Latest Technology

Oppo’s Find N5 feels like the end game for foldable phones. Not because it’s make or break for a segment of the phone market that never quite took off like manufacturers hoped it would, but because I simply don’t know where we go from here. There’s scarcely room to make the phone thinner without ditching USB-C entirely; battery life, performance, and even cameras are now on par with other flagship phones; and this time, Oppo even managed to fit wireless charging and water resistance in, too. This is what we were promised all along. Now what? Hardware and cameras It’s hard to see how the hardware improves much further. At 8.93mm thick when closed, this is the thinnest foldable in the world, shaving almost half a millimeter off the previous record holder, Honor’s Magic V3 . It’s just 4.21mm thin when it’s open, which proves there’s still space to trim — Huawei’s trifold Mate XT runs to just 3.6mm — but we’re close to at least one hard physical limit. Oppo t...

The Find N5 is thinner than any other foldable when shut. Oppo has launched the Find N5, the thinnest foldable phone in the world. It’s launching in markets worldwide, including across Europe and Asia, at $2,499 SGD (about $1,867 USD). That’s more expensive than either the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 or Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold in Singapore, though comparable once you adjust for storage. There won’t be any US release at all though, as sister brand OnePlus has already confirmed that it has no plans to launch a foldable phone this year. The Find N5 is slimmer than any rival foldable, so long as you measure it when closed. At 8.93mm it’s thinner than the previous record holder, last year’s Honor Magic V3 , and less than a millimeter thicker than an iPhone 16 Pro. Open the phone up and it’s just 4.21mm at its thinnest point — so thin that Oppo told me it had to customize the USB-C port to even fit — though measured this way it is fractionally thicker than Huawei’s 3.6mm trifold Mate XT, wh...

Twitch is planning to cull some of the content archived by streamers to save on storage costs. On Wednesday the streaming platform announced that it will introduce a 100-hour storage cap for Highlights and Uploads starting April 19th, warning that users will have their content automatically deleted until it falls below the limit. Twitch says it’s doing this because “Highlights haven’t been very effective in driving discovery or engagement,” and it isn’t worth the cost of storing thousands of hours of such content. Twitch is owned by Amazon, a market-leading cloud storage provider — a detail that hasn’t gone unnoticed by streamers criticizing the decision. The update only applies to Highlights — specific snippets edited from recordings of live broadcasts (VODs) using the Highlighter tool to showcase the streamer’s best moments — and uploaded footage created using third-party services. Other kinds of on-demand content, including Clips and VODs (the latter of which are already automat...

At least it’s a nice-looking paperweight. Ten days from now, the Humane AI Pin will be able to tell you how much battery it has left, and essentially nothing else. To be fair, though, it couldn’t do that much before. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because you almost certainly didn’t buy one. But if you did, that’s the bad news: Humane is shutting down the AI Pin — almost exactly a year after it first started shipping the little chest-mounted device — and has sold some of its remnant technology to HP. The details here are brutal for everyone involved. The $116 million HP is paying pales next to the $230 million the company raised since it was founded in 2018. (There was a rumor last spring that Humane was trying to sell to HP for somewhere near $1 billion .) The company’s founders, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, have now gone from celebrated Apple product makers to… working on AI stuff for HP’s printers and conference room gadgets. Pin owners will be stuck ...

Eufy’s newest smart lock adds palm unlock and a digital peephole. Anker’s smart home arm, Eufy, has announced its first smart lock that uses palm vein recognition to unlock your door. The $399 FamiLock S3 Max is also a video doorbell with a 2K-capable camera and an interior screen that shows a live video feed through the door lock. The S3 works over Wi-Fi 6 and supports Matter for integration with most smart home ecosystems, including Apple Home and Amazon Alexa. Palm unlock is a new biometric feature on residential locks, joining fingerprint unlock and facial recognition as new ways to access our homes. Philips , TCL , and TP-Link Tapo all recently launched models that unlock by waving your hand over an infrared sensor. Research shows that palm vein recognition is more accurate and secure than fingerprint readers, in part because it works by recognizing that blood is flowing through your veins. Most people who want a smart lock for their home probably aren’t worried about ...

Microsoft was planning to make some changes to the way you sign in to a Microsoft account in February, keeping accounts signed in automatically unless you sign out or use private browsing. While the changes were communicated to Outlook.com users through a notification and in a now-removed Microsoft support article , Microsoft has now confirmed to The Verge that this was a mistake. “There will be no changes to Microsoft users’ commercial (Microsoft Entra) or consumer (Microsoft account) sign in experiences in February,” confirms Alex Simons, corporate vice president of identity & network access program management at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge . “Media reports were based on incomplete information mistakenly published by a Microsoft product team. The incorrect notifications have been removed.” Microsoft hasn’t clarified when it plans to eventually roll out these changes after the mistaken notifications, but once they arrive it means you’ll no longer be asked if you wa...