Students of history learn the importance of primary sources; eyewitness accounts of what people saw and did when all of this history was going on. You also learn that there’s a great need for evidence to be gathered before the twin evils of memory and self-deception color the narratives. Just as important, however, are secondary sources which can collate all of that testimony, to pick out the truth, or at least a working theory about what went on.

Take WeWork, a startup that leases office space to individuals and small businesses with an emphasis on fancy design and an open bar. As Scott Galloway once said, “they’re renting f*cking desks,” but wound up inexplicably deemed to be worth $47 billion. Now, you might be wondering how exactly that came to be, but it’s not a question that Apple TV’s WeCrashed can answer. It can, in excruciating detail, lead you through the chronology of what happened, but why it happened remains frustratingly out of reach.

The series, adapted from the Wondery podcast of the same name, charts the rise and rise of Israeli entrepreneur Adam Neumann (Jared Leto). It charts Neumann’s life, from his stumbles at business school, meeting Miguel McKelvey (Kyle Marvin) and his future wife, Rebekah Paltrow (Anne Hathaway). Neumann and McKelvey launch Green Desk, a Brooklyn-based co-working company that they sell in order to repeat the feat in Manhattan under the name WeWork. Which, unlike Green Desk, makes a fairly sizable dent in the rarified world of investment banking and tech investments.

As usual, Apple asked critics not to spoil the details of the show. I can, however, safely recommend that you read the Wikipedia article to find out exactly what happened, which is a far more efficient and enjoyable way to spend your time. Suffice to say, a company deemed to be more valuable than the GDP of some countries winds up not being worth that much and some venture capital funds have to spend extra cash to clean up the error of their initial investment.

Unfortunately, the show’s biggest failure is that the above description is pretty much the level of stakes we’re expected to care about. The second is that a story that might have made a fairly breezy movie of the week on HBO drags on well beyond anyone’s tolerance to enjoy it. Third, and worst of all, is that it’s really hard to spend that much time in the company of Adam and Rebekah Neumann. Now, there are plenty of films and TV series that feature unlikeable yet compelling sociopaths as their lead characters, including the recently released Inventing Anna. And if WeCrashed had a more cohesive central thesis, or a clear-eyed view of these characters, then they might have been able to make the characters in any way compelling or pleasant. To say that spending eight hours in their company is a chore is a spectacular understatement.

Despite its never-ending running time, WeCrashed glosses over a fair number of details from the WeWork narrative. The Ballardian WeLive residential concept, which was detailed in Hulu’s WeWork documentary from last year, never gets a mention. More troublingly, the show glosses over the corporate culture of hard drinking and, reportedly, inter-office sexual assault that were widelydetailed at the time. The only time this is ever looked at, it’s as a montage showing people taking their turns with each other in a supply closet between rounds of drinks. And, because of how the show frames Adam as our, uh, hero, it almost celebrates the times he himself uses drinking (and bullying) to get his own way with would-be business partners. 

It’s interesting, to me, that WeCrashed seems to not have a clear idea of what sort of show it wants to be. If it wanted to portray the Neumanns as well-meaning ingenues out of their depth and manipulated by wider forces, it could have sanded off their rougher edges. If it wanted to make them the villains, it would have taken the sort of villain-as-hero perspective you’d find in a Martin Scorsese movie. But instead it sits in a middle ground, with silly gag bits sprinkled around what is otherwise a fairly po-faced prestige drama.

I will say, too, that viewers will notice that all of the people who backed and enabled Neumann are rarely treated critically. The people who wrote the checks, fed the beast and then threw a tantrum when it didn’t make a huge profit are always presented as well-meaning. This soft touch certainly extends toward Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank and head of Softbank’s Vision Fund. Softbank, if you recall, was Apple’s iPhone launch carrier in Japan, owns part of T-Mobile in the US and, most crucially, currently owns ARM, which licenses the technology that powers Apple Silicon. Sure depicting him at all is something of a risk, but he’s never presented as a fool, nor is it suggested that he was duped into investing in WeWork in the first place.

There are a couple of moments where a character is able to point at what’s unfolding in wide-eyed disbelief. But those are few and far between, again, maybe because it’s hard – yet – to see if WeWork is a success or a failure. It did go public, eventually, as part of a SPAC, and while it’s still a loss-making company, it may eventually rebound. It’s clear that you can’t pull, or land, a punch if you don’t know where your target is going to be in two or three years from now. If this story, for whatever reason, gets remade in the 2050’s, I bet it’ll be a lot more interesting than the one I’ve just sat through.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the WeCrashed’s creators were aiming for a show on the level of Succession. Unfortunately, while it does focus on “complex characters who are unlikeable worrying over their ownership stake of a company,” this feels more like a Billions knock-off. And not a good one at that.

In the Internet age, nothing is gone forever, and everything can be resurrected time and again as an easy way to sell products. Sadly, whatever residual affection our parents’ generation had for brands like Polaroid and Atari has been strip-mined to sell, well, whatever their new owners choose. Consequently, it’s time for a newer, fresher name to return from the dust and remind everyone over the age of 34 that our childhoods are now something that people can feel nostalgia towards. Oh, and apropos of nothing, LimeWire is coming back as an NFT marketplace.

In May, LimeWire is relaunching as a “mainstream-ready, digital collectibles marketplace for art and entertainment, initially focusing on music.” Its backers believe that it will be a place for artists and fans to create and sell digital trinkets without the “technical hurdles of the current NFT landscape.” It is hoping to partner with a raft of high-profile musicians in the hope of spreading word about LimeWire’s resurrection in the hope of getting a million willing buyers signed up before the first year is done.

The phrase of the day is ensuring that “NFT newbies” are well catered-for, offering easy signup, pricing in US dollars and a lack of any crypto-based gatekeeping. Users will be able to buy straight from their credit cards (or any other regular money) via Wyre’s payment platform, which is also used by OpenSea. The company added that it is working with “top-tier artists” from the music world who will create content for the platform and also open lines of communication with willing fans.

LimeWire’s resurrection is being handled by Julian and Paul Zehetmayr, who are also both co-CEOs of the company. The Zehetmayrs are the figures behind Eversign, as well as b2b-software companies Currencylayer and Stack Holdings. Julian, in a statement, said that “it’s important to note that we are not relaunching LimeWire as an alternative to streaming platforms, but rather as an additional channel for artists to sell exclusive music and art directly to collectors.”

Of course, it’s not clear if the folks who really loved LimeWire had much affection for the platform itself back in the day. After all, LimeWire’s ability to let you illegally pirate music from your friends and enemies came with the added inclusion of some spyware. But with LimeWire back and Napster lurking in the background as some sort of VR thing these days, maybe we can club together to get Kazaa revived so we can once again feel the delight at hearing Corky and the Juice Pigs’ Eskimo Song even though we’d tried to download the Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way.

Google has todayannounced that it has signed an agreement to buy Mandiant, a notable cybersecurity company, for $5.4 billion. The unit, once acquired, will be folded into Google’s Cloud team to ensure that it can offer an “end-to-end security operations suite” for its business customers. Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia says that the deal will enable “organizations [to] effectively, efficiently and continuously manage and configure their complex mix of security products.” Google's cloud platform is used by a number of major companies, and an outage towards the end of 2021 briefly knocked out Spotify, Snapchat, Etsy and Discord, amongst others.

Mandiant isn’t likely to be a name on everyone’s lips, but it’s one of those companies who gets called in whenever bad things go down. It discovered the SolarWinds hack, and it was hired by Equifax to look into its security practices after its massive security snafu in 2017, and T-Mobile entered into partnership with the company after its 2021 breach. It also works with major banks and governments to work on high-profile attacks involving state actors. Mandiant was previously a part of FireEye after being acquired in 2013, but the company was spun back out last year.

The news comes just a month after Bloomberg reported that Microsoft might be interested in acquiring the company. It said that any deal would enable its new buyer to offer “unparalleled cybersecurity knowledge,” although Microsoft — obviously — subsequently pulled out of negotiations. But Google clearly feels that the deal is worth it, and is the second most expensive purchase the company has ever made, after its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola.

Since its launch in 2013, Telegram has grown from a simple messaging app to a broadcast network. Its user base isn’t as vast as WhatsApp’s, and its broadcast platform is a fraction the size of Twitter, but it’s nonetheless showing its use. While Telegram has been embroiled in controversy for much of its life, it has become a vital source of communication during the invasion of Ukraine. But, if all of this is new to you, let us explain, dear friends, what on Earth a Telegram is meant to be, and why you should, or should not, need to care.

What is Telegram?

At its heart, Telegram is little more than a messaging app like WhatsApp or Signal. But it also offers open channels that enable a single user, or a group of users, to communicate with large numbers in a method similar to a Twitter account. This has proven to be both a blessing and a curse for Telegram and its users, since these channels can be used for both good and ill. Right now, as Wired reports, the app is a key way for Ukrainians to receive updates from the government during the invasion.

Who made Telegram?

Telegram was co-founded by Pavel and Nikolai Durov, the brothers who had previously created VKontakte. VK is Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, a social network used for public and private messaging, audio and video sharing as well as online gaming. In January, SimpleWeb reported that VK was Russia’s fourth most-visited website, after Yandex, YouTube and Google’s Russian-language homepage. In 2016, Forbes’ Michael Solomon described Pavel Durov (pictured, below) as the “Mark Zuckerberg of Russia.”

Does VK own Telegram, like Facebook owns WhatsApp?

Oh no. There’s a certain degree of myth-making around what exactly went on, so take everything that follows lightly. Telegram was originally launched as a side project by the Durov brothers, with Nikolai handling the coding and Pavel as CEO, while both were at VK.

In February 2014, the Ukrainian people ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, prompting Russia to invade and annex the Crimean peninsula. By the start of April, Pavel Durov had given his notice, with TechCrunch saying at the time that the CEO had resisted pressure to suppress pages criticizing the Russian government.

The next bit isn’t clear, but Durov reportedly claimed that his resignation, dated March 21st, was an April Fools’ prank. TechCrunch implies that it was a matter of principle, but it’s hard to be clear on the wheres, whos and whys. Similarly, on April 17th, the Moscow Times quoted Durov as saying that he quit the company after being pressured to reveal account details about Ukrainians protesting the then-president Viktor Yanukovych.

Either way, Durov says that he withdrew his resignation but that he was ousted from his company anyway. Subsequently, control of the company was reportedly handed to oligarchs Alisher Usmanov and Igor Sechin, both allegedly close associates of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

At this point, however, Durov had already been working on Telegram with his brother, and further planned a mobile-first social network with an explicit focus on anti-censorship. Later in April, he told TechCrunch that he had left Russia and had “no plans to go back,” saying that the nation was currently “incompatible with internet business at the moment.” He added later that he was looking for a country that matched his libertarian ideals to base his next startup.

Manuel Blondeau - Corbis via Getty Images

How does it make money?

On Telegram’s website, it says that Pavel Durov “supports Telegram financially and ideologically while Nikolai (Duvov)’s input is technological.” Currently, the Telegram team is based in Dubai, having moved around from Berlin, London and Singapore after departing Russia. Meanwhile, the company which owns Telegram is registered in the British Virgin Islands.

At the start of 2018, the company attempted to launch an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which would enable it to enable payments (and earn the cash that comes from doing so). The initial signals were promising, especially given Telegram’s user base is already fairly crypto-savvy. It raised an initial tranche of cash – worth more than a billion dollars – to help develop the coin before opening sales to the public. Unfortunately, third-party sales of coins bought in those initial fundraising rounds raised the ire of the SEC, which brought the hammer down on the whole operation. In 2020, officials ordered Telegram to pay a fine of $18.5 million and hand back much of the cash that it had raised.

On December 23rd, 2020, Pavel Durov posted to his channel that the company would need to start generating revenue. In early 2021, he added that any advertising on the platform would not use user data for targeting, and that it would be focused on “large one-to-many channels.” He pledged that ads would be “non-intrusive” and that most users would simply not notice any change.

So, uh, whenever I hear about Telegram, it’s always in relation to something bad. What gives?

Given the pro-privacy stance of the platform, it’s taken as a given that it’ll be used for a number of reasons, not all of them good. And Telegram has been attached to a fair few scandals related to terrorism, sexual exploitation and crime. Back in 2015, Vox described Telegram as “ISIS’ app of choice,” saying that the platform’s real use is the ability to use channels to distribute material to large groups at once. Telegram has acted to remove public channels affiliated with terrorism, but Pavel Durov reiterated that he had no business snooping on private conversations.

This ability to mix the public and the private, as well as the ability to use bots to engage with users has proved to be problematic. In early 2021, a database selling phone numbers pulled from Facebook was selling numbers for $20 per lookup. Similarly, security researchers found a network of deepfake bots on the platform that were generating images of people submitted by users to create non-consensual imagery, some of which involved children.

Telegram has become more interventionist over time, and has steadily increased its efforts to shut down these accounts. But this has also meant that the company has also engaged with lawmakers more generally, although it maintains that it doesn’t do so willingly. For instance, in September 2021, Telegram reportedly blocked a chat bot in support of (Putin critic) Alexei Navalny during Russia’s most recent parliamentary elections. Pavel Durov was quoted at the time saying that the company was obliged to follow a “legitimate” law of the land. He added that as Apple and Google both follow the law, to violate it would give both platforms a reason to boot the messenger from its stores.

The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are “private amongst their participants,” but it will respond to requests in relation to sticker sets, channels and bots which are publicly available. During the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel Durov has wrestled with this issue a lot more prominently than he has before. Channels like Donbass Insider and Bellum Acta, as reported by Foreign Policy, started pumping out pro-Russian propaganda as the invasion began. So much so that the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council issued a statement labeling which accounts are Russian-backed. Ukrainian officials, in potential violation of the Geneva Convention, have shared imagery of dead and captured Russian soldiers on the platform.

On February 27th, Durov posted that Channels were becoming a source of unverified information and that the company lacks the ability to check on their veracity. He urged users to be mistrustful of the things shared on Channels, and initially threatened to block the feature in the countries involved for the length of the war, saying that he didn’t want Telegram to be used to aggravate conflict or incite ethnic hatred. He did, however, walk back this plan when it became clear that they had also become a vital communications tool for Ukrainian officials and citizens to help coordinate their resistance and evacuations.

I want a secure messaging app, should I use Telegram?

You may recall that, back when Facebook started changing WhatsApp’s terms of service, a number of newsoutlets reported on, and even recommended, switching to Telegram. Pavel Durov even said that users should delete WhatsApp “unless you are cool with all of your photos and messages becoming public one day.” But Telegram can’t be described as a more-secure version of WhatsApp.

Telegram does offer end-to-end encrypted communications through Secret Chats, but this is not the default setting. Standard conversations use the MTProto method, enabling server-client encryption but with them stored on the server for ease-of-access. This makes using Telegram across multiple devices simple, but also means that the regular Telegram chats you’re having with folks are not as secure as you may believe.

If you initiate a Secret Chat, however, then these communications are end-to-end encrypted and are tied to the device you are using. That means it’s less convenient to access them across multiple platforms, but you are at far less risk of snooping. Back in the day, Secret Chats received some praise from the EFF, but the fact that its standard system isn’t as secure earned it some criticism. If you’re looking for something that is considered more reliable by privacy advocates, then Signal is the EFF’s preferred platform, although that too is not without some caveats.

One thing that Telegram now offers to all users is the ability to “disappear” messages or set remote deletion deadlines. That enables users to have much more control over how long people can access what you’re sending them. Given that Russian law enforcement officials are reportedly (via Insider) stopping people in the street and demanding to read their text messages, this could be vital to protect individuals from reprisals.

Twitter is today announcing an expansion to its Birdwatch scheme, which sees volunteer fact-checkers vet potentially-misleading tweets. The company said that, as of right now, a small randomized group of US-based users will see fact-checking notes appended to controversial missives. Rather than a full rollout, however, Twitter says that this is more an expansion in the “visibility of the pilot.” Its intention is to help gain more feedback from a broader number of users rather than anything more wide-ranging.

Birdwatch works by allowing these unpaid fact-checkers to attach contextual notes which, until now, have only been visible on a separate Birdwatch site. These notes won’t, however, reach general users during this expanded trial unless enough other Birdwatch volunteers vote on them positively. And these votes will need to come from a users with a broad number of “different perspectives,” which Twitter defines as having voted in opposition to their fellow volunteers. (Birdwatch has been criticized previously for the partisan slant to its fact-checking and subsequently moved to make its contributors anonymous.) 

The move comes just 48 hours after The Washington Post posted a report criticizing Twitter for failing to get Birdwatch rolled out to its global user base. Birdwatch is described as being “invisible to ordinary Twitter users,” and cited figures saying that, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, less than 50 tweets per day were being flagged and appended by volunteers. (That figure has since risen to more than 150 tweets per day, although that’s still nothing compared to what Twitter pumps out each day.)

Netflix has today announced that it will acquire Next Games, a Finnish mobile game developer that has already made an RPG based on Stranger Things. The deal will see Netflix hand over around €65 million (around $72 million), with all of the paperwork expected to be finalized by the summer. Next Games has plenty of experience courting the TV-tie-in market, and previously made The Walking Dead: Our World which was kept updated in sync with the (in)famous zombie show.

As Michael Verdu, VP of Games at Netflix explained, Next Games will become a “core studio,” “expanding our internal game studio capabilities.” This is very in-line with Netflix’s strategy to broaden out what it can offer to users beyond prestige TV miniseries that regularly last 2-3 hours longer than they should. As well as titles spun-out of Stranger Things and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Netflix has also launched a Hearthstone-esque card battler called Arcanium: Rise of Akhan and Krispee Street. Not to mention its projects in “interactive fiction” like Bandersnatch and the recently-released Cat Burglar.

If there’s one thing that really defined that murky period just after the turn of the millennium, it was the Razor Scooter craze. A thin-and-light scooter with impractically-small wheels, these vehicles were the ride of choice for tweens all over the US, at least before they got their own cars. Now, however, Razor is hoping to juice the nostalgia gland of all those kids by electrifying its original thin-and-light kick scooter. The Razor Icon is a scaled-up version of its original Model A, remade in the form of an e-scooter with the original-ish styling and detail.

The Icon is packing a 36V lithium-ion battery connected to a 350-watt motor that the company promises has a range of 18 miles, and a top speed of 18 miles per hour. Crafted with “aircraft grade aluminum” it’s designed to evoke those memories of kicking around your neighborhood or mall back when life was sweet. You’ll also find a LED headlamp and brake light to ensure you’re safe tootling around on those 8.5-inch airless tires.

Of course, this isn’t actually Razor’s first (second, or third) e-scooter, and it has a fairly beefy business offering a number of models. Earlier this year, it announced a partnership with Jeep to craft the RX200, an “off-road” scooter with a slow top speed but inflated tires and a 40-minute battery life. The models that Razor currently sell, however, do lack that certain stark something compared to its original, foot-powered design. It’s perhaps this issue more than the rest that the Icon is designed to address (although the E-Prime, I’ll admit, does come close).

Given that this is a nice piece of nostalgia it’s no surprise that the Razor Icon is being launched at Toy Fair today. And, naturally, it’s decided to take pre-orders for this thing via Kickstarter (Kickstarter! Another thing we can get nostalgic about) with early birds able to pick up a model for $549, while latecomers who spent their mornings pretending that listening to Warning was a good idea will have to spend $599.

Finnish software outfit Jolla has announced that it is attempting to disentangle itself from the Russian state interests that hold a significant stake in its business. Samuli Simojoki, current chair of Jolla’s board, posted (in Finnish) on LinkedIn, saying that Jolla is currently 45-percent owned by Rostelecom. The Russian telecommunications giant is itself 45-percent owned by the Russian government, and so while it’s not a majority stake, it is significant. Simojoki added that Jolla has been “actively” driving down its Russian business through 2021 and, at this point, does not make any money from the nation. But, until it can find a way of buying Rostelecom out, or somehow otherwise arranging a separation, the thorny issue remains.

Those with short memories might not recall that Jolla was the company that rose from the ashes of Nokia’s homegrown smartphone OS, MeeGo. Jolla, itself formed by former Nokia engineers, developed MeeGo into Sailfish, which was intended to offer a second alternative to Android in the then-burgeoning mobile world. After a not-too-successful attempt at launching its own handset in 2013, Sailfish pivoted to supporting Android devices as a replacement operating system for those tired of Google. By early 2015, having failed to make much of a dent in the world with that strategy, Jolla received positive overtures from the Russian government.

Russia’s interest in Sailfish was, broadly speaking, part of a trend back then reflecting a wariness on behalf of other major nations of western technology. Both China and Russia, concerned that computers, tablets, smartphones and industrial applications were becoming entirely dependent on American-owned hardware and software, looked for alternative platforms to adopt. In late 2016, the Russian government approved Sailfish as a platform that could be used by government departments and officials. It subsequently signed similar deals in China and Latin America, where Jolla licensed its source code to a local partner. This was sufficient to help it avoid a second bankruptcy, although its financial woes have always been an issue.

It’s not clear, and we have emailed Jolla for further comment, what this will mean for Jolla’s future as a standalone business. In his LinkedIn post, Simojoki said that the company has received plenty of positive interest from European companies, but they will only sign up after Rostelecom’s stake is gone. That, for now, leaves the company stuck in something of a Catch-22.

Honor is today announcing its latest flagship smartphone, the Magic4, which refines the general template laid down by its predecessor, the Magic 3. Not that you could actually buy the Magic 3, because despite the promise of a global rollout, the handset never officially left China. This, the company says, was down to the growing pains associated with escaping Huawei’s shadow after their sanctions-mandated divorce. This year, however, we’re told that things are going to be better and we might actually see these handsets here in the West.

The Magic 4 and the Magic 4 Pro are being positioned as equivalent handsets to Samsung’s Galaxy S22. Honor is hoping that you’ll appreciate the shopping cart’s-worth of features that the company has piled onto these devices in the hope of making you switch. And the Pro model has the sort of spec list that, on paper at least, would make you think twice about where you put your cash.

Both devices come with a 6.81-inch LTPO (Gen 3) display with a 120Hz adaptive refresh rate, although the Magic4’s 1,224 x 2,664 (430 ppi) screen looks inadequate compared to the Pro’s 1,312 x 2,848 (460 ppi) equivalent. Both are offering a backlit brightness of 1,000 nits, with 1,920Hz Pulse-Width Modulation dimming, HDR10+ and 100 percent DCI-P3 color. The company says that the benefits of LTPO over OLED include more efficient power usage, better refresh rate control and a reduction in eye strain.

Honor is also dumping a bucket-load of sensors into its “Eye of Muse”-branded camera setup, with both handsets getting two 50-megapixel cameras. An f/1.8 wide lens is sat across from a f/2.2 ultra-wide lens with a 122-degree field of vision. But while the vanilla edition gets an 8-megapixel periscope telephoto lens, the Pro is packing a 64-megapixel beast with a 3.5x optical zoom and 100x digital zoom. The more expensive unit also gets an 8x8 Direct Time of Flight (dTOF) sensor to help with focusing and improving image quality.

But, in all honesty, the company would much rather talk about its work harnessing “Multi-Camera Fusion” computational photography to blend together snaps from each of these lenses for sharper, better pictures. For instance, a shot taken between 0.6x and 1x zoom will likely be a composite of shots taken with those 50MP wide and ultra-wide lenses. Between 1x and 2x zoom will be the wide camera on its own, while anything after that will use the telephoto as well. Once you get to 3.5x and beyond, you’ll get “Multi-Frame Fusion,” mashing all of the lens inputs for, it’s hoped, far better zoomed images.

In terms of video, please forgive me for not wanting to repeat a chunk of what I wrote last year about the Magic3. Last year, Honor made a capital-B big deal about that model’s ability to shoot cinema-quality video in a custom, mobile-friendly version of (pro film standard) Log: MagicLog. This year, Honor says that MagicLog will crank out 10-bit 4K video running at 60 fps, which if accurate, would make this phone one hell of a tool for hobbyist filmmakers. The company adds that stills taken while recording video will be of far better quality than previous generations of handsets.

Both handsets are toting Snapdragon’s 8 Gen 1 SoC, the same 4nm 5G chip that you’ll find inside the Galaxy S22. Both come with an Adreno 730 GPU and the option of either 8GB or 12GB RAM, while storage options include 128GB, 256GB or 512GB on the Magic 4 and 256GB or 512GB storage on the Pro. There’s also a custom “dedicated security chip” designed to hold biometrics, passwords and payment data, although it’s not clear what security this offers over what Qualcomm already promises.

Rounding out the important news is at least one quality-of-life tweak for the Magic 4 Pro called AI Privacy Call. This, as the name doesn’t entirely suggest, is designed to dynamically adjust the volume of a call depending on the ambient noise. If you’re in a busy, noisy environment, it’ll boost the volume of the loudspeaker to help you hear what’s going on. If you’re in a pin-drop quiet elevator and would rather your fellow passengers not hear your most intimate conversations, it’ll dial it down.

Honor

Another feature reserved for the 4 Pro exclusively is 100W SuperCharging which, if you have the right charger, will rejuice that 4,600mAh battery up to 90 percent in just half an hour using wired or wireless charging. The Magic4’s 4,800mAh battery, meanwhile, will accept up to 66W charging through the correct Honor SuperCharge equipment.

As part of its split from Huawei, Honor pledged to produce its own range of hardware products to mirror its former parent’s strategy. This time around, the company is releasing a new pair of earbuds and a new watch, but promises that we can expect routers, displays and smart TVs to pop up at points further down the line.

Honor

The Honor Earbuds 3 Pro come with quick charging and a total playback time of 24 hours. They are also equipped with active noise cancellation and body temperature monitoring to help you keep an eye on your overall health. The Watch GS3, meanwhile, looks like Honor went all-in on making it look a little less agricultural than its predecessor. An eight-channel “Heart Rate AI Engine” is the headline feature, which the company promises will offer far more in-depth analysis of your ticker.

Sadly, we don't know yet the Magic 4 series, earbuds and watch will be available, but the company has released initial European prices for all of them. The Magic 4 Pro, with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage will cost €1,099 ($1,230) on that side of the pond. Similarly, the Magic 4 with 8GB/256GB will cost €899 ($1,006), while the Watch GS3 will start at €229 ($256) in midnight black and €249 ($278) in blue or gold. Finally, the earbuds will be priced at €199 ($222). 

Catch up on all of the news from MWC 2022 right here!

Those who keep an eye on the machinations of the Chinese phone market might remember that Poco used to be the budget division of Xiaomi. Since the latter decided to spin out the former, Poco has been standing on its own two feet and bulking out the range of affordable handsets it offers to consumers. Today at MWC, the company is showing off a new flagship X4 Pro 5G, as well as a non-5G version of the M4 Pro.

The X4 Pro 5G is packing a 6.67-inch, FHD+ display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a backlit capable of pumping up to 700 nits into your eyeballs. Poco is hoping to lure new customers in with the promise of a 108-megapixel, f/1.9 primary camera flanked by an 8-megapixel ultra-wide shooter and a 2-megapixel macro lens. Up front, meanwhile, is a 16-megapixel f/1.4 punch hole camera that gets little more than a nod in Poco’s press materials.

Lurking inside, however, is the “premium midrange” Snapdragon 695 5G nestled alongside either 6GB RAM and 128GB storage, or 8GB RAM/256GB. Support for 1TB additional storage is offered, as well as a 67W charger which comes in the box — useful, since the 5,000mAh battery supports 67W fast charging. You may forgive the side-button fingerprint sensor if you’re an audiophile, too, since it is both hi-res audio certified and also still comes with the rare and beautiful treat of a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Poco

If you’re looking for something a little gentler on your wallet, then Poco is today revealing a non-5G version of its M4 Pro. It’s packing a 6.43-inch FHD+ AMOLED display with a 90Hz refresh rate, a 64-megapixel, f/1.8 rear camera and 5,000mAh battery with support for 33W charging. Powering the unit is a MediaTek Helio G96, which comes with a choice of 6GB RAM 128GB storage, or 8GB of the former and 256GB of the latter.

As for right now, however, we don’t quite know if either of these handsets will be available to buy in the US and Europe, or how much they’ll cost. That said, a cached Amazon France listing suggests that the X4 Pro will at least reach that nation, priced at €350 (around $392). 

Catch up on all of the news from MWC 2022 right here!