In a world of overprocessed, HDR-heavy smartphone photos, Leica contributes realistic, tasteful color science to Xiaomi devices. While all smartphones need to operate in accordance with the laws of physics, the phones that Leica and Xiaomi have been working on together take photos that really don’t look like they came from a phone.

Most recently in Vienna, Xiaomi announced the latest in its line of collaborative Leica-branded phones, the 17T and 17T Pro. I was able to speak to representatives from Leica about the philosophy and technology behind its collaboration with Xiaomi.

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What is the T series? It hasn’t always been easy to pin down, often reusing various parts from Xiaomi’s vast supply chain. Last year, though, the 15T series got an industrial design of its own and stood out more as a relatively high-end option that allowed Xiaomi to pursue different priorities than the rest of its flagship lineup.

This year’s 17T series isn’t as big an overhaul, but the result is that Xiaomi now has a Leica phone for almost everyone.

The 17T mostly keeps the same design language as last year’s models: these are boxy phones with a squircle camera bump housing a quartet of round modules. That bump itself has been squared off at the edges this year, moving on from the 15T’s bevelled approach.

The most visible change is actually in the available colourways: the 15T series was solely offered in neutral metallic finishes, but the 17T and 17T Pro both have blue and purple options, which are darker and described as “deep” on the Pro model. They’re each available in black, too, with a further pearlescent “opal white” option for the 17T.

I actually kind of miss the raw silver option, which I thought looked great on the 14T and 15T, but I’ll never complain about more colours. In particular, the lighter “violet” I’ve been using on the 17T is a really good look.

The other main design change is that the 17T is now a little smaller than the Pro model, moving down to a 6.59” display while the Pro stays at 6.83”. It’s not a huge change, but they do feel different side by side — it’s roughly in line with the size disparity between the iPhone Air and the 17 Pro Max.

While the panels themselves remain similar, Xiaomi is making a big deal out of the steps it’s taken to ensure a comfortable viewing experience. This includes features like full-brightness DC dimming on the 17T Pro and 3,840Hz PWM on the 17T, which can alleviate eye strain that some people experience with other OLED phone panels, as well as a comprehensive approach to blue light reduction and ambient color shifting.

I’m not someone who’s ever suffered from flickering or low PWM rates on other devices, but I have noticed that the 17T Pro does a much better job than most Android phones of adapting its colours and brightness to various lighting environments. I often find myself brute-forcing white balance by manually using the reading modes on other devices; Xiaomi has taken a more user-friendly approach here.

On the spec sheet, the 17T Pro jumps to a MediaTek Dimensity 9500 SoC while the 17T has a Dimensity 8500 Ultra — that’s up from the 9400+ and 8400 Ultra respectively. The 9500 is MediaTek’s flagship chip and was announced the same week as the 15T Pro, so this earlier launch puts Xiaomi on a more favourable timeline.

As with the Xiaomi 17, the 17T and 17T Pro have received substantial upgrades in battery capacity. The 17T jumps to 6,500mAh from 5,500mAh, while the Pro gets an even bigger bump to 7,000mAh from the same prior 5,500mAh figure.

The Pro supports 100W fast-charging and 50W wirelessly, but the 17T is restricted to 67W with a cable and no wireless capability at all. That’s an unfortunate omission for a phone in this class.

The 17T Pro’s camera hardware is similar to the 15T Pro’s: a 1/1.31” 50-megapixel Light Fusion 950 sensor; a 1/2.76" 50-megapixel 5x telephoto camera and a 1/3” 12-megapixel ultrawide. The 17T has a smaller 1/1.55” Light Fusion 800 sensor seen on phones like the Poco M8 Pro, but gets the same 5x telephoto for the first time for a non-Pro model in the T series.

The bump from the Light Fusion 900 to the 950 is subtle but welcome, and it’s nice to see that the 5x telephoto lens now formally supports telemacro photography. As ever with the T series, though, the selling point here is that you get the excellent Leica image processing on less cutting-edge hardware that is generally up to the task.

This year’s phones also introduce a couple of new features. There’s a stage mode that optimizes the exposure for complex lighting situations like concerts; Oppo has been doing this on its recent phones, too, and it makes a big difference.

There’s also a new feature called Leica Live Moment, which is basically Xiaomi’s take on Apple’s Live Photos. There are a couple of advantages here, though — Leica’s image processing is applied to every frame of the moving image, for example, and it also works in Portrait mode. You can further customise the output with Leica watermarks and multi-frame collages.

I use Live Photos all the time on iOS but Android implementations have never really caught on with me, since they tend not to work as well across the entire operating system — let alone with others. While Xiaomi isn’t the first to try this, the Leica pipeline support and integration with apps like WhatsApp and Instagram make it a better attempt than most.

I’m not sure what (if anything) is happening in the second half of the year, but with this earlier T-series launch, Xiaomi has now set itself up for 2026 with a really strong lineup across screen sizes and Leica camera setups.

Here’s the rundown:

• The Xiaomi 17 is a compact powerhouse with a 6.3” screen, a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor and a 6,300mAh battery. The 2.6x telephoto lens could be considered a pro or a con.

• The 17T is a great mainstream phone at 6.59”, a Dimensity 8500 Ultra chip and a 6,500mAh battery. The lack of wireless charging will be a miss for many, but the 5x telephoto can be seen as a selling point over the regular 17.

• The 17T Pro bumps the screen, processor and battery to 6.83”, Dimensity 9500 and 7,000mAh. This hardware is easily on par with Pro-level iPhones or Pixels, if not quite Chinese flagship-level.

• The 17 Ultra pulls out all the stops with a 6.9” screen and a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset as well as by far the most advanced camera system, though it actually has the smallest battery of the lineup at 6,000mAh. (This can be augmented by the extra 2,000mAh in the Photography Kit Pro.)

So what does “T” really mean?

This lineup actually reminds me a lot of what Apple has done with the iPad in recent years. You have the iPad mini as a premium product for people who prefer smaller screens, the iPad Pro at the top with an overkill spec sheet, and two sizes of iPad Air in the middle.

In Apple parlance, “Air” has evolved from meaning “ultra-thin” to “the right pick for most people”. I think the same could be said for the new Xiaomi 17T phones. There’s something for everyone in this lineup, but the 17T Pro in particular is essentially playing the hits.

Although the Keirin is yet to become a commercial device, there’s a lot of its DNA in what VWFNDR has decided to release as its first product: an innovative new camera app for Android phones. VWFNDR + MBL is available now for free.

There’s a few things going on in VWFNDR + MBL, which I was lightly involved in testing before its release, and they make it quite unlike other apps available.

The first is the UI. This is where the app is most reminiscent of the Keirin; it uses the same idea of dragging the viewfinder into different aspect ratios, with the settings and buttons shifting around to fit.

Here’s the 35mm-standard 3:2, for example, which is a little wider than the 4:3 default on pretty much every phone:

Or you can stretch the viewfinder even wider to 2:1 and see how the UI adapts:

You’re also able to drag all the controls around the grid and place them where you want. It’s an intuitive system for photographers, with a button that switches between standard modes like full manual, shutter priority, program and auto, each option highlighting rows where you can swipe to adjust the relevant parameters.

Swiping all the way to the right of the controls brings up this simple settings screen, while swiping to the left of the viewfinder shows you your recently captured images.

That brings me to the next key feature of VWFNDR + MBL, which is that it is designed to capture and export unprocessed 16-bit RAW images in .DNG format. This is commonplace in popular enthusiast iOS apps like Halide, and some Android phone makers offer the option in their stock camera apps, but it’s less common for a third-party Android solution.

The results are, well, they’re RAW files. You don’t benefit from the computational grunt that most phones deploy for things like multi-frame stitching or noise reduction, and lens distortion isn’t automatically corrected — you’re at the mercy of your hardware, and you’ll likely want to edit your shots later to dial in the desired results.

But this gives you a lot of creative latitude down the line, and it frees you from the over-sharpened, over-processed, overly HDR results that mainstream phones churn out by default. VWFNDR presents this as a return to authenticity, transforming your phone into a more traditional camera.

And that plays into the final standout feature, which is that VWFNDR is (to my knowledge) the first third-party app that works with CP2A Content Credentials, a fairly new initiative that embeds metadata into images to prove they were captured with a real camera. Google added support for the built-in camera app on Pixel 10 phones last year, while Leica has started to do the same on newer models like the M11-P as well as the Leitzphone designed alongside Xiaomi.

The Content Credentials signature doesn’t last forever, as it’ll vanish if you edit the photo or upload a JPEG to social media. But as long as you have the original .DNG from the VWFNDR app, you can upload it to a compatible platform and prove that it was captured by a real camera, rather than edited in Photoshop or generated by AI.

I know from talking to the VWFNDR team during the development process that putting this app together was a hugely complicated task, and there are some limitations that weren’t able to be ironed out.

There’s no way to switch lenses within the app, for example, owing to manufacturers’ different implementations of the Android camera stack. And while the app has been tested on countless phones, including several from my drawers, it’s impossible to guarantee compatibility with everything.

VWFNDR + MBL isn’t going to replace something like the Leica Authentic mode on a Xiaomi 17 Ultra for my personal, general use. There’s something to be said for .JPEG files that look great out of camera, after all.

But I really encourage anyone with an Android phone to check this app out. It’s breathed new life into my Pixel 10 Pro, for example, which is not otherwise something I’d normally use for creative, traditional photography; it really makes it feel like a bespoke compact camera, one that encourages me to take my time shooting and editing the unfiltered results.

The naming convention here is admittedly a little confusing. Last year’s Titan 2 was a rugged, wide-format device clearly inspired by the BlackBerry Passport — it was, in every sense, “titanic.” But this new Elite successor isn’t a turbo-charged version of that phone; it’s a completely different animal. It ditches the ultra-wide, ruggedized footprint for a much smaller design that feels like a spiritual successor to the BlackBerry Q10.

The Elite 2’s industrial design is a departure from Unihertz’s recent “brick” aesthetic. This isn’t a rugged phone, and it feels better for it. That said, I would personally avoid the iPhone 17 Pro-inspired orange model, which seems unlikely to age too well; this black model I’ve been using is much more in keeping with the BlackBerry heritage.

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Ternus has been a senior vice president of hardware engineering at Apple for five years, and a VP since 2013, but beyond that he hasn’t been credited with steering the company in a particular direction. All anyone can really say for now is that Apple will be led by someone who is strongly experienced in hardware, which sounds like a meaningful change from Cook.

Of course, Ternus’ stewardship will be defined by a lot more than how he chooses to manage the hardware portfolio. The state of Apple’s software and how it handles developer relations will continue to be hot topics, not to mention how it adapts to the destabilizing impact of AI. As CEO, those issues will land at Ternus’ door.

Still, as a hardware enthusiast myself, I have to admit it’s encouraging to think that Apple will soon be led by someone who may share some of the same passions. And following many years of Ternus’ influence, it’s hard to say that Apple’s hardware is in a bad spot. The iPhone 17 lineup is excellent, while the new $599 MacBook Neo might be the most impressive example yet of the Apple Silicon advantage.

But as someone who uses a wide range of devices, I do know that Apple doesn’t always ship the best hardware available. Let’s dream for a minute and imagine that Ternus makes it a priority to change that reality. Here’s where I’d want him to focus.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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”.

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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?

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In recent years, Xiaomi has dominated MWC with its sheer volume of announcements for the global…

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