Sowmyanarayan Sampath on the 5G race with China and the challenges of standing up to the Trump administration.
When it debuts in China later this week on April 24th, the OnePlus 13T will feature a 6,260mAh battery, as spotted by Notebookcheck. That’s a lot of capacity for a compact phone with a 6.32-inch screen. For comparison, the 6.3-inch Google Pixel 9A has a 5,100mAh battery, while the 6.3-inch iPhone 16 Pro has an even smaller 3,582mAh battery.
In a 1,000 person survey of 20–29 year olds by a major Japanese bank, nearly 20 percent admitted: they once spent so much money on in-game purchases that they couldn’t cover living expenses.
We — and regulators — have long known these games can potentially be addictive, even if you’re aware of the risk. There are dozens of billion-dollar games as a result; now, an entire generation may have “gambled my rent away on cute digital characters” as a shared cultural touchstone.
Apologies to the three people out there nostalgic for Acer phones — the new Super ZX and Super ZX Pro handsets announced in India today are made under license by Indkal Technologies, meaning Acer itself has almost nothing to do with them. The same is true for last month’s two budget Acerpure models.
The last true Acer phone was 2016’s Android 6-powered Liquid Z6 Plus, which boasted a 13-megapixel camera and 32GB of storage.
That’s the new minimum storage for Android 15 devices to license Google Mobile Services, a requirement if you want to support the Play Store, according to Android Authority. In practice you’d have to work pretty hard to find any Android device with that little storage anyway, but it’s still good to see Android’s lowest storage bar raised a bit higher.
[androidauthority.com]
The OnePlus 13T will launch in China on April 24th, though we don’t know if or when it’ll launch elsewhere. The design is a little new for OnePlus, and we already know it will ditch the fan-favorite alert slider for a new shortcut button. It’s small, too, though only by modern standards — its 6.32-inch screen is still bigger than the iPhone 16’s.
That’s what the company told Ars Technica when asked about the current pause to the much-delayed update, which brings Android 15 to the Galaxy S24 series and other devices from 2024 and earlier. It was halted following reports of a bug that stopped people unlocking their phones. There’s no word on when the company will resume the rollout.
“The One UI 7 rollout schedule is being updated to ensure the best possible experience. The new timing and availability will be shared shortly.”
[arstechnica.com]
Motorola’s new teaser on X makes it pretty plain: its new folding-screen flip phones are coming two weeks from today.
The Razr 60 Ultra should come in some pretty sleek finishes, according to last week’s leaked images from Evan Blass. He previously revealed a wooden Razr, and YTechB claims to have leaked specs for both the Razr 60 Ultra and vanilla Razr 60 phone.
In addition to a camera grip with an extra battery and camera controls, Vivo is following companies like Xiaomi and Realme with an external zoom lens for its upcoming X200 Ultra that launches in China on April 21st.
The lens was announced on Weibo by Vivo’s Han Boxiao and will be part of the phone’s Photography Kit. It’s designed to work with the X200 Ultra’s periscope camera, boosting its optical zoom range from 3.7x to 8.7x.
