Screenshots promoting "Instagram Plus" have been spotted by users in the Philippines and Mexico in recent days. According to social media consultant Matt Navarra, a subscription to Instagram Plus includes several Story-focused features not otherwise available to Instagram users. This includes the ability to create multiple audiences for Stories posts, search the list of people who have viewed your Story, extend Stories longer than 24 hours and create "spotlight" Stories. It also mentions something called “super hearts” for reacting to Stories.
A spokesperson for Meta confirmed the test to Engadget, saying that Instagram Plus is currently available in “a few countries.” The spokesperson added that “preview” would allow people to see some of another user’s Story without “showing up as a viewer”. There’s nothing quite like paying to be sneakier on social media.
The idea, as we’ve seen so far, seems closely modeled after Snapchat+, which also offers bonus features to the app's power users. Launched in 2022, the service has now become a significant driver of non-advertising revenue for the company.
Apple has been around for fifty years. It reimagined personal computers, catalyzed the era of the smartphone, enlarged an iPhone and called it the iPad and garnered a strong position in wearable tech through its Watch series and its AirPods. It also popularized software and services like its App Store, FaceTime, iCloud, iMessages and many more.
However, Apple gives and it takes away. For the MacBook Air to exist, the disk drive had to go; ditching the home button led to edge-to-edge iPhone screens. The weight of Apple's influence has led to entire product categories following suit. Or, more typically, there's resistance, complaining and (eventually) following suit.
Two new models of Meta Ray-Ban AI glasses are on the wayand they're going to be catered to those who use prescription lenses, according to a Bloomberg report. While these are supposed to be announced next week, the report noted that these won't be a "new generation" of Meta's smart glasses.
You can already add prescription lenses to Meta Ray-Ban's AI glasses, so who cares? Well, the upcoming models will come in rectangular and rounded styles and will be sold through traditional prescription eyewear channels. It seems like a way to get Meta’s wearables in front of a new group of prospective customers.
Now available on the App Store and Google Play Store, the official White House App claims to give Americans "a direct line to the White House." According to the press release, the app provides "unfiltered, real-time upgrades straight from the source." The White House App's News tab features a carousel of about 35 articles that seem suspiciously cherry-picked, favoring the Trump administration. As Engadget’s Jackson Chen notes, in the Affordability window, the app points out year-over-year price drops for items like eggs, milk and bread, but conveniently omits the recent surge in gas prices.
In the Social tab, there's even a button to "Text President Trump," which auto-populates a new text with "Greatest President Ever!"
Over the last 50 years, Apple reimagined personal computers, catalyzed the era of the smartphone, enlarged an iPhone and called it the iPad and garnered a strong position in wearable tech through its Watch series and its AirPods. It also popularized software and services like its App Store, FaceTime, iCloud, iMessages and many more. For a lot of us, the first time we pinched-to-zoom on a photo was likely on an iPhone.
However, Apple gives and it takes away. Things have had to change, be removed and consumers have to move on to whatever's new. For better or worse, the weight of Apple's influence has led to entire product categories following suit. Or, more typically, there's resistance, complaining and then… following suit. With the benefit of hindsight, most of these cases are examples of Apple seeing where technology was going and getting ahead of a transition that would have been inevitable. Often, these transitions have caused short-term pain for some, but time has proven Apple (mostly) correct about dropping older tech.
As Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch once said: murder your darlings. Here are some of the darlings we’ve lost over the years.
The death of the disk drive (1998)
This is a two-parter. The iMac G3 marked Steve Jobs' return. The colorful all-in-one Mac was a new start in many ways. In 1998, Apple ditched the standard ports and myriad cable types of personal computers, going all in on USB and a little-known thing called the internet. (In fact, that’s what the ‘i’ in iMac stands for.)
In doing so, it also ditched the 3.5-inch floppy disk drive — although it did have a read-only optical disk drive. Even with sluggish internet and USB transfer speeds at the time, the convenience was plain to see and it led to a decade of thumb drives of ever-increasing storage limits. High-capacity alternatives to the floppy disk, like the Zip disk and even Minidisc, attempted to bridge the gap, but never gained the widespread traction and adoption of the original disk drive. But flash drives and, later, internet-based file storage quickly made them obsolete anyway. Apple was just a little early with its dismissal.
Portable music players (2007)
Despite Apple’s iPod being the de facto music player at the time, it was supplanted by the company’s own biggest hit: the iPhone. At its peak, the iPod made Apple the zeitgeisty tech company it is today. It dominated the MP3 player market, and by 2006, iPods were responsible for 40 percent of the company’s revenue. And that was before the era of Apple including a free U2 album with every iTunes account.
When the iPhone launched in June 2007, it was swiftly followed by the iPod Touch in September. This was the iPhone without the phone part — indicating how the company saw the future of music listening. You didn’t need an iPod if you already had an iPhone in your pocket. It’s the best example of Apple cannibalizing a product that defined a decade with something far more impressive and, eventually, more successful.
It was a slow death. Ignoring the countless MP3-playing rivals, (RIP Zune), Apple dropped the classic iPod in 2014. It soon did the same to the tiny iPod nano and iPod shuffle in 2017. Finally, the company discontinued the iPod Touch in May 2022.
The physical smartphone keyboard (2007 plus change)
Unsplash / Thai Nguyen
When the iPhone’s capacitive screen and touch keyboard landed, there was a learning curve. Moving from physical keys (whether it was a 9-key alphanumeric version or the BlackBerry’s QWERTY experience) to a touch screen, especially on the tiny 3.5-inch panel of the first iPhone, wasn’t easy.
But it was the future. Physical keyboards took up physical space on devices — especially as those screens grew and grew. The adoption of touch keyboards sped up, thanks to third-party keyboard apps on Android, like Swype, SwiftKey and many others, introducing different input methods, smarter predictive text, typing algorithms and even touch heatmaps. Software keyboards were intrinsically more versatile, supporting multiple languages, infinite key arrangements and eventually emoji galleries. A colon-ellipsis smiley soon didn’t hit the same.
The death of the disk drive, part 2 (2008)
The MacBook Air, introduced by Steve Jobs in 2008, was famously pulled from a manila envelope to demonstrate its ultraportable design. To achieve that slimness, it had to ditch the internal optical drive entirely, making it the first MacBook without one. That move kickstarted an era of ultraportable laptops.
It was a major break from what laptop users were used to, and Apple tried to offer people some options. Apple introduced "Remote Disc," a feature which allowed the Air to wirelessly use the optical drive of a nearby Mac or PC, and offered an external USB SuperDrive as an optional accessory. (I've used mine exactly once since I bought it in 2013.)
While it was considered underpowered compared to Windows competitors, the original MacBook Air set a new design standard for the industry. It positioned Apple’s Macs for a future of App Store software installations, faster internet connectivity, and the rise of streaming media, cloud storage, and the rest. Apple’s MacBook Pro and MacBooks eventually followed suit, ditching optical drives in 2012.
Adobe Flash (2010)
Apple
In the early days of the iPhone, Apple famously refused to support Adobe Flash. This was in the early 2000s, too, when much of the web was built with Flash for animations and video support. The iPhone and iPad notably lacked support, creating a fractured browsing experience for years.
In April 2010, just as the first iPad arrived, Steve Jobs published his "Thoughts on Flash" open letter, criticizing its poor security and a lack of touch-friendliness. Many Flash games and interfaces interacted with the mouse cursor's precise position, something that was invisible on the touchscreen iPhone.
It was also a calculated move. By denying Adobe access to the rapidly growing iOS user base, Apple forced developers to choose between sticking with the aging Flash or embracing open standards like HTML5. Also, by making Flash-based games and tools incompatible, it nudged those developers (and iPhone users) toward the App Store for those very games and tools (and more). There, Apple could curate and monetize those creations.
In a move described by Apple marketing executive Phil Schiller as "courage,” nixing the headphone socket ended up becoming the biggest headline to come from the iPhone 7 launch in 2016. Every flagship iPhone since has lacked the jack, with the most recent iPhone to include it being the original iPhone SE.
To make the change more palatable, Apple bundled a Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter (expect more dongle chat later) with the iPhone 7, 8 and X. In-box headphones also swapped from the typical jack to Lightning. Naturally, this meant you couldn’t charge the phone while you listened to music, unless you already had a pair of wireless headphones.
Of course, this move was ultimately instrumental in making true wireless earbuds ubiquitous. While Apple wasn’t remotely the first company to introduce wireless earbuds (and then headphones), the removal of the headphone jack undoubtedly sped up adoption. Pour one out for the Bragi Dash, the Jabras, the Jaybirds of this world.
Conveniently, alongside the aforementioned iPhone 7, Apple announced the AirPods. Features like one-tap setup and automatic pairing brought the convenience people expected of Apple and put it into a tiny white case.
Despite early resistance and "bragging" from rivals who clung onto the headphone jack, at this point, the socket is mostly confined to cheaper smartphones or phones aimed at audiophiles (hi, Sony) or mobile gamers (ASUS ROG).
Eventually, the iPad Pro also lost its headphone jack, and the rest of the company's tablets followed. The only non-Mac device to keep the jack? The iPod Touch, which had one until its discontinuation in 2022.
Bespoke ports (2016)
Engadget
2016 was the year of donglegate. Apple’s MacBook Pro redesign that year was another drastic shift in the laptop's history. Chasing ever-thinner profiles and less port fuss, Apple stripped away nearly every legacy connector that professionals relied on. This was particularly jarring after the previous-generation MacBook Pro (2015) was often cited as the peak of utility, with a MagSafe charging port, two Thunderbolt 2 ports, two USB-A ports, not to mention a full-size HDMI port and an SD card slot.
Those were replaced with four (or on the cheapest 13-inch MBP only two!) Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports and a headphone jack. For power users (like some Engadget editors), it demanded dongles (possibly multiple ones) in order to connect your USB-A thumb drive, wired internet, SD cards, external screens and well, at that point, pretty much everything. Many were particularly furious with the loss of the MagSafe charging connector. Of course, this also meant that one of those USB-C ports would be used primarily to charge the MBP. This sped up the availability of USB-C peripherals and accessories — perhaps because everyone was sick of carrying around so many dongles and hubs — but we still have USB-A devices. HDMI is everywhere. I still have SD Cards.
Eventually, Apple course-corrected itself. The 2021 MacBook Pro redesign reintroduced the SD card reader and HDMI port, and even MagSafe returned, freeing up a USB-C port.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/50-years-of-apple-pushing-tech-forward-for-better-or-worse-170025862.html?src=rss
Honda and Sony announced that they are discontinuing both the Afeela 1 and 2, their electric cars. The company is reviewing its “business direction,” but it's hard to expect much from a car company that’s cancelled all of its cars.
The Afeela 1, casually called the PlayStation Car, was meant to be a fusion of a modern EV and your own digital media bubble. (You could have a God of War-themed dash — if you wanted that.)
There’s a wider pressure on Honda, beyond this risky collaboration with Sony. It expects to take a $15.7 billion loss after writing off a large portion of its EV investment. The US’s removal of federal EV tax credits and the imposition of tariffs have hit everything hard.
The Afeela was exciting on paper, but in person, it was a pretty unassuming sedan. And expensive! Rival EV makers were offering more for less. Also: don’t tease a car for six full years. It’s never a good sign. Check out Tim Steven’s editorial on how it all fell apart.
TikTok and Snap settled ahead of the trial. Smart.
A jury in Los Angeles has found that Meta and YouTube were negligent in a closely watched trial over social media addiction. The two companies were ordered to pay $6 million in damages to a woman who said their addictive features harmed her.
For Meta, it's the second legal setback in recent weeks, after a New Mexico jury ruled against it on child safety issues. Meta was ordered to pay $375 million in penalties, making this settlement seem small in comparison. The companies are planning to appeal.
The Sonos Play could be the company’s reset button, a way to remind people what the company does well – and move on from busted updates, expensive gambits and fussy apps. The $299 Play is a portable speaker that sits between the $499 Sonos Move 2 and the $179 Roam 2. The new speaker sounds great, has a wide and versatile feature set and won’t break the bank. We particularly like the inclusion of Bluetooth grouping.
DJI responded quickly to Insta360’s debut drone, the Antigravity A1, with the Avata 360. It’s drawn from years of drone experience (and tech from its new Osmo 360 action cam). Compared to the A1, it’s safer to fly around people and offers single-camera OIS 4K footage in addition to 8K 360 video. The 360 video it shoots offers incredible editing flexibility, but overall quality is lower than that of DJI’s other drones. It’s cheaper than its 360 drone rival, too, though US availability remains unclear.
It’s coming. Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will take place from June 8-12. Going on past timings, CEO Tim Cook will take the stage for the keynote on June 8, most likely at 1 PM ET.
WWDC is a software-focused affair, so expect to see the upcoming "27" operating systems, now that the new naming convention has settled. Apple will likely cover iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, visionOS 27, watchOS 27 and macOS 27. However, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman is suggesting that WWDC will be "a fairly muted affair," – but in all fairness, WWDC has never been that explosive.
Still, there are things I want to hear about: Rumors suggest that iOS 27 will deliver big upgrades to Apple Intelligence and — possibly — that overdue Siri overhaul. Reports also suggest the presence of split-pane multitasking, if you’re aching to juggle spreadsheets, web browsing and more on your mobile device.
Senior reporter Karissa Bell marks two decades on Twitter. Twitter/X as changed a lot, especially in the last five years, as AI slop, clickbait, and ragebait keep the algorithm ticking over. More recently, X’s AI assistant was able to ‘undress’ anyone you ask it to. Great.
The social network has moved far away from its exciting heyday of live tweeting, memes and more — or even a place to make new friends and contacts. In fact, I got my job here at Engadget through Twitter DMs to former Engadget editor Richard Lai. As Karissa puts it, "Twitter stopped being that place a long time ago.”
The Phone 4a Pro punches well above its $499 price tag. Nothing has successfully refined its hardware into a more premium, all-metal unibody, losing the jarring camera bump of its predecessor in favor of a sleek design that houses a genuinely impressive camera. There are still a few signs that it’s not quite a flagship (mediocre video recording performance and a lack of wireless charging), but at this price, these seem like minor complaints. Nothing’s next flagship phone needs to offer something, right?
Android AirDrop sharing is expanding to more devices. Samsung announced earlier this week that its Galaxy S26 Series is getting AirDrop support via the Quick Share feature.
Google first introduced the Quick Share feature on its Pixel 10 phones last year. The setting allows Android users to send and receive photos and files from an Apple device. Y’know, like AirDrop.
Nothing takes a different tack with its phone series. For the second time in a row, its midrange entry-level A-series smartphones debuted ahead of its next flagship device. The company has even warned that we won’t be getting the Nothing Phone 4 until next year. Until then, the Phone 4a Pro is here to make an impact, with a more restrained design, a less obtrusive camera bump and specs that beat out last year’s Nothing Phone 3 — all for $499. In 2026, Nothing is truly aiming to dethrone the Pixel 10a.
Hardware
Mat Smith for Engadget
It’s a new look. That’s often the case with Nothing’s smartphones as the company typically reimagines or rejigs what you can see through the clear back panel. This year, however, Nothing is making bigger changes: this is its first metal (aluminum) unibody phone.
With a new periscope telephoto camera design, the jarringly thick camera bump of last year’s Phone 3a Pro is thankfully gone, resulting in a slice of smartphone that feels — and to some, looks — more premium and more refined than Nothing’s “flagship” Phone 3.
However, compared to the Nothing phones that came before, it also feels muted, and a little safe. The playfulness of Nothing has been hemmed in a little. You might prefer it, but I’m not sure I do.
Those identifiable Nothing design flourishes — red details, visible screens, lots and lots of circles — are now squeezed into a camera panel. This oblong area with curved corners houses a trio of cameras, a “Now Recording” red light and a tweaked Glyph Matrix, which we last saw on the Nothing Phone 3.
This new Glyph Matrix is bigger and brighter, but at a lower “resolution,” that’s made of 137 mini-LEDs. That’s fewer than the Nothing Phone 3’s 489-strong dot-matrix, but the LEDs here are 100 percent brighter. So bright, in fact, that I had to turn them down to their lowest brightness when I was using them.The 4a Pro, however, lacks the rear button on the Phone 3 that lets you cycle through Glyph functions. Does this mean the company has made it easy to switch between Glyph toys and notifications in the phone’s UI? Sadly not.
You can dip into the Glyph options through the main settings menu, but to change what the Glyph displays is hidden in a sub-tab. I also noticed that the offering of “toys” was limited, with fewer items than even the Nothing Phone 3 had at launch. Hopefully, this will expand once the phone officially launches.
The 4a Pro packs a bigger screen than the company’s flagship, with a 6.83-inch AMOLED screen running at 1.5K resolution. It also has a higher refresh rate than the 6.67-inch Phone 3. And on top of that, the Phone 4a Pro’s display has a peak brightness of 5,000 nits, making it Nothing’s brightest smartphone yet.
I’ve handled so many phones over the last four weeks that it’s often hard to discern the difference between brighter displays. Fortunately, I have the Nothing Phone 3 (and 3a Pro) to compare against the Phone 4a Pro. It’s noticeably brighter, and as we slowly get into sunnier weather, a smartphone that’s easier to read outdoors is always very welcome.
The Phone 4a Pro also has improved IP65 water and dust resistance, while Nothing says it's 42 percent more bend-resistant than the Phone 3a Pro as well. It’s also almost 0.5mm thinner, if you ignore the camera bump for those measurements. Factor that in and the Phone 4a Pro is almost 1.5mm thinner than its predecessor. This design change also makes Nothing’s newest phone feel far less top-heavy than the 3a Pro. Regardless of the aesthetic changes, this is unmistakably refined hardware.
Cameras
Mat Smith for Engadget
Besides the streamlined camera unit, with a new tetraprism periscopic lens that takes up less space, the Phone 4a Pro has improved imaging capabilities (almost) across the board. The new 50-megapixel periscope telephoto lens (which Nothing says also uses less power) has a 3.5x optical zoom, plus computational photography magic that can now crank it up to a (mostly unusable) 140x hybrid zoom.
The main 50MP sensor also features a bigger sensor for improved low-light performance. With an f/1.88 lens though, it doesn’t quite match the Phone 3’s main camera (f/1.68), both on paper and in practice. The array is rounded out with an 8MP ultrawide camera, which sounds like the weakest link, but I rarely use the ultrawide cameras on any phone aside from review testing. Oddly, the selfie camera is a technical downgrade in resolution, with a 32MP sensor on the 4a Pro, down from 50MP on the 3a Pro.
Mat Smith for Engadget
One new addition was co-developed by Google. Ultra XDR blends Android’s native HDR processing with Nothing’s own approach, capturing 13 RAW frames at different exposures and combining them to deliver greater dynamic range and detail. However, as proof of how new they are, your Ultra XDR images can’t be shared as easily. They do work with Google Photos and Instagram, at least. If it’s any consolation, Ultra XDR so far doesn’t seem hugely far away from typical HDR capture. I’ll keep testing the cameras and if I figure out where it really shines, I’ll update this review.
Mat Smith for Engadget
If one thing disappoints on the 4a Pro, it’s recording video. Switching between zoom levels will often completely derail exposure settings. Even if you record on a single camera at the same focal length, exposure levels seem extremely sensitive and struggle to stay locked. Footage is often muddy and low-light performance isn’t great, even if using the Ultra XDR video mode. You aren’t forced to endure this with the Pixel 10a, but then again, there’s no zoom on Google’s mid-range phone — just a lossless crop. In more forgiving lighting, video is adequate, but quality drops off beyond the 3.5x optical zoom. Still, the versatility and quality of the still images from both the main camera and the telephoto lens put it above every other smartphone at this price.
Performance and software
The Phone 4a Pro is now powered by a more capable processor: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Gen 4. Nothing claims that, in addition to its own on-device optimizations, it improved CPU performance by 27 percent, GPU performance by 30 percent and AI performance by 65 percent compared to the Phone 3a series.
There’s certainly a big difference in performance while gaming. While the 3a series struggled with more complex games, the 4a Pro kept up with Red Dead Redemption and Diablo Immortal. It’s not the most polished interpretation of Decard Cain and the lands of Sanctuary, but it's responsive and playable, even at 60 fps, with only a few frame drops.
The Phone 4a has a 5,080mAh battery, roughly equivalent to its predecessor. It supports up to 50W fast charging, a tad faster than the Pixel 10a, though it lacks wireless charging support, unlike Google’s midranger. It’s one of the few signs that this isn’t Nothing’s “true” flagship, even if it looks the part.
I was pleasantly surprised by the battery life, too. Typically, phones are getting increasingly bigger batteries, but as I mentioned, that’s not the case here.. However, the 4a Pro lasted 24 hours in our battery rundown test, five hours more than last year’s model.
The Phone 4a Pro has all the software features either present or teased in older Nothing Phones. Essential Search is a system-wide search that can find terms in messages, files and the rest of your phone. There’s also a new Breathing Break widget; we definitely need that in 2026.
Essential Memory is Nothing’s name for its background algorithms and analysis, scrutinizing your phone’s contents as well as whatever’s saved in Essential Space. Nothing has added cloud storage for Space, aimed at devoted upgraders, meaning everything you saved on older compatible Nothing phones can be transferred over. Sure, it’s a little niche, but it was an early frustration while testing the Phone 3 after the 3a series. If, for some reason, you have to reset your device, keeping everything in Space backed up elsewhere is a boon.
Mat Smith for Engadget
Also, while it’s technically a hardware tweak, Nothing has also moved the Essential Key to the left edge of the phone, making it far less likely to be triggered when you’re adjusting the volume and more in line with other phones and my own smartphone muscle memory.
One caveat from previous Nothing devices remains. The company says it will deliver three years of Android updates and an additional three years of security patches. Compare that to Samsung’s seven years of Android updates for this year’s S26 series (and Google’s Pixel 10a), and you can see how it falls short.
Wrap-up
The Phone 4a Pro punches well above its $499 price tag. Nothing has successfully refined its hardware into a more premium, all-metal unibody, losing the jarring camera bump of its predecessor in favor of a sleek design that houses a genuinely impressive camera. The improved camera versatility, coupled with its class-leading 24-hour battery life and a more capable processor, makes this a serious threat to the Pixel 10a.
However, some of Nothing's signature playfulness has been dialed back. The Glyph Matrix, while brighter, is lower-resolution and its “toys” are disappointingly limited at launch. The lack of wireless charging is another nod to its midrange status.
Nothing’s Phone 4a Pro is a device with a clear identity, delivering on the essentials for half the price of many rivals.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/nothing-phone-4a-pro-review-glyph-matrix-130042005.html?src=rss
Oppo is back with another high-spec foldable phone you may never see outside a tech journalist's hands. The Find N6 is its new, sub-9mm device that is headed to Asian markets and, for now, not many other places. That means no US or European availability. So why write about it? With its build quality, hardware specs and camera array, not only is it a very good phone, but it's also proof that another device maker can go toe-to-toe with Samsung’s dominance in flagship foldable phones.
Hardware
Image by Mat Smith for Engadget
Oppo is obsessed with the foldable crease. More than me, more than most of you, more than it should, probably. A focus of its presentation last month in London detailed all the effort put into its “zero-feel crease.” The idea is that you can’t really feel where the device folds, with 3D liquid printing and laser scanning used to fill the hinge's surface precisely. The company says this reduces hinge height variance from 0.2mm to only 0.05mm.
Oppo has improved the glass used on the foldable display, and according to TÜV Rheinland testing (again), the Find N6 reduces long-term crease formation by up to 82 percent compared to last year’s Oppo model. It apparently takes a lot of engineering to make a foldable that looks pristine for longer. It’s definitely still early days, but after a few weeks of use, the crease does seem perceptibly shallower than that of other devices, especially the older Find N5. However, there is still a crease. You might not feel it as much, but you can see it.
Despite that particular obsession, it’s another incredibly thin foldable, measuring 8.93mm (0.35 inches) thick. That means, folded, it seems roughly equivalent to most typical smartphone form factors. For reference, the iPhone 17 Pro is 8.75mm (0.34 inches) thick. Even with its slim profile, it also offers improved protection with IP59 certification against dust and water. The new foldable also picks up a new custom hardware button, like the Find X9, which can be assigned to launch the camera, switch sound profiles and other quick action settings.
The screens are the same size and resolution as its predecessor: a 6.62-inch front display and an 8.12-inch inner screen. There have been notable improvements here, too. Peak brightness has been punched up to 3,500 nits on the front screen and 2,500 nits on the foldable screen, making them brighter than on Oppo’s last foldable, but behind Motorola’s latest, most luminous foldable.
The Find N6 also has another custom 7-core Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor — the flagship processor of the moment. The more impressive spec may be the battery: a huge 6,000mAh Silicon-Carbon power pack. That’s 400mAh more than the Find N5 and 1,600mAh more than the ZFold 7. And it goes and goes: Doing a battery rundown test on the front display playing non-stop video lasted just shy of 30 hours, while using the bigger internal screen still hit 24 hours.
Another area where it bests Samsung is in charge speeds, supporting up to 80W SUPERVOOC wired charging through Oppo’s proprietary adapter and up to 55W with other high-wattage chargers. There’s also 50W AIRVOOC wireless charging — again, only if you have Oppo’s particular flavor of wireless charger, which I do not. Sadly, there are no Qi2/PixelSnap/MagSafe docking magnets.
The cameras
Image by Mat Smith for Engadget
Oppo has made major improvements to the cameras with several features showcased on the Find X9, now making their way to its foldables. There's a new 200-megapixel main camera with an f/1.8 lens and a new 50MP ultrawide camera that lets in 50 percent more light. The telephoto camera captures 50MP images, with 3X periscope optical zoom and telemacro focus up to 10cm away. All three cameras also support 4K 60 fps Dolby Vision video capture, with the main sensor also capable of 120 fps recording.
Image by Mat Smith for Engadget
Oppo’s new foldable has cameras that rival those of Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold series. The addition of the high-resolution 200MP main sensor adds more detail to images and more versatility, too. The company continues to collaborate with Hasselblad on camera hardware and software. A new Hi-Res mode that captures stills using the full pixel count of each sensor, while other shooting modes from previous devices are still here. That includes the Hasselblad Master Mode, with full control over the camera settings and the iconic XPAN mode for 65:24 panoramic stills and video.
While I was already impressed by Oppo’s recent Find X9, the Find N6 still surprised me. It’s versatile, consistent, and it’s almost the best foldable camera phone — if only its telephoto matched the Pixel 10 Pro Fold’s 5x zoom.
Software
Image by Mat Smith for Engadget
When it comes to multitasking, the Find N6 really wants to deliver, even if the end result is a little messy. You can run a full-screen app, while three Free-Flow Windows each run a different app or web page, all concurrently. Every window is interactive and it almost immediately gave me a stress headache. Oppo has baked in a system of swipes and pinches to aid navigation, but I’d argue that even an 8.1-inch screen isn’t enough for all those windows. Still, for the true power user, there is a lot to tap into. If you’re the kind of person who bounces between work chats in Slack, your calendar and umpteen Chrome tabs — this phone is aimed at you.
Oppo wasn’t done with the productivity bonafides. It’s added a new stylus to its foldable series, which comes with its own holster/case that attaches to the back of the Find N6. In most instances, this would make a chunky foldable too bulky, but the base phone is so slim that it's passable. The case also serves as a charging cradle that can recharge the stylus via reverse wireless charging. I’m not a huge stylus user, but for those who miss the S Pen, this is an option if you live in a country where it’s being sold.
The stylus, officially called the Oppo AI Pen (hate that name), has a button to summon an onscreen palette of tools and features. Double-pressing the button switches between writing and erasing, which is pretty handy. Screen-off note-taking will apparently arrive in a later software update.
Oppo is also continuing to bridge ecosystems with iPhone Connect, which adds AirDrop-style file sharing to Apple phones. Remote PC control is still a cute feature, making the Find N6 into a tiny pocketable PC, if you’re willing to work on your laptop through a tiny screen.
Wrap-up
Image by Mat Smith for Engadget
It’s another impressive foldable from Oppo, one that sadly most folks will never be able to buy. What’s stopping Oppo from testing the waters outside of Asia? The Find N6 is an incredibly powerful, technically impressive device. What is Oppo afraid of?
The foldable will arrive in both silver and orange, although the latter is a little more muted than I’d hoped. For now, Oppo is launching the Find N6 on March 20 in China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand and other Asian territories. The company just announced that prices will start at ¥9,999 in China (approximately $1,450), with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/oppos-find-n6-might-be-the-foldable-of-your-dreams-131036055.html?src=rss
You may have a little Apple fatigue after last week's barrage of Macs, iPhones and iPads. The company wasn't done, however. Surprise! Here is an updated pair of AirPods Max. It's a predictable surprise, perhaps, but one I wasn't expecting after so many other new devices.
It's also the first true update. The AirPods Max 2 look identical to their predecessor, but now have an H2 chip. First, the AirPods Pro 2 improve noise cancellation by 50 percent and add support for Adaptive Audio and Live Translation. It's a much-needed update for headphones that, barring a USB-C option, haven't changed since 2020.
What did I just say? Wrapping up the barrage of reviews of all that new Apple hardware (besides those new AirPods), we test out Apple's most powerful new MacBook. The new Pro has an M5 Max chip, plenty of memory and is a beast. Thankfully, it still has all the ports you'd want.
The class action lawsuit says that the lives of three teens have been "shattered."
xAI is facing a class-action lawsuit in California, after its Grok AI reportedly generated sexualized images of children. Three teenagers filed suit, alleging Grok used their photos to create child exploitation material. One teen was alerted in December that AI-generated, sexually explicit images of her and other minors were being shared "in settings with which she was familiar, but morphed into sexually explicit poses." The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated in January that Grok produced millions of sexualized images, including 23,000 potentially depicting children.
Google is rolling out a new feature for Chrome that will add a bookmark bar to the browser on Android foldables and tablets. Spotted by 9to5Google, this move will make the browsing experience on larger mobile devices more akin to that of laptops and desktops running Chrome. Perfect if you managed to grab Samsung's Galaxy Z TriFold before it disappears forever.
It's already smartphone season. Samsung's annual deluge encompasses three new phones for 2026: the frontier-pushing S26 Ultra ($1,300) with its innovative Privacy Screen, the S26 ($899) and the S26+ ($999). The smaller flagships, yet again, are iterative versions of what came before, with the major differences centering on bigger batteries and brighter screens.
I'm getting waves of deja vu as I review the Galaxy S26, because at times I was writing exactly what I wrote last year — including the part about it being a little too similar to what came before.
Hardware
Image by Mat Smith for Engadget
Let's focus on the changes. The Galaxy S26's screen size is a little bigger than its predecessor's; 6.3 inches, up from 6.2 inches on the S25. However, it still has the same FHD+ (2,340 x 1,080) resolution. Given the slight size difference, there's no particular drop in sharpness. The screen can also go slightly brighter, topping out at 3,000 nits, which is always welcome — especially when Samsung has increased the battery to 4,300mAh from the S25's 4,000mAh. (The S25 already impressed us with its battery longevity.)
The design, however, is largely unchanged. The camera trio now sits on a unified circular island and, well, that's all I really have to say. Once again, it's premium Samsung hardware, but otherwise I'd just be reiterating what I said last year… and our review from the year before that.
Inside, Samsung increased the base RAM to 12GB and the storage to 256GB on the S26, doubling the space found on the S25. With the S26's processor, Samsung split the device into two different builds depending on region. In the US, you'll get the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, like the S26 Ultra. Elsewhere, including my review device in the UK, the S26 and (S26+) have the in-house Exynos 2600.
Samsung's Exynos 2600 SoC is its first 2nm chip and should offer power-efficiency improvements over larger alternatives. This year's S26 didn't struggle with any of the games I played or video-editing tasks. Samsung says its new chip delivers around 50 percent better performance across single- and multicore tasks. The Exynos 2600 includes a new Xclipse 960 GPU, which casubtlenuan deliver double the graphical performance of the Exynos 2500.
On Geekbench 6, the Exynos S26 scored 3151 on single-core tests and 10,664 on multicore tests (not far behind the Snapdragon-powered S26 Ultra). Similarly, the GPU score (24425) didn't lag far behind — all pleasant surprises. There is a but coming.
Comparing battery rundown tests between a Snapdragon S26 and my Exynos version revealed a gap. Watching a looped video at 50 percent brightness, the Exynos iteration lasted almost 28 hours, while the Snapdragon 8 Elite S26 lasted nearly 30 hours. Sure, that's great longevity regardless of which S26 model you get. But this year's flagship does have a bigger battery, so why is the Exynos-powered version only matching last year's phone?
Cameras
Image by Mat Smith for Engadget
Not much has changed in the composition (or resolution) of the camera trio: there's a 50-megapixel main, a 12MP ultrawide and a 10MP telephoto. That means that any improvements in photos and video are subtle, to put it kindly.
It's hard to discern the improvements this year without really scrutinizing dark shots and zooming right in. The S26 does seem a little faster at capturing bursts and high-res video. And while I prefer the no-nonsense shooting of the Pixel 10a, the S26 offers a little more versatility with its zoom and ultrawide cameras. Cropped zoom, for example, lets you get closer to subjects beyond the 3X optical zoom, though more detail is lost than with the S26 Ultra and its larger resolution sensors.
Image by Mat Smith for Engadget
Once you've taken the shot, Samsung's bundle of AI tools can take over. Photo Assist attempts to corral all of these editing features into one place, offering quick ways to reduce reflections or edit out photobombers. You can now use natural language text prompts to guide your photo editing.
For example, I attempted to adjust the lighting more evenly on a photo of me taken outdoors with a flash. I could do it with my rudimentary photo-editing skills, but Samsung's tools are fast and, crucially, very easy to use. It's a feature where natural language interfaces really make sense.
With the front-facing camera, Samsung has added its Object Aware Engine, promising better, more accurate rendering of skin tones and hair, as well as an improved portrait mode. But again, I noticed marginal differences. The S26 seemed to have better color accuracy than its predecessor, resulting in slightly warmer selfies.
For videos, Samsung Super Steady mode is now more versatile, maintaining a consistent horizontal lock no matter how much you move around. As I mentioned during my hands-on, it's an interesting addition, the kind of feature you typically see on action cams and gimbals. It works well, too, although the footage does pick up a bit of focus-pumping as it fights to stabilize everything.
Rounding out the new additions is an Autoframing mode that crops in on your tracked subject as they move around. There's a degree of auto-detection for faces and pets, but you can tap to apply tracking to anything, to which it locks on well. It works particularly well with tripods, but there is a slight floating effect as the S26 tries to keep up with the phone's movement. I also noticed warping at the edge of the lens when the camera app kept my subject centered in the frame.
Software
Image by Mat Smith for Engadget
Samsung's S26 launch event suggested this was the era of agentic AI, with assistants now positioned to connect the dots between tasks themselves. We're not quite there, though.
The company has slightly expanded many of the features introduced last year. Now Brief is capable of pulling data from more apps to generate more comprehensive daily summaries, but I mostly saw the usual suspects: weather, calendar reminders and not much else.
Across the S26, a new Now Nudge feature will suggest actions with an unobtrusive icon, based on what's happening on screen, such as sharing contact numbers with someone or suggesting calendar times while dealing with work emails.
Perplexity is an interesting addition. The S26 series is in a curious spot where it has hooks into no fewer than three AI assistants: Gemini, Bixby (bless its heart) and now Perplexity.
You do have to install the Perplexity app (and log in to use it), but you can then choose to make it your primary AI assistant. Odd things are missing: Samsung said Perplexity integration would work across the phone, including its own Browser app — something I was excited to test. Perplexity's own browser, Comet, has a slick feature that lets it browse and summarize multiple tabs. I was in the middle of deciding where to eat during my recent trip to Barcelona, so I thought this was a great use case. However, that feature isn't available in Samsung's browser for now. According to Perplexity, Samsung will "integrate Perplexity's APIs into the Samsung Browser, with agentic browser capabilities."
Voice commands of "Hey Plex" also went unanswered. I found I had to manually grant permissions to the Perplexity app for it to work like Google's Gemini. This could just be teething issues with a pre-release device and software, but Perplexity, for now, doesn't offer enough utility beyond what I was already used to with Gemini.
Wrap-up
Image by Mat Smith for Engadget
The Galaxy S26 is a solid phone, with upgraded battery capacity and more base storage. Whether you get the Exynos or the Snapdragon S26, there's fortunately no performance gulf as has happened in the past. However, the shorter battery life is a disappointing discovery from Samsung's first 2nm chip.
For Samsung's smallest flagships over the last three years, it's all been very samey. Is the company now focused on its true flagship Ultra phone and foldables to generate buzz and make things exciting? That's what it feels like. There's nothing wrong with this safe, solid Android phone, but you could pick up last year's S25 and get an experience that's 99 percent the same for $99 less.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/samsung-galaxy-s26-review-the-smartphone-status-quo-143033391.html?src=rss
Apple's new family of laptops might have a cringeworthy name, but don't let it fool you. Despite the MacBook Neo running on a built-for-iPhone A-series processor and being limited to 8GB of RAM, it delivers on what Macs do best. It has a capable screen, keyboardand trackpadand its overall build quality should embarrass other laptop-making rivals that have compromised on those areas with their $600 laptops.
Don't expect a gaming rig – it struggled predictably to run Lies of P, but for most of the things you need a laptop for – especially for students and desk workers – it handles them with aplomb. Yeah, I said aplomb.
Check out our full Neo review by Devindra Hardawar – surely you're intrigued by the idea of a $600 MacBook?
Project Cyberdeck is Rabbit's attempt to make a PC tailored for vibe coding. The company began working on Project Cyberdeck after its CEO, Jesse Lyu, saw how extensively his software engineers were using Claude Code. Unfortunately, existing cheap, lightweight machines had bad keyboards and other limitations. So Rabbit is making its ownand it's taking a big serving of inspiration from the tiny, almost pocket-sized laptops that VAIO made back in the late '00s and early 2010s.
In a bid to distract from corporate reshuffles, fears of generative AI game slop and a pretty poor showing against the PS5, Microsoft is getting ahead of its rival. At GDC 2026, the company said that it planned to get Project Helix dev consoles in the hands of game devs as soon as 2027.
Jason Ronald, vice-president of next generation for Xbox, reiterated that the new system would be capable of playing both Xbox console games and PC games. (Sony's decision to halt porting its games across to PC makes more sense. ) Ronald said it would incorporate a custom AMD-made system-on-a-chip, offering "a magnitude leap in ray tracing performance and capability".
The owners of Facebook are buying Moltbook, the hyped Reddit-like social network for AI agents that has only been around since January. The company hasn't disclosed the terms of the deal, but Moltbook and its creators will be joining Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) when the deal closes.
And that definitely doesn't sound like a cabal of comic book villains that fights the Justice League.
Now that Apple is designing and engineering its own silicon, the updates come fast. It’s been less than two years since the company released the M2-powered iPad Air and we’re already on our third iPad Air iteration, one with the M4 inside. That’s the same chip that was inside the iPad Pro in 2024.
That’s one way of expressing how powerful 2025's iPad Air now is – and it remains a step above the base iPad in most ways. However, there’s room for improvement. Apple has stuck with the same display for another year. The 11-inch iPad Air that Nathan Ingraham reviewed seems to have has the same screen in 2026 as it did when the first no-Home button iPad Air was released in late 2020. (And that’s the one I’m still using!) Also, why still no FaceID?
Qualcomm, which bought microcontroller board manufacturer Arduino last year, just announced a new single-board computer that marries AI with robotics. The Ventuno Q is more sophisticated (and expensive) than Arduino's usual AIO boards, thanks to the Dragonwing IQ8 processor that includes an 8-core ARM Cortex CPU, Adreno Arm Cortex A623 GPU and Hexagon Tensor NPU that can reach up ot 40 TOPs. It also pacs in Arduino App Lab, with pre-trained AI models including LLMs, VLMs, gesture recognition and object tracking, all running offline.
Siri's ongoing AI overhaul could be to blame for the wait.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is back with the latest rumors on new Apple hardware and the company’s continued Siri woes. His sources say that Apple is expected to postpone its smart home display until later in 2026, possibly September, when it often introduces another barrage of new gadgets. The hardware has reportedly been finished for months, but the AI-centric overhaul of Siri is still not done.
Dell’s revamped XPS 14 is more powerful than ever. The XPS series has long been a favorite at Engadget, and this one’s lightweight and features a gorgeous OLED screen. However, Dell’s keyboard this year has a baffling flaw: its keyboard. It somehow forces you to type more slowly to log each key press. And this isn’t a capacitive touchscreen or anything complicated. According to Dell, “a small batch of early XPS units” have these quick typing issues. They also say the issue is currently resolved and doesn’t affect XPS units shipping now. We’ll be checking once a firmware update, meant to fix the issue, lands.
