When Honor's Magic V2 first showed up some seven months ago, we were left impressed with its sub-1cm folded thickness. The company has since picked up where Huawei left off and joined forces with Porsche Design, with the first result being a special edition foldable phone, the "Magic V2 RSR" ("RSR" stands for "RennSport Rennwagen," which translates to "racing sport racing car"). Porsche fans may recognize several attributes here that pay homage to the automotive brand, including the iconic agate gray along with a flyline running down the middle of the body — supposedly resembling the Porsche 911's hood. The rear camera island has also been upgraded with a dark titanium frame to go with its bolder trapezoidal redesign.

The Magic V2 RSR retains the same dimensions, measuring 9.9mm thick when folded and 4.7mm when opened, ensuring it remains the world's thinnest foldable phone. The extra decoration adds 3 grams over the base model, reaching 234 grams (about 8.25 oz) which still beats the likes of the OnePlus Open, Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Google's Pixel Fold, largely thanks to Honor's mix of titanium alloy and proprietary steel in its hinge design — this is apparently certified to last for at least 400,000 folds. As a bonus, the Magic V2 line's 5,000mAh battery capacity is larger than the competition, thanks to its more energy-dense silicon-carbon cells. The trade-off here is the missing wireless charging, but you do get 66W of wired fast charging, which takes around 50 minutes to go from zero to 100 percent.

The Magic V2 RSR is still powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, but with storage option limited to just 1TB to go with the 16GB of RAM. The rest of the spec sheet is identical for both Magic V2 variants. For displays, you get a 7.92-inch 2,344 x 2,156 foldable OLED screen (with a barely-noticeable crease) and a 6.43-inch 2,376 x 1,060 exterior OLED display, with their brightness going up to 1,600 nits and 2,500 nits, respectively. For audio, this Android phone comes equipped with "IMAX Enhanced" stereo speakers, whereas phone calls leverage the device's three-mic system for better voice reception. As is the case with most foldables, the fingerprint reader is integrated into the side-mounted power button.

The rear "Falcon Camera System" consists of a 50-megapixel main sensor, a 50-megapixel ultra-wide shooter and a 20-megapixel telephoto camera (2.5x zoom), whereas a 16-megapixel punch-hole selfie camera sits at the top of both screens. Both the rear and front cameras support up to 4K resolution for video recording.

It should come as no surprise that the Magic V2 RSR boxset packs some extra goodies, namely an active stylus, its own carrying case and a spare 66W charger. The special protection case is wrapped in a stitched dark gray vegan leather, though compared to the normal version, it's missing out on a kickstand — a feature I struggle to live without when it comes to foldable phones.

Photo by Richard Lai / Engadget

Like the base model, the Magic V2 RSR will also be headed to global markets, though the prices are under wraps until MWC later this month. For reference, the Magic V2 RSR retails for 15,999 yuan or about $2,220 in China, but expect a huge bump for international pricing. The regular Magic V2 — only available in 512GB flavor for international markets — is priced at £1,700 ($2,140) in the UK and €1,999 ($2,150) in Europe, but the China version and Hong Kong version (also international firmware) cost around $1,400 only. It's no wonder that some savvy consumers would rather import smartphones from overseas, despite the lack of local warranty services.

Nintendo's "Switch 2" was widely expected to arrive sometime this year, but a new rumor is putting that timeline into question. Now, the company is telling publishers that the next-gen console is slated for release in the first quarter of 2025, according to VGC, Eurogamer and other sources. That would line up with the release of the original Switch, which was announced in October 2016 but came out in March 2017. 

Publishers were reportedly briefed recently on the launch date change from late 2024 to early 2025. Several sources said they were working on Switch 2 games with releases planned for early 2025. One key title could be the long-delayed Metroid Prime 4, which is still on Nintendo's release schedule but has no specific date attached. 

Earlier this month, Nintendo slightly bumped its fiscal 2024 Switch sales forecast from 15 million to 15.5 million, compared to 18 million and 23 million in 2022 and 2021. Nintendo's stock slid today based on the release delay rumors, according to Reuters.

Not much is known about the future device, including the name. Rumors suggest it will have backward compatibility with Switch, along with 4K capabilities and visual quality similar to that of the PS5 and Series X. In any case, this year is bound to be a busy one for the company — if the new console does launch in Q1 2025, it'll likely be announced at a Nintendo Direct showcase later this year.

The Biden administration plans to loosen the limits on tailpipe emissions proposed last year by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), giving automakers more time before they’ll be required to sell significantly more electric vehicles than gas-powered cars, The New York Times reported this weekend. Under the proposed regulations laid out by the EPA, EVs would have to account for 67 percent of new car and light-duty truck sales by 2032.

Rather than forcing manufacturers to start ramping up EV sales right away, the changes would allow them to make the shift more gradually through the remainder of the 2020s, sources told the NYT. After 2030, though, EV sales would need to drastically increase. Automakers have argued that the current cost of electric vehicles and the lack of charging infrastructure stand in the way of hitting such extreme targets as those proposed by the EPA. Last year, just 7.6 percent of new cars sold in the US were EVs, per NYT.

The revision is likely a move in part to appease labor unions, which represent a demographic seen as a key area of support for Biden and have expressed a need for more time to unionize new EV plants among other concerns, according to NYT. The rules are not yet finalized, but are expected to be published in the spring.

Astroscale’s ADRAS-J spacecraft, a demonstration satellite that could inform future space junk cleanup efforts, is now in orbit after a successful launch from New Zealand on Sunday. The satellite was sent to space atop an Electron rocket from Rocket Lab. Its mission, which was selected by Japan’s space agency (JAXA) for Phase I of the Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration program, will see ADRAS-J rendezvous with an old Japanese rocket upper stage that’s been in orbit since 2009.

The accumulation of waste in Earth’s orbit from decades of spaceflight is an issue of growing concern, and space agencies around the world are increasingly working to address it, in many cases tapping private companies to develop potential solutions. One of the most effective ways to deal with space junk could be to deorbit it, or move it to a lower altitude so it can burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. ADRAS-J will be the first to target a piece of existing large debris and attempt to safely approach and characterize it, relying on ground-based data to hone in on its position.

Over the next few months, it’ll make its way to the target and eventually try to get close enough to take images and assess its condition to determine if it can be removed. “ADRAS-J is officially on duty and ready to rendezvous with some space debris!” the company tweeted. “Let the new era of space sustainability begin!”

Apple may be facing a fine of roughly $539 million (500 million euros) from the EU and a ban on its alleged anti-competitive App Store practices for music streaming services, according to FT. The publication, which cites five unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter, reports that the European Commission will announce its ruling early next month.

The probe stems from a 2019 antitrust complaint filed by Spotify and is focused on App Store rules that at the time prevented developers from directing customers to alternative subscription options outside the app, which could be cheaper as they wouldn’t have to compensate for Apple’s 30 percent fee. Apple later loosened these restrictions. According to FT, the Commission will say Apple broke EU antitrust law and created “unfair trading conditions” for its rivals with the App Store’s “anti-steering obligations.”

Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander is well on its way to the moon after launching without a hitch on Thursday, but it managed to snap a few incredible images of Earth while it was still close to home. The company shared the first batch of images from the IM-1 mission on X today after confirming in an earlier post that the spacecraft is “in excellent health.” Along with a view of Earth and some partial selfies of the Nova-C lander, nicknamed Odysseus, you can even see the SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage falling away in the distance after separation.

Odysseus is on track to make its moon landing attempt on February 22, and so far appears to be performing well. The team posted a series of updates on X at the end of the week confirming the lander has passed some key milestones ahead of its touchdown, including engine firing. This marked “the first-ever in-space ignition of a liquid methane and liquid oxygen engine,” according to Intuitive Machines.

If extreme challenges are your cup of tea, NASA has the perfect opportunity for you. The space agency put out a call on Friday for volunteers to participate in its second yearlong simulated Mars mission, the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA 2). For the duration of the mission, which will start in spring 2025, the four selected crew members will be housed in a 1,700-square-foot 3D-printed habitat in Houston. NASA is accepting applications on the CHAPEA website from now through April 2. It’s a paid gig, but NASA hasn’t publicly said how much participants will be compensated.

The Mars Dune Alpha habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center is designed to simulate what life might be like for future explorers on the red planet, where the environment is harsh and resources will be limited. There’s a crew currently living and working there as part of the first CHAPEA mission, which is now more than halfway through its 378-day assignment. During their stay, volunteers will perform habitat maintenance and grow crops, among other tasks. The habitat also has a 1,200-square-foot sandbox attached to it for simulated spacewalks.

To be considered, applicants must be a US citizen aged 30-55, speak English proficiently and have a master’s degree in a STEM field, plus at least two years of professional experience, a minimum of one thousand hours piloting an aircraft or two years of work toward a STEM doctoral program. Certain types of professional experience may allow applicants without a master’s to qualify too. CHAPEA 2 is the second of three mission NASA has planned for the program, the first of which began on June 25, 2023. 

Sometimes, timing ruins things. Take this week, instead of detailing the disgust I feel towards this 'meaty' rice, this week's Morning After sets its sights on Mark Zuckerberg, the multimillionaire who's decided to review technology now. Does he know that's my gig?

The Meta boss unfavorably compared Apple's new Vision Pro to his company's Meta Quest 3 headset, which is a delightfully hollow and petty reason to 'review' something. But hey, I had to watch it. And now maybe, you'll watch me? 

We also look closer at Waymo's disastrous December, where two of its robotaxis collided with a truck. The ... same truck.

This week:

🥽🥽: Zuckerberg thinks the Quest 3 is a 'better product' than the Vision Pro

🤖🚙💥💥: Waymo robotaxis crash into the same pickup truck, twice

🚭🛫🚫: United Airlines grounds new Airbus fleet over no smoking sign law

Read this:

GLAAD, the world's largest LGBTQ media advocacy group, has published its first annual report on the video game industry. It found that nearly 20 percent of all players in the United States identify as LGBTQ, yet just 2 percent of games contain characters and storylines relevant to this community. And half of those might be Baldur's Gate 3 alone. (I half-joke.) The report notes that not only does representation matter to many LGBTQ players, but also that new generations of gamers are only becoming increasingly more open to queer content regardless of their sexual orientation. We break down the full report here.

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Some Wyze camera owners have reported that they were suddenly given access to cameras that weren't theirs and even got notifications for events inside other people's homes. Wyze cofounder David Crosby has confirmed the issue to The Verge, telling the publications that "some users were able to see thumbnails of cameras that were not their own in the Events tab." Users started seeing strangers' camera feeds in their accounts after an outage that Wyze said was caused by an Amazon Web Services problem. 

Crosby wrote in a post on the Wyze forum that the company's servers got overloaded, which corrupted some user data, after the outage. The security issue that resulted from that event then allowed users to "see thumbnails of cameras that were not their own in the Events tab." Users couldn't view those videos and could only see their thumbnails, he clarified, and they were not able to view live streams from other people's cameras. Wyze was able to identify 14 incidents before taking down the Events tab altogether. 

The company said it's going to notify all affected users and that it has forcibly logged out everyone who've recently used the Wyze app in order to reset tokens. "We will explain in more detail once we finish investigating exactly how this happened and further steps we will take to make sure it doesn’t happen again," Crosby added. 

While the company doesn't have a detailed explanation for what happened yet, its swift confirmation of the incident is a huge departure from how it previously dealt with a security flaw. Back in 2022, cybersecurity firm Bitdefender revealed that in March 2019, it informed Wyze of a major security vulnerability in the Wyze Cam v1 model. The company didn't inform customers about the flaw, however, and didn't even issue a fix until three years later.

Update, February 20 2024, 9:08PM ET: In an email received by Engadget, Wyze admits to affected users that "about 13,000 Wyze users received thumbnails from cameras that were not their own and 1,504 users tapped on them. Most taps enlarged the thumbnail, but in some cases an Event Video was able to be viewed." 

The company went on to explain that this glitch was caused by a mix-up of device ID and user ID mapping, due to a new third-party caching client library struggling to cope with the "unprecedented" data load from client devices rebooting all at once. Wyze promises to prevent this from happening again by adding "a new layer of verification" for connections, and that it'll look for more reliable client libraries to cope with such incidents.

Some Wyze camera owners have reported that they were suddenly given access to cameras that weren't theirs and even got notifications for events inside other people's homes. Wyze cofounder David Crosby has confirmed the issue to The Verge, telling the publications that "some users were able to see thumbnails of cameras that were not their own in the Events tab." Users started seeing strangers' camera feeds in their accounts after an outage that Wyze said was caused by an Amazon Web Services problem. 

Crosby wrote in a post on the Wyze forum that the company's servers got overloaded, which corrupted some user data, after the outage. The security issue that resulted from that event then allowed users to "see thumbnails of cameras that were not their own in the Events tab." Users couldn't view those videos and could only see their thumbnails, he clarified, and they were not able to view live streams from other people's cameras. Wyze was able to identify 14 incidents before taking down the Events tab altogether. 

The company said it's going to notify all affected users and that it has forcibly logged out everyone who've recently used the Wyze app in order to reset tokens. "We will explain in more detail once we finish investigating exactly how this happened and further steps we will take to make sure it doesn’t happen again," Crosby added. 

While the company doesn't have a detailed explanation for what happened yet, its swift confirmation of the incident is a huge departure from how it previously dealt with a security flaw. Back in 2022, cybersecurity firm Bitdefender revealed that in March 2019, it informed Wyze of a major security vulnerability in the Wyze Cam v1 model. The company didn't inform customers about the flaw, however, and didn't even issue a fix until three years later.