Most budget phones have one screen you stare at and a back you think about. The Honor X5d s makes that back worth a second look by placing a 2.01-inch touchscreen next to its rear camera. It shows the time and alerts, handles music, and helps you take selfies with the better camera. That’s a useful design trick for an inexpensive phone.
The camera island looks like it was built around that display, rather than having a screen tacked on afterward. Two dark circles sit beside it, although Honor lists only one rear camera. Forest Green makes the island pop against a pale back, while Midnight Black keeps things subdued. Either way, the phone’s most interesting feature is visible before you even wake it.
Designer: Honor
That rear screen makes sense when you’re trying to get everyone into a photo. Instead of extending your arm, guessing at the framing, and discovering that someone’s head is missing, you can see the shot while using the 50-megapixel rear camera. A tap on the back takes the picture. There’s also a 5-megapixel front camera, but this arrangement gives selfies another option.
Of course, a phone can’t spend all day posing for pictures. Leave the X5d s face down on a desk, and its little window can still show the time or a call alert. Music controls live there too, so skipping a song doesn’t require turning the whole device over. It’s a small convenience, but those are often the ones you keep using.
On the other side, there’s a 6.78-inch LCD for more than a glance. Its size makes room for videos, messages, and the photos you took, although the 1,576×720 resolution isn’t particularly sharp for such a large panel. The rear display doesn’t fix that limitation. It simply gives quick tasks their own place instead of asking the bigger screen to do everything.
There’s a 6,000mAh battery to keep both screens running, though the phone’s 15W wired charging might test your patience when it finally needs a refill. Honor also provides 64GB of storage and a three-card slot, letting you add a microSD card without sacrificing either SIM. That’s handy if you keep your photos and music on the phone rather than in the cloud.
Inside, the Unisoc T610 processor and 4GB of RAM tell a more familiar budget-phone story. The side-mounted fingerprint reader is convenient, but there’s nothing particularly exotic about the rest of the hardware. In South Africa, the 4GB/64GB version costs R2,499 (about $150), which puts the extra screen in reach of people who aren’t shopping for a flagship just to get a conversation-starting feature.
That display won’t replace your phone’s main screen, nor will it make the X5d s a better choice for demanding games. But it changes the small interactions that fill a day: a glance at a call, a tap to skip a song, a preview before taking a selfie. At this price, giving the back something useful to do feels refreshing.
A kid wants to bike to a friend’s house. A parent wants to know they can call if plans change. Neither of them particularly wants the trip to end with an hour of scrolling in someone’s driveway. That small negotiation is the problem Freckle is trying to solve. Its phone offers children a way to stay connected and find their bearings without handing them the full, distracting experience of a conventional smartphone.
The idea appeals to me because childhood independence is often built from ordinary errands, not grand adventures. Walking to the park, buying a snack, figuring out which way leads home: these are modest freedoms, but they matter. Freckle, designed for kids ages 7 to 13, treats a phone as something that might help those moments happen rather than replace them.
Designer: Freckle
Developed by Freckle with design studio Body Shop, the device runs a simplified operating system called ClayOS. There’s no open web, app store, social media, or streaming-video app waiting to turn a quick check of the time into a long detour. That restraint is the design story. Freckle isn’t trying to make a smaller version of the phone adults already carry. It asks which features a child actually needs when they leave the house.
The physical design follows the same thinking. A 3.1-inch screen shows basic information without making the display the center of attention. Colorful hardware and tactile buttons give the phone a playful feel, while an available case with a lanyard makes sense for a device meant to go along on walks and outings. It looks like something a kid could claim as their own, not a stripped-down piece of parental equipment.
Freckle’s most interesting features point away from the screen. Its Discovery Camera lets kids photograph something they find and learn about it. Quests can send them looking for bugs, flowers, or other discoveries, with missions created by parents or provided by Freckle. I like the shift in attention here: the phone supplies a prompt, but the neighborhood supplies the activity.
Of course, a camera that identifies plants and insects won’t turn every walk into a nature documentary. Kids may use it for five minutes and then run off to do something else. That would be a perfectly good result. The appeal is that Freckle doesn’t need to hold a child’s attention indefinitely to justify its place in their pocket.
It also handles the less whimsical parts of going out alone. Kids can call and text contacts approved by their parents, use a mini-map to navigate, and talk to friends with nearby Freckle phones through a walkie-talkie feature. Basic tap-to-pay functionality could help with a snack or a transit fare. Each feature answers a practical question that might otherwise keep a parent from saying yes to an outing.
Parents can track the phone’s location or set safe zones that trigger an alert when a child leaves them. That offers reassurance, though it raises a worthwhile question about how much monitoring is helpful. I’d be more interested in using those tools as a backup than following every turn on a map. Freckle’s stronger promise is not constant supervision. It’s making a little more trust feel possible.
That distinction matters because no device can teach a child how to cross a busy street, handle an unexpected change of plans, or decide when to ask for help. Those lessons still need conversation and practice. Freckle could make them easier to put into practice by giving a child a way to call home while leaving room to work things out for themselves.
There are practical considerations, too. Fast Company reported a $199 price and a $25 monthly wireless plan, with shipping planned for December 2026. That is a meaningful expense for a first phone, and families will need to decide whether its focused features are worth paying for. Parents should also look closely at how location information and the AI-powered camera work before treating either as a reason to buy.
Still, I appreciate the design premise. Freckle doesn’t suggest that kids must choose between being connected and being present. It gives them a camera for noticing things, a map for finding their way, and a means of reaching people who care about them. If it works as intended, the best moment might be when a child checks the phone, puts it away, and keeps going.
I’ll give Apple its props by saying that it’s genuinely remarkable they built Apple Pencil compatibility into the iPhone Duo. Yes, it’s a welcome move because it’s a step above what Samsung did by nuking S-Pen support for their Galaxy Z Fold8 series, but it’s also sort of stupid that they didn’t build the compatibility in right away. The iPhone Duo is announced to be compatible with the Pencil on a future date. It’s something Apple announced you’ll get, but in the words of MKBHD, don’t ever buy a product on a promise of future upgrades.
I appreciate Apple trying though, but there’s one problem Apple never accounted for – the Apple Pencil is longer than the iPhone Duo. Unlike the S-Pen, which is mobile-sized, the Apple Pencil measures 6.43″ long. That’s almost 2 inches taller than the iPhone Duo which sits at 4.64″ in height. There’s no realistic universe in which anybody is carrying an Apple Pencil along with the iPhone Duo – they might be compatible but they’re not built to be a cohesive design solution… so Eslam Mohammed invented one. Meet the Pencil Duo – a stylus specially designed to be the iPhone Duo’s loyal sidekick.
Designer: Eslam Mohammed
The regular Apple Pencil’s design was informed by the device it was supposed to pair with. A simple all-white design, a circular grip, and one single chamfered edge to let the Pencil snap to the edge of the iPad to charge. The Pencil was also sized to just about fit the iPad mini, showing how much Apple had thought about the integration between the two products. So when Mohammed built the Duo, he basically approached it from the ground-up. No chamfer, no awkwardly long stylus.
The Pencil Duo is a perfectly cylindrical stylus, albeit with a silver detail running along its edge. Inspired by the iPhone Duo’s silver hinge which punctuates its design, the Pencil Duo sports that running metallic detail too, paired with a button that works just the way the button on the S-Pen does with Samsung’s phones. Mohammed doesn’t explicitly detail what the button does, but one can assume it helps with highlighting text, opening shortcuts, working as a shutter button, etc.
No snapping to the iPhone’s edge means there’s no chamfer. This gives the Pencil Duo a design that feels a lot cleaner in my opinion. The reason why snapping wouldn’t work is because it would prevent you from being able to open your phone. Instead, the Pencil Duo sits at the back of the phone, thanks to a special case that lets you dock the pencil.
The pencil neatly tucks into the back, occupying the empty space left behind by the camera bump, which doesn’t extend all the way to the end (the way the Pixel Fold did in the past). It’s a neat arrangement, and I’m sure Molly Anderson would approve. Who’s Molly Anderson, you ask? Well just the VP of Industrial Design, but Apple’s never really had a design lead in the limelight after Jony I’ve left.
The Pencil Duo measures roughly 4.3 inches in length, and a tad bit narrower than its predecessor. Sort of just like how the iPhone Duo is so much slimmer than its other counterparts. There’s no mention of how this pencil would charge, although I’m sure wireless charging is on the table. You’d probably need a special cradle to charge the device, but I wouldn’t put it past Apple to invent one.
Mohammed has, however, detailed a few other things, like the Pencil Duo having haptic feedback, the Hover Preview feature, and obviously angle and pressure sensitivity. The only real problem here is that this entire stylus is conceptual… but I wouldn’t put it past third party designers from making iPhone Duo styluses that work using capacitive touch and have Bluetooth pairing so that the button on the stylus actually packs a few features. Maybe long-press for Apple Intelligence too!
Imagine sitting at a table with friends and whipping your phone out. Your friends see it’s a foldable… then as you unfold it, the animation looks suspiciously like the iPhone Duo. Your friends are impressed, they designate you as the group photo taker… and you tell them regrettably that your iPhone Duo has no cameras. Then you add… not only does it not sport any cameras, it also costs fourteen grand.
To be honest, that scenario is entirely imaginary. Mainly for a bunch of key reasons. Caviar built this version of the iPhone Duo for privacy, championing what they call “Privacy, Minimalism, and a Refined Masculine Style.” Someone who sees truth in that ethos isn’t designated photographer material. And if they were, shelling 14k on a phone means you probably have a few extra grand to hire a photographer wherever you go. The only reason someone buys this hare-brained version of the iPhone Duo is because they can. Plain and simple.
Removing the camera stack from the back of the iPhone Duo does something unexpected: the phone becomes genuinely beautiful. That rear panel, normally dominated by the triple-lens module, turns into a single flat sheet of satin-finished black titanium. No bumps, no rings, no glass circles competing for visual real estate, just one uninterrupted surface that shifts character depending on the light hitting it. Caviar calls the inspiration “supersonic aviation aesthetics,” which sounds like marketing speak until you actually look at the product photos. A blacked-out Apple logo sits flush in the titanium, the Caviar crown marks the opposite panel in a swept fabric-like texture, and the whole thing looks less like a phone and more like a prop from a very expensive spy film.
Apple’s decision to use Touch ID for the iPhone Duo, abandoning Face ID, turns out to be what makes Caviar’s camera-free execution actually hold up. A Face ID phone needs its front camera array to function as a biometric sensor, so pulling that out would mean a very pretty device that cannot unlock. Touch ID lives in the frame rather than behind the screen, so Caviar could strip the entire camera stack, front hole-punch and rear module both, without breaking anything fundamental. Based on product images, the inner display on the Ultimate appears completely clean, no hole-punch interrupting the screen, which makes the inside as seamless as the outside. Two separate design decisions from two separate companies ended up fitting together better than either could have planned.
Caviar made 19 of these total. Each unit ships in a custom lockable black luxury box, presented the way a jeweler presents a watch rather than the way Apple ships a phone. A smaller gold-colored wooden case inside holds what appears to be a gold-plated commemorative coin, the kind of object that exists purely to make the unboxing feel like a ceremony. The side of the phone is engraved with a serial number too, for exclusivity. Caviar knows exactly who they are selling to, and made sure the packaging matches the energy.
Caviar has been doing this for years, taking flagship Apple hardware somewhere Apple would never go, for clients who appreciate the gesture. The formula is consistent: start with the most premium Apple product on the market, make it rarer, make it more dramatic, and let the price be the final statement. We have covered their gold-plated and titanium iPhone builds here before, and none of them committed this hard to stripping features as a form of self-expression. At $13,990 for 19 units (mind you, that’s just the 512GB variant), the Ultimate is the purest version of the Caviar argument: a phone that costs seven times its base price because it does less, and somehow makes that sound like the point.
+Four Android upgrades and security patches until 2032
+Matte back and bundled case both shrug off fingerprints
What doesn't
–Screen readability dips in direct sunlight
–Haptics are softer than on premium phones
–No ultra-wide or telephoto cameras
–Video recording tops out at 1080p
The Redmi Note 17 5G spends its budget on what people actually run out of, battery and years of support, and asks for a calmer chip in return.
Phone prices went up this year, and not because phones got dramatically better. Memory and storage cost more, so every brand had to decide what to keep and what to cut. Some raised the price. Others trimmed the camera or the chip to hold it. Xiaomi made a very clear choice with the Redmi Note 17 5G, and you can feel it the moment you pick the phone up.
On paper, the whole phone is built around one number: a 7,700mAh silicon-carbon battery. Around it sit a 6.99-inch AMOLED screen, a Snapdragon 4 Gen 4 chip, a single 50MP camera, IP65 protection, and security updates until 2032. I used the 6GB and 256GB version for about two weeks to see whether a phone designed for endurance is also a phone you actually enjoy using.
Designer: Xiaomi
Aesthetics
The Redmi Note 17 5G doesn’t try to shout, and that works in its favor. I received the Black version, and the interest is in the details. Xiaomi describes the back as a dual finish, which means the panel and the camera plate are treated very differently. The panel is a fine matte that turns almost graphite in low light, while the camera plate is glossy.
That plate is where the design gets its character. It’s a rounded square in the top left corner with a glossy, pill-shaped module holding two circles: the 50MP camera and a small second lens above and the flash below, plus a small brushed disc with “50MP” printed on it. The arrangement is balanced and calm, and it makes a single-camera phone look complete. The matte back stays clean through daily handling, and only the glossy plate picks up the odd fingerprint.
The frame is flat with rounded corners and a metallic-look finish, and the front is just as simple: a flat 6.99-inch screen with a small punch-hole camera. It’s a tidy, well-proportioned design that favors restraint over flash, and in black it keeps a low profile. If you want more personality, Xiaomi also sells it in Sky Teal and Celestial Purple.
Ergonomics
The numbers tell most of the story. The Redmi Note 17 5G measures 169.7 x 79.14 x 8.45mm and weighs 225g. It’s a substantial phone, and the weight is the first thing you notice when you pick it up. That’s the fair price of fitting a 7,700mAh battery into a body under 9mm thick.
The flat sides and rounded corners make that size easy to live with, and the matte back isn’t slippery. The power button and volume rocker sit on the right edge, and the fingerprint reader is an optical one under the display. Xiaomi’s Wet Touch 2.0 keeps the screen usable with damp fingers, which is handy in humid weather. At almost 80mm wide, it’s most comfortable in two hands, which suits the large screen for reading and video.
Haptics are the one area where the price shows. The vibration motor’s feedback is softer and less precise than on flagship phones. It’s a small detail, yet it’s the kind that reminds you how much good haptics add to everyday use.
Xiaomi includes a case in the box, and it’s better than the usual clear plastic shell. It’s a soft, matte silicone case in dark gray with a raised lip around the camera, and it doesn’t pick up fingerprints either. On a phone of this weight, the extra grip is welcome, and the phone is protected from day one.
Performance
Snapdragon 4 Gen 4 and HyperOS 3
Inside is a Snapdragon 4 Gen 4, made on a 4nm process, with Adreno 613 graphics, 6GB of LPDDR4X memory and UFS 2.2 storage. It’s a chip built for efficiency over outright speed, and that efficiency is what lets such a large battery fit in a body this thin. Messaging, maps, browsing, streaming, and photos run comfortably, and demanding 3D games run best at lower settings.
3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme stress test shows where the chip’s strength lies. The headline scores sit where you’d expect for this class, but the consistency stands out. Over 20 minutes of full graphics load, the phone held 99.5 percent stability across all 20 loops, and its temperature only rose from 33°C to 35°C. It stays cool and steady when pushed.
It runs Xiaomi HyperOS 3 on Android 16, with Google’s Circle to Search and Gemini, Xiaomi’s HyperIsland for live notifications, and AI Erase Pro promised in a later update. It’s pretty much Xiaomi’s whole UX experience, crammed into a lower mid-tier phone.
Display and Sound
The 6.99-inch flat AMOLED has a 2,396 x 1,080 resolution and a 1,800-nit peak. There’s no option to lock the refresh rate. The panel adjusts itself up to 120Hz, so scrolling stays smooth and the phone saves power when the image is still. Indoors and in shade, it looks great, and TÜV Rheinland certifies it for low blue light and circadian-friendly viewing. Direct sunlight is the one condition where it struggles to keep up.
Audio comes from a single speaker on the bottom edge, tuned for calls, alarms, and spoken content. For music, earbuds bring out more, and since there’s no headphone jack, Bluetooth or USB-C is the way to go. Two useful extras round things out: an infrared blaster for TVs and air conditioners, and NFC for contactless payments.
Main Camera, 1xMain Camera, 1x, EveningMain Camera, 1x, Human Skin
50MP Camera
Main Camera, 1xMain Camera, 2xMain Camera, 10x
The single 50MP main camera has an f/1.8 lens, and in good light it does a good job. Photos come out bright and clean, greens are punchy, and skies lean towards a deeper blue. Dynamic range holds up well too. Shooting up a dark underground stairway into a bright sky, it kept both the tiled mural and the clouds. The 2x option is a crop from the main sensor and stays sharp in daylight. Beyond that, the zoom is digital, and at 10x a group of turtles on a rock took on an almost watercolor softness, so 1x and 2x are where this camera does its best work.
For designers, it’s a handy reference camera. The 50MP and Ultra HD modes save files of around 48 million pixels, which leaves room to crop into textures like bark, stone, or lacquered wood later. It won’t replace a proper camera, but for collecting material and color references, it does the job.
Night IndoorNight DefaultNight Mode
Night mode is worth using. On a street corner at night, the normal shot used ISO 250 at 1/100s, while Night mode chose ISO 400 at 1/50s and brought the lanterns and shopfronts out of the dark without blowing out the lights. In very dim restaurants, around ISO 2000, the processing leans on noise reduction for a cleaner image at the cost of some fine detail. The 16MP front camera gives natural skin tones in daylight, and both cameras record video at up to 1080p and 30fps.
Battery Life and Charging
This is where the design pays off. Xiaomi rates the battery for more than two days of moderate use, and the EU energy label’s standard test puts it at 68 and a half hours on a charge. My own testing points the same way. The 20-minute 3DMark stress run, with the graphics chip working flat out the whole time, used just 3 percent of the battery.
My unit came with a 45W charger in the box, though that varies by market. Independent tests put a full charge at about an hour and a half, which is reasonable for a battery this size. Charging is wired only, and wired reverse charging at up to 22.5W lets the phone top up earbuds, a watch, or a friend’s phone.
50MP ModeUltra HD ModeSelfie Camera
Sustainability
The strongest sustainability point is software support. Xiaomi promises four major Android upgrades, up to Android 20, and six years of security updates, which means patches until 2032. The updates are already arriving. During my time with the phone, it received a 295MB system update that moved its security patch from June to August 2026. A phone that stays safe to use for that long doesn’t need replacing after two years.
The EU energy label adds useful detail, because it uses the same tests for every brand. It rates the battery for at least 1,000 full cycles before it drops to 80 percent capacity, lists it as user-replaceable, and records 90 drops without a defect in its repeated fall test. Xiaomi’s own lab claims 1,600 cycles, or about six years of normal use.
iFixit hasn’t published a teardown of this model yet. In the meantime, where the program runs, Xiaomi offers one free screen replacement and one free back cover replacement within 24 months, plus one free battery replacement within 36 months. The phone is IP65 rated against dust and water jets, the screen uses Corning Gorilla Glass 7i, and the case covers the back from the start. Recycled materials aren’t part of Xiaomi’s story for this model yet, which leaves room for the next generation to go further.
Value
In Europe, the Redmi Note 17 5G launched at 379.90 euros for the 6GB and 256GB version I tested. With the case, a USB-C cable and, in many markets, a 45W charger in the box, it’s a generous package for the price.
Its own predecessor is the most useful comparison. The Redmi Note 15 5G spread its budget across a faster chip, a 108MP camera and 4K video. The Note 17 5G concentrates on a much bigger battery and a longer support period. Most phones still carry batteries in the 5,000 to 6,000mAh range, so that focus gives it a clear identity in its class.
Xiaomi is betting that battery life and years of updates matter more, and for a lot of buyers, I think that’s the right bet. If 4K video, long zoom, and high-end gaming aren’t part of your routine, this phone gives you a lot for the money.
Verdict
The Redmi Note 17 5G is easy to sum up with one number, but the battery is only the starting point. The weight, the flat and grippy frame, the case in the box, the efficient chip, and the self-adjusting refresh rate all follow from it. It feels like one clear decision carried through the whole product.
Speed seekers and heavy video shooters will find better matches elsewhere. But if you keep your phones for years and care more about something that lasts than something that wins spec comparisons, the Redmi Note 17 5G was made for you. Buy it for the battery, and keep it for the years of updates.
Honor apparently looked at a movie camera from 1937 and thought, yeah, let’s build for that. The Magic9’s camera module borrows its arrangement from ARRI’s iconic ARRIFLEX three-lens turret cameras, the design that shaped professional cinema for decades, translating into a 200MP main sensor, a 200MP periscope telephoto, and a 50MP ultrawide organized with actual compositional intent. It is a neat flex, dressing up a camera bump with nearly a century of cinema history. The phone launched in China on September 28 alongside the pricier Pro Max and the battery-heavy Super Edition, starting at RMB 5,000 for the 12GB/256GB version. Of the three models, the standard Magic9 makes the clearest design argument: serious camera ambition in a body that still wants to fit in a normal pocket.
Going fully flat at 6.37 inches while growing the battery to 8,000mAh and keeping the body around 8.5mm thick is a set of competing constraints Honor has not fully unpacked in public. The screen change also comes with a trade, stepping down from the Pro Max’s LTPO panel to a fixed 120Hz LTPS display. The base model runs the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, same as the previous Magic8, while the Pro Max moves to the newer Gen 6 platform. That gap is where a chunk of the price difference lives, and it makes the Magic9 feel less like a cut-down flagship and more like a very deliberate edit.
Designer: HONOR
A camera bump with a film-school reference
ARRI’s ARRIFLEX, introduced in 1937, used a rotating three-lens turret that let cinematographers swap focal lengths quickly on set. That same 1+2 organizational logic now shows up in the Magic9 family, turning a smartphone camera island into something that feels arranged rather than merely installed. Most camera bumps look like a housing engineer gave up and drew a circle around the parts. This one feels like somebody actually cared where your eye lands first. That matters more than it sounds, because camera phones now live or die by how convincingly they present themselves as tools.
The raised module also has a practical side. On a smaller phone, finger placement gets messy fast, especially when a periscope camera and a big battery are competing for the same internal real estate. A high-set camera island can help keep fingertips away from the lenses during horizontal shooting, and the flat display helps too. Curved screens always looked sleek in renders, but a flat panel is easier to grip, easier to frame with, and less visually slippery at the edges. In a phone pitched around image-making, that kind of boring ergonomic win is actually the fun part.
Dual 200MP cameras sound loud, but the details matter more
The base Magic9 pairs a 200MP main camera with a 1/1.4-inch sensor and f/1.9 aperture, plus a 200MP periscope telephoto with a 1/1.56-inch sensor and dual-prism design. A 50MP ultrawide completes the rear setup, while the front gets a 55MP square-format selfie camera designed for flexible vertical and horizontal crops. On paper, that is already enough to make most compact flagships sweat a little. The weirdly charming part is that Honor packed all of it into a 209-gram body, which is heavy enough to feel serious but still light enough that your wrist probably will not file a complaint by lunch.
This is also where the ARRI partnership needs a little adult supervision. Honor’s Pro Max press material clearly confirms features like ARRI LogC3, 10-bit color, ARRI Wide Gamut 3, preset ARRI Looks, and a larger library of predefined color gradings. For the base Magic9, the public story is fuzzier. Coverage points to ARRI-tuned imaging and ARRI Looks across the series, but it is still not fully clear which cinema features carry over in full and which are more about color styling than deep capture control. So the safe read is this: the Magic9 definitely borrows some ARRI flavor, but the exact recipe still needs a proper hands-on.
The real compromise is not where most people will look
The easiest complaint is the chipset. The Magic9 uses the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 while the Pro Max gets the new Gen 6, and that immediately makes the base model sound like the one sitting at the kids’ table. In practice, this may be the smartest compromise in the whole lineup. Last year’s flagship chip is still plenty fast for 4K video, gaming, and daily use, and most people will feel the benefit of a bigger battery or better camera hardware far sooner than they will notice a one-generation jump in silicon. Spec sheet purists may clutch their pearls, but regular humans tend to notice battery anxiety before benchmark scores.
That trade-off becomes easier to respect once you look at what Honor did with the saved budget and space. The Magic9 still manages an 8,000mAh battery, 80W wired charging, 50W wireless charging, and a body that stays compact by current flagship standards. That is the part that makes this phone interesting from a design perspective. Honor did not try to win every category at once. It picked the categories that physically change how the phone feels in the hand and how long it lasts away from a charger. Honestly, that is a much more believable kind of ambition than the usual annual race to squeeze another chip name into a headline.
Compact now means choosing your priorities carefully
For years, “compact flagship” mostly meant a smaller battery and a camera system that got politely downgraded behind the scenes. The Magic9 flips that script a bit. It keeps the smaller 6.37-inch footprint, goes fully flat, hangs onto dual 200MP cameras, and stuffs in an 8,000mAh battery that sounds almost fake until you see it listed next to the weight. The cost of all that is visible in the panel tech and the older chip, and maybe that is exactly why the phone works as a concept. Every compromise is attached to something tangible on the other side.
That is what makes the Magic9 more interesting than a generic launch story about megapixels and brand partnerships. It feels like a phone designed by subtraction, where Honor kept asking what could be trimmed back so the body could hold onto the stuff people actually touch, carry, frame, and recharge. Whether the ARRI connection turns into genuinely better footage or just cooler color science remains to be tested. But as an object, the Magic9 already lands its point pretty clearly: if you want a compact camera phone in 2026, the real challenge is not making it smaller, it is deciding what deserves to stay big.
Apple’s first foldable was always going to be a spectacle, and the iPhone Duo delivered. Titanium frame, a hinge built from over 100 components, a 7.6-inch inner display Apple calls the largest and sharpest they’ve ever shipped, and an IP68 rating that no current Samsung foldable can match. The debut made a strong case, and we laid out five specific things it got right in our companion piece last week, which predictably sent a portion of the comments section into a very productive Saturday. Every honest design audit has a flip side, though. The iPhone Duo, for all its first-generation confidence, left a meaningful number of things unresolved, and some of those gaps are more significant than launch-week coverage has made them seem.
Samsung has been folding phones since 2019, and the Galaxy Z Fold8 is what that long runway looks like after years of hinge tweaks, crease complaints, software refinements, and repeated attempts to make a folding phone feel normal. It does not win every category, and Apple absolutely deserves credit for solving a few long-standing foldable annoyances on its first try. Even so, there are still several places where Samsung’s latest Fold feels more complete, more practical, or simply better thought through as an everyday device. Some are obvious the moment you compare the two side by side. Others only start to matter after the honeymoon phase wears off.
Keeps the SIM Tray, Despite What Anyone Says
When we covered the iPhone Duo’s announcement, one of the hardware elements Apple dropped was the physical SIM tray, a decision the company framed as part of a broader design simplification agenda. Apple went full eSIM, keeping the chassis cleaner, eliminating a cut line in the frame, and folding the decision into the same purity narrative behind the iPhone Air’s extreme thinness. For users in markets where eSIM support is solid and carrier switching is painless, this is genuinely fine and probably the right long-term direction. The problem is that a $1,999 foldable probably should not be making hardware convenience trade-offs that actively complicate life for international travelers, anyone running two numbers, or users whose carriers still make eSIM provisioning feel like homework.
Traveling internationally and swapping to a local carrier SIM is a very different experience when you are not navigating eSIM setup through a foreign carrier’s app on spotty airport WiFi. The Z Fold8 keeps the physical SIM tray, and that decision is more forgiving than it is glamorous. Moving a number between devices is faster with a tray, carrier flexibility requires fewer account management steps, and the hardware workaround for eSIM friction simply does not exist. Samsung is not winning any design philosophy debates by pointing at a metal drawer. But the Fold 8’s willingness to keep that hardware in place reflects a different set of priorities than Apple’s, one that bets user convenience should edge out aesthetic reduction, and across a wider range of real-world situations, that bet holds up.
Weighs Noticeably Less Over a Full Day (53 Grams Less, to be precise)
The Galaxy Z Fold8 weighs 201 grams, which is the figure Samsung’s product page leads with, and it earns the emphasis because it makes the Fold 8 the lightest book-style foldable currently on the market. The iPhone Duo comes in at 254 grams. At a 53-gram gap, the difference sits closer to a full AA battery than a rounding error, and the foldable category is already asking more of you than a standard slab phone before the weight conversation even starts. Foldables are physically larger, structurally more complex, and thicker in the pocket by default. Stacking substantial extra mass on top of all that is a real ask, and the Duo makes it.
Apple’s grade 5 titanium frame and hinge housing are premium materials decisions that contribute directly to the device’s rigidity and structural confidence, and directly to its number on the scale as well. Samsung came in lighter, and that shows up in the most boring and most honest way possible, in how aware you are of the phone in your pocket across a full day. A lighter foldable is a foldable that has had more generations of mass reduction applied to it, and the Fold 8’s 201 grams is the current best result of that sustained process. The Duo’s weight is a first-generation structural reality, and Samsung simply has more iterations of solving those demands behind it.
Folds Thinner for Better Pocket-ability
The Galaxy Z Fold8 closes to 9.7mm. The iPhone Duo closes to 11.3mm. The 1.6mm gap sounds mild, and it lands less mildly in a pocket, because the book-style form factor makes closed thickness something you register physically every time the phone goes in or out of a pocket, gets set on a desk, or is gripped shut in one hand. Small dimensional differences accumulate across hundreds of daily interactions in a way that flat spec comparisons do not fully communicate. 9.7mm versus 11.3mm is a material gap in this context, not a footnote.
Opened flat, the Fold 8 measures 4.5mm against the Duo’s 5.2mm. Apple tried hard on the thinness front, and for a first-generation foldable carrying a dual-battery system and a 100-plus component hinge, 5.2mm open is legitimately impressive engineering. Samsung just has more attempts behind it. Years of shaving fractions of a millimeter off the Fold form factor across successive generations produce gains that compound, and the Fold 8’s dimensional figures are the accumulated result of that process. The Duo is not there yet, and that is a first-generation reality rather than a permanent condition.
A More Refined, Battle-tested Multitasking Software
The Taskbar on the Z Fold8 holds eight app slots, and dragging any one of them into a running screen split takes a single gesture rather than a full trip back to the home screen. App Pairs let users save specific two-app workflows and relaunch them together in a single tap. Three-way split-screen and floating pop-up windows give the inner display real workspace flexibility, while AI Results View places AI output in a separate panel so source content stays visible alongside it rather than disappearing behind the response. These features are specific because the problems they solve are specific, and that specificity usually means someone already ran into that friction point on an earlier Fold and the feedback made it into the next build.
Apple’s Duo software looks like a genuinely strong first draft, and side-by-side multitasking on a 7.6-inch inner display is a compelling foundation for what iOS on a foldable can eventually become. What it does not yet carry is the institutional knowledge that comes from shipping foldable hardware in volume for years and learning where real users find the edges of the experience. Samsung knows, from behavioral patterns observed across the Fold 3 through Fold 7, that people using a foldable for actual work want to move windows around without returning to the launcher constantly. Apple will develop that understanding across future software generations. Samsung already developed it, and the current One UI reflects that directly.
The Hinge Comes From Eight Generations of Experimenting
The Z Fold8 moves to a dual-rail hinge design, where two parallel contact rails distribute fold stress more evenly across the display than the single-rail approach used through the Fold 7. The practical payoffs are reduced delamination risk over long-term use and a 0.6mm reduction in folded thickness compared to last year’s model. The dual-rail architecture exists because the single-rail design produced failure patterns in field data, and Samsung engineered the fix after watching those problems accumulate at scale. Samsung rates the updated hinge at 200,000 fold cycles, which works out to roughly 7 to 10 years of daily use at realistic fold rates, a number that carries credibility specifically because Samsung has the service history to know what foldable hinge failure actually looks like.
Apple’s hinge uses over 100 components including carbon fiber support plates, a grade 5 titanium housing, and an integrated magnet array for closure, and for a first-generation attempt from a company with no prior foldable track record, it is a serious piece of engineering. What it does not have is field history, and in a category where the hinge is the single most consequential mechanical component, field history is what separates a confident launch spec from a genuinely proven design. Samsung’s dual-rail approach did not emerge from a thought experiment. It came from hinge failures, teardown data, warranty claims, and years of iterative engineering against failure modes that only reveal themselves after real-world shipping at volume. Apple’s Duo hinge may age beautifully. Samsung’s already has.
Apple’s iPhone Duo folds into a shape phones haven’t really had before, and that changes what a case, a charger, or a screen protector needs to do. ESR noticed. Its accessory lineup for the iPhone Duo and the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max doesn’t treat these phones like slightly bigger versions of last year’s model. It builds around the hinge, the fold, and how people actually hold these things.
ESR has been making phone accessories since 2009, and it shows in how confidently this lineup comes together. Four products anchor it: a vegan leather case with a built-in stand, a screen protector built around Corning glass, a magnetic charging pad with active cooling, and a retractable wall charger made for travel. Each one solves a different part of daily life with the new iPhone, starting with the case.
ESR Atelier Magnetic Case with Flex Stand
The Atelier case is where ESR’s design ambitions show up first, and the Deep Burgundy finish makes the case, pun intended. It uses organic silicone leather that feels closer to a wallet than a phone shell, soft to the touch with a grain that resists fingerprints and daily grime. An anti-fouling coating keeps the lighter trim looking new, so it ages more like a handbag than plastic.
The iPhone Duo version centers on a Flex Stand that finally makes sense on a folding phone. When opened, it can rotate a full 180 degrees, supporting portrait and landscape viewing whether the phone is folded shut or opened flat, and doubles as a secure grip in hand. Zinc alloy and a damping hinge keep it locked at any angle, and ESR says it survives 3,000 open-and-close cycles without loosening.
Closing the stand also forms a lip around the camera lenses, shielding them from direct contact with tables or countertops. The rest of the case follows the same foldable logic, with hinge padding, a soft microfiber lining, a TPU frame, and raised edges around the screen. A 1,400g magnet on the back locks onto MagSafe chargers, car mounts, wallets, and power banks.
The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max version sports the same dual-function Flex Stand but trades the grip function for a simpler adjustable stand, tilting between 15 and 69 degrees for portrait or landscape viewing. A built-in cover keeps the Camera Control button protected without getting in the way, while the same 1,400g magnet, aligned by a precise ring layout, locks onto MagSafe gear just as securely.
Screen protectors usually get bolted on as an afterthought, but this one leads with durability first. It’s built from Accessory Glass by Corning, the same company that’s supplied Apple’s cover glass since the very first iPhone, and ESR rates it at up to 10 times the impact absorption of generic protectors. Corning’s own testing also credits it with up to twice the scratch resistance of standard glass.
That toughness doesn’t come at the cost of clarity. An anti-reflective coating tunes light reflection down to just 3.75%, with 94% optical transmittance, so colors read truer and glare backs off in bright rooms or direct sun. Installation skips the bubble wrestling match: a tray system aligns the protector automatically, and pulling one tab clears dust and pushes out air for a clean, edge-to-edge fit in two steps.
The Cyclone’s real advantage becomes clear before the battery bar even climbs halfway. Its Qi2 25W charging combines with a CryoBoost fan that pulls heat off the phone’s back, a pairing ESR says charges a phone to 50% noticeably faster than Apple’s own charger. That same active cooling drops temperatures by about 11.7°F, easing the heat buildup that erodes battery health over time.
Beyond the charging speed, the Cyclone earns its desk space with practical touches. Its built-in stand tilts from 0 to 150 degrees, supporting both portrait and landscape viewing; the latter also enables StandBy mode. It stays whisper-quiet under 25dB even overnight, which also makes it a perfect bedside accessory. Paired with an ESR magnetic case, the pad delivers a 2,000g magnetic hold to keep the phone locked in place, while a 5.9-ft cable adds slack for charging without unplugging.
The Xtend charger solves a smaller but familiar annoyance: the loose cable that always ends up tangled at the bottom of a bag. It has a cable built right into the block, one that pulls out to 3.1 ft when needed and retracts back in when it’s not. ESR says the braided cord can handle 20,000 pulls and 10,000 bends, which is a lot of trips through airport security.
Powered by the PD 3.2 AVS protocol, the Xtend charger delivers up to 60W of dynamic power, enough to fast-charge laptops, phones, and other smart devices without swapping bricks between them. ESR says it can push an iPhone 18 Pro to 50% in about 15 minutes, a pace that turns a quick coffee break into enough juice to get through the rest of the day without reaching for an outlet.
A second USB-C port sits tucked onto the side, so a set of earbuds or a smartwatch can top up alongside the phone without hunting for another outlet or unplugging anything else first. TÜV certification backs up the over-voltage, under-voltage, and temperature safeguards built into a charger small enough to disappear into a jacket pocket without adding any noticeable bulk. All these features are packed into a compact, travel-ready shell that’s easy to swap in for the bulkier charger-and-cable combo most people pack for a trip, making it especially convenient for travel and on-the-go use.
Seeing the iPhone Duo and the iPhone 18 Pro paired with accessories built around their actual design makes it easier to skip the usual guesswork of a phone setup. ESR treats the hinge, the screen, and the charging cable as design decisions rather than afterthoughts. Anyone curious about how the lineup comes together can browse ESR’s iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pro collection to see where a new setup might start.
A smartphone’s camera bump usually exists to hold lenses and nothing else, a necessary bulge nobody asks to admire. The motorola signature 27 turns that same block into a badge, stamping a Bang & Olufsen wordmark directly onto the module beside the lenses themselves. It’s the clearest possible signal that this device treats audio as a design decision, not a spec buried three pages into a press release.
That badge marks Motorola’s first phone built under its new multi-year partnership with Bang & Olufsen, a deal aimed at making sound feel purposeful rather than incidental. Camera hardware and speaker hardware rarely share billing on the same panel of glass, yet here they sit side by side, treated as equally important reasons to pick this phone up and turn it over in your hand before ever opening an app.
Designer: Motorola, Bang & Olufsen
The name itself carries intent too. Motorola is retiring its old naming logic in favor of a simple year-based tag, with this device marking the first signature phone to carry a number tied directly to 2027 rather than an arbitrary sequential digit. It’s a small administrative choice that quietly promises a predictable rhythm going forward, one flagship a year, clearly dated, without guesswork about where it sits in the lineup.
Flip it back around, and the chassis keeps making that same argument through touch alone. The Coal Smoke colorway wears a tightly woven, tactical-feeling texture borrowed from automotive interiors and performance wear, grippy enough to trust in a bag without a case. Capulet Green swaps that for a brushed, fabric-like softness pulled from fashion and interior design instead, warmer under a thumb than any glass back manages.
Both finishes wrap around a body built specifically to survive its own performance. Powering everything is Qualcomm’s brand-new Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, paired with a cooling system Motorola calls ArcticMesh, combining diamond-infused gel, liquid metal, and copper mesh across a vapor chamber 40% larger than before. That matters most during long gaming sessions or video exports, when cheaper phones start throttling, and this one keeps its pace steady.
Photography gets the same layered treatment. A 50MP Sony sensor anchors the main shot, backed by a 200MP periscope lens for distant detail, while stabilization hardware works alongside Qualcomm’s own image processing to keep handheld footage from wobbling during a walk or a pan. Motorola’s Video Enhancement Engine reads a scene in real time, adjusting color before and during recording so a sunset or a dim concert stage looks the way it actually felt standing there.
Google’s Gemini threads through the software layer without waiting to be asked. It handles more than answering questions, moving from a spoken intention to a finished action, booking a table, drafting a plan, or turning a handful of photos into an edited video through a tool Motorola calls Gemini Omni. A companion feature named Lyria builds original music and soundtracks from scratch, folding creative software into hardware that already looks built for it.
None of this arrived as a finished retail package. What Motorola showed at Snapdragon Summit is a preview, missing pricing and a firm release window, with the company promising fuller detail as 2026 continues. What’s already clear is the intent: sound, texture, and image quality are being treated as one connected decision here, not three separate boxes checked down a spec sheet.
Vivo has unveiled the X500 series in Shanghai, introducing the X500, X500 Pro, and X500 Pro Max as the first phones built around its new dynamic imaging strategy. The whole lineup is meant to raise the bar for both photography and video, but the X500 Pro Max is clearly the main attraction. It is the model with the biggest imaging ambitions, the most serious video features, and Vivo’s clearest attempt yet to turn a smartphone into a genuine all-in-one production tool.
The X500 Pro Max debuts Vivo’s new Sony LYTIA L910 sensor, which the company says delivers true 17 EV ultra-high dynamic range output. The goal is to preserve more detail across bright highlights and deep shadows in the same frame. The rest of the setup is just as ambitious, pairing the main camera with a 200MP ZEISS APO telephoto camera and support for a 400mm equivalent Vivo ZEISS Telephoto Extender Gen 2 Ultra. Vivo is also putting plenty of weight behind stabilization, with 3-degree gimbal-grade OIS on the main camera and CIPA 7.0 professional stabilization on both the main and telephoto cameras.
Designer: Vivo
Vivo X500 Pro Max
Video is where the X500 Pro Max really starts to pull ahead. The phone supports 4K 240fps cinematic slow-motion video, 4K 120fps 10-bit Log burn-in direct output, AF tracking video, and 8K Native Live. Vivo is also leaning into a more professional workflow with 10-bit 4:2:2 encoding, ACES support, and official color transformation support with DaVinci. Taken together, those features make the X500 Pro Max feel less like a phone that happens to shoot good video and more like a camera tool built with editing in mind from the start.
Vivo X500 Pro
The X500 Pro Max and X500 Pro share almost the same design, with size being the main differentiator. Both come in black, gray, white, and dusty orange, with a subtle two-finish back panel that adds slight contrast to the rear surface. The effect is understated, but it helps the phones feel a little more considered than a purely spec-driven flagship.
The standard X500 looks a little different from its Pro siblings. Available in black, gray, white, and purple, it uses a square camera plateau at the top instead of following the same rear layout as the X500 Pro and X500 Pro Max.
Vivo X500
The rest of the hardware is built to keep pace with the camera system. The X500 Pro Max runs on the MediaTek Dimensity 9600 Pro and includes Vivo’s V3+ imaging chip alongside the VS1+ pro imaging chip. It also gets a 6.85-inch 2K ZEISS Master Color Display and an 8000mAh battery, which should matter to anyone actually using these video features for more than a few minutes at a time. The X500 Pro shares much of the same foundation, making the two Pro models feel more like parallel options than a simple good-better-best ladder.
Vivo is also building an ecosystem around the X500 Pro Max with a dedicated Creator Kit. Its most interesting feature is a real-time wireless camera viewfinder, which makes framing and monitoring a lot more flexible during shoots. The kit also includes 2.35x and 4.7x telephoto converter lenses, pushing the phone further toward a more modular shooting setup.
The standard X500 still sounds strong on its own, with a large main sensor, ZEISS gimbal-grade OIS, 4K 120fps slow motion, and 8K Native Live. Still, this launch revolves around the X500 Pro Max. It is the phone Vivo is using to show where mobile imaging is headed next, and it makes a stronger case than most for a phone that can go well beyond casual shooting and hold its own in professional-level workflows.
Vivo has confirmed pricing for the X500 series. The X500 starts at 5,499 CNY (about $821) for 12GB+256GB, the X500 Pro starts at 6,499 CNY (about $970) for the same tier, and the X500 Pro Max opens at 6,999 CNY (about $1,045) for 12GB+256GB. The Creator Kit, built around the 16GB+1TB satellite communication X500 Pro Max, carries a suggested price of 12,999 CNY (about $1,941). Pre-orders for the X500 series are open now in China, with official sales beginning on September 24. A global rollout is planned for later on, though the company hasn’t shared specific markets or pricing outside China, leaving international buyers to wait for further details.
