Last year, for instance, the company enjoyed record U.S. sales in September after the launch of the Pixel 10 line, according to Counterpoint Research. But despite achieving 28% year-on-year growth, the Pixel still only accounted for 6.1% of the $600-and-up smartphone market in the US, which is dominated by Apple.

There is one market, however, where Google has managed to turn the Pixel into a big hit, and surprisingly it’s in a country that was one of the last to adopt its search engine. The entry-level Pixel 8A and 9A have been some of the best-selling phones in Japan over recent years, and this seems to have prompted Google to pull out all the stops for the latest iteration.

Read more

At the time, I was imagining that it might be difficult for the Pixel 10 to compete with an upgraded 10A six months down the line. Well, now that that phone is here — belatedly so in Japan — I have to assume that Google agreed with my premise, because the 10A has very few upgrades at all.

That’s not to say it’s a bad phone — the Pixel 9A was a major upgrade in terms of technology and design for the A-series, and none of that has regressed here. But it’s clear that certain updates were left on the table, meaning the Pixel 10 remains relevant and an obvious step above.

The design is very similar to the 9A but features a couple of notable tweaks. While the 9A had an unusually tiny camera bump that almost felt like it had been laminated onto the back of the phone, the 10A’s is even less protrusive — in fact, it’s actually slightly recessed.

Google seems to have achieved this by making the phone a tenth of a millimetre thicker, which is less noticeable in the hand than the difference in the camera design. It does make for a phone that feels refreshingly different to use, even if it’s only possible due to the modest camera hardware.

The plastic back panel still feels a little cheap, but I can at least vouch for the new “Berry” colourway that my review unit comes in. It’s honestly quite unlike any other phone colour I’ve ever seen — kind of a vibrant red with hot pink undertones. I think it’s a great look, and together with the minimalist camera bump and lack of glass on the back, it makes the 10A the perfect phone to use without a case.

Unfortunately, this also means it’s all the more disappointing that Google didn’t bring over the MagSafe-compatible Pixelsnap magnetic wireless charging feature that it introduced with the other Pixel 10 phones. Apple made the same mistake with its entry-level iPhone 16E last year and rectified it with the 17E; Google should really do the same. Those magnets can’t be that expensive and they do make a huge difference in usability.

The screen is very similar to last year’s model, keeping the same 6.3” size and 1080p resolution but upgrading to Gorilla Glass 7i and boosting the outdoor brightness by a couple of hundred nits to 2,000. The bezels have been slimmed down due to imperceptibly smaller dimensions in the phone itself, but the difference is quite noticeable when you look at the two screens side-by-side — they’re thinner and now fully symmetrical, giving a more refined look.

But the 10A is still noticeably bigger in the hand than the regular Pixel 10, despite having the same size screen. Clearly there is a point at which Google is unwilling or unable to further shrink dimensions while meeting a certain price.

That’s about it for visible changes. The battery is still a solid 5,100mAh, close to the 5,200mAh capacity in the much larger Pixel 10 Pro XL, and it’s performed well in general use for me; it also now charges at 30W, up from 23W in the 9A.

The camera system is unchanged, using a 48-megapixel 1/2” sensor and an f/1.7 lens for the main shooter and a 13-megapixel 1/3.1” sensor with an f/2.2 lens on the ultrawide. Google did add some new software features from the other Pixel 10 phones, like the AI-powered Camera Coach and Auto Best Take, but otherwise I know what to expect from this camera setup at this point. The hardware isn’t great but it does the job at recreating the punchy, slightly artificial Pixel look.

Beyond the camera, the Pixel 10A also solidly delivers on the general Pixel software experience, which I continue to be even more of a fan of since Google’s Material 3 Expressive overhaul based on Android 16. This is just a fun phone to use, with quirky, appealing visual design and animations throughout, as well as trademark system-level features like Circle to Search and various real-time language capabilities.

But the most contentious decision on the Pixel 10A risks it getting left behind in that regard. Google has chosen to stick with the Tensor G4 chip from the Pixel 9 generation of phones, rather than moving to the 10-series’ G5. The 10A also still tops out at 256GB of storage and, critically, 8GB of RAM, which means it doesn’t run the latest Gemini Nano models that enable features like Magic Cue, the Pixel Screenshots app and notification summaries.

I do think the 10A is a good phone for $499, and the Pixel 10 lineup is now solidly differentiated at a range of price points. The upgrade to the 10 makes sense for $300, or if you can find it at a discount: you get better build quality, a telephoto camera, thinner bezels, a faster chip with all the features it enables and — maybe most importantly — Pixelsnap.

But that’s also what you’d get over the Pixel 9A, which you can probably find for even cheaper than the 10A, and you won’t be missing out on much. It feels like the 10A only exists to help straighten out the lineup and provide an updated offering for anyone who does need an upgrade this year.

The 10A itself will also be upgraded as time goes on, of course. To its credit, Google has now assembled a coherent range of phones that all work in their own way for various budgets.

Still, the 10A ends a run of increasingly impressive A-series upgrades, where each year erased a particular pain point and left you wondering what would even be left to keep for the higher-end models next time around. This time, the difference is a lot more obvious.

Which is fine for now, because there’s actually quite a lot to talk about on that front.

Readers, I am smitten. After last year’s excellent but fairly staid X8 Ultra, Oppo has followed it up with a gorgeous phone that finally makes the most of the company’s Hasselblad partnership.

This review unit comes in the “Tunda Umbra” colourway, which takes notes from the Earth Explorer limited edition of the Hasselblad X2D 100C. Like that camera, the finish here is akin to a gunmetal grey with slight brown undertones — notably different to the vaguely reddish Find X9 Pro — and it’s paired with a black vegan leather material for grip.

Oppo says the design “channels Scandinavian minimalism and the raw beauty of tundra and glaciers, honouring legendary craftsmanship.” The Oppo and Hasselblad logos are both horizontally aligned, reinforcing the idea that the X9 Ultra is meant to be held in landscape orientation, like a camera. There’s a Hasselblad-trademark orange ring around the knurled camera bump, which is also echoed in the dedicated shutter button on the top edge of the phone.

Oppo did make one unusual choice with the camera bump, giving the glass section a vaguely hexagonal design that’s inspired by the aperture blades of camera lenses. I’m not fully sold on this, as the rounded shape means it doesn’t really look regular from any angle.

Overall, though, the effect is very impressive. This phone feels like a tank in terms of build quality, and Oppo has done a great job of giving it the sense that it’s a piece of professional equipment you could take anywhere.

The other finish is Canyon Orange, which I briefly saw at a preview event in Shenzhen last month. This version of the Find X9 Ultra has a completely different vibe, and it’s also pretty different to the orange Find N6 I’ve been using; it has a fibre back panel with an orange pattern that’s subtly embossed with a pattern evocative of Antelope Canyon.

At 8.65mm, the Canyon Orange Find X9 Ultra is almost half a millimetre thinner than the Tundra Umbra version, and it’s also a single gram lighter. For me, though, Tundra Umbra is clearly the way to go. This is just a great-looking phone that I’m excited to go out and shoot with seriously.

Xiaomi set a very high bar for cameraphone design early this year with the 17 Ultra by Leica, and so far I would say Oppo has certainly risen to the challenge. Stay tuned to see how the X9 Ultra matches up in terms of performance.

For now, real hardware sickos may be able to glean some hints from this close-up of the camera bump:

So, this past weekend I went to New Japan Pro Wrestling’s Sakura Genesis show at the Ryogoku Kokugikan, which is better known as the national venue for sumo in Tokyo. I don’t follow pro wrestling very closely but I am somewhat into NJPW; this was the first show I’d been to in a little over a year.

Anyway, great show. I thought the best match was the tag title contest between the Knockout Brothers (Oskar and Yuto-Ice) and TMDK (Zack Sabre Jr. and Ryohei Oiwa).

As for the camera setup, I brought the Find X9 Pro as well as its dedicated 10x Hasselblad teleconverter kit.

Here’s the hardware you get with the Find X9 Pro:

• 23mm-equivalent lens with a 50-megapixel 1/1.28” sensor and f/1.5 aperture

• 70mm-equivalent telephoto lens with a 200-megapixel 1/1.56” sensor and f/2.1 aperture

• 3.28x teleconverter that attaches onto the 70mm lens for a 230mm-equivalent field of view

• 15mm-equivalent ultrawide with a 50-megapixel 1/2.76” sensor and f/2 aperture

But I relied almost entirely on the teleconverter, for a few reasons. First off, these were our seats:

Secondly, in order to use it you have to attach a case and then a mounting plate that covers all the other camera lenses. You also have to use the teleconverter in a dedicated mode within the camera app, because it inverts the image from the 70mm lens.

And thirdly, well, what else is an unwieldy telephoto lens attachment for if not taking close-up photos of professional wrestlers.

No edits, as ever.

Read more

Infinix is a sub-brand of Chinese company Transsion, which also owns the smartphone maker Tecno. The manufacturer is particularly successful in developing smartphone markets like Africa and the Middle East; across all of its brands, Transsion accounts for about half of Africa’s smartphone market share, according to figures from Canalys last year.

Read more

Vivo X300 Ultra announced

Vivo has announced the X300 Ultra, the latest in its series of high-end flagship camera phones. This is looking like one of the most capable options that’ll see release in 2026.

The X300 Ultra’s main camera uses a 200-megapixel 1/1.12” sensor, which is a little bigger than last year’s but not quite up there with the X100 Ultra’s 1” chip from a couple of years ago. Still, Vivo continues to stand out by pairing the sensor with a 35mm-equivalent f/1.85 lens. I’ve written before about how the ever-widening focal lengths on phone cameras might not be a good thing, and Vivo continues to release the highest-end phones to lean into that concept.

What if you want to go wider? Well, what if the ultrawide camera was actually good? The 14mm-equivalent f/2 lens has a 50-megapixel 1/1.28” sensor, the same size as the main camera from last year and the largest ultrawide sensor on any phone I’m aware of. There’ll certainly be a tradeoff compared to the main camera, but you should still be able to get decent 28mm results simply by using a 2x crop.

As for the zoom story, Vivo is using a 200-megapixel 1/1.4” sensor with a 85mm-equivalent 3x lens, which is a similar setup to the excellent 100mm telephoto on the Xiaomi 15 Ultra. Vivo is also offering Zeiss-branded 200mm- and 400mm-equivalent teleconverters that attach onto the 3x sensor, along with a heavy-duty grip accessory with extra buttons and a dial.

This is Vivo’s first high-end phone in a while to see release outside of China, although precise details on the launch (or pricing) haven’t yet been announced; preorders are set to start on April 16. I’ll definitely try to check it out, because it looks like a very strong competitor.

Read more

Izu Oshima is larger and closer to Tokyo than Hachijojima, where I took the Xiaomi 17 Ultra by Leica last month. That trip involved an overnight ferry, whereas this took a couple of hours on a much faster jet-propelled hydrofoil.

Izu Oshima is famous for a large active volcano called Mount Mihara, which most recently erupted in 1986. It’s also known for a diverse array of wildlife and tsubaki flowers, known as camellias in English; this past weekend marked the end of the annual Tsubaki Matsuri festival.

In this photo essay you’ll see the cooled lava formations on Mihara-yama, a lot of animals both at a well-kept zoo and around the island itself, a volcanic ash desert, a bunch of camellias and some pizza.

As a reminder, here’s what we’re dealing with on the Find N6 in terms of camera hardware:

• 21mm-equivalent lens with a 200-megapixel 1/1.56” sensor and f/1.8 aperture

• 70mm 3x telephoto lens with a 50-megapixel 1/2.75” sensor, f/2.7 aperture and telemacro close-focus capability

• 15mm-equivalent ultrawide with a 50-megapixel 1/2.75” sensor and f/2.0 aperture

The setup isn’t hugely different to last year’s Find N5, which I wrote about a year ago; the big changes are the higher resolution (to say the least) main sensor and the much-improved ultrawide, which is now in line with higher-end phones like the X9 Pro.

Also like the X9 Pro, the N6 also has an extra spectral sensor to help with colour rendition across the whole frame, and it makes use of Oppo’s Lumo image engine for processing.

I shot all these photos in the camera app’s Hasselblad Master mode, which I always feel gives much more natural results than the standard photo mode, and as ever they’re all unedited.

Read more

But Poco’s newest phones somehow manage to cover both angles. One of them has unprecedented endurance, and the other literally has Tony Stark’s badge on it.

Let’s start with the latter.

The Poco X8 Pro is a global version of the China-only Redmi Turbo 5. It starts at €400 in Europe for a model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, or €550 for this ostentatious Iron Man edition that comes with higher specs.

Iron Man ornamentation aside, this is a nicely designed phone with an aluminium frame and a glass back panel. It’s 8.2mm thick and weighs 204g, so it’s thinner and lighter than the smaller 6.3” iPhone 17 Pro despite having a much bigger screen and battery.

I might not be the target audience for this device, but honestly I think it looks pretty cool for what it is. It’s reasonably subtle for a phone with a holographic mech suit on the back panel. Poco even integrated the camera flash into an embossed design that evokes the arc reactor on Iron Man’s chest. And hey, you also get a SIM ejector tool with the Marvel logo on it.

The standout specs are the screen and the battery, which aren’t bad places to start for any phone. That screen is a great-looking 6.59” 2756 x 1268 120Hz OLED panel, and the battery is 6,500mAh — same as the bargain Poco M8 Pro from earlier in the year. It can be charged at up to 100W with a compatible cable, and it also provides reverse wired charging at 27W.

Elsewhere, the phone uses a MediaTek Dimensity 8500 Ultra chip with up to 512GB of storage and 12GB of RAM, which is the configuration for the Iron Man variant. The camera system is something of an afterthought, pairing a 50-megapixel 1/1.95” main sensor with an 8-megapixel 1/4” ultrawide. You do, however, get RGB ring lights around each lens that can be used for things like countdown timers and battery charging status.

I think this is a pretty neat phone if you’re into the design. But the Max version is more interesting to me, mostly for one (very) big reason.

The X8 Pro Max is quite similar to the smaller X8 Pro. It’s also 8.2mm thick, it has a bigger but broadly equivalent 6.83” 2772 x 1280 120Hz OLED display and memory still tops out at 512GB of storage and 12GB of RAM. The camera system is identical.

The processor is a class above, though — Poco gave the Max a new chip called the Mediatek Dimensity 9500s, which is a cut-down version of the current flagship 9500 and performs roughly between that and last year’s 9400 silicon. It’s a very solid chip for a device at this price point, which starts at €429.

But the real achievement here is that Poco has somehow managed to cram an 8,500mAh battery into a normal-sized phone. Seriously, I dug my iPhone 16 Pro Max out of my drawer to compare, and these two phones have nearly identical dimensions — yet the iPhone’s battery is just 4,685mAh.

Obviously Apple is not known for pushing boundaries in this regard, but this is a huge battery even by Chinese Android phone standards. Oppo’s fantastic Find X9 Pro, a phone I was simply unable to kill in a day — and which incidentally uses the high-end Dimensity 9500 chip — achieved its heretofore unparalleled endurance on a 7,500mAh battery.

With the proprietary 100W charger, you can expect the X8 Pro Max to get to around 35% in 15 minutes, 65% in half an hour, and full in a little over 50 minutes. Those aren’t ultra-fast speeds compared to some Chinese competitors, but this is an 8,500mAh battery we’re talking about, and you’re still getting far faster speeds than many phones with smaller capacities.

Now, I will be honest and say I haven’t yet tested the X8 Pro Max to the edge of its capabilities. There have frankly been far too many phones in my inbox this month. But I do think this might be my next camping phone — hold me to that.

(I’ll just need to bring an actual camera along for the trip.)

While Poco has recently been making moves in more premium directions and pledging to increase its focus on cameras, the X8 Pro phones feel like they were designed in the classic tradition of the brand.

Both of these phones have great screens, solid specs and huge batteries. And the cameras? Well, they certainly are capable of taking photographs.

But I think the X8 Pro Max in particular looks like a really good deal. If battery life is your priority, this is likely to beat anything else out there by some distance while keeping within relatively svelte dimensions. You’re also getting a great screen and a very capable chip for a more than reasonable price.

That sounds like a typically Apple feature to prioritise, and it could well explain why the company is late to the category. Folding phones are cool, but the creases in their inner screens are undeniable imperfections. Whether it’s capacity with music players, user interface with smartphones or the overall form factor with tablets, Apple tends to avoid making products with clear compromises in their defining elements.

But is it even possible to make a crease-free folding phone? There are huge engineering challenges to making a phone with a glass display that bends back and forth and flattens seamlessly, much less one that stays that way over time.

Read more

A little over a year later, here’s the Find N6. In most regards, it’s an iterative upgrade. But in one area, it’s truly groundbreaking — and it might be the phone that finally sells some holdouts on foldables.

The Find N6 is dimensionally very close to the N5. It’s still about the same 8.9mm thick when folded and 4.2mm unfolded, which was extremely impressive a year ago before the likes of Samsung and Honor caught up. Now, it’s merely in the ballpark of the best available, while maintaining a considerable advantage over Google’s Pixel 10 Fold.

Oppo has managed to trim four whole grams off the N5’s weight, with the N6 weighing in at just 225g. Fun fact: that is a single gram lighter than Oppo’s Find X8 Ultra flagship, and one heavier than the Find X9 Pro. Foldables no longer need to weigh more than conventional smartphones.

Other than a streamlined camera bump that ditches the squircle look, Oppo has focused on materials and durability for its design tweaks with the N6. The hinge is made from Grade-5 titanium, the frame is 30% stronger due to 7000-series aluminium and the back panel uses “aircraft-grade fibre” that’s 43% thinner than regular glass and is said to be more drop-resistant.

Oppo isn’t the only company making a shift to this fibreglass-style material; Xiaomi did the same with its 17 Pro and Pro Max last year. It doesn’t feel quite as, well, glassy to the touch as standard glass, and consequently could be viewed as less premium. As a functional tradeoff, though, it may well make sense. I wasn’t about to drop the N6 to find out.

Elsewhere, Oppo has boosted its water resistance for the N6 by securing IP56, IP58 and IP59 certifications, as well as Level 5 dust protection. Again, without testing this in great detail for myself, the message here is very much that you shouldn’t be worried about fragility in your foldable.

One way in which the Find N6 does stand out visually next to its predecessor is the new Blossom Orange colorway, which pairs an orange back panel with a rose gold frame and hinge. Comparisons with the Cosmic Orange iPhone 17 Pro may be inevitable, but for me it evokes the similarly orange-and-gold Find X2 Pro from 2020. I think it’s a great look.

The outer screen is very similar to the Find N5’s: it’s a 6.62” 2616 x 1440 120Hz OLED panel. Brightness has been boosted by 200 nits to 1,800, and while the screen size itself hasn’t changed, Oppo has given the phone some slight nips and tucks to achieve 1.4mm symmetrical bezels — the narrowest on a foldable.

It’s a similar story with the inner screen, which has the same 8.12” dimensions and 2480 x 2248 resolution but has received a 400-nit boost to 1,800 in the high brightness mode, now matching the outer panel in readability in most situations. Both screens can also go down to a single nit.

Rather than the panel itself, the Find N6’s biggest upgrade is more about what’s behind it and directly on top of it. Oppo says the N6 has a “Zero-Feel Crease”, claiming the hinge mechanism is “virtually imperceptible to the touch”.

I got into the engineering in a separate post, because it is both cool and complicated. For the purposes of this review, suffice it to say that this really is a genuine breakthrough.

It’s not that you can’t see or feel the crease if you’re really trying to in edge cases, because inevitably it isn’t completely imperceptible, but you simply won’t notice it in regular use. If Oppo’s claims about durability hold up, I’ll look back and call this the moment where creases have ceased to become an issue on folding phones.

When I reviewed the Find N5, I wondered where future hardware advances could come from. I certainly wasn’t expecting this just a year later, and I can’t imagine next year will bring a “Literally-Zero-Feel-Crease-In-Every-Situation” improvement. But hey, maybe!

The Find N6 runs on Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor. The model I’m using has 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage; I’m not aware of any other global variants.

The silicon-carbon battery has been increased to 6,000mAh silicon carbon battery, a small but meaningful bump on the N5’s 5,600mAh capacity. It can be charged at up to 80W with a proprietary SuperVOOC adapter, or at up to 55W with regular USB-C power delivery. It also supports 50W AirVOOC wireless charging, though unlike the Pixel 10 Pro Fold there are no built-in Qi2 magnets, which now feels like a downgrade for any phone that doesn’t have them.

As ever, the battery life will depend on how much you’re using the folding screen versus the outer panel. But every Oppo phone I’ve used in the past couple of years has had excellent endurance, and in my week of use so far I haven’t seen any evidence not to expect the same from the Find N6.

The camera system is similar to the Find N5’s with a few notable tweaks.

• The main camera is still a 1/1.56” sensor, but it’s now 200 megapixels rather than 50

• The ultrawide has a 50-megapixel 1/2.75” sensor — like the Find X8 Ultra and X9 Pro — representing a big upgrade on the previous 8-megapixel 1/4” component

• The 3x telephoto is unchanged, meaning it now matches the ultrawide at 50 megapixels and 1/2.75”

• There’s now a “True Color Camera” as featured on the Find X8 Ultra and X9 Pro, which is a spectral sensor that collects accurate white balance data from different sections of the frame

The Find N6 camera has the same suite of Hasselblad-branded features as other recent high-end Oppo phones, all running on top of the Lumo image engine. There’s the enthusiast-targeting Master mode, the X-Pan mode for wide-angle panoramas and the Portrait mode’s array of bokeh effects inspired by Hasselblad lenses.

You also get a Hi-res mode on the Find N6 that now allows the main camera to shoot 200-megapixel images, while the other two lenses can use their full resolution of 50 megapixels. All three cameras are capable of 4K Dolby Vision footage at 60fps, while the main camera goes up to 120fps.

Realistically, a folding phone should never be your first choice if image quality is a primary concern. There’s no getting around the physical constraints of a device this thin. (As a comparison, the main camera has the same size sensor as the single camera on the iPhone Air.)

As with the Find N5, though, my experience with the N6 so far has shown it makes the most of what it has to work with, thanks to Oppo’s software prowess. You can’t expect shallow depth of field or incredible telephoto reach, but as with the Find N5, the colours are reliably tasteful and on point.

Stay tuned for more on the cameras soon.

Oppo takes a very different approach to Google’s software on the Pixel Fold phones. That’s not to say it’s better or worse — while Google keeps things simple, the folding version of ColorOS 16 is heavily focused on power users.

The big new feature is Free-Flow Window, which lets you run up to four windows at once, resize them and place them anywhere across the screen. It’s easy enough to operate and good to have as an option when you need to lock into some hardcore mobile multitasking, but it’s a little excessive for general use.

The previous Boundless View system, which gives almost the entire display to one app while letting you quickly bounce to others that remain present at the edges of the panel, is still here, and you can switch between each mode with a four-finger pinch gesture. You can also invoke simple split-view multitasking by dragging apps out of the dock at the bottom of the screen.

Oppo has also added more productivity features that work in tandem with a new stylus called the AI Pen. The pen charges magnetically through the phone with pogo pins in a dedicated case. You can press a button on the side of the pen to take quick notes or analyse portions of the screen to extract text, images and so on.

On the global model of the Find N6, the AI Pen has hooks into Google’s Gemini AI assistant. You can roughly scribble a chart, for example, then highlight it and ask Gemini to format it into a dynamic digital table. In the above screenshot, I drew a sketch of a dog riding a skateboard that would be embarrassing for a three-year-old, and Nano Banana turned it into a reasonably cute picture.

This stuff works pretty well if you’re into it, but I wish there were a way to use the pen without the case. It adds quite a lot of bulk to the Find N6, compromising one of the key advantages of the device. Maybe a bay to actually store the pen would have been impractical, but a built-in magnetic charge would be a useful addition.

Oppo has also been improving its OConnect+ software, which allows Apple ecosystem users to access iCloud files on Oppo devices and transfer them between platforms. I’m often a little hesitant to recommend this stuff because I figure Apple could patch it out at some point, but it’s been working great for me for a long time now and in some ways exceeds the integration you get with an iPhone. Being able to remotely access my Mac mini at home as if the Find N6 is a tiny MacBook is amazing.

One potential snag with the Find N6 is availability. The N5 had a high-profile launch in Singapore, but ultimately the global model was only officially released in a few South East Asian markets. This time around the launch is in China, and while I have been using the global model, I don’t yet know where it will actually be released — or for how much.

But if you can get your hands on one, I think the Find N6 sees Oppo clearly stake another strong claim to making the best folding phone around, while almost eliminating a historical bugbear with the technology once and for all. This phone is also likely to remain the standard to beat as a certain high-profile competitor enters the market later in the year.

I’ve been using the Find N6 for a while, but the full reveal and review isn’t until next week. What I can tell you about today is that inner panel, with which Oppo claims it has solved one of the major pain points behind folding phones: the crease.

Yes, Oppo said much the same thing last year, dubbing the Find N5’s crease “almost invisible”. That was true in most situations, but not all, and you could still feel the fault line when you ran your finger across the centre of the screen. But the Find N6 has what Oppo is dubbing a “Zero-Feel Crease”, and while “zero” is a strong claim, I’d say Oppo has got pretty close.

It’s not impossible to feel the crease on the Find N6, but you kind of have to make a point of doing so. In regular use with light touches, it’s more or less imperceptible. Next to the Find N5, which was already a leader in this regard, the difference is stark. Visually, too, the crease is less obtrusive than before, even when the screen is off.

Oppo says it has achieved this unprecedented degree of flatness by 3D-printing tiny liquid photopolymer droplets to fill in the imperfections inherent to each individual hinge mechanism, then solidifies it all with UV light. This is done 20 times to reduce height variance from what Oppo says is the industry-standard 0.2mm to just 0.05mm, resulting in a far smoother surface.

The hinge’s “waterdrop” design is 11% wider than on the Find N5, further reducing stress on the display and increasing the folding radius. Oppo also claims that its “Auto-Smoothing Flex Glass” will last much longer than other devices without developing a crease due to a 50% increase in thickness, nearly twice as much shape recovery and a 338% increase in deformation resistance.

The screen is certified by TÜV Rheinland to function for up to a million folds and is said to remain “exceptionally flat” through 600,000 of them. The phone also has IP56, IP58 and IP59 ingress protection against dust and water.

Not much of that, of course, is possible to test over the course of a couple of weeks. But I can say that the Find N6 is certainly the closest anyone has got to achieving a crease-free folding phone screen — even if “zero” is an exaggeration.

Stay tuned for more on the Find N6 next week.

It’s a neat piece of history, but I’m not sure it had the intended effect. Rather than demonstrating Samsung’s progress over the years, it highlights how the South Korean tech giant — still the #2 phone maker in the world right behind Apple, according to data from Counterpoint — has been treading water at the top of its lineup.

This year’s Galaxy S26 Ultra, announced a few days before Mobile World Congress kicked off, is an extraordinarily iterative update in what has become a line of near-identical flagships. The design is almost indistinguishable from the previous four years’, and there isn’t much to shout about on the inside either.

Read more

I have made my way home from Barcelona; here’s a roundup of what I thought was neat or noteworthy at Mobile World Congress.

Google AI glasses

Look, Google Glass obviously didn’t go so great, for a million reasons we’re all familiar with. That said, I always thought there was something to the idea. That first teaser video demonstrating a future where Google Maps is beamed into your retina? Sign me up for that. Just not if it looks like, well, that.

Well, that’s what Google is working on now, and I was able to try the latest demonstration of its upcoming AI-powered smart glasses. The final product will be developed in partnership with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, while the demo glasses were more of a generic prototype. Still, they looked normal enough and no more obtrusive than my Meta Ray-Bans.

Google is shooting for somewhere in between the complexity of those Ray-Bans and the more advanced, display-equipped version that Meta recently launched. There’s no neural wristband for control here, but you do get a simple colour display that appears more or less in the centre of your visual field.

The glasses’ functionality is overwhelmingly handled by Gemini. Tap a capacitive sensor on the frame for a second and the Gemini Live interface pops up, allowing you to naturally interact with the AI. I’ve found Gemini to be really useful on smartwatches lately, and this has the potential to be even more convenient.

But what takes the glasses’ implementation to a new level is the multimodal functionality. The best demonstration of this was when I looked at a framed picture of the Camp Nou and asked what it was. Gemini gave me a concise explanation that it was FC Barcelona’s home stadium, I followed up by asking how I could get there, and then I was able to invoke walking directions through Google Maps. The implementation is smart — it’s not constantly in your field of view while walking, but if you tilt your head down about 45 degrees you can see a compass-orientated map of your surroundings.

Google plans to ship its first AI glasses this year. Based on this demo, I’ll definitely be picking a pair up — as long as its partners stick the landing on the design.

Honor

Honor certainly had the flashiest phone of the show, which was simply dubbed the “Robot Phone”.

Read more

Gurman did, however, note that the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max will have “a new camera system with a variable aperture”, which caught my eye as a phone camera obsessive. There have been rumors about this for years, but I wasn’t expecting it to be perhaps the key feature of what are likely to be this year’s most popular models.

That’s because variable aperture is an idea that’s come and gone in smartphones several times in the past. Does Apple have a truly new take on the concept, or is it just late to the party?

Read more

In recent years, Xiaomi has dominated MWC with its sheer volume of announcements for the global market, and 2026 is no different. The Chinese tech giant announced today that it’s bringing the Xiaomi 17 Ultra to other countries, along with a bunch of other gadgets.

I’ve already covered the Leica-branded Chinese version of the 17 Ultra extensively, so I won’t focus too much on the global model. But here’s everything else of note, and I’ll follow up on the rest of the show as it gets underway.

17 Ultra Photography Kits

Ahead of this global launch, I did get the chance to check out the photography kits for the 17 Ultra. Xiaomi is producing two separate versions this time around, the €99 Photography Kit and the $199 Photography Kit Pro.

The regular Photography Kit is a totally new design that brings some of the previous kits’ functionality into a more slimline form. The grip only extends out about as far as the camera bump, so the combination sits flat on a table, fits easily into a pocket and is easy to use as a regular phone.

There’s a dedicated two-stage shutter button, of course, although it isn’t quite as substantial as the previous kits’. This case also connects over Bluetooth, not USB-C, and has a small onboard battery that can be charged through the phone so as not to drain it when away from a power outlet.

I actually think this is a pretty great product for anyone who doesn’t want to go all-in on the bulkier setups. I used it for my recent trip to Hachijojima where I tested the awesome M9 mode, and found it added useful functionality and tactility without getting in the way.

One thing to note is that it does cover up the control ring on the Leica edition of the phone, so if you still want to use that you’ll be better off with this year’s higher-end model.

Xiaomi has been making these photo grips for a while now, and the Photography Kit Pro for the 17 Ultra is by far the best-designed iteration to date. It adds a more substantial triangular grip with a serious control dial next to the shutter button and zoom lever; the thumb grip is also built directly into the case.

If you use the filter thread adapter around the lens, you can use it to control the physical ring on the Leica variants of the phone. Between that, the zoom lever and the dial, you have much more manual control than on any phone camera to date.

This year’s kit also just feels much better built, with a rough PU leather finish and lower tolerances between all the modular parts. Between the new camera hardware and this kit’s updated design, I think the combination is the best general-purpose compact camera setup you can get.

Leica Leitzphone powered by Xiaomi

If you thought “Xiaomi 17 Ultra by Leica” was an unwieldy name for a phone, the global version flips it around. The new Leitzphone, a term previously used by Sharp in its Japan-only (and much less successful) branded collaborations with Leica, carries the same exclusive features as the 17 Ultra by Leica, including the physically rotating control ring and the awesome M9 mode.

One curio is that the prestigious red-dot Leica logo is oriented to be read when the phone is held in portrait, unlike the horizontal camera-style 17 Ultra by Leica. The design looks very clean and perhaps even more Leica-like than the Chinese model.

The Leitzphone will only come in a 1TB model and cost around €1,999, which is €500 more than the 512GB base model 17 Ultra.

Xiaomi 17

The regular Xiaomi 17 doesn’t change much from last year’s 15, which itself was very much in keeping with the previous two models. That’s fine by me; this is the fourth iteration in the line of what has become some of the most reliably great compact phones available.

The most visible design change is on the back, where the camera bump now separates out the lenses similarly to the T-series. Other than that, we’re looking at the same 6.3” OLED panel with slightly higher peak brightness and a tweaked take on the squared-off 8.1mm-thick frame.

The camera hardware is also the same except that the main sensor has been upgraded to the Light Fusion 950, last seen in the Poco F8 Ultra, which should give better HDR performance. Unlike Poco, though the Xiaomi 17 still makes use of Leica’s image processing. Xiaomi has also added a new 50-megapixel selfie camera.

The biggest changes are really on the inside, where the processor is Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and the battery has been boosted 20% to 6,330mAh, which is pretty huge for a phone in this form factor.

This is a welcome spec bump to a line of phones that I always enjoy using for a while every year. There’s nothing revolutionary here, but you still won’t find a better camera in a phone this size.

Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro

The Xiaomi Pad 8 Pro is a similar update in scope to the Xiaomi 17 — the 11.2” LCD screen is the same, but you get a higher-class chip in the Snapdragon 8 Elite and the battery is now larger at 9,200mAh.

Xiaomi did slim down this year’s tablet by about half a millimeter, so it comes in at 5.75mm; that’s not quite as thin as the iPad Pro, but it’s now thinner than the iPad Air, which the Xiaomi is more directly competitive with in terms of specs and pricing.

There’s also a new stylus called the Focus Pen Pro, which ditches the physical buttons for haptic gestures and swipes that can bring up on-screen controls like the Apple Pencil Pro. This already feels like a good move after using it for a few days; the gestures are much easier to remember than the button functionality.

Xiaomi’s tablets are really good at this point and I can recommend this one to anyone for whom not being an iPad isn't a dealbreaker. It's now arguably better than the iPad Air the same way the Xiaomi Pad Mini is better than its Apple equivalent, though the iPad’s productivity advantage is more relevant at this screen size.

Xiaomi UltraThin Magnetic Power Bank 5000 15W

Last year I wrote about an ultra-thin MagSafe-compatible 5,000mAh battery from a Japanese company called Matech. It looks like Xiaomi is the first major manufacturer to outdo Matech, with the UltraThin Magnetic Power Bank 5000 15W coming in nearly a millimeter thinner at just 6mm.

Xiaomi claims up to 15W of charging speed on the 17 series, but you’ll need a compatible case because the phones don’t have magnets built in. It worked similarly to the Matech battery on my iPhone Air, popping up a “slow charger” message on the lock screen. The battery also supports wired charging at up to 22.5W.

This Xiaomi product actually launched in Japan before anywhere else; perhaps there is greater demand there for thinner phone batteries. But now it’s coming to the rest of the world in black, silver and iPhone 17 Pro-style orange — the latter of which for some reason costs €65, a €5 premium on the others.

I think ultra-thin magnetic batteries are a game-changer, particularly if you’re one of the 17 other people in the world who love the iPhone Air, so I’m glad to see one come out from a big name with wide distribution.

Xiaomi Watch 5

The Xiaomi Watch 5 is, confusingly, the follow-up to the Watch 2 from 2024, as it’s the company’s latest watch to run on Google’s Wear OS 6. It's actually a pretty big upgrade: a huge-for-a-watch 930mAh battery and a larger 1.54” screen alongside a new design with a rotating crown, a stainless steel case and sapphire glass on the front and back.

I like the design and the battery has lasted me around three days with the always-on display activated; Xiaomi claims up to six days with it turned off. This probably wouldn't get me to switch away from my Apple Watch Ultra or Pixel Watch 4, but it's good value at €300 for a full-featured Wear OS device with Gemini support.

Xiaomi Tag

The Xiaomi Tag is, unsurprisingly, Xiaomi’s take on the AirTag, which you can see it pictured next to above. It works with Google’s Find Hub on Android as well as Find My on Apple devices, though I actually couldn't get it to connect to my iPhone at first.

Still, assuming that isn't a widespread issue, the broader compatibility should be a useful differentiator for a product that at €15, costs half as much as the AirTag. It also adds another missing feature by including a built-in loop for attaching to luggage or keychains.

To that end, I took it on a trip to the fairly remote island of Hachijojima this past weekend and shot exclusively in the Leica M9 mode. Hachijojima is technically part of Tokyo, but the nearly 200-mile journey involves a 10-hour overnight ferry. The island is famous for cows, scuba diving and a green plant called ashitaba that you will find in everything from pasta to bath bombs.

As a reminder, here’s the camera hardware on the 17 Ultra:

• 23mm-equivalent lens with a 50-megapixel 1” sensor and f/1.7 aperture

• 75-100mm-equivalent actual zoom lens with a 200-megapixel 1/1.4” sensor and f/2.4-3.0 aperture

• 14mm-equivalent ultrawide with a 50-megapixel 1/2.76” sensor and f/2.2 aperture

I usually shoot Xiaomi phones in Leica Authentic mode, but I was curious to try the M9 option on the 17 Ultra by Leica. Xiaomi says it uses a “RAW-to-RGB” image processing pipeline with a model trained on hundreds of thousands of photos captured by the Leica M9 rangefinder.

The M9 was Leica’s first full-frame digital M, representing a major breakthrough in 2009 after the controversial crop-sensor M8. The CCD sensor is indeed known for its distinctive color rendition, but I was a little sceptical of Xiaomi’s claims here.

You really need to shoot the M9 in RAW to get usable files, which means editing them to your taste. And that’s what I’ve always liked about the Leica Authentic mode — the JPEGs pretty much look like what I want without needing to edit them. So what exactly would this virtual M9 turn out?

For full 35mm-style effect, I decided to set the M9 mode to 3:2 aspect ratio, which remains oddly uncommon as an option on phone cameras. All of these images are unedited beyond some slight downsampling, because the M9 JPEGs are actually huge and often come in above this CMS’s 25MB limit.

Read more

The location this time around was PokéPark Kanto, the new Pokémon theme park that just opened earlier this month in Tokyo. It’s actually a park within a park, now occupying a big chunk of the somewhat retro Yomiuriland, operated by the company that owns the Yomiuri Giants baseball team and the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra is all about its zoom capabilities, so what better place to test it out than a pokémon safari?

The park is a lot of fun, albeit very kid-focused. You start out by exploring a “forest” and searching for pokémon; I was not disappointed by the amount or the diversity on display.

Once out of the forest, you find yourself in a recreation of a town like you’d find in the games, with shops and rides and a Pokémon Center and so on. I got Vaporeon latte art and saw an unhinged musical show called “Pika Pika Sparks”.

Anyway, here’s what we’re dealing with in terms of camera hardware on the Xiaomi 17 Ultra:

• 23mm-equivalent lens with a 50-megapixel 1” sensor and f/1.7 aperture

• 75-100mm equivalent actual zoom lens with a 200-megapixel 1/1.4” sensor and f/2.4-3.0 aperture

• 14mm-equivalent ultrawide with a 50-megapixel 1/2.76” sensor and f/2.2 aperture

The hardware is similar to last year’s 15 Ultra — my Phone of the Year for 2025 — but combines the separate 3x and 4.3x telephotos into a single module that physically zooms through the 75-100mm range. There’s a slight tradeoff here in that you lose telemacro functionality at the wider end and the aperture is slightly smaller at the longer, but the advantage is a massively larger sensor at 3.2x as well as true optical quality at every focal length, without the need for digital zoom.

The Leica edition of the 17 Ultra also has a physical ring around the camera module that can be used to zoom through the complete range, switch between discrete photo lengths or control other exposure settings.

The other big change is that the main sensor is a new chip called the Light Hunter 1050L, which uses LOFIC (Lateral Overflow Integration Capacitor) technology. This allows for higher sensitivity and lower noise per pixel, boosting performance in low light and HDR.

Xiaomi is making a couple of photography kits for the 17 Ultra, but for this outing I was just using the phone by itself. All shots are unedited and were taken in the default Leica Authentic mode in the regular camera app.

Read more

Leica’s stewardship of its brand, however, has not always quite lived up to its history. The company historically outsourced most of its point-and-shoot camera design to Panasonic, slapping its iconic red dot on existing compacts and charging an unwarranted markup. Early smartphone collaborations with Huawei and Sharp were similarly surface-level.

But for the past few years, a partnership with Xiaomi has quietly been producing what regular Multicore readers will be used to hearing me say are some of the best phone cameras in the world. And for the Chinese smartphone maker’s latest flagship device, the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, Leica’s branding and influence takes greater prominence than ever.

Available in China now, the 17 Ultra is sold in two variants; there’s the regular model, and another version called the “Xiaomi 17 Ultra by Leica”. I’ve been using the latter model, though the camera hardware is nearly identical across the two.

This is a beautifully designed phone, and it’s the first to carry the coveted Leica red dot. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 4 in 2010, which is still for my money the best-looking iPhone ever, he said “its closest kin is like a beautiful old Leica camera”. Well, the 17 Ultra really is like a Leica camera — and not just because it also kind of looks like an iPhone 4, right down to the circular volume buttons.

Read more

The Charmera is like the gashapon or Labubu of cameras; there are seven designs, and you don’t know which one you’re getting until you open the box. The “secret” transparent version is a one-in-48 special edition that wasn’t announced until after the Charmera shipped.

I have to applaud Kodak for its masterful hypebeast marketing, because the Charmera ended up completely sold out everywhere for several months after its release, and it only just went on sale here in Japan at normal pricing. Could it actually be a good camera?

Well, no. But it is an inspired piece of design, and I’m not surprised it’s proven to be so popular.

The Charmera is actually manufactured by Hong Kong-based camera company Reto, which sells a variety of casual film cameras. (One of its products is another revival of the cult-classic Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim; I have a basically identical model from about 15 years ago by now-defunct Japanese company Superheadz. Highly recommended as a simple sunny-day 35mm point-and-shoot with a wide-but-usable 22mm lens.)

Where Kodak comes in is the inspiration for the design; the Charmera is based on the tiny Kodak Fling from 1987, which used Kodak’s ultra-compact cartridge-based 110 film format. The Charmera is even smaller than its design inspiration and can easily be attached to a keychain without being too obtrusive. In fact, one comes in the box. I’d compare the overall size to a shorter pack of chewing gum.

Obviously, that brings with it some ergonomic constraints. The “viewfinder”, for example, is literally just a hole that pokes through the camera from front to back and doesn’t give you much more indication of framing than basic guesswork.

The LCD screen on the back, meanwhile, is about half the size of a postage stamp and isn’t going to blow you away with its colour reproduction. It kind of reminds me of early flip phones in that regard, albeit a lot sharper and with better viewing angles. Ultimately it’s big enough for you to see your basic composition while also being small enough to discourage you from looking too closely, which is probably for the best.

The buttons are simple and intuitive. You have one each for power, playback and the shutter, as well as an up-down pair for switching through photos or filters. It’s hard to go wrong with the minimalist user interface, such as it is, though my one complaint is that you have to actively select whether to shoot photos or videos every time you turn the camera on.

The model I ended up with is like a Memphis design throwback, which is a neat reference for an ‘80s-inspired camera. I actually think they all look pretty great and wouldn’t have been particularly disappointed or psyched to get any of them over any of the others, except maybe the transparent one. Kodak and Reto definitely nailed the trims on all of these versions.

The bottom panel of the Charmera houses a USB-C port for charging and a microUSB card slot for storage. I repurposed a 4GB card from a Nintendo 3DS, which is good for more than 14,000 photos from the tiny 1/4” 1.6-megapixel sensor.

So, about that hardware. As you will no doubt be unsurprised to learn, it isn’t good in any conventional sense. The main reason to use the screen carefully is to make sure the Charmera has caught up with your framing — if you’re lining up a landscape, for example, it can take two or three seconds simply to make sure that the sky isn’t blowing everything out.

The 35mm-equivalent f/2.4 lens is fixed-focus, although that’s kind of a moot point on such a small sensor. You can generally forget about getting much of use in low light, even with the tiny LED flash that automatically activates in the dark.

To get creative shots out of the Charmera, you’ll want to leverage its built-in filters and frames. Here are the four standard colour options, which are basically “normal”, “warm”, “cool” and “monochrome”":

The next few options are more about framing than altering the exposure. Here’s one that evokes film sprockets:

And I kind of love this Windows 95-esque frame:

This one, meanwhile, is very meta and serves as a way to “zoom”, though the image processing is working overtime to deliver anything legible:

Finally, you also get some Game Boy Camera-esque 1-bit options:

As you can tell, this is not a good camera by any conventional metric. But I think it’s an excellent toy camera. Reto and Kodak figured out a cute, simple design that’s fun to use and is up to the task of capturing memories in an idiosyncratic way.

I was talking to my sister about the Charmera the other day, and she asked whether it’d be a good option for her son. With the caveat that I am not all that in touch with the proclivities of eight-year-olds, I said I thought it absolutely would be. I think anyone could enjoy using this camera — especially if they’ve never used anything better.

For much-older me, though, the Charmera is still cheap enough and well-designed enough to be worth shooting with on a few specific occasions and using as a keychain or a desk ornament the rest of the time. I am, dare I say, charmed by it.

As a consumer brand, Kodak has been through some rough times since the rise of digital photography. I remember annually visiting its booth at CES when I was with The Verge and cringing at every attempt at slapping its logo onto bad Android phones, or whatever the move was that year.

But the Charmera is a great example of how the company is reinventing itself. Kodak has also capitalised on the recent trend for compact cameras among Gen Z — the Pixpro FZ55 was the best-selling point-and-shoot in Japan last year, with three other Kodak models placing in the top 10.

I’m all for this. Toy cameras and retro-ish compacts are another antidote for the flat blandness of most smartphone photography. Any camera that gets people more engaged with the way they take photos can only be a good thing.

We here at Multicore believe in the tactile joy of hardware and the evocative impact of design. The Kodak Charmera may not take classically great pictures, but if you share those tenets, it’s probably worth $30.

Games? Not so much.

But a new release on Apple Arcade this week is the most impressive gaming software I’ve seen on the Vision Pro, promising to convert your personal space into a virtual video games arcade from the ‘80s.

Retrocade is developed by Resolution Games, a Swedish studio that has released a range of titles for the Vision Pro as well as Meta Quest headsets. It’s also available on the iPhone and iPad, but the Vision Pro experience is clearly where most of the effort has been made.

After a slightly overwrought tutorial, Retrocade drops you in the middle of a virtual Los Angeles arcade. You can walk around it if you have the physical space, or just drop any of the cabinets right in front of you. There’s also an option to place them right in your physical environment through passthrough mixed reality, as well as a windowed mode that floats the cabinet screens in mid-air anywhere you want to place them.

The full list of titles available is:

Read more