Tag Archives: phones

You Can Now Own the Actual Motherboard from the First iPhone, Sealed Inside The 17 Pro

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Caviar’s Apple 50th anniversary collection has been moving faster than the company’s own PR team can keep up with. We covered the Steve Jobs turtleneck edition earlier this month, nine units of a titanium iPhone 17 Pro carrying an authenticated Issey Miyake fabric fragment inside the Apple logo, and by the time most readers had processed whether it was brilliant or absurd, Caviar had already sold out. I’ll admit I did not see that coming. The lesson appears to be that the intersection of Apple mythology and physical relics is a more powerful commercial force than any reasonable person would predict.

So Caviar has returned with an even more loaded artifact for the second release in this anniversary series. The iPhone 2007 embeds a verified fragment of the original iPhone 2G motherboard into the rear panel of an iPhone 17 Pro, sealed beneath an Apple-logo-shaped capsule, ringed by engravings tracing the circuitry of the phone that launched in January 2007. Production is limited to 11 units. Pricing starts at $10,770 for the 256GB Pro and climbs to $12,700 for the 2TB Pro Max, with each phone shipping alongside a 999 fine gold commemorative coin and a signature Caviar key.

Designer: Caviar

The chassis is titanium with a black PVD coating, and the color story it tells is deliberate. Black and silver, offset logo placement, minimalist engraving: Caviar is visually quoting the 2007 original without cosplaying as a replica, which is the smarter move. The motherboard fragment anchors the rear panel at dead center, with circuit-trace engravings fanning outward from it like a schematic that never quite finished rendering. Jobs’ signature runs along the frame. The whole composition functions as a timeline compressed into a single object, 2007 hardware embedded inside 2025 hardware, separated by a few millimeters of machined titanium.

A PCB fragment from a specific hardware generation is an unusually specific kind of artifact. Original iPhone 2G boards have identifiable components, documented manufacturing runs, a physical particularity that places them firmly in a category alongside signed guitars and moon rocks rather than alongside phone cases. Caviar ships each unit with an authentication certificate, and unlike fabric or paper memorabilia, a motherboard fragment from a consumer electronics device has enough physical specificity to make that certificate mean something. At eleven grand, that distinction matters to the kind of buyer who actually reads the certificate rather than frames it.

The original iPhone is one of a very small number of consumer products whose design was so resolved on arrival that the industry spent the following decade catching up to it. Eleven units of the iPhone 2007 will exist in the world, each carrying a physical fragment of that hardware inside Apple’s current best. For the collector who thinks about objects that way, the website link is at the bottom of this page.

The post You Can Now Own the Actual Motherboard from the First iPhone, Sealed Inside The 17 Pro first appeared on Yanko Design.

World’s Most Affordable Foldable Phone Costs $320. That’s Less Than an Apple Watch

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The moment Motorola resurrected the Razr as a foldable in 2020, every industrial designer I know had the same thought: the flip form factor was always the right one, the market just needed to catch up. Five years later, the category has matured enough that Samsung, Motorola, Oppo, Honor, and a dozen Chinese brands all compete for the same $800-to-$1,200 buyer, nudging specs up and prices sideways with each generation. Nobody was competing seriously for the buyer who wants the flip experience at a fraction of that figure, because the assumption was that buyer did not exist at scale. Ai+ has decided to test that assumption directly.

The Nova Flip, unveiled at Ai+’s April 2026 launch event in India alongside the Nova 2 series and a tablet, carries a sticker price of Rs 29,999, roughly $320. The inner display measures 6.9 inches across an AMOLED panel resolving at 2790 x 1188 pixels, complemented by a 3.1-inch AMOLED cover screen. A MediaTek Dimensity 7300 handles processing duties, paired with 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB of internal storage. The camera array consists of a 50-megapixel primary sensor, a 2-megapixel depth lens, and a 32-megapixel front camera. Battery capacity clocks in at a surprisingly healthy 4325mAh, with 33W wired charging, 5G, NFC, and IP64 rounding out the headline features.

Designer: Ai+

Let’s talk about that battery for a moment, because 4325mAh in a flip phone is genuinely unusual. The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 packs a 4000mAh cell, and Motorola’s Razr Plus 2024 manages just 4000mAh as well, both at prices three times higher than the Nova Flip. Fitting a larger-than-average cell into a folding chassis requires either a very clever internal layout or an acceptance of added thickness, and Ai+ has not published the device’s folded dimensions yet. The 33W charging speed is adequate without being exciting, sitting well below the 65W and 80W speeds that Chinese flagship foldables now routinely offer. For a $320 device, though, adequate is a perfectly reasonable baseline.

The Dimensity 7300 helps keep the cost within its ultra-affordable bracket. MediaTek’s chip powers a range of competent mid-range phones in the $200-to-$400 segment, including several from Oppo and Vivo, where it handles everyday tasks, social media, and casual gaming without complaint. It does not belong in the same conversation as the Snapdragon 8 Elite powering the Galaxy Z Flip 6, and Ai+ is clearly not pretending otherwise. The 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM is similarly mid-range, a generation behind the LPDDR5X specification that flagship devices now ship with. None of this is disqualifying at this price point, but buyers upgrading from a previous-generation Galaxy or Razr will feel the performance delta in sustained workloads and camera processing speeds.

At that price, the fact that the phone comes IP64 rated is frankly surprising. Splash and dust resistance in a folding device requires careful engineering around the hinge mechanism, where gaps and moving parts create obvious ingress points. Many foldables at twice the price ship without any IP certification whatsoever (it also costs money to get the certification), so Ai+ clearing that bar at Rs 29,999 signals a level of build ambition that the spec sheet alone does not fully communicate. The side-mounted fingerprint sensor, dual SIM 5G support, NFC, and USB-C port complete a feature list that would have looked respectable on a $600 phone two years ago.

The real question the Nova Flip poses has nothing to do with its own specifications. It asks whether the Indian market, and potentially the broader emerging market landscape, is ready to embrace foldables as a mainstream form factor rather than a luxury signifier. Samsung has spent five years building the foldable as an aspirational object, priced and marketed accordingly. If Ai+ can deliver a hinge that survives 18 months of daily use, a display that resists visible creasing, and software that stays coherent across the cover screen and inner display, the Nova Flip could do to the foldable category what budget-tier 5G phones did to 5G adoption: accelerate it by years. The Glacier White colorway goes on sale in May 2026, and that month’s sales figures will tell us far more about the future of affordable foldables than any spec sheet ever could.

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The Kids’ Phone With No Screen, No Apps, and Only $100

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The moment you see the Tin Can, you know exactly what it is and also what it isn’t. It’s a landline phone, complete with a handheld receiver and a curly cord, designed to sit on a countertop or mount on a wall. It isn’t a smartphone. It isn’t a tablet. It doesn’t have a screen. And that’s entirely the point.

Tin Can is the brainchild of three Seattle-based dads: Chet Kittleson, Max Blumen, and Graeme Davies, who created it after hitting the same wall millions of parents run into. Their kids were at that in-between age, old enough to want independence and social connection, but too young to be handed a device with unrestricted internet access. The options available were either too much or not enough. As the founders put it: “Everything out there felt like a compromise, too much tech, too much access, or just another screen to manage.” So they built something else entirely.

Designers: Chet Kittleson, Max Blumen, and Graeme Davies

The Tin Can works through Wi-Fi but without any browsing capability, social media, or texting. Children can only call and receive calls from a parent-approved list of contacts, managed through a companion app that only parents can access. Quiet hours and Do Not Disturb can be scheduled. Voicemails are supported. That’s it. That’s the whole phone. And it turns out, that’s more than enough.

From a design standpoint, the product is refreshingly considered. The cylindrical Tin Can model has a playful, almost cartoonish quality that looks deliberate rather than dated. Its colorful palette, with names like “Answer Me Aquamarine,” signals that this wasn’t designed to collect dust in a hallway. The other model, the Flashback, leans harder into nostalgia, styled after the wall-mounted phones of the 1980s and connecting via ethernet cable rather than Wi-Fi. Both feel like products made by people who actually thought about what a child’s first phone should feel like, not just what it should do.

I’ll be honest, my initial reaction to this was mild skepticism. We’ve seen “screen-free” devices for kids before, and they tend to be clunky, joyless compromises that kids tolerate for about two weeks before losing interest. Tin Can feels genuinely different. Part of that is the design, which doesn’t try to mimic a smartphone and fail. It commits fully to being a phone, a beautiful, strange little object that sits in your home and rings. Part of it is the clarity of the concept. The product makes no attempt to sneak in “just a little” content or add a casual app or two for good measure. That restraint is its biggest strength.

The market response has been telling. Since launching, Tin Can has reached users in all 50 US states and across Canada, raised $3.5 million in funding, and sold through its first batches fast enough to crash at Christmas. The founders have described the reception as overwhelming, and it’s not hard to see why. Parents have been waiting for exactly this, a middle ground between total dependence on mom’s phone and a fully connected smartphone, and no one had bothered to build it yet.

What also makes Tin Can compelling is that it re-centers something communication technologies quietly stripped away: the social ritual of calling someone. You pick up the receiver, you dial, you wait, and you talk. No typing, no video filters, no leaving someone on read. It’s a more focused, more present kind of connection, and kids who grow up with it might just develop a better instinct for actual conversation.

The Luddite movement has spent years arguing that smartphones reached kids too early and too fast. Tin Can doesn’t join that argument. It sidesteps it entirely by offering something genuinely useful, beautifully designed, and completely free of the features that make smartphones so hard to put down. Whether you call it nostalgia or just good design thinking, the result is the same: a phone worth answering.

The post The Kids’ Phone With No Screen, No Apps, and Only $100 first appeared on Yanko Design.

HMD Terra M Can Do What Flagship Smartphones Can’t Even Handle

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Most smartphones weren’t designed with construction sites or hospital wards in mind. They crack under a single bad drop, struggle with wet or gloved fingers, and can’t survive a pressure wash. Yet these are exactly the environments where reliable communication matters most. Frontline workers are often stuck choosing between powerful devices that can’t take a beating and durable ones too basic to be of any real use.

The HMD Terra M tries to close that gap without overcomplicating things. It’s a compact, ultra-rugged feature phone designed to handle the kind of punishment that leaves most consumer devices in pieces. Beyond just surviving harsh conditions, it’s built to actually work well in them, with features tailored for people who spend their shifts outdoors or in places where a dropped call simply isn’t an option.

Designer: HMD Global

That starts with its credentials. The Terra M carries both IP68 and IP69K ratings, handling full submersion at 1.5 m for 30 minutes and high-pressure water jets at up to 100 bar and 80°C. It also meets MIL-STD-810H military standards, withstands drops from 1.8 m, and resists gasoline, industrial solvents, and medical-grade sanitizers, covering just about every hazard a field environment can throw at it.

Surviving the job site is one thing, but staying useful there is another. The Terra M has a textured, non-slip grip and large physical keys that work with gloves on, which matters when you’re in the middle of a job and can’t afford to fumble. Its 2.8-inch display reaches up to 550 nits, sits behind Corning Gorilla Glass 3, and responds to both wet fingers and gloved hands.

Communication is where the Terra M earns its keep. Two programmable keys on the side give users instant, one-touch access to Push-to-Talk apps or custom shortcuts without digging through menus. The loudspeaker pushes up to 100 dB, and the microphones come with echo and noise cancellation, so you can be heard clearly even on a loud construction site or in a warehouse with heavy machinery running nearby.

The 2,510 mAh battery is rated for up to 10 days of standby, so field workers don’t have to hunt for a charger mid-shift. Better yet, the battery is user-replaceable on-site without any special tools. Pre-loaded apps include a barcode scanner, a note taker, a sound recorder, and a web browser, among others, meaning the Terra M is genuinely ready to work straight out of the box.

For organizations deploying multiple devices, an optional stackable docking station uses magnetic pogo-pin connectors to charge up to 10 units simultaneously, which suits logistics depots and shift-based teams well. Fleet management runs through Mobile Device Management, with remote OS and security patches delivered via HMD FOTA (Firmware Over The Air). HMD has also committed to five years of quarterly security updates, reducing the overhead of keeping a large deployment current and secure.

The Terra M isn’t trying to compete with the latest flagship smartphones. It’s a practical replacement for the aging two-way radios many frontline teams still rely on, offering modern 4G connectivity, eSIM support, and a proper touchscreen in a form that can take a beating. Priced at £179.99 and available through HMD Secure in select markets, it’s designed for people who simply can’t afford for their phone to fail.

The post HMD Terra M Can Do What Flagship Smartphones Can’t Even Handle first appeared on Yanko Design.

HMD Terra M Can Do What Flagship Smartphones Can’t Even Handle

Posted on by

Most smartphones weren’t designed with construction sites or hospital wards in mind. They crack under a single bad drop, struggle with wet or gloved fingers, and can’t survive a pressure wash. Yet these are exactly the environments where reliable communication matters most. Frontline workers are often stuck choosing between powerful devices that can’t take a beating and durable ones too basic to be of any real use.

The HMD Terra M tries to close that gap without overcomplicating things. It’s a compact, ultra-rugged feature phone designed to handle the kind of punishment that leaves most consumer devices in pieces. Beyond just surviving harsh conditions, it’s built to actually work well in them, with features tailored for people who spend their shifts outdoors or in places where a dropped call simply isn’t an option.

Designer: HMD Global

That starts with its credentials. The Terra M carries both IP68 and IP69K ratings, handling full submersion at 1.5 m for 30 minutes and high-pressure water jets at up to 100 bar and 80°C. It also meets MIL-STD-810H military standards, withstands drops from 1.8 m, and resists gasoline, industrial solvents, and medical-grade sanitizers, covering just about every hazard a field environment can throw at it.

Surviving the job site is one thing, but staying useful there is another. The Terra M has a textured, non-slip grip and large physical keys that work with gloves on, which matters when you’re in the middle of a job and can’t afford to fumble. Its 2.8-inch display reaches up to 550 nits, sits behind Corning Gorilla Glass 3, and responds to both wet fingers and gloved hands.

Communication is where the Terra M earns its keep. Two programmable keys on the side give users instant, one-touch access to Push-to-Talk apps or custom shortcuts without digging through menus. The loudspeaker pushes up to 100 dB, and the microphones come with echo and noise cancellation, so you can be heard clearly even on a loud construction site or in a warehouse with heavy machinery running nearby.

The 2,510 mAh battery is rated for up to 10 days of standby, so field workers don’t have to hunt for a charger mid-shift. Better yet, the battery is user-replaceable on-site without any special tools. Pre-loaded apps include a barcode scanner, a note taker, a sound recorder, and a web browser, among others, meaning the Terra M is genuinely ready to work straight out of the box.

For organizations deploying multiple devices, an optional stackable docking station uses magnetic pogo-pin connectors to charge up to 10 units simultaneously, which suits logistics depots and shift-based teams well. Fleet management runs through Mobile Device Management, with remote OS and security patches delivered via HMD FOTA (Firmware Over The Air). HMD has also committed to five years of quarterly security updates, reducing the overhead of keeping a large deployment current and secure.

The Terra M isn’t trying to compete with the latest flagship smartphones. It’s a practical replacement for the aging two-way radios many frontline teams still rely on, offering modern 4G connectivity, eSIM support, and a proper touchscreen in a form that can take a beating. Priced at £179.99 and available through HMD Secure in select markets, it’s designed for people who simply can’t afford for their phone to fail.

The post HMD Terra M Can Do What Flagship Smartphones Can’t Even Handle first appeared on Yanko Design.

TCL’s $200 Phone Fixes Eye Strain That $1,000 Flagships Still Ignore

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Screen time has crept up to the point where most people spend more waking hours staring at a phone than almost anything else. Smartphones aren’t particularly kind about it, with vivid, high-brightness displays that perform well in demos but aren’t gentle over long stretches. Eye fatigue and dryness have become almost expected, yet most people aren’t ready to swap their phones for e-readers just to get some relief.

TCL has spent the better part of four years building an answer to that problem through its NXTPAPER line, and the NXTPAPER 70 Pro is the most capable version yet. It’s a full Android smartphone with eye-care features pushed to their highest iteration, now available in the US at $199.99 through T-Mobile and Metro by T-Mobile, and at $299.99 unlocked.

Designer: TCL

The centerpiece is the 6.9-inch NXTPAPER display, an IPS LCD panel with a matte, anti-glare surface built using nano-matrix lithography. It cuts harmful blue light at the hardware level down to 3.41%, uses DC dimming to eliminate flicker entirely, and applies circular polarized light to simulate diffused daylight that’s easier on the eyes. Independent certification from TÜV and SGS backs those claims up.

A physical NXTPAPER Key on the side cycles through three viewing modes. Regular keeps full-color smartphone output, Color Paper shifts to a warmer and more subdued tone suited for long reading sessions, and Ink Paper dials the display down to a near-monochrome, paper-like appearance that also conserves battery. Switching between them takes a single press, keeping the feature genuinely useful rather than buried in a settings menu.

That Ink Paper mode also unlocks the phone’s most impressive feature: battery life, which TCL claims can stretch to seven days when reading. The 5,200 mAh cell with 33W fast charging handles everyday use comfortably and reaches 50% in about 38 minutes, but it’s the combination of a power-efficient display mode and capable hardware that pushes endurance well past what most phones manage.

The camera doesn’t feel like an afterthought either. A 50 MP main sensor with optical image stabilization handles everyday shots and difficult lighting well, paired with an 8 MP ultrawide and a 32 MP front camera that covers video calls and social content. Storage starts at 256 GB and expands via microSD to 2 TB, while a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 chip keeps things running on Android 16.

Built-in AI tools can summarize articles, transcribe audio, and help clean up text you’re writing, which fits the device’s clear lean toward readers, students, and anyone who uses their phone for focused work. The IP68 rating handles rain and spills without fuss, and at 207g, the large frame doesn’t feel excessive in hand. Unfortunately, it seems that T-Pen stylus support won’t be making its way to this US variant, a feature that has been revealed for the global version.

What’s notable about the NXTPAPER 70 Pro isn’t any single feature taken alone, but how they all pull toward the same priority. Eye-care display technology has mostly lived on phones that cost well over a thousand dollars, which puts it out of reach for most buyers. At $199.99 on T-Mobile, that changes, and the argument for a phone your eyes might actually thank you for becomes genuinely hard to ignore.

The post TCL’s $200 Phone Fixes Eye Strain That $1,000 Flagships Still Ignore first appeared on Yanko Design.

Insta360’s $80 Snap Lets Your Phone’s Best Camera Shoot Selfies

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Anyone who’s owned a modern smartphone knows the frustration. The front camera you rely on for selfies and vlogs is almost always the weakest lens on the device. Rear cameras have grown increasingly capable, packing larger sensors, multiple focal lengths, and advanced computational photography, yet most people never use them for self-facing shots because there’s simply no way to see what’s being captured.

That’s the problem Insta360 is solving with the Snap Selfie Screen, a portable magnetic display that attaches to the back of your phone and gives you a live view of what the rear camera sees. It’s a fairly obvious idea in hindsight, one that’s been a long time coming, but there’s enough thoughtfulness in the execution to make it feel like a genuinely practical accessory.

Designer: Insta360

On iPhones, the Snap attaches magnetically to any MagSafe-compatible model from the iPhone 15 series onward and connects through the USB-C port. That wired link is what keeps the preview stable and responsive, in a way that Bluetooth or Wi-Fi-based alternatives simply can’t match. The Snap draws power directly from the phone as well, so there’s nothing separate to charge or carry.

Insta360 says the wired connection keeps latency down to around 30ms during 4K recording, close enough to real time that there’s no discernible gap between movement and what appears on the screen. Android users aren’t left out either, as those with USB-C and DisplayPort Alt Mode support can use the Snap with the magnetic ring adapter that comes included in the box.

The 3.5-inch touchscreen goes well past a passive viewfinder. It fully mirrors your phone’s display and responds to touch, so you can adjust exposure, switch focal lengths, change apps, and tap the shutter all from the back of the device. Any camera app on your phone works exactly as it normally would, including Instagram, so you’re not tied to Insta360’s own software.

The premium edition adds a ring light around the screen, co-developed with beauty-tech company AMIRO. It comes with three color settings and five brightness levels, which makes a real difference when shooting indoors under flat lighting or outdoors at an awkward hour. For content creators who’d rather not carry a separate panel light, this version handles fill lighting without adding much to the bag.

At just 6.8mm thick, the Snap fits into a bag without adding much. The protective cover that folds over the screen also secures the USB-C cable when not in use, so nothing tangles with other gear. That tidy design makes daily carry feel easy, and it’s especially handy for solo travelers who’d rather have a reliable way to photograph themselves than hope a willing passerby is nearby.

Both editions are available now through Insta360’s store and Amazon. The standard version starts at $79.99, with the ring-light edition at $89.99. Smartphone cameras have been improving for years, but always with the assumption that you’d be shooting other things. The Snap flips that around, putting the device’s most capable optics in the hands of the person holding it.

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Someone Made The E-Ink Kindle Smartphone That Amazon Refused To Make

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Amazon has spent nearly two decades perfecting the Kindle, turning it into the default eReader for millions of people, and in all that time they’ve steadfastly refused to shrink it down to pocket size or open it up to the broader Android ecosystem. They had every opportunity to merge the best parts of their Kindle line with the form factor of a smartphone, creating a distraction-free reading and productivity device that could actually fit in your jeans pocket and run the apps you already use. Instead, they kept the Kindle locked into its walled garden, kept it at 6 inches or larger, and left a gaping hole in the market for anyone willing to build what they wouldn’t. DuRoBo took that opportunity and ran with it, launching the Krono, a 6.13-inch E Ink tablet running full Android 15 that costs $279.99 and does exactly what Amazon has spent years pretending nobody wants.

The Krono packs an E Ink Carta 1200 display at 300 PPI (matching the sharpness of a Kindle Paperwhite), an octa-core processor, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a 3,950 mAh battery, and a unique side-mounted Smart Dial that controls screen refresh, frontlight adjustment, voice recording, and web browsing through a single rotary knob. It weighs just 173 grams, measures 154 x 80 x 9 mm, and is available in black or white from DuRoBo’s site or Amazon US. The pitch is straightforward: it’s an eReader, a voice note-taker, a podcast player, and a music device all in one, built on an open platform that lets you install whatever reading app, productivity tool, or communication software you actually want to use. It launched in August 2025 and started shipping in September, quietly carving out space in the niche that BOOX’s Palma lineup has been dominating for the past year.

Designer: DuRoBo

Six gigs of RAM in an E Ink device is borderline excessive in the best possible way, especially when most eReaders ship with 2GB or less and struggle the moment you try to run anything beyond the stock reading app. The 128GB of storage means you can load an absurd library of ebooks, PDFs, audiobooks, and whatever else without ever worrying about running out of room. Running Android 15 (not some ancient fork, but the actual current OS) gives the Krono access to the full Play Store ecosystem, which is exactly what Amazon has been allergic to for years. You want Kindle, Libby, Moon+ Reader, Pocket, Instapaper, Obsidian, and Spotify all on one device? The Krono lets you do that. A Kindle will let you read Kindle books and maybe listen to Audible if you’re lucky. That’s the entire difference.

The Smart Dial highlights DuRoBo’s industrial design philosophy most clearly – instead of burying every interaction behind capacitive touch menus (which E Ink refresh rates make tedious), they mounted a physical rotary dial on the side of the device that you can press and rotate to trigger different actions depending on context. It’s a design choice borrowed more from cameras and audio gear than from tablets, and it gives the Krono a tactile, mechanical quality that most E Ink slabs completely lack. The back of the device features what DuRoBo calls the Axis, a strip housing six small breathing lights that glow softly on a schedule to gently nudge you back toward focused reading or work. It’s a wellness-adjacent UX detail that could easily feel gimmicky, but in the context of a device explicitly marketed as a “focus hub,” it at least makes thematic sense. The whole package is clearly designed to feel intentional and calm, a deliberate counterpoint to the dopamine-optimized chaos of a smartphone.

DuRoBo is positioning the Krono hard into the distraction-free productivity and mindfulness lane, framing it as the device you reach for when you want to read long-form content, capture ideas through voice notes, or listen to podcasts without getting dragged into Instagram or TikTok. The dual-tone frontlight (warm and cool adjustment) and the paper-like texture of the Carta 1200 display are meant to make extended reading sessions comfortable in a way that backlit screens never quite manage. The built-in speaker and Bluetooth support let it double as a surprisingly capable audio player for music, audiobooks, and podcasts, which gives it utility beyond just being a reading slab. The open Android platform means you can customize it to fit whatever workflow you actually need, whether that’s Notion for notes, Pocket for saved articles, or Spotify for background music while you write. Amazon would never build this, because opening the Kindle platform would undermine their entire content ecosystem lock-in strategy.

The Krono is available now for $279.99; with a fitted TPU case is sold separately, designed to accommodate both the Smart Dial and the Axis breathing lights without blocking either. At that price point, it’s competing directly with the BOOX Palma (which runs around $280 depending on configuration) and sits well above Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite but below their Kindle Scribe. Whether the Smart Dial, the breathing lights, and DuRoBo’s focus-first branding are enough to justify choosing it over a Palma or just installing a launcher on a Kindle will depend entirely on how much you value that design identity over raw software polish.

The post Someone Made The E-Ink Kindle Smartphone That Amazon Refused To Make first appeared on Yanko Design.

Pictures of iPhone Fold appear online, just before Apple’s supposed foldable hits engineering challenges

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Apple’s first foldable phone, the Apple’s first foldable phone, iPhone Fold (if that’s how it will be called) is one of the most anticipated smartphones in recent memory. While Apple remains tight-lipped about anything concerning the awaited device, rumors, leaks, and concepts have flooded our memories over the years with what the iPhone Fold is and what it will be like.

2026 is suggestively the magical year when Apple is expected to launch the foldable iPhone. It has been an unperturbed timeline in almost all the reports we have seen. In the same loop – but without a timeline – a recognized Apple leaker, Majin Bu has shown “actual design of the iPhone Fold” in the latest leaked pictures.

Designer: Apple

It’s “more beautiful than the previous one,” Bu notes in his update on X, stating that he believes this is “the final design of the future iPhone Fold.” How much context there is in the claim, only time will tell, but Bu has had some correct Apple-related predictions in the past, which suggests he could have some substance to back his claim.

From the leaked pictures, one can visually notice that the camera bump on the back of the foldable device is significantly smaller than that seen in previously rumored designs. The images appear more than renders and supposedly of a prototype, showing the iPhone in a book-style foldable form factor. Appearing to open horizontally to reveal a tablet-like display on the inside.

If the 2026 timeline is to go by – it’s Apple’s golden jubilee year as well – the iPhone Fold should ship alongside the iPhone 18 Pro slated for release in fall this year. But according to a new report from Nikkei Asia, the launch could be delayed. Nikkei reports that Apple has encountered a major setback in the engineering test phase of the foldable iPhone. There have been previously report concerning the foldable display’s crease, but this time, the report notes that the Cupertino giant is facing “more complex engineering challenges than anticipated.” If the issues persist, they could, “in a worst-case scenario,” delay the iPhone Fold launch schedule by some months. It could even mean a postponement until 2027.

Earlier this year, it was rumored that Apple had entered into the manufacturing phase of its first foldable device at Foxconn. New revelations, however, suggest Apple is “notifying” its component suppliers about the possibility of a delay in the “component production schedule for the new foldable iPhone.”

Despite the reports and unauthorized leaks, one thing is definite now. Foldable iPhone – by whatever moniker it comes – is clearly on the horizon. Apple will soon have a competitor for the Samsung Fold and other foldable smartphones on the market. If it is anything like the iPhones that rocked the smartphone world in the late 2000s, the iPhone Fold could repeat that in the late 2020s.

The post Pictures of iPhone Fold appear online, just before Apple’s supposed foldable hits engineering challenges first appeared on Yanko Design.

Pictures of iPhone Fold appear online, just before Apple’s supposed foldable hits engineering challenges

Posted on by

 

Apple’s first foldable phone, the Apple’s first foldable phone, iPhone Fold (if that’s how it will be called) is one of the most anticipated smartphones in recent memory. While Apple remains tight-lipped about anything concerning the awaited device, rumors, leaks, and concepts have flooded our memories over the years with what the iPhone Fold is and what it will be like.

2026 is suggestively the magical year when Apple is expected to launch the foldable iPhone. It has been an unperturbed timeline in almost all the reports we have seen. In the same loop – but without a timeline – a recognized Apple leaker, Majin Bu has shown “actual design of the iPhone Fold” in the latest leaked pictures.

Designer: Apple

It’s “more beautiful than the previous one,” Bu notes in his update on X, stating that he believes this is “the final design of the future iPhone Fold.” How much context there is in the claim, only time will tell, but Bu has had some correct Apple-related predictions in the past, which suggests he could have some substance to back his claim.

From the leaked pictures, one can visually notice that the camera bump on the back of the foldable device is significantly smaller than that seen in previously rumored designs. The images appear more than renders and supposedly of a prototype, showing the iPhone in a book-style foldable form factor. Appearing to open horizontally to reveal a tablet-like display on the inside.

If the 2026 timeline is to go by – it’s Apple’s golden jubilee year as well – the iPhone Fold should ship alongside the iPhone 18 Pro slated for release in fall this year. But according to a new report from Nikkei Asia, the launch could be delayed. Nikkei reports that Apple has encountered a major setback in the engineering test phase of the foldable iPhone. There have been previously report concerning the foldable display’s crease, but this time, the report notes that the Cupertino giant is facing “more complex engineering challenges than anticipated.” If the issues persist, they could, “in a worst-case scenario,” delay the iPhone Fold launch schedule by some months. It could even mean a postponement until 2027.

Earlier this year, it was rumored that Apple had entered into the manufacturing phase of its first foldable device at Foxconn. New revelations, however, suggest Apple is “notifying” its component suppliers about the possibility of a delay in the “component production schedule for the new foldable iPhone.”

Despite the reports and unauthorized leaks, one thing is definite now. Foldable iPhone – by whatever moniker it comes – is clearly on the horizon. Apple will soon have a competitor for the Samsung Fold and other foldable smartphones on the market. If it is anything like the iPhones that rocked the smartphone world in the late 2000s, the iPhone Fold could repeat that in the late 2020s.

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