue finish directly. But the design doesn’t stop at the shell. Specific keys carry the actual color palette of the original N64 controller: yellow arrow keys for the C-buttons, blue and green A and B keys, and a red left Ctrl referencing the Start button. For anyone who logged enough hours with that particular controller, the color map reads immediately.

Designer: 8BitDo

The Clear Blue edition uses 8BitDo Cloud Gray Linear mechanical switches, co-developed with HUANO specifically for this version and distinct from the Kailh Box White switches in the Fami and N editions. The keycaps combine dye-sublimation PBT and ABS + PC double-shot construction with a matte UV coating, giving the legends both durability and a finish that suits the translucent shell better than a glossy alternative would.

Underneath, the hot-swappable PCB sits in a top mount configuration, which is a construction choice that tends to provide a softer, more cushioned typing feel compared to bottom mount builds. N-key rollover handles simultaneous inputs without dropping keystrokes. Per-key RGB backlighting runs through the whole board, visible through the translucent shell in a way that a standard opaque case would never allow. The 200-hour wireless battery life on a 2,000 mAh cell is rated for the 2.4 GHz wireless mode, with the adapter included in the box.

Connectivity covers three modes: Bluetooth, 2.4 GHz wireless, and wired USB, the standard trio for a modern keyboard that needs to move between devices and setups. A pair of programmable Super Buttons ships with the keyboard, matching the Clear Blue finish and assignable through 8BitDo Ultimate Software V2. They sit outside the main typing area and can take on whatever function is needed, from media controls to game inputs.

The 87-key tenkeyless layout drops the number pad but keeps the full navigation cluster, which is the practical choice for a keyboard meant to share desk space with other peripherals. The layout doesn’t commit to being purely a gaming board or purely a productivity tool, which suits a keyboard this visually distinctive rather well. Something that references a 30-year-old console doesn’t need to pretend it’s a neutral office accessory.

There’s a certain honesty to the approach here. The Clear Blue colorway isn’t a subtle nod or a distant reference; it’s an explicit callback to a specific era of hardware design that a generation of players grew up with. The translucent shell shows the PCB and internal components through the blue tint, carrying the same logic those original Funtastic consoles did: the inside of the hardware was worth looking at.

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Goldmund’s $500,000 Amp Is as Much a Sculpture as It Is a Machine

High-end audio amplifiers tend to get bigger, heavier, and more expensive in the pursuit of performance headroom that most recordings will never fully demand. The formula is familiar: more transformer capacity, larger capacitor banks, thicker panels, and bigger heat sinks, all folded into a single imposing chassis. It’s an engineering approach that works, but it also introduces a fundamental compromise that most manufacturers quietly accept rather than solve.

The Goldmund Telos 9800 doesn’t accept it. For the first time in the Telos line, the power supply and amplification stages occupy completely separate enclosures, each allowed to do its single job without the electrical and mechanical interference that sharing a chassis inevitably introduces. Two interconnected volumes, one devoted entirely to power supply and one to amplification, form what Goldmund describes as the most advanced amplifier the company has ever made.

Designer: Goldmund

The power supply chassis is built around a 10 kVA transformer and a 648 mF capacitor bank, the largest Goldmund has ever engineered. That stored energy reserve exists not to push volume louder but to handle the sudden, intense current demands of complex musical passages and difficult loudspeaker loads without the amplifier flinching. The amplification stage draws from that reservoir freely, stable down to a 1-ohm load and fully galvanically isolated from its source.

Both chassis are machined from micro-blasted aluminium with 15 mm thick side panels and 40 mm thick radiator sections that function as passive heatsinks through natural convection. There are no fans, no active cooling components. A single gold plate marks the junction between the two volumes, a discreet visual signal where one enclosure ends and the other begins. Gold-plated copper terminals and screws appear at connection points throughout. The construction is available in grey or black.

The Telos 9800 is a monoblock, meaning each unit drives a single channel. A stereo pair requires two of them, bringing the combined weight to 720kg and the combined cost to approximately $1 million USD. Goldmund specifies that installation requires at least two trained technicians with appropriate lifting equipment, which may be the most understated sentence in any modern audio product launch.

At 1,367mm tall, the Telos 9800 stands in a room rather than sitting in it. The separation of functions into two physically distinct objects transforms an engineering decision into something closer to sculpture. Most amplifiers hide their internal architecture behind a single front panel. The Telos 9800 makes the architecture the design.

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Most Macro Pads Top Out at 24 Keys, but This Keychron Has 100

Macro pads have always operated on the assumption that a handful of keys is enough. Most offer between six and 24 programmable buttons, which covers a tidy shortcut setup until it doesn’t, when a workflow shifts or a new application joins the rotation. Running out of keys usually means buying a second pad, stacking it beside the first, and accepting that the layout will never quite be what you originally wanted.

The Keychron C100 8K skips that problem entirely by starting with 100. Arranged in a 10-by-10 grid and taking up roughly the footprint of a full-size keyboard, it ships with every key completely unbound. There are no default shortcuts, no preset layouts, and nothing to undo. The entire surface is a blank canvas that users fill through Keychron Launcher, the brand’s browser-based configuration tool.

Designer: Keychron

That software handles everything from key assignments and macro sequences to per-key RGB lighting. Color-coding matters more here than it does on a conventional keyboard, because it’s one of the more practical ways to navigate 100 unmarked keys. A cluster in red for video editing, a row in blue for streaming controls, and a section in green for communication apps turns a uniform grid into something immediately legible.

The switches underneath are Keychron’s own Apex Red linears, which ship installed but aren’t the only option. Hot-swappable sockets mean any MX-style switch fits without soldering, which opens the C100 to the deeper enthusiast habit of collecting and testing different switches across different zones. The transparent ASA-profile keycaps, made from a combination of PBT and polycarbonate, let the per-key RGB glow through without muddying the colors.

An 8,000Hz polling rate sits at the competitive end of the spec sheet, which matters most for gaming where input latency becomes meaningful. That puts the C100 in a different position from most macro pads, which treat speed as secondary to programmability. Having both in the same device means the 100 keys can cover reactive gaming inputs and slower productivity shortcuts with the same responsiveness.

The scale of the grid also changes how the device can be organized in practice. A standard macro pad tends to cluster tightly around a single application, leaving little room for secondary controls. The C100 has enough room to dedicate zones to different software contexts without overlap, so switching between a video editor and a 3D modeling tool doesn’t require reprogramming or layer-switching in the middle of a session.

Connectivity is wired USB Type-C, which removes batteries and wireless latency from the equation. Adjustable feet let users dial in the typing angle, and the plastic body keeps the overall weight manageable for something this large. At 196.65mm x 196.65mm, the C100 forms a perfect square, which makes it geometrically distinctive at a glance and easy to position consistently on a desk.

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ASUS Built an E-Bike Booster You Can Actually Take on a Plane

Dedicated e-bikes have become a convincing answer to the urban commuting question, but they come with their own set of problems. They’re expensive to buy, awkward to carry on public transit, and they make the bike itself the investment rather than the ride. For anyone who already has a bicycle they like, replacing it entirely to gain electric assist has always felt like the wrong solution to a solvable problem.

The ASUS Oxiis E250G1 takes a different approach. Instead of replacing a bike, it adds to one. The unit clamps directly to the seatpost, pressing a motorized roller against the rear tire, and the friction-drive mechanism converts pedaling into electrically assisted riding without touching the existing drivetrain. Installation doesn’t require tools or a visit to a shop, and removal takes about the same amount of time.

Designer: ASUS

At the heart of the system is Adaptive Boost Technology, which reads the terrain and automatically increases power on climbs or against headwinds. Riders can also select between Eco, Normal, and Sport modes manually, either through a button on the unit itself or via the companion app on Android and iOS. Sport mode keeps range to about 10 km; Eco mode extends it to 50 km on a single charge.

That 50km ceiling comes from a 158.4Wh battery rated at 36V, which charges to full in two hours using a 100W USB-C PD connection. The battery is removable and certified as flight-safe for carry-on luggage with airline approval, which opens up a category of travel where bringing an electric bike along typically requires checking oversized bags or renting locally. A round trip on a familiar bike instead of a rental changes the experience considerably.

The anti-slip mechanism keeps the roller seated against the tire consistently, even over uneven surfaces, so power delivery stays smooth rather than intermittent under load. The unit weighs 3.7kg with the battery in place, puts out 250W rated and 500W at peak, and tops out at 32km/h. A built-in tail light uses brake detection to signal the rider slowing down to anyone behind, which is one of those small safety details that matters more in traffic than spec sheets tend to convey.

Compatibility stretches across most city, road, gravel, folding, and hardtail mountain bikes, fitting wheel sizes from 16 inches up to 700C. Full-suspension frames and carbon fiber seatposts are the noted exceptions, which rule out a portion of higher-end mountain bikes. For slick, semi-slick, and textured tires, the roller has enough grip to handle regular commuting conditions; knobby off-road tires aren’t recommended for obvious reasons.

When the ride ends and the commuter reaches their destination, the Oxiis comes off the bike and goes into a backpack. That portability reframes what an e-bike conversion kit can mean: not a permanent modification that commits the bike to one configuration, but a system that travels with the rider and attaches only when the assist is wanted. The bike stays as it is the rest of the time.

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The No-Drill Plywood Shelf System Every Renter Has Been Waiting For

Most shelves come with a decision baked into their design: find a wall, drill some holes, and commit to a location that will outlast most furniture arrangements. Wall-mounted storage has its advantages, but it tends to dictate how a room organizes itself rather than the other way around. Freestanding alternatives often compensate with bulk, trading flexibility for a kind of permanence that doesn’t feel all that different.

The Repisa 01 approaches that problem from a different angle. It’s a modular shelf system built around the idea that storage should adapt to the space it occupies, not the other way around. Made from CNC-cut plywood with an interlocking joint system, it stands without screws, brackets, or wall anchors, and reconfigures into entirely different layouts depending on what a space needs from it at any given point.

Designer: Lorenzo Vega

Everything here reduces to four interchangeable pieces: two tops and two sets of legs. These plywood components lock together through notched cutouts that let the legs slot directly into the shelf tops, with no hardware or tools required. Assembly is straightforward, and so is breaking it down. The simplicity of the connection is what keeps the whole system flexible rather than fixed in one form.

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From those same base components, the Repisa 01 assembles into layouts that look quite different from one another. A wider, lower arrangement works naturally as a living room display shelf for books, plants, and framed pieces. The same parts, rearranged taller, shift it toward something that reads more like a room divider, creating a soft visual partition in open-plan spaces without committing to anything structural.

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Smaller configurations bring it down to something suited to a bedroom corner or a compact apartment’s entryway, holding a few books or a cluster of plants without crowding the room. The natural plywood finish sits comfortably next to most interior palettes without needing to match them precisely. A shelf that follows you between apartments and living situations can’t afford to be too particular about its aesthetic surroundings.

This flexibility extends to what the shelf holds as well. There’s no fixed shelf spacing or depth to work around, so the arrangement scales up or down depending on what needs displaying. A household that favors tall ceramics has different priorities than one focused on paperback books or small indoor plants, and the Repisa 01 doesn’t try to resolve those differences with a single fixed configuration.

That also makes it a natural fit for renters or anyone who moves often. Most modular shelving available on the market still anchors somewhere eventually, even if only at the back panel or through a top-shelf bracket. The Repisa 01 removes that requirement entirely, which quietly changes the relationship between the shelf and the room, giving the room back its walls without giving anything up.

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This Collapsible Mouse Is So Flat It Shares a Sleeve With Your Laptop

Traveling with a mouse has always carried a specific low-level inconvenience. Full-size mice claim too much space in a slim bag, compact mice often sacrifice comfort for portability, and both still need their own compartment to avoid getting lost or damaged. The usual answer is a palm-sized wireless mouse that needs to be packed with some thought and unpacked with intention at every new stop along the way.

The Portronics Toad Fold approaches that directly. Rather than making a mouse smaller, it slides down in half with a magnetic snap mechanism, collapsing to a profile flat enough to slip into the same laptop sleeve as the laptop itself. At just 38g, it barely registers in a bag, and the snap closure means it doesn’t need a separate case or a dedicated compartment to stay protected during the commute.

Designer: Portronics

Connectivity covers both Bluetooth and 2.4 GHz wireless, and multi-device pairing allows the Toad Fold to work across several devices without swapping dongles or going through re-pairing every time. Moving from a laptop to an Android tablet becomes a matter of switching, not reconfiguring. The included USB receiver handles the 2.4 GHz side for scenarios where a stable, lag-free connection matters more than portless convenience.

Opening the mouse reveals an ergonomic curved shape designed for extended use, with DPI adjustable up to 3,200 for precision across different tasks. The curve sits more naturally against the hand than most ultra-compact mice allow, since that category usually forces a nearly flat profile that gets tiring through long sessions. A matte black finish keeps the surface neutral and fingerprint-resistant without demanding any particular attention.

The built-in battery charges via USB-C, removing the need for replacement batteries, and an auto sleep mode stretches battery life during idle periods. That combination handles a full workday without needing to charge mid-session, which is the relevant concern for anyone moving between locations rather than sitting at a fixed desk with easy access to a charging cable at all times.

The Toad Fold is designed for a kind of worker who treats the mouse as the last thing to pack rather than the first. Students sharing library tables, remote workers bouncing between coffee shops, and professionals moving between offices all share the same friction with conventional mice, which tend to be an afterthought in bag organization despite being essential to how work actually gets done on a laptop every day.

Compatibility covers Windows, macOS, and Android, which handles most combinations of laptop and tablet a person might carry across locations. Multi-device pairing means a single mouse can stay connected to a laptop and tablet at the same time, reducing the friction of shifting between screens during a day that moves between different setups without a fixed home base. It’s a mouse built around the idea that the best portable peripheral vanishes into an existing bag without adding to the mental overhead of packing.

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The $150 Charger That Explains Why Your Laptop Is Still at 60 Percent

Most multi-port chargers operate on faith. You plug in six devices, the indicator lights glow, and you assume everything is receiving the power it needs until something is still at 12 percent an hour later. The culprit is almost always shared output being split in ways the charger never bothered to explain, which leaves users guessing which port to prioritize and whether anything is actually charging at full speed.

The Satechi ChargeView 240W Desktop Charger takes the guesswork out with an LCD on the front that shows live wattage readings for every port simultaneously. Plug in a laptop and see exactly how many watts it’s drawing. Add a tablet, a phone, and a pair of earbuds, and every number updates in real time. It’s a straightforward idea that most chargers, including expensive ones, haven’t bothered to implement.

Designer: Satechi

Six USB-C ports cover the range of what a loaded desk actually needs. The top two, C1 and C2, each deliver up to 140W using PD 3.2 AVS, making them capable of handling two MacBook Pros at full speed simultaneously. C3 and C4 go up to 100W each for tablets and lighter laptops, while C5 and C6 top out at 30W each for phones, earbuds, and accessories. The 240W total budget distributes intelligently across whichever ports are active.

That intelligence extends to how the ChargeView negotiates with each device. PD 3.2 AVS and PPS allow the charger and device to agree on precisely the right voltage in fine increments rather than jumping between fixed steps. In practice, that means a nearly full phone battery gets a gentle trickle rather than the same hard push used to top up a laptop from empty, which is easier on battery health over time.

The display does more than show wattage. It reads temperature across all ports simultaneously, and flags when thermal conditions shift, with the charger pulling back output before heat becomes a problem. That monitoring runs continuously without any intervention needed. The LCD auto-dims after about a minute of inactivity and wakes when a cable is plugged in, so it’s visible when useful and dark when not. The display also rotates to stay readable in either vertical or horizontal orientation, matching whichever position the included precision stand is set to.

GaN technology handles the power delivery without a fan, keeping the unit silent even when all six ports are running at capacity. At 4.3in x 3.6in x 1.5in, it’s roughly the footprint of a paperback book for something handling 240W. The Space Black metallic finish and borderless display cover sit comfortably next to darker-toned setups, and the stand’s horizontal position adds a slight forward tilt that makes the display easier to read from a seated position.

The ChargeView 240W retails for $149.99 and is covered by a two-year warranty. What this 240W charger offers that a standard multi-port product doesn’t is accountability. Every watt is visible, every device is reported, and the charger’s own thermal state is always on display. For anyone who has watched a laptop charge for two hours and wondered why it’s still at 60 percent, that kind of transparency turns out to be worth something.

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This $549 QWERTY Android Phone Was Built to Give You Your Day Back

Smartphones have never been smarter, but they’ve also never been more demanding. Bigger screens, algorithmic feeds, and relentless notifications aren’t design oversights. They’re deliberate, built to keep you engaged for as long as possible. The prevailing logic is that longer screen time is better, and most phones are optimized around that, pulling you back in every time you try to put them down.

The Minimal Phone 2 is a different kind of proposition. It’s a modern 5G Android phone built around the opposite idea: that a phone should serve you and then get out of the way. It pairs a compact AMOLED display with a full physical QWERTY keyboard and a custom OS called Minimal OS, designed to make daily interactions faster, more deliberate, and less compulsive.

Designer: Armen Youssefian

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The keyboard is the phone’s most striking feature, and also its most considered. It’s a full QWERTY board integrated directly into the phone, about 69mm wide, with backlit keys whose legends are laser-etched into the keycap surface rather than printed on top, so they won’t fade with use. Each row fans outward slightly, and the keycaps are sculpted to guide your thumbs naturally.

What a physical keyboard really changes is the relationship between picking up your phone and doing something on it. When the keyboard is always there, typing becomes the default instinct instead of scrolling. You reach for the phone with something in mind, do it, and put it down. That shift sounds subtle, but over the course of a day, it changes how the device feels.

Minimal OS reinforces that instinct with its command bar, which lets you do most things without opening an app at all. Start with a symbol, type what you want, and the OS handles the rest. Typing “@jason on my way” sends a text. Typing “#lauren” places a call. A hyphen adds a to-do, an asterisk creates a calendar event, and an exclamation mark saves a note.

Communication is pulled together in something called the Minimal Hub. Swipe right from the home screen, and you get a single, unified list of everything that’s come in: emails from every account, texts, missed calls, voicemails, and calendar invitations. You can read and reply without opening a separate app, which makes a full inbox feel like clearing a short list rather than bouncing between five different places.

Two quieter features round out the software side. The Activity Bar puts 24 dots on the home screen, one per hour. Each turns white when your time stays focused, and red when the hour slips into social apps or media. The notification LED lets you assign colors and patterns to specific contacts and apps, so a glance at your desk tells you what’s actually waiting.

The hardware underneath makes it a credible daily driver. A 3.92-inch AMOLED at 1080×1240 pixels and 90Hz, a MediaTek Dimensity 8300 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB or 512GB of storage make up the core. Connectivity covers 5G, Wi-Fi 6E, and NFC. The rear camera is 50MP, the front has a 20MP shooter, and there’s both 27W wired and 15W wireless charging, as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack.

The phone sits in an aluminum frame measuring 122.6mm x 72mm x 9.48mm, in three finishes. Pearl is a brushed light alloy in a warm off-white. Onyx is an anodized alloy in a deep near-black. Ember is an anodized minimal orange, offered as a launch exclusive. The design language is restrained throughout, with nothing calling for attention except the keyboard, which announces itself plainly.

What’s interesting about the Minimal Phone 2 is that its restraint doesn’t feel punishing. It still runs full Android, so banking apps, navigation, music, and messaging are all there. What changes is how you arrive at them. Rather than a phone that sprawls into your day uninvited, this one waits to be needed, which in a landscape of devices competing for attention, feels unusual.

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