Dominic Preston is The Verge’s UK-based News Editor. He’s been in journalism since 2013, after picking up two degrees in philosophy that he still hasn’t figured out what to do with. His career in journalism started out with covering movies and games before moving onto the tech beat. He was previously the deputy editor at Tech Advisor and a managing editor at Android Police, and will jump at any excuse to review an Android phone. When he’s not writing about tech he’s usually writing about food instead, on his Substack newsletter Braise.
The company’s first chief technology officer (CTO), Francis Shanahan, has a remit “to focus on artificial intelligence efforts,” announced alongside a new head of marketing. New-ish CEO Peter Stern has already said AI “has the potential to give humans superpowers,” which in Peloton’s case so far means personalized workout plans and AI-powered subtitles for classes.
Then bring suitcases full of hard drives to the AI chips. That’s what some Chinese engineers have reportedly taken to amid efforts to skirt the US ban on selling training chips to China, manually moving terabytes of data to Malaysia to build an AI model there.
Founder Carl Pei had already teased as much, but now it’s official: when the phone launches next month it’ll go on sale at Amazon and Nothing’s own store. It won’t be available direct from carriers, but will support AT&T and T-Mobile, 4G and 5G. The same was true of 2023’s Phone 2, and that was mostly fine on Verizon too.
Oh, and don’t worry — Nothing’s first over-ear headphones are getting a North American release too.
Vivo claims its X Fold 5 has achieved an Android first: interoperability with the Apple Watch. According to product manager Han Boxiao the watch can display calls and texts from the X Fold 5, and sync health data. The phone can also receive calls and texts sent to an iPhone, access iCloud, and extend the display of a Mac.
How? We have no idea, but hopefully we’ll find out when the phone launches this month.
Rumors have long had it that this year’s Galaxy Z Fold phone will be substantially thinner, as Samsung tries to keep up with Oppo and Honor, and now the company itself has hinted at the same.
It says this year’s Fold is “our thinnest, lightest and most advanced foldable yet,” with a picture that certainly looks thin, as it promises to bring the Ultra experience to foldables.
Yesterday the official Android Developers account interrupted the WWDC hubbub to tease that the “final release” of Android 16 should arrive today, after seven months of testing. Don’t expect it to include the Material 3 Expressive design language though, which is coming later this year in a quarterly feature drop.