Tag Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Samsung and Google Are Trying Smart Glasses Again, at the Worst Possible Time

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“Glasshole” entered Urban Dictionary as word of the day in March 2013, which tells you roughly how long it took society to make up its mind about face-mounted cameras. Google Glass had barely reached early users when bars, restaurants, and theaters started banning it. The device died from a social verdict so decisive it became a punchline. A decade later, Google is back. At Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked in London today, the company helped reveal a new generation of AI-powered smart glasses, co-engineered with Samsung, dressed up in Warby Parker frames, and powered by Gemini. Same idea. Different fonts.

The climate into which these glasses arrive is not quiet. Meta spent the better part of 2026 trying to convince the public that AI glasses are aspirational, recruiting Kylie Jenner for the Meta Starfire Kylie Edition at $399 and positioning it as a style statement. What followed was a wave of coverage about covert recordings, a social media tutorial on disabling the LED light meant to prevent covert recording, and a protest campaign near Meta’s headquarters branding the glasses “fascist.” Some owners are reportedly now reluctant to wear them in public, having learned that the street name for their $399 fashion statement is “pervert glasses.” Google could not have picked a stranger moment to try again.

Designers: Samsung, Google, Warby Parker, and Gentle Monster

So what exactly did Samsung and Google show up with today? The glasses, branded Intelligent Eyewear, come in two designs: a slim black frame from Gentle Monster with a refined, fashion-forward silhouette, and a rich brown Warby Parker edition with a subtly upswept brow line meant for everyday wear. Under the hood, the Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chip handles the processing, the same silicon inside Ray-Ban Meta’s glasses, which is either reassuring or ironic depending on your mood. Gemini runs as the AI assistant on Android XR, the platform Samsung and Google co-developed, delivering information spoken into your ear rather than displayed on a screen. Battery life sits at nine hours, with a charging case that carries up to seven additional full charges. There is a built-in camera. There is always a built-in camera.

The positioning is reasonably clever and deliberate. By going audio-first with no display, Samsung sidesteps the cyborg-visor aesthetic that made Google Glass so alienating, and by partnering with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, two brands with genuine fashion credibility, they are betting that good frames can do what celebrity endorsements and $400 price tags couldn’t for Meta. The glasses also pair with both Android and iOS, which removes the ecosystem friction that would otherwise halve the addressable market before a single unit ships. On paper, this is the most considered entry into smart glasses anyone has made.

The paper, unfortunately, has to reconcile with the sh*tstorm that is Meta and Kylie’s brand collab. Kylie Jenner’s job in the Meta Starfire campaign was to make AI glasses feel safe and aspirational, particularly for women. She wore them, posed with them, starred in content shot from the glasses’ own point of view. What nobody at Meta apparently modeled was the possibility that Jenner’s involvement would become the story, and the story would be unflattering. Lorde publicly called the glasses “not sexy.” Women across Brussels and beyond reported being filmed without consent by men wearing the exact product Jenner was paid to glamorize. Meta had to patch their own hardware to stop people from disabling the recording indicator light. The fact that a patch was required is its own headline.

Samsung and Google have built in visible recording indicators and user-controlled privacy settings, which they are smart to advertise loudly. But the problem Meta created for the entire category goes deeper than indicator lights. The public now has a fixed mental model of what a camera on someone’s face means, and it was not built by reading spec sheets. It was built by watching someone get filmed on the bus, by the NameTag story, by “pervert glasses” becoming the phrase that stuck when “Intelligent Eyewear” didn’t.

Google killed Glass in 2015 because society rejected the behaviour the device enabled before the technology even had a chance to mature. Everything Samsung unveiled today is genuinely more refined, more considered, and more fashionable than anything Glass ever was. The question is whether any of that is the actual problem. Going by recent evidence, the frames were never really the issue.

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SAM Might Be the Most Human Thing Samsung Has Finally Built

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Most conversations about aging and technology eventually circle back to the same frustrating gap: the tools we build for older people rarely feel like they were designed with older people in mind. They’re functional, clinical, and often carry the visual language of a hospital supply catalog. SAM, a concept robotic mobility aid designed by David Webber for Samsung, feels like a direct response to that problem, and it’s the kind of design thinking I genuinely want more of.

At first glance, SAM looks like it belongs on a near-future film set. The rounded, cloud-white body, the articulating arms, the small expressive face-like display on top. But spend a little more time with it and the aesthetics start to make sense in a very deliberate way. Webber didn’t want SAM to read as medical equipment. He wanted it to feel like a companion, something you’d actually invite into your home and not hide in a corner when company comes over.

Designer: David Webber for Samsung

What SAM does differently from most mobility aids is where the real story lives. A standard walker or rollator solves one problem: moving from point A to point B. SAM looks at the fuller picture of what daily independence actually requires. Picking up a dropped object from the floor. Carrying groceries from the door to the kitchen. Helping someone rise from a chair safely. These are the small, invisible tasks that quietly determine whether an older adult can continue living alone or not, and they are almost entirely absent from the current conversation around mobility technology.

The concept is built around the idea of physical AI, the notion that artificial intelligence should operate in the physical world in a way that supports human capability rather than overriding it. SAM doesn’t take over. It doesn’t assume. The user stays in control, and the technology fills in the gaps, which is a harder design problem than it sounds. Building something that assists without patronizing, that helps without making a person feel like they’ve surrendered something, requires a kind of empathy that most tech doesn’t bother with.

I’ll be direct: the design of SAM is one of the more thoughtful things I’ve seen come out of a Samsung concept in a while. The color options, soft greys and muted sage greens, feel intentional. They’re domestic. They say “living room” rather than “rehab facility,” and that distinction matters enormously for user dignity and adoption. Nobody wants to use a tool that announces their limitations to every visitor who walks through the door. SAM seems to understand that.

The arms and end-effectors are worth a close look too. The gripper design is specific enough to handle real objects but rounded and soft-looking enough not to feel threatening. The integrated display sits at a natural eye level when someone stands and grips the handles, showing simple information like time, a to-do list, and device status. It’s thoughtful UX layered into an already thoughtful form.

Is SAM a product you can buy right now? No. It’s a concept, a vision piece, and it should be taken as one. But the best concept designs do something important: they shift where the conversation is pointed. Right now, too much of the assistive tech space is focused on reactive solutions, devices that help after a fall, after a diagnosis, after independence has already started to erode. SAM is proposing something more proactive. It’s asking what support looks like before the crisis, and that’s a question the industry desperately needs to sit with.

What I hope designers, healthcare companies, and tech brands take from SAM is not the specific form but the underlying philosophy. That independence isn’t just about mobility. That dignity is a design requirement, not a bonus feature. That the people who need the most thoughtful design often receive the least considered version of it. If SAM pushes even one conversation in that direction, David Webber has done something genuinely worth paying attention to.

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Lenovo Just Made a $44 Kid Phone That Kills TikTok and the Browser

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Most phones marketed at kids are really just smartphones in disguise, dressed down with monitoring apps and screen-time limits that parents set and children quietly find ways around. The tension between staying connected and staying focused has pushed many families toward patchwork fixes: a shared phone, an old handset with most apps deleted, or a prepaid SIM dropped into hardware never meant for the job.

Lenovo’s answer to that problem is the AI Student Phone L1, which we covered at launch in China in late June 2026 for 299 yuan, or about $44. It looks like a compact candy-bar phone with a 1.83-inch touchscreen and 4G connectivity, but it behaves far more like a purpose-built study companion. There’s no browser, no social media, no games, and based on current reporting, sideloading isn’t an option.

Designer: Lenovo

What makes the L1 interesting from a design standpoint isn’t what’s missing; it’s what Lenovo chose to keep and why. The phone reportedly features a compact body built with Panda glass, a material meant to handle the daily punishment a backpack full of school supplies tends to deliver. That choice isn’t a premium flourish; it’s a quiet signal about who this device is actually built for.

The most telling design decision is the dedicated physical AI button reportedly built into the side of the L1. In most other phones, the AI assistant lives inside software, hidden behind a long press or buried in settings. A hardware button changes that, making help a fixed and visible part of the object. A child doesn’t need to find the feature; the button is it.

Press it, and the L1 reportedly connects to an AI assistant that can help with homework, language learning, and subject lookups. The simplicity is the point. Instead of opening a browser and disappearing down a rabbit hole, the student gets a focused answer and moves on. The phone isn’t trying to replace a teacher; it’s trying to stay out of a teacher’s way.

The feature most coverage tends to bury is the reported QR-code payment system with parent-set spending limits. A child can reportedly take the bus, grab lunch, or pay for a snack without a full smartphone or a physical wallet. GPS tracking and an SOS button reportedly keep parents in the loop. Parents set a cap, the child spends within it, and that’s the end of the negotiation.

That said, the L1 isn’t without its compromises. A 1.83-inch screen is genuinely small, and while that probably discourages mindless scrolling, it also makes extended interaction feel a bit cramped. If handwriting input is included, as some reports suggest, the novelty may wear off quickly. Restraint is a valid design philosophy, but it still has to feel comfortable enough to use every day.

(Image courtesy of @Technology)

For parents in the US or Europe, the L1 is unfortunately a China-only device for now. Products like the Gabb Phone, Pinwheel, and Bark Phone all tackle the same distraction problem, but by restricting a conventional smartphone from the inside. The L1 appears to start from a narrower behavioral premise, building limits into the hardware rather than patching them in through software.

That distinction is worth sitting with. Handing a child their first phone has always been about balancing independence and oversight, and software-based restrictions have always felt like a workaround. The Lenovo AI Student Phone L1 raises the question of whether you can get closer to that balance by designing the object differently from the start, and that’s probably the right conversation to be having.

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OpenAI and Work Louder Just Built a $230 Physical Remote for AI Agents

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Managing multiple AI agents at once has become a surprisingly real friction point in modern knowledge work. Developers using tools like OpenAI’s Codex, which is closing in on nine million users, often run several threads simultaneously. Constantly switching between windows and chat screens to check each agent’s progress breaks the kind of focused flow that agentic workflows are supposed to create in the first place.

That’s the problem the Codex Micro, a collaboration between OpenAI and boutique keyboard maker Work Louder, tries to solve. It’s essentially a compact mechanical macropad purpose-built as a physical command center for AI agents, keeping the most important controls and status readouts within arm’s reach without requiring you to look at your screen. It’s a small but thoughtfully considered piece of hardware for heavy Codex users.

Designer: Work Louder x OpenAI

The heart of the device is its six frosted Agent Keys, each mapped to a separate Codex thread. They light up in different colors to reflect each agent’s status: white for idle, blue for thinking, green for completed tasks, amber when it needs your input, and red for errors. A single tap selects an agent in the background; a double tap brings it to the foreground.

The dial and joystick add two more dimensions of tactile control. The rotary encoder lets you adjust how deeply your agent reasons through a problem, dialing things down for quick tasks and up when the work calls for more careful consideration. The four-directional joystick can be mapped to skills like toggling plan mode or navigating between threads, and it’s never more than a thumb’s flick away.

The largest button, which takes up twice the space, is for push-to-talk. A double-tap starts recording, and the ambient RGB shifts to a snaking green pattern to confirm it’s live. Once you stop speaking, a white effect takes over while Codex processes your voice, and a solid white cue signals it’s ready to send. It makes submitting a prompt feel more like dictating than typing.

Beyond what it does, the Codex Micro is built to feel as good as it works. The body is made from sandblasted polycarbonate that diffuses the RGB lighting into a soft, even glow. The base, a solid aluminum block, keeps the whole unit planted on the desk thanks to an anti-slip ring. Buyers can choose between clicky or silent low-profile switches, with USB-C and Bluetooth connectivity.

What sets it apart from a generic programmable macropad is its direct integration with Codex itself. There’s no extra software to download or vet; key assignments and layouts can be adjusted natively within Codex. For more advanced setups, Work Louder’s Input app unlocks up to six programmable layers, letting you group different workflows into dedicated layouts without needing more desk space. It works on both Mac and Windows.

The Codex Micro ships with a USB-C to USB-C cable and the Codex Icon Keyset, a collection of 32 custom-designed keycaps with icons specific to Codex functions. It’s the kind of peripheral that’ll appeal to developers who’ve started treating their AI agents less like chat windows and more like teammates running parallel tasks. It’s priced at $230, and stocks have been limited since its launch.

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nubia Just Built the World’s First Phone That Does Things on Its Own

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Smartphone makers have been adding AI features for a few years now, and at this point, the marketing language around them has become fairly predictable. A phone summarizes your messages, suggests reply text, cleans up your photos, and maybe transcribes a meeting. These are genuinely useful tools, but they’re still responding to individual requests. The phone doesn’t actually do anything on its own. Someone still has to ask.

The nubia NaviX Ultra is making a more ambitious claim. Unveiled at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, it’s being positioned as the world’s first AI agent smartphone, and the distinction matters. An AI agent doesn’t just respond to prompts; it operates across apps and services on behalf of the user, handling multi-step tasks without being asked to execute each one individually. Nubia is calling this system-level integration rather than a feature layer.

Designer: nubia

That distinction isn’t entirely hypothetical for nubia. The NaviX Ultra’s predecessor, the nubia M153 with Doubao AI assistant, debuted earlier this year in partnership with ByteDance and sold out its initial 30,000-unit batch on launch day in China. The NaviX Ultra is the commercial follow-up to that limited run, now carrying the Doubao assistant at a system level that nubia describes as enabling autonomous cross-platform operation. The phone also received the 2026 SAIL Award ahead of its unveiling.

The hardware specifics haven’t been fully confirmed yet. What nubia has revealed ahead of launch is the design: a metal-framed body with exceptionally narrow bezels, a triple rear camera arranged in a horizontal Pixel-style bar, and a dedicated AI button on the frame. The phone comes in four colorways: Blue Horizon, Black, Dreamscape, and White. Whether the internal hardware matches the ambition of the software positioning is still an open question until full specs are released.

What’s interesting about the NaviX Ultra’s framing isn’t just the technical claim. It’s what the AI agent model implies about how people actually use their phones. The friction of switching between apps, re-entering context, and manually chaining tasks together is real, and it’s something that feature-level AI has only partially addressed. A phone that can hold that context across apps and act on it changes the interaction model rather than just adding a new tool to an existing one.

Nubia’s Doubao partnership with ByteDance gives the NaviX Ultra’s AI ambitions a specific cultural and software context. Doubao is one of the most widely used AI assistants in China, which gives this particular agent integration a large user base to learn from. Whether the system-level AI agent lives up to the label is something that will only be testable after the full device is in hand, but nubia is at least asking a more interesting question than most of its competitors have been willing to pose publicly.

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The Fortune Teller Just Got an AI Upgrade and It Knows Too Much

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Remember the movie Big? Tom Hanks, the carnival Zoltar machine, a kid who just wanted to grow up overnight. That film had a way of making wish-granting feel both magical and slightly unsettling, because the machine didn’t really know you. It just read the room and gave you what you asked for. Now, almost four decades later, Australian art and technology studio ENESS has built something that does the same thing but with significantly more data points, and the result is one of the more thought-provoking design pieces to come out of the 2026 festival circuit.

HP*ATM, which stands for Human Psyche AI Teller Machine, debuted at Illuminate Adelaide 2026 as part of an exhibition called Automation Bias. It looks exactly like what you’d expect from an old ATM, boxy and vintage, with colored buttons and a telephone handset forming part of the interface. But instead of dispensing cash, it dispenses something far more personal: a psychological reading based on your face, your palm, and a series of choices you make in the moment. ENESS founder Nimrod Weis drew direct inspiration from the Zoltar machine in Big, and the connection makes complete sense once you’re standing in front of it.

Designer: ENESS

The premise is deceptively simple. You walk up, you consent (the screen literally asks, which is already more than most apps do), and the machine reads you. It analyzes your face and your palm, processes your button selections, and produces what the studio calls a “lyrical psychological reading.” You get a portrait of yourself, filtered through AI. And maybe that portrait is accurate. Maybe it’s not. But the more interesting question is: does it even matter? The moment you step up and say yes, you’ve already told the machine something about yourself.

That’s exactly the territory ENESS is navigating here, and they do it in a way that feels playful rather than preachy. The installation isn’t trying to scare you about AI. It’s asking you to notice something you’re already doing in your daily life, handing over intimate data to systems that claim to understand you, often without the ceremony of a formal machine with colored buttons formally asking for your consent. The irony is that HP*ATM might be the most transparent AI interaction many people have ever had, because at least it’s honest about what it’s doing.

There’s a layer of humor baked into the whole thing, which is very much part of ENESS’ design language. The vintage ATM aesthetic is a deliberate choice. Weis has said the installation is meant to remind visitors that current AI systems might eventually look as dated as cash machines and landline phones. That’s a point worth sitting with. The technologies we currently regard with either reverence or a low-grade anxiety tend to look a lot less intimidating in hindsight, and ENESS is nudging you toward that perspective while you’re still in the middle of it all.

The act of not participating also becomes part of the artwork, and that’s where the piece gets genuinely interesting. If you walk up and decide not to engage, that choice still belongs to the installation. The machine doesn’t require you to perform for it, but it does invite you to think about why you’d hesitate. Why would you say no to an AI reading your face when you’ve already handed that same data to your phone, your laptop camera, and roughly half the apps you downloaded last year without bothering to read the terms? The answer probably says more about you than the machine ever could. The question isn’t rhetorical. It’s just honest.

HP*ATM runs through August 30, 2026, at FutureJuice in Adelaide, Australia. If you happen to be near it, stepping up to that machine and choosing yes or no is probably more thought-provoking than most things you’ll do on your phone that day. And if you’re not in Adelaide, the work still travels with you, because the questions it raises don’t stay in the gallery. They follow you home.

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Google, Amazon, and Sonos All Redesigned Their Smart Speakers, Except Apple

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Between 2017 and 2021, Amazon’s devices division burned through over $25 billion, with Alexa and Echo hardware at the center of almost every bad quarter. The logic had always been that the hardware was just the entry point, a subsidized gateway to a much larger commercial relationship with the customer. But the gateway proved harder to monetize than expected. Alexa stayed useful but shallow. Echo devices multiplied without ever feeling essential. By the mid-2020s, the smart speaker category had the atmosphere of a bet that had come in wrong, expensive, underperforming, and quietly being maintained rather than championed. These fabric-covered cylinders became kitchen furniture, occasionally summoned for timers and weather forecasts, rarely inspiring anyone to rethink the room they lived in.

That atmosphere is lifting in 2026. Google, Amazon, and Sonos are each arriving with hardware that reflects a completely different set of priorities: softer silhouettes, AI that understands context, and audio that adapts to a space rather than simply occupying it. The smart speaker is being redesigned from the object outward, and the convergence across three separate companies suggests something closer to a category-wide correction than a coincidence of product cycles. The one company yet to offer a visible answer to this moment is Apple. It has the custom silicon, the acoustic engineering, and the design heritage to lead this reset. So far, it has chosen to watch.

The freeze began around 2020, right after the category normalized itself into oblivion. By that year, every major player had established its smart speaker lineup: a small version, a premium version, and often a screen-equipped version. Google had the Nest Audio and Nest Mini. Amazon had refined the Echo and Echo Dot into cheap, competent appliances. Apple had shipped the HomePod mini and repositioned the original HomePod as a premium but niche play. The market was saturated, the designs were settled, and the pace of innovation slowed to the rhythm of assistant software updates rather than genuine hardware rethinks. For half a decade, the smart speaker became something people bought once and forgot about. The category was not dead, but it had stopped asking interesting questions about itself.

What is happening now feels like an answer to questions the industry spent years avoiding. The new generation is defined by a shared visual and behavioral language that cuts across competitive lines. Fabrics are softer, volumes are lower, edges are gentler. Google’s latest Home Speaker trades the aggressive branding and hard plastic of earlier models for something that reads more like a domestic object than a gadget. Amazon rebuilt four Echo devices from scratch for its Alexa+ platform, including the new Echo Dot Max and Echo Studio, both of which prioritize touch-first controls and room-blending forms. Sonos pushed the Play and Era 100 SL into the same softer, more architectural territory. These are not coincidental choices. They reflect a collective decision that the smart speaker should feel native to the home, a piece of the room’s fabric rather than an intrusion into it.

The surface redesign only works because the internal proposition has changed too. The smarter pitch in 2026 is about behavior, not specs. AI assistants are becoming more conversational, more capable of understanding context, and in many cases more locally responsive without needing constant cloud reliance. On-device processing means faster reactions and more natural interactions. Room-aware audio tuning means the speaker adapts its output to the acoustics of the space it occupies, rather than blasting a fixed profile into every environment. The result is a device that feels less like a tool you command and more like a presence that integrates into how you use a room. That shift from command-and-response to ambient intelligence is what separates this generation from everything that came before it.

Apple’s absence from this wave is conspicuous, and it lands differently now than it might have two years ago. The company has not publicly joined the 2026 reset in any visible way. Its HomePod and HomePod mini remain comparatively static in a market that is suddenly showing signs of genuine motion. That gap would be easier to dismiss if Apple were not also in the middle of a larger hardware leadership transition. Johny Srouji, who has led Apple’s silicon engineering since 2015, was promoted to Chief Hardware Officer in April 2026, taking control of not just chips but batteries, cameras, sensors, and the full stack of core hardware technologies. Alongside John Ternus, who oversees hardware engineering as Senior Vice President, Srouji is now reshaping Apple’s product roadmap from the silicon up. That internal realignment suggests Apple is rethinking what it builds and why at a structural level, which makes the HomePod silence feel less like neglect and more like a strategic pause.

The question is what that pause means for the smart speaker itself. Apple could be deciding that the category remains secondary to other home devices in its hierarchy, or it could be planning a response that reflects the new leadership’s priorities in ways the current HomePod line does not. If Apple ships a more intelligent, more room-aware, more visibly rethought HomePod in the next twelve months, it will validate the broader industry thesis that smart speakers really are resetting around AI behavior and domestic presence. If it does not, then Apple may be signaling that it sees the smart speaker as a solved accessory category rather than a serious frontier worth heavy investment.

Either way, Apple’s eventual move will tell us more than just what the company thinks about voice assistants. It will reveal whether the smart speaker has genuinely earned a second act or whether the current wave of redesigns from Google, Amazon, and Sonos turns out to be the industry’s last serious attempt to make these devices matter. The category spent years being useful without being essential. The new generation is trying to close that gap. Apple’s decision to join that effort, or not, will be the clearest indication yet of whether the bet is finally worth taking seriously.

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Nokia’s 4 New Dumb Phones Still Come With an AI Button

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The dumb phone comeback has been one of the more quietly satisfying design stories of the last few years. People are tired. Tired of doom-scrolling, tired of notification overload, tired of carrying a pocket-sized anxiety machine everywhere. So when HMD quietly dropped four new Nokia feature phones — the Nokia 210 4G, Nokia 200 4G, Nokia 215 4G 2nd Edition, and Nokia 235 4G 2nd Edition — it felt like another chapter in that story. Except for one very notable detail sitting right on the side of each device: a dedicated AI button. Yes. An AI button. On a dumb phone.

Let me back up. These phones are, by most definitions, exactly what the dumb phone crowd has been asking for. Compact candy-bar designs. That immediately recognizable Nokia build, now with a metallic frame around the selfie camera and speaker that gives it a slightly more premium feel. A 1,450 mAh battery. A 3.5mm headphone jack, because HMD remembers those exist. FM radio. USB-C charging. The Nokia 215 4G 2nd Edition and Nokia 235 4G 2nd Edition carry 2.8-inch IPS displays, while the Nokia 200 4G and Nokia 210 4G keep things even more minimal with 2.4-inch screens. You can make calls, send texts, set an alarm, and leave your house without dreading a 14-hour screen time report. Classic.

Designer: HMD

And then there’s the AI. The button accesses an on-device assistant powered by Sikey AI, which lets you do things like turn on the flashlight, set a reminder, open the camera, or place a call using voice commands. It even comes with cloud phone service support, so you can check weather forecasts, sports news, and short-form video without eating up local storage.

On paper, that sounds almost reasonable. Voice control on a small phone with no touchscreen? Fine, I get it. But the moment you start pulling on that thread, the whole premise of a “digital detox device” starts to unravel a little. A feature phone that checks your weather and streams video content via the cloud is not exactly the quiet, intentional tool that most dumb phone enthusiasts are reaching for. It starts to feel less like a step back and more like a regular phone wearing a disguise.

The subscription element makes it even more interesting. The Sikey AI features come with a free trial period, after which users need to subscribe to a paid plan. HMD notes, somewhat cheekily, that you’ll need an actual smartphone to complete that purchase. So your minimalist phone requires a smartphone to fully unlock its most marketed feature. That’s a sentence.

None of this makes the devices bad. For their actual intended market — likely first-time phone users, older users who want simplicity, or people in markets where smartphone data is still a real cost concern — these phones make a lot of sense. The design language is clean and familiar. The feature set is honest. And HMD has clearly put thought into making them feel more current with the USB-C port and 4G connectivity.

But I keep thinking about what the AI button is really doing here. Is it genuinely useful? For some users, absolutely. Is it a design choice that muddies the identity of a product built around the appeal of doing less? Also yes. The best thing about a dumb phone is the clarity of purpose. You pick it up, you make a call, you put it down. Every added layer of “smart” functionality chips away at that clarity, even if the layer is thin.

HMD is navigating a strange middle ground, honoring a legacy brand built on simplicity while trying to stay current in a market that rewards anything labeled AI. Whether that balance lands well depends entirely on who’s buying. For the digital detox crowd, these probably won’t scratch that itch. For everyone else, they’re solid little phones with a lot of nostalgic charm and a feature that might come in handy more often than expected.

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A Moss-Covered Payphone Just Became the Voice of 2147

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Picture a payphone. Not a sleek, reimagined version, just an actual, beat-up Telefónica booth, the kind you might walk past on a Barcelona street without a second glance. Except this one is overtaken by moss. And if you pick up the handset, the Earth answers.

That’s the premise of 2147: A Voice from the Future, an interactive installation by Cris Olmedo of Divina Machina, the digital art branch of creative innovation studio QS Ventures. The piece was presented at Sónar+D, set against the medieval backdrop of the Llotja de Mar in Barcelona. That pairing alone says something: one of the oldest commercial buildings in the city, hosting an open-ended conversation with an AI that speaks on behalf of a future planet.

Designer: Cris Olmedo (Divina Machina)

The concept is disarmingly simple. You pick up the handset. The AI, voiced through an ElevenLabs system and powered by a Raspberry Pi 5 tucked inside the original booth, responds in real time as a fictional representation of the Earth. No scripts, no predefined dialogue paths, no multiple-choice menus. You take the conversation wherever you want, whether that’s climate, survival, memory, or grief. The Earth, imagined 121 years from now, has things to say. Whether you do is another matter.

What makes this work is the object itself. Olmedo didn’t design something new and purposefully futuristic. The booth kept its original Telefónica structure, its original signage, its unmistakably analog bones. Only what’s hidden inside changed. The moss slowly consuming the exterior reads like nature quietly reclaiming something that people gave up on. That tension between the obsolete and the alive does a lot of the emotional heavy lifting here, and it’s a smarter choice than any glowing interface could have been.

We tend to think of design as a forward-moving discipline, always chasing newer, faster, more capable. But 2147 asks a different question: what happens when you take something we’ve already discarded and give it a new reason to exist? The payphone is a perfect vessel for that question, precisely because it was once the most public, most democratic form of long-distance communication we had. You didn’t need an account, a plan, or a device you owned outright. Just a coin and a number to dial.

Now that infrastructure is largely gone. Olmedo took what’s left of it and filled it with something else entirely. That’s not just clever art direction. It’s a genuinely pointed observation about how we build things, discard them, and eventually recognize that the shell still has something to offer. The fact that this installation lives inside an actual retired Telefónica booth, rather than a replica, matters more than it might seem.

The year 2147 gives me pause, in the best way. It’s far enough to feel like science fiction, but close enough to feel like a countdown. It’s the kind of temporal framing that shakes you out of the comfortable haze of “we’ll deal with it later.” The Earth speaking through this installation isn’t a distant abstraction. It’s speaking through a receiver you’ve held before, in a language you already understand, about problems you’ve already heard about.

The moss is the detail I can’t stop thinking about. It reads as both beautiful and quietly alarming, the natural world slowly spreading over a structure that once represented human connection. As if the planet didn’t wait for us to sort things out. It also turns a mundane artifact into something you actually want to stop and stare at, which is half the job of any good installation. It communicates instantly and without explanation, which is exactly what good design is supposed to do.

2147: A Voice from the Future earns its concept. It’s not a payphone with AI bolted on. It’s a meditation on time, obsolescence, and the conversations we keep putting off. And the most compelling thing about it is that it asks you to start one, right now, handset in hand, with a planet that’s been waiting for you to pick up.

The post A Moss-Covered Payphone Just Became the Voice of 2147 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Lenovo’s AI Student Phone prioritizes learning over entertainment with smart parental controls

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Lenovo has introduced a smartphone with a very different purpose from the devices that dominate today’s gadget landscape. Instead of chasing higher performance, better cameras, or immersive entertainment, the AI Student Phone is designed to help students stay focused on learning while giving parents greater control over how the device is used. Launched in China at an affordable price of 299 Yuan (approximately $44), the phone strips away many of the distractions associated with modern smartphones. The device instead replaces them with AI-powered educational tools and safety-focused features.

Unlike conventional Android smartphones, the AI Student Phone intentionally excludes games, web browsers, and social media platforms. This reduces digital distractions during study sessions while still allowing students to stay connected with parents and access learning resources. Rather than serving as an all-purpose entertainment device, it functions as a communication and educational companion that encourages healthier smartphone habits.

Designer: Lenovo

A dedicated AI button sits on the side of the phone, providing instant access to the built-in assistant. Students can ask questions using voice commands, receive explanations for school subjects, and get homework assistance without navigating through multiple apps. Lenovo positions the AI assistant as a reliable study companion that can provide quick answers while keeping interactions simple enough for younger users.

Parents receive an equally important set of features through extensive remote management tools. They can monitor the phone’s location using GPS tracking, establish geofenced safe zones, and receive notifications whenever a child enters or leaves designated areas such as school or home. The parental controls also make it possible to manage usage remotely, ensuring the device remains focused on educational activities rather than unnecessary distractions.

The phone includes support for voice and video calling, allowing families to stay in touch throughout the day. Despite the simplified software experience, the device still offers practical communication capabilities, making it suitable for everyday use. Lenovo has also incorporated emergency features that enable children to quickly contact family members if needed, further strengthening the device’s appeal as a first phone for younger users.

From a hardware perspective, the AI Student Phone focuses on reliability instead of premium specifications. It features a compact touchscreen display, basic cameras for communication, and sufficient battery capacity to comfortably last through a school day. The modest hardware helps keep costs low while remaining adequate for the educational tasks the phone is intended to perform.

While its highly restricted software environment may not appeal to general smartphone users, Lenovo’s latest device fills a niche that many parents have been looking for. This is an affordable phone that keeps children connected without exposing them to the endless distractions of traditional smartphones. The budget-friendly AI Student Phone is a highly practical solution for families seeking a safer introduction to mobile technology for students.

 

The post Lenovo’s AI Student Phone prioritizes learning over entertainment with smart parental controls first appeared on Yanko Design.