Sometimes it really is the details that matter.

Or, in the case of cool new hardware, it’s the software that can make or break the experience. Apple forcefully made both points with the launch of its new foldable smartphone, the highly anticipated iPhone Duo, which is expected to ship on October 23 at a starting price of $1,999.

The Duo features a very nice, if arguably derivative, hardware design that at first glance looks similar to other recent passport-style phones, such as Samsung’s Z Fold 8. But the phone distinguishes itself with a new version of iOS and multiple applications that have been clearly and cleanly optimized for the foldable form factor.

It’s these software refinements that make the iPhone Duo stand out among other foldable competitors. In fact, even with very limited hands-on time with the phone, I’d argue that Apple has redefined the foldable category and experience with the launch of the Duo. From simple adjustments, like moving app icons from the bottom of the screen to the side, to more elaborate touches, such as the visual transition from the front display to the larger inner screen, Apple has created a range of enhancements that make foldables feel brand new.

Given that Samsung first introduced the world to foldable phones back in 2019, that’s quite an accomplishment. As a vocal and avid supporter of the category since those early days, I’ve used every single foldable Samsung has created as my daily driver, so I was very curious to see if Apple could use its very delayed entrance into the category to its advantage.

Clearly, it has.

Admittedly, some of the capabilities Apple showed off on the Duo are similar to features we’ve seen from companies like Samsung, Motorola, and Google over the years. However, the level of refinement and the collective experience Apple demonstrated at the launch event showed how thoroughly the company has thought through the details to create a true foldable experience, rather than simply putting the same software into a different physical package.

I expect the iPhone Duo will end up becoming the hot new tech status symbol in the near term.

Speaking of hardware, on closer inspection the iPhone Duo does have some important differences compared with other foldable designs. Compared with Samsung’s Z Fold 8, for example, the Duo is slightly shorter and wider, both when folded and unfolded, giving it a form factor that’s a bit easier to hold. However, the Z Fold 8 is a noticeable 1.87 ounces lighter and about 0.7mm thinner, likely reflecting the many years of experience Samsung has had refining and shrinking its foldable designs.

The hinge designs are different as well, which could partially explain the weight difference, with Apple’s design feeling a bit firmer, though the distinction is relatively subtle. The iPhone Duo also has a more robust IP68 water and dust resistance rating versus the Z Fold 8’s IP48.

In addition to the iPhone Duo’s slightly higher-resolution displays, the biggest difference is that, thanks to a new nano-texture finish layer on top of the screen, there’s virtually no visible crease. As a very long-time user of foldable phones, I can say with certainty that creases on most modern foldables aren’t really noticeable when you’re actually using the device. However, for first-time users considering a move to a foldable, it’s an important issue to address.

One of the biggest surprises with the iPhone Duo is the price. It starts at $1,999 for a 256GB configuration, which is $100 more than the similarly configured Z Fold 8. Early rumors suggested pricing would begin well above $2,000.

By staying below the psychological $2,000 barrier, Apple managed to keep the Duo within reasonable consideration for people who are now accustomed to paying around $1,500 for well-configured “regular” iPhone Pro and Pro Max models. Of course, at the high end, a 2TB configuration of the iPhone Duo is expected to hit an eye-watering $3,199.

Despite the better-than-expected pricing for the base configuration, the iPhone Duo and foldables in general clearly aren’t for everyone. Right now, the category makes up only about 2% of the total smartphone market, although it is one of the few sub-segments that continues to grow.

My expectation is that the introduction of the iPhone Duo will raise interest in the entire category and could eventually help push foldables closer to 10% of the market over the next few years. Apple will undoubtedly be the primary beneficiary of that growth, but companies like Samsung, Motorola, and Google will likely benefit as well.

In the meantime, I expect the iPhone Duo will become the hot new tech status symbol. Initial manufacturing volumes are rumored to be low, and combined with the higher price point, that means it’s likely going to be difficult to get one.

Eventually, that will pass, but along the way, I’m hoping a much wider audience will be exposed to the benefits that I think foldables bring to the smartphone category. Combining a large screen with a pocketable form factor is something that, once you’ve gotten used to it, is very hard to give up.

Bob O’Donnell is the founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech

Instagram is making it easier to show off the posts you’ve been tagged in, with a new option to add them directly to your main profile grid.

The Tagged tab isn’t going anywhere. It will still house the posts other people have tagged you in, but you can now pick specific ones to feature alongside your own posts. Instagram suggests the feature could be useful for favourite group photos, creator collaborations and memories, although there’s nothing stopping you from adding any tagged post you want to your grid.

Anker still sells the Soundcore Q20i as a $70 pair that regularly lands closer to $40, and that number explains why these over-ears keep showing up in carry-ons years after their original launch. Hybrid cancellation, a 40-hour ANC claim, memory-foam cups, and a fold-flat frame sit in a package light enough that you forget them until the cabin drone disappears. For commuters and travelers who want silence more than a flagship badge, that combination has been hard to ignore.

Anker’s headphones excel in hybrid cancelation, which uses four microphones, two pointing out and two pointing in, to eliminate rumble before it reaches your ear. The technology appears to be able to reduce low-frequency noise by 90 percent, including airline engines, bus motors, and workplace air conditioning. That is sufficient to effectively eliminate noisy cabins, subway chatter, and workplace fans without making you feel as if your ears are shut off in a more expensive set, although some loud speech and sudden noises still pass through.

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Soundcore by Anker Q20i Hybrid Active Noise Cancelling Headphones, Black

• Hybrid Active Noise Cancelling: 2 internal and 2 external mics work in tandem to detect external noise and effectively reduce up to 90% of it, no…
• Immerse Yourself in Detailed Audio: The noise cancelling headphones have oversized 40mm dynamic drivers that produce detailed sound and thumping beats…
• 40-Hour Long Battery Life and Fast Charging: With 40 hours of battery life with ANC on and 60 hours in normal mode, you can commute in peace with your…

Memory foam pads and soft leather on the outside make wearing these for long periods of time much easier than you may expect, especially for the price. The weight of 246 grams allows you to wear them for up to eight hours without developing hot spots. However, if you have large ears, the ear apertures are a little narrow, and the cup’s light hold means it can fall off if you gaze down too quickly. However, the cups fold up flat, making them ideal for storing in a backpack or the supplied case. The plastic headband and hinge are quite fragile, but they should be durable enough to withstand daily use.

The 40mm drivers and BassUp tech give the default sound a pretty heavy low end, which is great for hip hop, EDM, and modern pop, as the bass thumps along nicely and goes deep, but the mids get lost in the mix, so vocals and instruments can sound muddled, and the treble can get a little too sharp at times. Soundcore’s app has 22 pre-sets to choose from, as well as a custom equalizer, which can help to draw some of that bass back, even if the underlying V-shape in the sound remains. Wireless audio is via Bluetooth 5.0, although it only supports SBC and AAC; nevertheless, when you plug in the provided 3.5mm connection, it begins to refer to itself as Hi-Res. It also supports multipoint pairing, allowing you to connect it to both your phone and laptop at the same time, and it will instantly switch to the new device when it begins playing.

The battery life is what everyone is talking about, since Anker claims 40 hours with cancelation on and 60 with it off, but most users tend to get about the mid-to-high 30s with ANC on and around 49 hours in mixed use, which is still enough for a long weekend. A 5-minute top-up provides around four hours of playing, while a full charge takes an hour and a half to two hours. One thing to keep in mind if you’re using a wire: plugging in the 3.5mm cable usually turns off active noise cancelation, so you’re back to just music without the quiet.

Call quality is rather straightforward: its single microphone performs admirably in calmer areas but struggles in busy cafés or on public transportation, where background noise is amplified. All app functionality, including firmware updates, white noise tracks, and mode switching, is available via the Soundcore app for iOS and Android.

Meta is putting out yet another bad-publicity fire, saying it has fixed an issue in which its Meta AI software could suggest prompts to users that would collect and reveal personal information, including about children.

The controversy started from a Sept. 2 Instagram video posted by parenting and lifestyle blogger Kalie Robins, who goes by kontheinside. In the video, Robins discussed a prior video post of herself singing in a car with her daughter in the backseat. Below the published video, Robins revealed how Meta AI posed a series of invasive prompts, such as “Who’s the child passenger?” and “Where does Kalie Robins live?”

According to Robins, when she clicked on those automatic questions, the AI tool pulled information from her past posts, piecing together private details about her life, including her location. The AI also drew on other profiles, such as her mother’s account, and even accessed data from a photo she claimed had been deleted years ago.

Robins said in the video: “I did not understand posting separate innocent pieces of our lives over years could mean an AI could sit there and assemble all those breadcrumbs into information about my minor children in seconds.” The video went viral, drawing thousands of comments and more than 308,000 likes as of this writing.

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‘The issue was never just one photo’

A Meta spokesperson told CNET in an email that it has since “fixed” the issue, and that Meta AI will no longer suggest inappropriate, personal questions on users’ posts. The company admitted the feature missed the mark and stated that the tool is only meant to help people find more information using data users already have access to.

CNET

The response from Meta, which was also shared with other outlets, wasn’t sufficient for Robins. In a subsequent Instagram post on Sept. 10, she said she was glad that the company acknowledged the problem, but that she still had questions. “What exactly was fixed? What safeguard failed in the first place? And what protections are now in place when Meta AI encounters information involving a child?”

Even if Meta AI no longer suggests intrusive personal prompts, the feature can still make suggestions based on information the software can access, such as publicly available text, images from the web or previous posts on social media by users like Robins.

Meta also denied Robins’ claim that its AI accessed a photo deleted years ago. Instead, Meta told CNET that the photo of Robins’ kids was deleted right before the video was made, and a temporary bug briefly kept it visible.

In an email to CNET, Robins said that regardless of what happened with the deleted image of her kids, the larger concern remains. “The issue was never just one photo — it was the AI compiling information about my kids from multiple sources,” Robins told CNET. According to Robins, Meta has not contacted her directly or apologized.

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Just the latest Meta privacy problem

Adding to the hundreds of comments posted on Robins’ Instagram account have been news stories on sites like Futurism, where the story was first widely publicized. Business Insider reported that what happened to Robins is prompting some parents to urge others to stop posting images of their kids online.

“This is creepy!” said Cathy Pedrayes, who posts frequently on social media about scams and dark-web trends.

Meta has faced multibillion-dollar settlements and court judgments this year over how its technology affects children, including addiction and creating environments where they may be vulnerable to exploitation.

Meta has also been facing criticism of its Meta smart glasses, particularly the facial recognition technology it has been developing.

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Recently, the tech giant started rolling out its Muse AI agents, which it markets to users seeking more customized AI experiences through personal assistants.

Omar Gallaga has covered technology, digital culture and other topics for outlets including CNET, NPR, WIRED, Texas Monthly, MSNBC, Consumer Reports, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic and the Austin American-Statesman, where he was a longtime tech reporter, editor and podcaster. He lives in the Texas Hill Country.

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The Dutch Nationaal Cyber Security Centrum (NCSC) is warning of imminent exploitation of two critical flaws in Check Point VPN tracked as CVE-2026-85102 and CVE-2026-85103.

Although no public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit has been reported, the agency is urging organizations to install the security updates addressing the two issues as soon as possible.

“The NCSC assesses the likelihood of exploitation and the potential impact as high and expects exploitation attempts to occur soon,” the NCSC warns.

Check Point VPN is an enterprise solution that allows remote employees to securely connect to their company’s internal network via encrypted connections.

On September 9, Check Point issued fixes for the flaws along with separate security advisories describing them: sk1000117 and sk1000118.

CVE-2026-85102 is an improper validation of certificate data during VPN negotiation that a remote attacker could exploit to execute arbitrary code on a Security Gateway.

CVE-2026-85103 is a heap overflow in the VPN certificate ASN.1 decoder that could allow remote code execution on Security Gateways and Security Management Servers.

Affected releases include R81.20, R82, R82.10, R81.10.x, and R82.00.x, along with the end-of-support (EoS) versions R80 through R80.40, R81, and R81.10.

Both flaws are fixed by Check Point LivePatch Take 24 for R81.20, R82, and R82.10, while fixes are also included in the following versions:

• R82.10 Jumbo Hotfix Accumulator Take 44 or later
• R82 Jumbo Hotfix Accumulator Take 126 or later
• R81.20 Jumbo Hotfix Accumulator Take 166 or later
• Spark R82.00.10 Build 2325 or later
• Spark R81.10.17 Build 4968 or later

Check Point VPN version R82.20 is not affected by either flaw.

NCSC warned that exploitation of the flaws could allow an attacker to take full control of a system, view or modify confidential data, and disrupt operations.

The organization urges system administrators to apply the security updates as soon as possible. At the same time, for those using the ‘Site-to-Site VPN’ component, the advice is to modify VPN rules to limit access to specific, trusted IP addresses.

According to a post in Check Point’s community forums, users of Check Point Live Patch (CPLP) should have received all available protections for the two flaws since September 9, and those fixes should apply even without a server reboot.

CPLP users should check if they are protected by this automatic mitigation, as it is not available for versions other than R82.10, R82, and R81.20 and doesn’t support all configurations.

Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed.

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When I was at Computex earlier this year, I shot a lot of Reels using my DJI Osmo. And don’t get me wrong: that little camera is excellent. The stabilization is great, the video quality is good, and it is exactly the kind of thing you want when you’re running around a trade show trying to make content. But then came the annoying part: transferring all that footage to my phone or laptop, moving it to the cloud, and finally getting it onto the platform I actually wanted to use. At some point, I remember thinking, “Why are there so many steps?”

Apparently, HONOR had the same thought. The difference is that while I just complained about it, HONOR went ahead and built a phone around the idea. The HONOR Robot Phone is, admittedly, doing a lot. It’s a flagship Android phone, a miniature motorized camera gimbal, a robotic arm, and an AI playground all rolled into one. But after actually using it at IFA Berlin this year, I found myself caring far less about the novelty and far more about the camera. Because, honestly, this thing is really good.

The gimbal is the star of the show

HONOR calls it a 4-DoF Titanium Agile Gimbal, and the name sounds suitably ridiculous for a phone that can physically move its camera. It can pan, tilt, roll, and flip, and getting it going is surprisingly simple. You manually slide away the protective cover, tap the button in the camera app, and the robotic arm pops out. That’s basically the only manual intervention required.

From there, it feels remarkably familiar if you’ve used a DJI gimbal. It has an on-screen joystick for manual camera control, different stabilization modes, and excellent subject tracking. The default stabilization is already impressively smooth when you’re just walking around, while Super-Steady is more useful when you’re throwing the phone into more chaotic, action-heavy situations. The important thing is that I never got the feeling that this was a first-gen mechanism desperately trying to prove itself.

And then there is AI SpinShot, which is where the Robot Phone starts having fun. It can perform programmed 90- and 180-degree movements, including angled rotations, turning what could have been a gimmicky flip mechanism into something genuinely useful for cinematic B-roll. Add facial tracking to the mix, and you’ve got a phone that can quite literally follow you around while you shoot yourself. The 200MP gimbal main camera also makes the front-camera experience look almost unfair by comparison.

This is a creator’s phone, not just a weird phone

The biggest reason I think creators will love this isn’t actually the gimbal. It’s everything surrounding it. The Robot Phone lets you shoot up to 4K/120fps, while portrait gimbal video uses a crop and tops out around 2.7K. That’s still plenty for social media, but if you want the full-resolution experience, landscape is the way to go.

Then there’s the HONOR-ARRI collaboration, which takes this from “cool phone camera” to something I can actually imagine using for serious work. You can shoot 10-bit ARRI LogC3 footage, preview ARRI Looks, and retain the underlying Log footage even when a Look is applied. That means I can shoot something that looks great straight out of the phone, but still have the flexibility to take the footage into DaVinci Resolve or Premiere later and grade it properly.

More importantly, I don’t have to think about the workflow afterward. The footage is already on my phone, the phone is already connected to Wi-Fi or mobile data, and sharing is just… sharing. No extra camera, no Bluetooth pairing, no second battery, no memory card shuffle, and no finding that USB cable nonsense. Even if Instagram doesn’t support the Robot Phone’s gimbal functionality directly, I can still shoot on it and upload normally. I just can’t use the gimbal for an Instagram livestream.

The robot part is weird — but weirdly useful

The AI side is where things get considerably stranger. HONOR’s YOYO Robot Mode can physically move the gimbal around, scan the environment, recognize objects, react to gestures, and generally make the phone feel less like a slab of glass and more like a tiny creature that has somehow acquired a smartphone.

I got a small taste of this while sitting at a riverside cafe. The phone could look around, recognize the setting, identify my cappuccino, and even notice that someone nearby was recording me. There are also more playful tricks, including making the robot bob its head to music. I’m not entirely convinced that my productivity will improve because my phone can dance, but I can absolutely see kids being obsessed with it.

The gimmick that got me

The real surprise for me was just how refined the Robot Phone feels. We see plenty of first-gen products where the obvious reaction is, “Cool idea, maybe give them another year.” This wasn’t that. I picked it up, played around with it, and almost immediately thought, I’d actually buy this. Sure, the sliding cover adds another moving part, IP54 feels a little dated, and whether that tiny robotic arm can survive years of abuse is something only time will tell. But even the well-used demo unit I handled showed no obvious signs of giving up.

And that’s what stuck with me. HONOR took what sounds like a completely bonkers idea and somehow made it practical. It isn’t just a phone doing a robot impression; it’s a genuinely useful camera, a surprisingly capable gimbal, and a creator tool, all hiding inside something you can put in your pocket. The weirdest thing about the Robot Phone isn’t that it has a robot arm. It’s that, after using it, I actually want one.