Google’s latest compact flagship, the Pixel 11 Pro, priced at $799 today (was $1,100), arrives with a 6.3-inch LTPO OLED that reaches 3,600 nits of peak brightness and keeps a fluid 1-to-120 Hz range, numbers that sit ahead of the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s 2,600-nit ceiling and match or edge the iPhone 18 Pro’s 3,000-nit outdoor peak.
Zack Nelson finally got his hands on a Trump Mobile T1 and put it through the same series of physical stress tests that have become his signature for years. Right from the start the phone lined up with an HTC U24 Pro he already owned, matching in overall size, the angled metal frame contour, the placement of the power and volume buttons, the notification light, the USB-C port, the headphone jack, and the microSD card slot.
Charging a smartphone with marbles sounds impossible until you watch Engineezy spend weeks turning steel balls into a working power source. He called the finished machine a Sphero electric battery, a playful nod to the way pumped hydro plants store energy by lifting water high and letting it fall through turbines later.
Brax Technologies opened pre-orders this month for the Wink, a compact handset that measures roughly 85 by 75 by 10 millimeters without its keyboard and stretches to about 122 millimeters tall once the module clips on. A 4-inch OLED screen sits above a full physical QWERTY keyboard whose keys also sense finger swipes so you can scroll without covering the display. That keyboard section unclips entirely, leaving a shorter slab or accepting a larger battery module still in development.
Google built the Pixel 10 Pro XL, priced at $849 today (was $1,200), as its largest phone in the 2025 lineup, measuring 162.8 by 76.6 by 8.5 millimeters and weighing 232 grams. An aluminum frame wraps around Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on both sides, and the whole package carries an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance. In hand it feels substantial without turning awkward for one-handed reaches or pocket carry. A 6.8-inch LTPO OLED panel fills most of the front, running at 2992 by 1344 resolution with a 120 Hz refresh rate that drops as low as 1 Hz when nothing moves. Peak brightness hits 3300 nits in short bursts and holds around 2200 nits for HDR content, which keeps outdoor text readable even under direct sun.
Michael MJD recently pulled a Sony Ericsson Xperia Play out of relative obscurity, the 2011 smartphone that tried to blend everyday mobile use with handheld gaming in one sliding package. Announced that February at Mobile World Congress and released in Europe the following spring, with a U.S. Verizon version arriving in May for about two hundred dollars on contract, the device carried the Xperia name rather than any PlayStation branding even though its box noted PlayStation certification.
Motorola positions the Moto G (2026), priced at $249.99 (was $300), as a straightforward unlocked option for people who need a phone that covers daily work, messages, maps, and media without demanding extra spending. It lands in a crowded budget field with a few practical touches that keep it usable day after day. A 6.7-inch IPS LCD panel runs at 120Hz with a peak brightness rating around 1000 nits, protected by Gorilla Glass 3. Text and icons look a little soft because the resolution sits at 1604 by 720 pixels, yet the higher refresh rate keeps scrolling and interface movement fluid enough that most owners notice the smoothness more than the pixel count during ordinary use.
Photo credit: Ruochen Hou et al. / RoMeLa, UCLA / New Atlas
Old Android phones sitting unused in drawers can now serve as the central brains for a compact walking robot that stands about nineteen inches tall and weighs under four pounds. Researchers at UCLA’s Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory built PhoneBot as an open-source platform that mounts a commodity smartphone as the torso, relying on the phone’s camera, motion sensors, processor, and wireless connection to handle vision, balance sensing, and movement calculations. Hardware costs for the body, motors, and supporting electronics run around four hundred dollars, leaving the phone itself as the main variable. The design deliberately keeps electronics simple so that swapping one phone for another requires no rewiring.
OnePlus released its newest flagship in China today. The OnePlus 16 centers on a 9,000mAh silicon-carbon battery, a display that can update as fast as 185 times a second, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chip built on a 2nm process.
Kevin Noki got tired of the same interruption that ruins a stretch of real work. His phone would light up, his hand would move, and the next half hour would vanish into a screen he never meant to open. His answer was a handset that can take a call while the phone that owns the number stays somewhere else.