Tech

MWC Is Where Cutting-Edge Phones Shine. Too Bad You’ll Probably Never Buy Them

For years, people have decried the monotony of smartphone design. With each annual release, companies tend to recycle the same features — when they’re not borrowing from each other — with minimal upgrades and hardly any aesthetic changes, resulting in an uninspiring sea of sameness and predictability.. That’s why at every tech event I’ve attended over the last several years, the most eager crowds cluster around phones that defy hardware limitations. This year’s Mobile World Congress was no exception. I wiggled my way through hordes of people pushing to get their hands on foldable, flippable and ultraslim devices.. Some of these phones are already available to purchase, like Samsung’s Galaxy Z Trifold and Huawei’s Mate XTs. Others are still concepts, like Tecno’s superthin Phantom Ultimate G Fold and its modular phone. A handful of others I saw are on the way to store shelves, like Honor’s Robot Phone and Motorola’s book-style Razr Fold.. Watch this: Our Experts’ Favorite Products at MWC 2026 | All Things Mobile. As our smartphone options have expanded, our collective tastes have remained largely the same. Global foldable phone shipments hit a record 14% year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2025, according to Counterpoint Research. But their share of the overall smartphone market was just 2.5% that quarter, keeping foldables firmly in the niche sector. Thin handsets like Apple’s iPhone Air and Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge have reportedly been underwhelming, with marketing buzz not matching up to real-world adoption. Even at a tech conference like MWC, I rarely saw attendees toting anything other than a standard slab phone.. “Just because something looks great, doesn’t mean you want it at the end of the day,” IDC Senior Research Director Nabila Popal told me in December.. Novelty and adoption remain two separate spheres in the world of mobile design. It’s refreshing to see phone manufacturers branch into more ambitious form factors, but those configurations have yet to graduate from spectacle to staple. And perhaps that’s by design; something can only be buzz-worthy if not everyone owns it. But the argument that there’s a lack of interesting phones loses merit with each passing year of hardware innovation — even if flagship devices continue to feel like copy-paste versions of their predecessors.. Much of the gap between niche phone hype and adoption boils down to their needing to be more practical. Foldables, for instance, have come a long way with improving camera quality and battery life, but they still lag behind what you’ll get on high-end flat phones. The same goes for thin phones like the Galaxy S25 Edge and iPhone Air, which have scaled back specs in exchange for lighter builds. Until sleekness can fully coexist with function, most people will keep choosing the latter.. Prices for unique phones are also prohibitive. Book-style foldables cost around $2,000, and a trifold will set you back around $3,000. Even with their more limited c

Tech

Rabbit’s Cyberdeck is a modern take on a netbook

When you think of an AI-forward PC, you might think of something like NVIDIA’s $3,999 DGX Spark — a computer with enough computing power to run complex large language models locally. That’s not what Rabbit is trying to build with Project Cyberdeck. Instead, the company’s goal is to produce a device tailored for vibe coding, and Engadget was given an exclusive first look at the upcoming PC. Rabbit began working on Project Cyberdeck after the company’s CEO, Jesse Lyu, saw how much his software engineers were using Claude Code. Lyu thought a small form factor PC, like the netbooks that were popular in the late aughts, with a command line interface would be ideal for on-the-go vibe coding, but when he went online to look for something that fit the bill, he was disappointed.”They all come with shitty rubber dome keyboards,” Lyu says of low-cost PCs like the latest Chromebooks, which use flexible silicone sheets under their keys to save on space and cost. “They’re not something you would enjoy typing on for an extended period of time.” So Rabbit decided to build its own device. For inspiration, Lyu and company looked to an unlikely source: the Sony Vaio P. The Cyberdeck takes inspiration from the Sony Vaio P. SonySony’s netbook was only briefly available from the start of 2009 to about the end of 2010. At the time, the 8-inch Vaio P was the world’s lightest netbook, weighing just 1.4 pounds, but it had a host of issues. It was also expensive, costing considerably more than other Intel Atom notebooks of the time. In 2009, the most affordable Vaio P would set you back $900 (about $1,365 adjusted for inflation). With Project Cyberdeck, Rabbit is aiming for a device that costs about $500, and hopefully avoids a similar fate.I saw a few early renders of Project Cyberdeck, which Rabbit isn’t ready to share publicly yet. Imagine a cross between the Rabbit R1, Vaio P and the original Nintendo DS. It looks cute. All the renders had four USB-C ports to allow users to connect the device to external monitors and peripherals, though the actual IO specs are as-yet undecided. The company is in the process of sourcing components and working towards a final design, so details can — and will — change. I saw some of the parts Lyu has been testing in his office, but no final prototype as such. For one, Rabbit still needs to decide on a chipset. The company is aiming for a performance benchmark relative to the Raspberry Pi 5, which has a Broadcom BCM2712 quad-core Arm Cortex A76 processor clocked at 2.4GHz. With 16GB of RAM, the Raspberry Pi 5 can run two external monitors, a capability Rabbit hopes to match with the Cyberdeck. The idea here is to make a device that’s powerful enough it won’t feel slow when it’s communicating with Anthropic and OpenAI’s servers, but affordable enough to make it a no-brainer purchase for developers. The company confirmed Project Cyberdeck will run Linux. Rabbit will allow users to modify the operating system and install any third

Tech

Yeti’s Durable New Portable Power Station Doubles as an Off-Grid Solar Generator and UPS

Goal Zero’s newest portable power station comes with a more durable build and additional capabilities.

Tech

My Favorite Gaming Headphones From SteelSeries Cured My Battery Anxiety

I’ve used a lot of great wireless gaming headsets, but this pair from SteelSeries helped me stop worrying about battery life, making them worth the high price.