Other Phones to Consider

We test a ton of Android phones. We like the ones below, but you’ll be better off with one of the options above. If you haven’t yet done so, check out our Best Cheap Phones and Best Folding Phones guides for more.

Samsung Galaxy S25 FE

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Samsung Galaxy S25 FE for $650: If Google’s Pixel 10 doesn’t appeal, you can get a really great Samsung phone for around $500 (it’s often on sale around this price!). The Galaxy S25 FE is like a “lite” version of the flagship Galaxy S25, with a bigger 6.7-inch screen, a larger battery, and a triple-camera system that includes a 3X optical zoom lens. Performance isn’t as good, but I never had any issues (you may not be able to play the most demanding games at the highest graphical settings). The screen is sharp, bright, and smooth, and this phone is even Qi2 Ready if you use a compatible magnetic case. I don’t recommend buying it at its MSRP, but when it’s frequently at $500, it’s a smart option. It’s also worth considering the standard Galaxy S25 series if you can find them on sale.

Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold for $1,799: I think Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold7 takes the cake as the best folding phone designed like a book in 2025, but if you prefer Google’s Pixel phones, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold (7/10, WIRED Review) isn’t a bad option. It’s nowhere near as thin, but it does have Qi2 magnets built in, meaning you can attach it to various magnetic accessories, like car docks and phone chargers, or attach magnetic wallets or power banks to the phone. It’s also one of the only folding phones with an IP68 dust- and water-resistance rating for peace of mind. The screens look great, battery life is solid, and the camera system is reliable. It’s easy to get into split-screen mode, but I think there’s more Google can do to improve the multitasking experience.

Google Pixel 9 series

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Google Pixel 9 series for $570+: The Pixel 9 series (9/10, WIRED Recommends) from 2024 is still a great buy if you can find them on sale. The Pixel 9 is similar to the Pixel 9a but with better build quality and larger camera sensors. The Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL have the 5X optical camera and the vapor chamber cooling, among other perks. The key is to make sure you avoid paying MSRP. These have dipped fairly often in price during sale events, and now, as stock gets cleared, you can probably find a killer deal if you hold out.

Galaxy Z Flip7

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip7 for $1,056: Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip7 (7/10, WIRED Recommends) got some great upgrades over its predecessor, but it wasn’t enough to dethrone the Razr Ultra 2025 as my top flip phone pick. Still, it’s worth considering if you’re shopping for a folding phone of this category, because the cameras are solid, the displays are excellent and larger than ever, and the cover screen is a little more useful (though not as versatile as on Motorola’s phone). Battery life is even worse here over the Fold7, so snag a power bank while you’re at it.

Minimal Phone

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Minimal Phone for $450: Having trouble curbing your screen time? Instead of going cold turkey with something like the Light Phone III, try the Minimal Phone (6/10, WIRED Review). This is an e-paper Android phone with a physical keyboard. The goal is to let you access the usual Android apps, but because the screen is ill-suited to videos and most social media, you’ll naturally be able to avoid those distractions. It’s successful in this task, but the constant screen ghosting and plasticky build dampen the experience.

Mobile Accessories You Might Need

Arc Pulse bumpers for Pixel 10 Pro XL

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

We have case recommendations for a few popular devices, like Samsung’s Galaxy S25, Galaxy S24, and Galaxy S23, or Google’s Pixel 10 series. It’s smart to slap a case on these glass sandwiches and even a screen protector to keep the display free of scuffs and scratches. Here are a few other noteworthy accessories, including charging adapters, which many phones don’t include anymore. Read our Best USB-C Cables guide for other recommendations.

Nomad 65W Slim Power Adapter for $55: There are lots of great options if you want a cheap, tiny charger these days, but why not spend a bit more for something versatile? This ultra-slim charger from Nomad is easy to travel with, especially thanks to its folding prongs, and it has enough power to recharge a MacBook, let alone your phone. There are two USB-C ports to boot.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Counterpart Retractable The Charger for $44: It’s not the best value, but this design-forward charger has a retractable 4-foot cable that makes it a fantastic two-in-one—no need to pack a separate charger and cable! It outputs 35 watts, which is plenty to fast-charge most phones and tablets, and the prongs fold in for travel.

Peak Design Samsung and Pixel Everyday Case for $50: If you have a Samsung or Pixel phone and you frequently mount your phone to a bike or scooter, you owe it to yourself to snag this case and Peak Design’s bike mount. The case snaps perfectly into the mount, is dead simple to release, and has yet to fall off after years of riding. Peak Design also sells several other accessories you can attach to the back of these cases, bringing Android into Apple’s MagSafe ecosystem.

Nimble Champ Portable Charger 10,000 mAh for $60: This portable battery is small enough to leave in a bag but has enough power to fully recharge your phone once or twice. There’s a USB-C and USB-A port; it delivers 18 watts of power, so it can recharge your tablet or phone, and it’s housed in 73 percent post-consumer plastic with plastic-free packaging.

Nomad ChargeKey V2 for $29: When your phone dies, it’s almost always when you forget to bring a charger or battery pack. The ChargeKey is a nifty solution—it’s like clipping a tiny USB-C charging cable to your keychain. Just plug one end into your phone and the other into any kind of power source (a friend’s phone or a charging adapter if you manage to find one), and you can top up your phone. Native Union also has a similar item that’s cuter but nearly as capable.

Choose a Wireless Charger: Our guide to the best wireless chargers includes dozens of models in varying colors, shapes, and materials, and even some designed for specific phones. Not every Android phone supports wireless charging, but it’s a luxury you’ll want to take advantage of. Take a gander at our guide for our favorites.

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We’ve just witnessed a stellar BGIS Grand Finals tournament, filled with ups and downs for many teams. Still, in the end, it came down to just two teams: Soul and Genesis. As you may have guessed from the title, it was Soul who clinched the title, but that wasn’t without a twist. Soul had a horrible last match, which meant all hopes rested on Genesis, who also messed up and ended second. OG completed the podium, but if you missed the action, here’s everything that happened on day 3 of the BGIS Grand Finals.

Match 13 & 14: Fast Starts, Wild Zones, and a Genesis Miracle

The first Rondo match started in typical fashion—absolute chaos. Teams like Soul, Genesis, RNTX, and NINZ lost most of their players early, though recalls helped them return to the game. Nebula came out swinging with over five kills right after the first zone. MYTH and GodLike also had strong starts. The first team to go was VS, who were taken out by OG in a bold play. Tamilas and RGE followed soon after. At the end, OG, VS, and Soul remained, and the big win came for OG.

The second match had its own madness. MYTH was eliminated without even getting a weapon, and RGE were also sent packing early. The zone played tricks again, leaving Genesis with just one player after the second circle. Soul went on a rampage, chasing down OG and finishing three players in minutes. GodLike gambled on a military base zone, but it shifted back to the mainland, forcing them into a risky rotation where they got ambushed. In the final circle, four teams remained, including Soul. But then came the unthinkable—Genesis’ last surviving player, hiding inside a burnt loot truck, clutched the match and stole the win.

Match 15 & 16: Tournament Wide Open

NIMZ had a shocker in the next game, getting eliminated early by Nebula. Genesis also had a rare bad game, finishing second out with zero points. GodLike’s struggles continued as K9 took them out, leaving Soul as the only consistent team among the top contenders. And Soul? They looked unstoppable. They wiped K9, rolled over OG, and even took down VS without breaking a sweat. At this point, it genuinely felt like the tournament was theirs. But just when the hype train was at full speed, Reckoning Esports stopped Soul in their tracks and took the match.

The last Erangel match started with a shocker—Soul lost two players early to WELT and were eventually eliminated by them. Suddenly, the tournament was wide open. WELT didn’t last long either, getting third-partyed by MYTH, who were then wiped by GodLike.Nebula joined the same fight and eliminated GodLike, too, meaning two of the top teams were gone before the first circle even closed. Genesis and OG had a golden opportunity to capitalize. Reckoning was taken out by NIMZ, while a messy Gatka fight saw multiple teams fall. OG couldn’t convert their chance and finished 8th. In the final moments, it came down to Genesis vs RNTX—and Genesis secured another chicken dinner, keeping the title race alive.

Match 17 & 18: Soul Clutch the Championship

The Miramar match started with a hard east zone shift, cutting the playable area in half. WF were the first team to fall, followed by Genesis’s shocking early exit. Then came another twist—WELT took down Soul, meaning both top teams were out without significant points. OG, who were sitting in third, were also eliminated early. This match turned into an opportunity for the bottom teams to step up. Nebula looked dominant with over 10 kills, but was eventually taken out by K9. The final fight came down to K9, MYTH, and LEFP, with K9 closing it out for the chicken dinner.

The final match had everything riding on it, with just a 9-point gap between the top two teams. The zone shifted hard towards La Cobreria, and Soul lost a player early, forcing them to rethink their approach. LFP was the first team eliminated, while GodLike once again made a costly mistake, continuing their rough Day 3. Soul’s Joker was knocked early, and Genesis was slowly closing the gap. But in the end, despite being eliminated early, Soul had already done enough—and Genesis couldn’t capitalize. For the full standings, click here.

One of the purported advantages of self-driving car tech is that every car can learn from one vehicle’s mistakes. Here’s how Waymo puts it on its website: “The Waymo Driver learns from the collective experiences gathered across our fleet, including previous hardware generations.”

But in Austin, Waymo’s vehicles struggled for months to learn how to stop for school buses as drivers picked up and dropped off children. An official with the Austin Independent School District (AISD) alleged that the vehicles had, in at least 19 instances, “illegally and dangerously” passed the district’s school buses while their red lights were flashing and their stop arms were extended rather than coming to complete stops, as the law requires.

In early December, Waymo even issued a federal recall related to the incidents, acknowledging at least 12 of them to federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees road safety. According to federal filings, engineers with the self-driving vehicle company had “developed software changes to address the behavior” weeks before.

But even after the recall, the school-bus-passing incidents continued, according to school officials and a report from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), an independent federal safety watchdog that’s also investigating the situation.

Now, email and text messages between school officials and Waymo representatives, obtained by WIRED through a public records request, show the lengths that the Austin public school district and Waymo went to try to solve the problem. AISD even hosted a half-day “data collection” event in a school parking lot in mid-December, the documents show, with several employees pulling together school buses and stop-arm signals from across the fleet so the self-driving car company could collect information related to vehicles and their flashing lights.

Still, by mid-January, over a month later, the school district reported at least four more school-bus-passing incidents had taken place in Austin. “The data we collected from the beginning of the school year to the end of the semester shows that about 98 percent of people that receive one violation do not receive another,” an official with the school’s police department told the local NBC affiliate that month. “That tells us that the person is learning, but it does not appear the Waymo automated driver system is learning through its software updates, its recall, what have you, because we are still having violations.”

The situation raises questions about the self-driving technologies’ curious blind spots and the industry’s ability to compensate for them even after they’ve been spotted.

Self-driving software has long struggled with recognizing flashing emergency lights and road safety devices with long, thin arms, including gates and stop-arms, says Missy Cummings, who researches autonomous vehicles at George Mason University and served as a safety adviser to the NHTSA during the Biden administration. “If [the company] didn’t fix this a few years ago, the more they drive, the more it’s going to be a problem,” she says. “That’s exactly what’s happening here.”

Waymo did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Austin Independent School District referred WIRED to the NTSB while the incidents are under investigation. A spokesperson for the NTSB declined to answer WIRED’s questions while its investigation continues.

Illegal Passing

By midwinter of 2025, AISD officials were frustrated. In one of the 19 incidents alleged by a lawyer for the district in a letter later released by federal road safety regulators, a Waymo passed a school bus letting off children “only moments after a student crossed in front of the vehicle, and while the student was still in the road.”

“Alarmingly,” the lawyer wrote, five of the alleged incidents had occurred after Waymo had assured the district that it had updated its software to fix the problem. Federal regulators with the NHTSA had already launched a probe into the behavior. “Austin ISD is evaluating all potential legal remedies at its disposal and intends to take whatever action is necessary to protect the safety of its students, if required,” the lawyer warned.

Co-founder Mark Tan had initially considered shutting down the site

Homegrown digital publication RICE Media has been acquired by Hustle Studios, the content agency arm of creative academy Hustle Singapore.

According to an announcement made on RICE Media’s website, the acquisition marks a new chapter for the publication, bringing together its editorial voice and audience community with Hustle’s expertise in creative training, facilitation, and industry programmes.

The deal formalises a long-standing partnership between the two organisations, which have previously collaborated on initiatives aimed at developing creative skills for Singapore audiences.

Under Hustle Studios, RICE is expected to expand beyond publishing into workshops, community programmes, and other experiences that engage readers in more interactive and participatory ways.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

RICE Media was founded in 2016

Founded in 2016 by former lawyer Mark Tan and Julian Wong, RICE Media billed itself as an independent publication that offered an unfiltered take on Singapore and Asia. It became known for its long-form stories and commentaries on Singapore’s news and culture.

“We started RICE because we believed Singaporeans deserved honest, thoughtful storytelling about their own lives,” said Mark Tan, outgoing founder and CEO. “I think we’ve largely accomplished that mission.”

Co-founder Wong added that the acquisition aligns with the publication’s long-term vision. “We’ve built more than just content… we’ve built a community. Hustle shares that vision, and we’re confident they’re the right partners to help RICE evolve,” he said.

Tan said he had initially considered shutting down the site but ultimately decided the publication still had a role to play. “The transaction and the money coming in would allow me to settle most of the liabilities and also pay people a severance package, so I think it’s really the most responsible thing for me to do,” he said.

The goal is not merely to maintain what RICE has been, but to “grow into what its community has been asking for.” During this transitional phase, Tan and Wong will remain involved in an advisory capacity, while RICE continues to publish content for its audience.

Further announcements about new programming and community initiatives will follow in the coming months.

Featured Image Credit: RICE Media/ High Net Worth

Every co-founder Elon Musk recruited to build xAI has now reportedly left the company. Manuel Kroiss, who led the pretraining team, told people this month that he was departing. Ross Nordeen, described by Business Insider as Musk’s “right-hand operator,” left on Friday. They were the last two of eleven co-founders, all of whom have exited a company that was valued at $250 billion when SpaceX acquired it in February and that Musk himself described two weeks ago as having been “not built right the first time around.”

The departures are not ordinary startup attrition. The researchers Musk assembled in 2023 were among the most accomplished in artificial intelligence. Jimmy Ba co-authored the 2014 Adam optimisation paper, the most-cited paper in AI with more than 95,000 citations. Igor Babuschkin, the chief engineer, came from Google DeepMind. Christian Szegedy came from Google. Tony Wu led the reasoning team. Greg Yang, Toby Pohlen, Zihang Dai, Guodong Zhang, and Kyle Kosic brought experience from DeepMind, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. That entire cohort is now gone, and the company they helped build is being, in Musk’s words, “rebuilt from the foundations up.”

A timeline of unravelling

The exodus accelerated sharply in early 2026. Christian Szegedy left in February 2025, an early signal. But the cascade began in earnest when Tony Wu, one of the most operationally central co-founders, announced his departure on February 10, 2026. Jimmy Ba resigned within 24 hours, reportedly amid tensions over demands to improve model performance. By mid-March, only Kroiss and Nordeen remained. Their departures this week complete the sweep.

The timing is difficult to separate from the corporate restructuring happening around xAI. On February 2, SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock transaction that valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion, creating a combined entity worth $1.25 trillion, the largest corporate merger by valuation in history. The deal brought xAI, X (formerly Twitter), and SpaceX under a single corporate umbrella, with SpaceX now preparing for a potential IPO in mid-2026 that could target a $1.75 trillion valuation.

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Weeks earlier, in January, Tesla invested $2 billion in xAI’s Series E round at an approximate $230 billion valuation. Tesla shareholders are suing Musk for breach of fiduciary duty over the investment, arguing that the company’s chief executive effectively directed shareholder capital into his own private venture. The lawsuit gained additional force on March 13, when Musk publicly acknowledged that xAI’s products, particularly its coding tools, were not competitive with Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex. Tesla had invested $2 billion in a company whose founder admitted it needed to be rebuilt from scratch.

What “not built right” means at $250 billion

Musk’s admission on March 13 was unusually candid for a chief executive whose company had just been acquired for a quarter of a trillion dollars. He said xAI’s AI coding tools simply did not work, and that the underlying system needed to be rebuilt. The statement appeared to validate the co-founders’ decision to leave: if the company’s own leadership acknowledges that the product failed, the researchers who built it have limited incentive to stay for the rebuild, particularly when they can command extraordinary compensation at competitors.

The AI talent market in 2026 is the most competitive it has ever been. Meta has reportedly offered packages worth up to $300 million over four years to retain top AI researchers. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic are all expanding their research teams aggressively. The eleven researchers who left xAI represent a concentration of talent that any of those companies would pay handsomely to acquire. Where they end up will say as much about the industry’s future direction as their departure says about xAI’s past.

xAI is not without assets. The Colossus supercomputer, built with more than 200,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, remains one of the largest AI training clusters in the world. Grok, the company’s chatbot, has a distribution channel through X’s user base. And the SpaceX merger provides access to capital, infrastructure, and engineering talent at a scale that few AI companies can match. The question is whether infrastructure and distribution are sufficient when the research leadership that was supposed to make the product competitive has entirely departed.

The pattern

The xAI co-founder exodus follows a pattern that has repeated across Musk’s companies. Twitter lost the majority of its senior leadership and roughly 80 per cent of its workforce within months of his 2022 acquisition. Tesla’s senior ranks have thinned steadily as Musk’s attention has divided across six companies. The common thread is a management style that produces extraordinary results in hardware engineering, where Musk’s tolerance for risk and pace of iteration have built SpaceX and Tesla into industry-defining companies, but appears less effective in research-driven fields where the most valuable people have abundant alternatives and low tolerance for instability.

Artificial intelligence research is, in 2026, the most competitive labour market in technology. The researchers who co-founded xAI did not need to be there. They chose to be, attracted by the resources Musk could deploy and the ambition of the project. That every one of them has now chosen to leave, during a period when the company received a $250 billion valuation and access to the resources of SpaceX, suggests that the problems at xAI are not principally financial or infrastructural. They are organisational. And no amount of capital can rebuild a research culture once the people who created it have gone.