Tag Archives: privacy

AI Surveillance Cameras Can’t See Through This Jacket

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The last time I really thought about what my outfit was doing for me, I was considering whether my summer dress made me look like I was fashionable or it was just perfect for the hot weather. Simon Weckert has me rethinking the question entirely. Do my clothes do something for me other than protect me from the elements or make me look cool? Can they be about something more?

The Berlin-based artist recently unveiled Digital Camouflage, a conceptual garment collection that does one very specific, very remarkable thing: it makes you invisible to AI. Not invisible to the human eye, obviously. You’d still be fully, stylishly present to anyone walking past you. But to the surveillance cameras powered by AI-based person detection systems that increasingly populate airports, streets, and public spaces, you essentially cease to exist. That’s not a metaphor. It’s the engineering.

Designer: Simon Weckert

The collection works through what researchers call an adversarial attack, a method of manipulating visual data so that a machine misreads what it’s looking at. The garments are printed with a continuous, generative pattern that floods AI recognition systems with computational noise. The algorithm looks at you, processes the visual information, and fails to register a person. You’re there. The camera sees you. But the machine watching through it draws a blank.

At first glance, the clothes look like bold graphic fashion. The kind of abstract print that could easily headline a capsule collection or land on an editorial mood board. The technical function is completely hidden in plain sight, which is, when you think about it, a fairly elegant bit of design irony.

Previous anti-recognition designs relied on fixed printed patches, a kind of static visual disruption that quickly lost effectiveness when fabric folded or camera angles shifted. Weckert’s collection uses a continuous adversarial texture across the entire garment surface, designed to hold up against both movement and perspective change. It’s not a sticker. It’s the whole jacket.

The collection is manufactured in Latvia from a blend of 65% recycled polyester and 35% polyester, with the adversarial pattern applied through digital textile printing. For something that sounds like it belongs in a speculative fiction exhibit, it’s a remarkably practical construction.

And yet, the project lives comfortably in conceptual territory. Weckert is not selling these at retail. Digital Camouflage was exhibited at Ars Electronica Festival 2025, which carries a certain kind of cultural weight. Ars Electronica has long been the venue where designers and technologists come to ask uncomfortable questions rather than offer comfortable answers. Showing the work there feels deliberate. This isn’t a product pitch. It’s a provocation.

I think that tension is exactly where the project is most interesting. The garment works, or is designed to work, but its purpose is as much about raising the question as answering it. Who should have the right to walk through a public space without being catalogued? At what point does automated surveillance stop being a security tool and start being a form of ambient control? Weckert isn’t handing out a manifesto. He’s handing out a jacket.

The fact that we even need clothes that hide us from cameras is worth pausing on. Digital surveillance infrastructure has expanded so quietly and so consistently that most of us have simply accepted it as background noise. AI-powered cameras now occupy the same mental category as streetlights: ubiquitous, impersonal, unremarkable. Weckert’s collection interrupts that acceptance, not through argument, but through design.

Fashion has always been a negotiation between the self and the seen. We dress for impressions, for identity, for protection against the cold. Adding protection against algorithmic recognition to that list feels like a genuinely new chapter in a very old human conversation about who gets to see us and on whose terms.

Whether or not Digital Camouflage ever becomes something you can actually buy, it has already done its most important work. It made an abstract threat feel like something you can put on your body. And sometimes that’s all it takes to make people start paying attention.

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Most Laptops Mute Your Camera in Software, This One Cuts the Wire

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The privacy conversation around laptops tends to happen entirely in software. Operating systems add permissions dialogs, apps get granted or denied microphone access, and browsers warn about tracking cookies. All of that matters, but it operates in a layer that can be undermined by the hardware underneath it. A microphone that’s turned off in software is still physically connected to a circuit that could, under the right conditions, be activated without the user’s knowledge.

The Purism Librem 16 treats that gap as the actual problem worth solving. It’s a 16-inch Linux laptop built around the premise that hardware security has to be literal, not just promised. Two physical kill switches on the body electrically disconnect the camera and microphone as one group and the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio as another. Not toggled in software, not muted through the operating system, but physically disconnected from the board.

Designer: Purism

The machine runs Intel’s 13th-generation Core i7-13620H, with ten cores, 16 threads, and a peak frequency of 4.9GHz. Two DDR4 RAM slots support up to 64GB, and two M.2 slots can take the storage configuration all the way up to 16TB. Four USB ports cover the connectivity side, split evenly between two USB-C ports running USB4 with DisplayPort alternate mode and two Type-A USB 3.2 ports, alongside HDMI, Ethernet, a headphone jack, and a microSD reader.

The Intel Management Engine, a separate embedded processor that runs independently of the main CPU and operating system, is disabled. This component exists on most Intel-based systems and can operate even while the machine is off, a characteristic that privacy-focused hardware communities have objected to for years. Disabling it removes the most significant piece of hardware the owner never had direct control over.

Firmware comes in the form of PureBoot, Purism’s implementation of Coreboot combined with the Heads open-source security framework. This replaces the conventional UEFI BIOS with a verified boot process that can detect whether the firmware has been tampered with since the last known-good state. An optional Librem Key USB token works alongside PureBoot to verify that nothing has changed between sessions, providing tamper detection at startup.

The operating system is PureOS, a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution that ships with only free and open-source software. Purism also offers an optional anti-interdiction service, a supply chain inspection process that adds physical tamper-evidence measures before the laptop ships, for buyers who want assurance that the hardware hasn’t been compromised in transit.

Aesthetically, the Librem 16 carries the understated design language that runs across the Librem lineup. The lid has no branding, the ports have no identifying icons, and the only visible label appears above the keyboard indicating the model. The aluminum chassis keeps the profile clean, matching the design intent of a machine meant to disappear into its owner’s workflow rather than announce itself.

The base model starts at $2,899, with a 32GB/2TB configuration at $4,199 and a fully maxed-out 64GB/16TB version at $9,799. Given that the premium is paid for hardware-level privacy architecture rather than raw performance specs, that price range is exactly what the machine’s philosophy leads to.

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Google Built a Translation Device That Doesn’t Need Google’s Own Cloud

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Real-time translation has quietly become one of the most useful things AI can do, and most of the solutions doing it well are deeply dependent on cloud infrastructure. The phone apps and earbuds that translate conversations on the fly are continuously routing audio through remote servers, which works fine until the network doesn’t. Travel to areas with spotty coverage, use a device that can’t roam internationally, or simply value keeping your conversations off someone else’s server, and the whole pipeline collapses at the exact moment you need it most.

The Gemma Translator is a direct answer to that. It’s a handheld voice translation device that runs its entire AI processing pipeline locally on a Raspberry Pi 5, with no internet required after the initial setup. There’s no cloud to route audio through, no API key to maintain, and no service that can be discontinued. You speak into it, and it translates and speaks back, all on the same pocket-sized device.

Designer: Google

The hardware is deliberately approachable. A Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM powers the whole thing, paired with a 480×320 touchscreen, a microphone, a speaker, push-to-talk buttons, and a rotary encoder for selecting languages. Everything fits inside a 3D-printed enclosure in yellow and black, and the STL files for printing it are included in the open-source repository, so anyone with a printer can replicate the physical build exactly.

The software stack is what makes the offline operation genuinely work at useful speeds. Translation runs on Google’s Gemma 4 E2B model via LiteRT-LM, hitting around six tokens per second on the RPi 5 while using under 1.5GB of RAM. Speech recognition uses Moonshine, which is reportedly up to five times faster than Whisper Tiny. Text-to-speech output runs through Kokoro. The result is a complete speech-in, speech-out translation loop that stays on the device from start to finish.

The interface was designed specifically for face-to-face conversation rather than solo use. Two modes let the device handle either one person managing both sides of the exchange or two people independently operating their own microphone and language selection. Physical buttons keep recording controls tactile, which matters when you’re trying to have a conversation rather than navigate menus.

The privacy argument is almost incidental to how useful the offline capability turns out to be in purely practical terms. Field researchers in areas without reliable networks, travelers moving through places where international data is expensive, and anyone working in a sensitive conversation context all get the same thing: a translation device that doesn’t require a connection to keep working. The fact that none of the audio ever leaves the device is simply a consequence of building something that had to work without one.

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A Designer Just Answered Facial Recognition With a Medieval Visor

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Facial recognition has become one of the fastest-growing forms of infrastructure in public life. Cameras in airports, transit systems, retail spaces, and city streets capture biometric data routinely, often without the awareness of the people being scanned. The face has gradually become something closer to a credential, an identifier read by systems that process it instantly against databases that are constantly growing.

OBEX is a conceptual wearable that treats this shift as a design problem worth addressing through physical form. Rather than responding to surveillance with software or policy, it proposes a new category called “privacy armor,” a tangible boundary between the wearer and systems of biometric recognition. Its form language doesn’t come from consumer electronics but from something much older, the medieval visor.

Designer: Haechan Ryu

In medieval warfare, a knight’s visor concealed identity while creating distance between the person and the world beyond the armor. The logic behind OBEX borrows that idea and applies it to a different kind of threat, one that’s less physical and more informational. As surveillance systems continuously collect and analyze biometric data, the face becomes a vulnerable interface, and OBEX imagines what it would mean to shield it.

The visor itself is made from a micro-perforated optical film that allows the wearer to see out clearly while appearing opaque from the outside. It’s a deliberate asymmetry, the kind that surveillance systems rely on, reversed and put in the hands of the individual. The shielding motion references the sliding visors of historical armor, and the weight distribution is engineered to reduce strain across the head during long wear.

The temple module anchors the visor to the head and holds most of the active technology. Embedded PPG sensors monitor physiological data in real time, enabling continuous biometric monitoring through the wearer’s own biological signature. Dual directional speakers deliver audio feedback without cutting the wearer off from surrounding sounds, and a small bitmap display on the side communicates system status and shield activation modes at a glance.

The frame is precision-engineered titanium, chosen for its balance of strength and low weight. The outer surface carries a refined micro-texture that improves grip while minimizing visible wear over time. The ornamental detailing on the temple module draws from the craftsmanship traditions of medieval armor, with intricate surface patterns that make the component read more as a personal artifact than as a piece of hardware.

OBEX isn’t proposing that everyone should walk around in a visor. It’s asking what protection means when the thing being protected isn’t the body but the face’s function as an identity signal. The concept sits at the edge of speculative design and industrial practice, using grounded materials and structural logic to imagine an object that doesn’t quite exist yet, but one that feels increasingly necessary.

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This Google-Free Phone Is IP68-Rated and Has a Replaceable Battery

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Most smartphones ship with an assumption baked in: that you’re fine with your data running through Google’s servers, your habits feeding its algorithms, and its apps occupying your home screen whether you asked for them or not. Privacy-first phones have tried to push back against this for years, but they’ve often done so at the cost of build quality, performance, or both.

Volla has been making the case that those trade-offs aren’t necessary, and the Plinius is the latest, most convincing version of that argument. Named after Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist who died investigating the eruption of Vesuvius, it’s a phone built for the curious, the outdoorsy, and the uncompromising. It’s also the direct successor to the Volla Phone X23, and it’s a considerable step up.

Designer: Volla

The body carries an IP68 rating against water and dust, which you’d expect from a rugged phone, but what’s less expected is how slim and light the Plinius is. At 163mm x 76mm x 10.5mm and 230 grams, it’s noticeably slimmer than its predecessor. A transparent back cover and armored glass film come in the box, and the touchscreen handles wet hands and gloves without missing a beat.

The 5,300 mAh battery keeps things going through a full day and beyond, with 30W fast charging and 15W wireless charging both covered. What’s genuinely unusual, though, is that the battery is user-replaceable with a standard screwdriver, even with the IP68 rating in place. That’s a deliberate choice from a company that built its reputation on longevity and transparency rather than planned obsolescence.

Out of the box, the Plinius runs Volla OS, a Google-free build of Android with a clean, text-based interface and a Security Mode that controls which apps communicate externally. Ubuntu Touch is also available, a fully Linux-based OS from the UBports Foundation that doubles as a desktop when connected to a monitor, and you can run both on the same device.

The 6.67-inch FHD+ OLED display runs at up to 120 Hz and reaches 1,000 nits of peak brightness, so outdoor visibility isn’t an issue even in direct sunlight. The triple-camera setup is anchored by a 64MP main shooter with phase-detection autofocus, an 8MP ultra-wide, and a 2MP macro, with a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 processor and 5G connectivity running the show underneath.

Step up to the Plinius Plus, and you get 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and an extra-durable back cover with a Pogo PIN connector for accessories that attach magnetically. The modular system is still in its early days, but the open-source hardware foundation is already in place, and it’s a signal that Volla isn’t done thinking about where this phone can go.

The standard Plinius starts at €598 and arrives in April 2026, while the Plus is priced at €698 with a June 2026 release. For most people, neither version is a cheap proposition, and mid-range internals might make that sting a little. For those who’ve quietly grown tired of being tracked, targeted, and optimized against, the price suddenly starts to look far more reasonable.

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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.

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This Finnish Privacy-focused Linux Phone Wants You to Forget Google Exists

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Finland gave us Nokia, the company that taught an entire generation what a mobile phone could be before the iPhone rewrote the rules. That legacy didn’t vanish when Microsoft bought Nokia’s devices division in 2013. It splintered into smaller, fiercer projects, including Jolla, a company founded by ex-Nokia engineers who refused to let European mobile technology die quietly. Jolla launched its first phone in 2013 running Sailfish OS, a Linux-based alternative to Android and iOS, and while that device never broke into the mainstream, it proved something vital: you could build a commercial-grade mobile OS outside the American duopoly. Thirteen years later, Jolla is back with new hardware, 10,000 pre-orders, and a renewed argument that Europe deserves its own smartphone ecosystem.

The new Jolla Phone costs €649 and ships in two waves, the first batch leaving Finland at the end of June 2026, with a second limited run of 2,000 units arriving in September. It runs Sailfish OS 5, the latest iteration of Jolla’s Linux-based platform, and it supports Android apps through an emulation layer that strips out Google’s surveillance infrastructure. The hardware sits comfortably in mid-range territory: a 6.36-inch Full HD+ AMOLED display, MediaTek Dimensity 7100 5G chipset, 8GB of RAM (expandable to 12GB), and 128GB of storage (upgradable to 256GB). Final assembly happens in Salo, Finland, the same city where Nokia used to manufacture millions of handsets per year, and every unit ships with a physical privacy switch that kills the microphones, cameras, and Bluetooth when you flip it.

Designer: Jolla Phone

The design language leans heavily into Scandinavian minimalism with a splash of nostalgia. The Orange colorway (one of three finishes alongside Snow White and Kaamos Black) features a vibrant coral hue that recalls the bold plastics Nokia used on devices like the Lumia 920. The rear panel is smooth and removable, emblazoned with a script “jolla” wordmark and the Sailfish OS logo at the bottom. Two camera lenses sit in the top-left corner in a vertical arrangement, and the overall footprint is boxy and utilitarian rather than chasing the curved-edge aesthetic that dominates Android flagships. Physical buttons line the right edge, the top houses what appears to be a modular accessory port, and the bottom edge packs a USB-C port flanked by speaker grilles. The front is all screen with minimal bezels, no notch, and no hole-punch cutout, giving the display a clean, uninterrupted canvas.

Jolla’s privacy commitments go deeper than marketing copy. The physical privacy switch, located on the side of the device, cuts power to the microphones, cameras, and Bluetooth radios entirely, a hardware-level kill switch that software toggles can’t replicate. Sailfish OS doesn’t require a Google account, doesn’t collect location data for advertising, and doesn’t send telemetry back to corporate servers. The operating system compiles from source code in-house, and Jolla installs it manually in Finland rather than relying on third-party ODMs. The battery is user-replaceable, a feature that disappeared from flagship phones over a decade ago, and one that extends the device’s practical lifespan well beyond the typical two-year upgrade cycle.

The modular back panel revives the “Other Half” concept from the original Jolla Phone, which allowed users to swap colorful rear covers that could also carry NFC chips to trigger UI themes and functionality changes. This time around, Jolla is opening the platform to third-party designers and hardware hackers, with potential add-ons including secondary e-ink displays, physical keyboards, and extended batteries. Android app compatibility comes courtesy of Jolla’s AppSupport layer, which emulates the Android runtime without Google Play Services, meaning banking apps, messaging platforms, and productivity tools run normally but without the tracking apparatus baked into standard Android. It’s a pragmatic compromise: you get access to the app ecosystem that makes a smartphone functional in 2026, but you don’t hand over behavioral data in exchange.

Jolla CEO Sami Pienimäki positioned the phone explicitly as a statement of technological sovereignty, arguing that Europe’s dependence on American mobile infrastructure represents both a privacy liability and a strategic weakness. Only four commercial-grade mobile operating systems exist today: iOS and Android from the United States, HarmonyOS from China, and Sailfish OS from Finland. Antti Saarnio, chairman of the Jolla Group, acknowledges the phone will remain a niche product in the near term but frames it as infrastructure for what comes next, particularly as AI reshapes the form factors and interaction models we use to access computing. Whether Jolla scales beyond enthusiasts and privacy advocates depends on how well Sailfish OS holds up in daily use and whether the company can sustain hardware production beyond these initial batches.

The Jolla Phone is available now for pre-order in EU countries, the UK, Norway, and Switzerland, priced at €649 with a €99 deposit required upfront. The September 2026 batch is capped at 2,000 units, and given that the first wave of pre-orders moved 10,000 devices in just three months, that inventory won’t last long. A U.S. launch is under consideration but has no confirmed timeline, and while the phone should theoretically work with major American carriers, it lacks FCC approval. If you’ve been waiting for a legitimate alternative to the iOS-Android duopoly, this is the closest thing Europe has built in over a decade.

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The Brax open_slate is a modular tablet that lets you actually own what you buy

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Most tablets arrive as sealed objects with decisions already made for you: storage is fixed, the battery is buried somewhere inaccessible, and the operating system is whatever the manufacturer chose. You use the device on those terms until it slows down or falls out of software support, and then you replace it. Brax Technologies, the company behind the BraX3 privacy smartphone, is betting there’s a different way to do this.

The open_slate is a 12-inch 2-in-1 tablet that treats its hardware as a starting point rather than a finished product. Inside the chassis sits an M.2 2280 slot, a standard used in laptops and desktops, allowing owners to swap in faster storage, add capacity, or eventually slot in a network card. There’s also a user-replaceable battery, which sounds mundane until you consider how few tablet makers have bothered to include one in years.

Designer: Brax Technologies

That battery holds 8,000mAh and carries a claimed 20-hour runtime, a figure that tracks given how efficiently ARM processors handle light workloads. The MediaTek Genio 720 chip pairs two Cortex-A78 performance cores with six Cortex-A55 efficiency cores. It’s a capable mid-range processor, not a desktop replacement, but paired with either 8GB or 16GB of RAM and a 120Hz display, daily use should feel smooth for the tasks the device is designed for.

That 12-inch IPS screen runs at 1600 x 2400 resolution with Gorilla Glass protection and supports a stylus at 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity. Connectivity covers Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, GPS, and two USB-C ports, one supporting DisplayPort 1.4 output. Someone writing on the go, sketching ideas, or running a Linux terminal while connected to an external monitor could reasonably treat this as a primary machine, provided the software cooperates.

On that note: the open_slate ships with BraxOS, a de-Googled Android build, and targets Ubuntu support through MediaTek’s Genio developer platform. Brax acknowledges that some Linux features may not be complete at launch, which is an honest position for a small team working outside the mainstream supply chain. ARM Linux has improved considerably, but it still surprises you at inconvenient moments.

The physical kill switches are the most distinctive feature on paper. Dedicated toggles cut power to the cameras, microphone, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS at the hardware level, not through a software setting that an app might quietly bypass. This design logic comes from the secure laptop world, and applying it to a consumer tablet is unusual enough to notice. For anyone who’s thought seriously about what their devices transmit and to whom, the appeal is immediate.

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Punkt. MC03 Is a Smartphone You Buy With Money, Not Your Data

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Most phones make a familiar bargain: free services and slick apps in exchange for constant tracking, profiling, and data being treated as currency. The line about how if you do not pay for the product, you are the product, has gone from cliché to lived reality. Punkt. has been quietly pushing back against that logic for years, starting with minimalist feature phones and now moving into full touchscreen territory with the same philosophy intact.

The Punkt. MC03 is a premium secure smartphone designed in Switzerland and built in Germany, running AphyOS instead of mainstream Android skins. It is subscription-based by design; you pay for the OS and services, so you are not paying with your data. The pitch is simple: a modern, fully capable phone where privacy is the default, not a buried settings menu you hope you configured correctly.

Designer: Punkt.

AphyOS splits the phone into two spaces. Vault is the calm, minimalist home screen with Punkt. curated, privacy-friendly apps and Proton services, a hardened enclave for mail, calendar, messaging, and files. Wild Web is a swipe away, where you can install any app you want, but each one lives in its own privacy bubble, with clear controls over what data flows where and who gets to see it.

The interface is deliberately color-free and stripped back. Icons are simple, backgrounds are monochrome, and the whole thing is designed to reduce visual noise and cognitive load. The idea is to make the phone feel less like a slot machine and more like a tool, nudging you toward intentional use instead of endless scrolling, without taking away the apps you actually rely on for work or getting around.

Privacy tools include Digital Nomad, the built-in VPN that protects connectivity on the move, and Ledger, which lets you dial app-specific permissions from full access to full restriction, even showing the carbon impact of background activity. The MC03 can be de-Googled, reducing reliance on Google Mobile Services, and Proton Mail, Drive, VPN, and Pass live in Vault, reflecting a Swiss Tech ethos where you pay to retain your data.

The hardware is quietly competent, a 6.67-inch FHD+ OLED at 120 Hz, a 64 MP main camera with ultra-wide and macro companions, dual stereo speakers, and a removable 5,200 mAh battery with 30 W wired and 15 W wireless charging. It is IP68 rated and manufactured at Gigaset’s German facility, leaning into durability, repairability, and a European supply chain as part of the trust equation, not just marketing.

The MC03 is talking to people who are tired of feeling like their handset is a tracking device with a screen attached, but who do not want to retreat to a feature phone. It suggests a different path, a smartphone that still does all the smartphone things, but asks you to pay for the privilege of keeping your data yours, and makes that trade-off feel intentional instead of hidden. For anyone looking for an alternative to the usual iOS or Android bargain, Punkt. keeps building that alternative, one monochrome screen and one Swiss principle at a time.

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Jolla Phone Returns with a Physical Switch to Cut Off Mics and Tracking

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The mobile OS graveyard is crowded. Symbian, MeeGo, Firefox OS, Windows Phone, all killed by iOS and Android’s duopoly. Most people quietly accepted that those two won and moved on. Jolla started from Nokia’s MeeGo ashes in 2013, shipped the original Jolla Phone, and somehow kept Sailfish OS alive for twelve years in the wilderness. The new Jolla Phone feels less like a comeback and more like a refusal to die.

Jolla frames it as Europe’s independent smartphone, a 5G Sailfish OS 5 device built around the pitch that every Android and iPhone phones home to California. The announcement post says this is about digital sovereignty and choice rather than nationalism, but the subtext is clear: Europe needs its own mobile platform, or it stays perpetually dependent on US and China infrastructure. It is a Linux phone you are meant to daily drive, not a dev kit or novelty.

Designer: Jolla

The core specs sit in upper mid-range territory. A 6.36-inch FullHD AMOLED screen, a Mediatek 5G platform, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage with microSD expansion up to two terabytes, dual SIM, and a 5,500 mAh battery. The flat-sided Scandinavian design offers replaceable back covers in Snow White, Kaamos Black, and The Orange, a nod to the original Jolla’s signature color. It includes a side fingerprint reader and an RGB notification LED.

The privacy hardware choices feel almost retro. A physical privacy switch can be configured to cut off the mic, Bluetooth, Android apps, or other subsystems. The battery and back cover are user-replaceable, which feels unusual in a world of sealed slabs. Those choices align with the idea of owning your device instead of renting it, and they support Sailfish OS’s pitch as “private by design,” with no tracking or hidden analytics happening in the background.

Sailfish OS 5 is a Linux-based, gesture-heavy mobile OS that Jolla promises will get at least five years of updates without forced obsolescence. App ecosystems matter, so the phone includes Android app support via Jolla AppSupport, without Google Play Services. That means many Android apps will run, but you are not feeding data into Google’s backend every time you unlock your phone or letting services siphon usage patterns while sitting idle.

The funding model is a 99 euro fully refundable pre-order voucher toward a 499 euro final price, with production only happening if at least two thousand units are reserved. The community voted on key specs and features, and the campaign already passed its goal. The phone becomes a Do It Together project where early adopters literally decide whether it exists, and pre-order customers get a special edition back cover as a thank you.

The new Jolla Phone represents a rare, stubbornly optimistic alternative in a market that settled on two platforms years ago. It will not replace iOS or Android for most people, and there are risks around timelines and app compatibility. But for anyone who wants a phone that treats privacy, longevity, and independence as design constraints instead of afterthoughts, Jolla’s return feels like proof that small, opinionated hardware can still find oxygen if the community wants it badly enough.

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