I didn’t bring the Pixel 8a to Camiguin to prove a point. I brought it because it’s still my phone, two years after I bought it as a stopgap when my OnePlus 7 Pro died. That’s annoying, because I wasn’t supposed to like this thing for this long.

A week on the island gave it chances to fail. I used it for directions, island-hopping photos, Bluetooth music, online payments, and the usual checks when nobody remembers where the booking screenshot went.

The Pixel 8a never let me forget it’s a cheaper phone. Charging was slow, and that showed. The more useful surprise was how much of the core Pixel experience still held up: steady performance, a good camera, basic durability, and Google’s photo processing.

The cheap phone did the actual work

The first real test was navigation when I became the designated map person. Camiguin made that interesting with island roads, unfamiliar turns, and weak signal areas.

The Pixel 8a handled it cleanly. GPS stayed steady, Google Maps behaved, and I never had a vacation meltdown where the phone forgot where it was.

Dual SIM helped too, especially when one signal started acting like it had gone on vacation.

Battery was the part I trusted least, so I cheated early. I turned on battery saver at 100% because I didn’t want background apps nibbling away at charge while the phone worked. Ugly strategy, good result.

The closest call came during the trip back to the city. I used the Pixel 8a for navigation and Bluetooth music at the same time. By the time we reached the hotel, it was down to 4%. The remaining 4% was enough to pay online at the front desk.

The camera did the Pixel thing

The camera surprised me most. Bright beaches, food shots, roadside photos, and night scenes should’ve exposed the limits quickly.

Instead, the photos kept coming out better than expected. Google’s processing rescued ordinary shots without making them look fake, and Google Photos’ AI tools helped when a photo needed polish.

Performance was boring, which is praise.

I didn’t get app reload tantrums, random slowdowns, or reminders that this was supposed to be the cheaper option.

Charging felt slow, and screen brightness struggled outdoors. They were noticeable without becoming the story.

I didn’t have to worship it

The Pixel 8a worked so well on vacation because I didn’t have to treat it like jewelry with a SIM card.

If I’d brought a shiny flagship, I would’ve been more anxious around water, sand, heat, bags, and every table where phones mysteriously slide toward danger.

It was capable enough to trust, cheap enough not to worship, and durable enough that I didn’t spend the week calculating repair costs. That’s the awkward thing about a phone like the Pixel 8a aging this well. It’s good for me, but inconvenient for an industry that needs old phones to feel older than they are. Planned obsolescence doesn’t always mean a device suddenly breaks. Sometimes it just means making a perfectly useful phone feel faintly embarrassing.

After a week in Camiguin, the Pixel 8a made the flagship upgrade itch feel silly.

It was supposed to be temporary, but two years later it became the phone I trusted when the trip needed one less thing to go wrong.

In January and February 2026, Volkswagen reclaimed the top position in China’s passenger vehicle market with a 13.9 per cent share, narrowly ahead of Geely at 13.8 per cent. Toyota’s joint ventures held 7.8 per cent. BYD, which dominated 2024 and much of 2025 as the world’s largest EV maker, slipped to fourth at 7.1 per cent after six consecutive months of declining sales, its steepest drop since the pandemic. The numbers look like a foreign comeback. They are not. They are a subsidy hangover.

China ended its purchase tax exemptions and trade-in incentives for new energy vehicles at the close of 2025. The expiration hit domestic EV and plug-in hybrid makers hardest because their sales volumes had been inflated by subsidies that made their cheapest models artificially competitive. BYD’s January sales fell more than 30 per cent year on year. February fell 41 per cent. Volkswagen and Toyota, whose sales lean more heavily on conventional petrol and hybrid models, were relatively insulated. The foreign brands did not get better. The playing field got temporarily less tilted.

The scale of the loss

Foreign automakers have lost roughly a third of the Chinese market in five years. Domestic brands now control nearly 70 per cent of passenger vehicle sales, up from less than 40 per cent in 2020. New energy vehicles, a category that includes battery electrics, plug-in hybrids, and extended-range models, are expected to account for more than 54 per cent of all car sales in China in 2026. In the NEV segment specifically, Chinese brands hold more than 85 per cent of the market. The foreign brands that once defined aspiration for Chinese consumers, Volkswagen, Toyota, Honda, BMW, Mercedes, are now fighting for the shrinking share that remains.

The casualties are real. Skoda confirmed in March that it will exit China by mid-2026 after sales collapsed 95 per cent from a peak of 341,000 vehicles in 2018 to 15,000 in 2025. Honda’s sales have fallen for five consecutive years, dropping 24 per cent in 2025 to 650,000 units, and its January 2026 volume of 57,489 was down another 16.5 per cent. Volkswagen has been cutting EV production globally as demand in its home markets faltered, and in China its two joint ventures delivered 2.69 million vehicles in 2025, down 8 per cent year on year.

The Beijing strategy

The 2026 Beijing Auto Show, held in late April across 380,000 square metres of exhibition space with more than 1,000 exhibitors, was where the foreign brands showed what they intend to do about it. The answer, almost universally, was to become more Chinese.

Volkswagen unveiled the ID.UNYX 09, an electric sedan co-developed with XPeng in two years at VW’s new research and development centre in Hefei. The company plans to launch more than 20 EVs in China this year and expand to 50 by 2030 across Volkswagen, Audi, and Jetta sub-brands. Hyundai launched its all-electric IONIQ brand in China with the IONIQ V, which uses an autonomous driving system co-developed with Chinese AI company Momenta and runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8295 chipset. Beijing Hyundai plans 20 new models in China over five years, targeting 500,000 annual sales. Nissan integrated DeepSeek AI into its N7 electric sedan and announced five new energy vehicles within 12 months.

The pattern is consistent: foreign automakers are partnering with Chinese technology companies because they cannot develop competitive software fast enough on their own. The Chinese domestic brands update their in-car software, autonomous driving features, and AI assistants on cycles measured in months. Even Tesla, which reclaimed the quarterly global EV sales crown from BYD in Q1 2026, cannot run its latest Full Self-Driving software in China. BYD’s God’s Eye system has been deployed across 2.3 million vehicles. XPeng’s VLA 2.0 has obtained Level 4 pilot operation permits in Guangzhou. The technology gap that once favoured Western automakers has reversed.

The exceptions

Toyota is the only Japanese automaker that grew in China in 2025, selling 1.78 million vehicles for a slight year-on-year increase. The turnaround came from two moves: a $15,000 electric vehicle built specifically for the Chinese market, and a hybrid lineup that benefits from the subsidy expiration because hybrids are cheaper to produce than full electrics and do not depend on purchase incentives to be price-competitive.

GM reported nearly 1.9 million deliveries in China in 2025, up 2.3 per cent, with new energy vehicle sales rising 22.6 per cent. Buick surged 54 per cent. Cadillac’s LYRIQ deliveries jumped 90 per cent. But analysts note that the bulk of GM’s China volume comes from SAIC-GM-Wuling, its joint venture that sells ultra-low-cost mini EVs in a segment with razor-thin margins. GM’s own branded vehicles through SAIC-GM represent roughly 2.1 per cent of the passenger market. The Detroit company is, as one analyst put it, surviving rather than thriving.

The technology problem

Tesla’s global sales slump has opened a window for competitors, but in China that window is being filled by domestic brands, not foreign ones. BYD sold 4.54 million vehicles in 2025, all of them new energy vehicles. Geely overtook Volkswagen to become the second-largest automaker in China with 2.61 million sales, driven by NEV growth exceeding 80 per cent. Xiaomi delivered more than 410,000 cars in its first full year of production and is targeting 550,000 in 2026. These are not legacy automakers bolting electric powertrains onto existing platforms. They are technology companies that happen to make cars, and their competitive advantage is software, not sheet metal.

The Beijing Auto Show made this visible. Horizon Robotics introduced its Starry chip, a 5-nanometre automotive-grade processor with 650 TOPS of computing power, and more than ten automakers including BYD, Chery, and Volkswagen expressed interest. The Chinese EV ecosystem has its own chip designers, its own AI model providers, its own autonomous driving stacks, and its own battery supply chain. Foreign automakers entering this ecosystem are not competing against individual companies. They are competing against an industrial infrastructure that has been optimised for electric, intelligent, connected vehicles from the ground up.

The question

Volkswagen’s early 2026 market share recovery is real but contextual. The subsidy hangover suppressed domestic EV sales in January and February, and BYD’s March figures already showed a return to the top of the rankings with 295,693 vehicles sold. VW’s own projections place the true turning point for its joint ventures in 2027, when it expects profit contributions to reach 2 billion euros. The question is whether the market will wait.

Europe’s broader push to compete with China and the United States is mirrored in the automotive strategies of its largest manufacturers, but the competitive dynamics in China are harsher than in any other market. Chinese consumers have moved on from the assumption that foreign means better. In a market where NEV penetration is heading past 54 per cent, where autonomous driving features are standard on mid-range domestic vehicles, and where software updates arrive monthly, the brand equity that Volkswagen and Toyota spent decades building is depreciating faster than the cars themselves.

The foreign brands that survive in China will be the ones that stop trying to sell Chinese consumers what worked in Europe and start building what works in China. Volkswagen’s XPeng partnership and Hyundai’s Momenta collaboration suggest they understand this. The question is whether localisation at this speed is possible for organisations designed to develop vehicles on five-year cycles in a market that moves in five-month ones. The Beijing Auto Show was full of announcements. The sales figures for the rest of 2026 will determine which of those announcements were strategies and which were eulogies.

Two former employees of cybersecurity incident response companies Sygnia and DigitalMint were sentenced to four years in prison each for targeting U.S. companies in BlackCat (ALPHV) ransomware attacks.

40-year-old Ryan Clifford Goldberg (a former Sygnia incident response manager) and 36-year-old Kevin Tyler Martin (a DigitalMint ransomware negotiator) were charged in November and pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy to obstruct commerce by extortion.

Together with 41-year-old Angelo Martino, a third accomplice who also pleaded guilty in April, the two acted as BlackCat ransomware affiliates between May 2023 and November 2023, breaching the networks of multiple victims across the United States.

According to court documents, they paid a 20% share of ransoms in exchange for access to BlackCat’s ransomware and extortion platform.

The list of victims includes a Maryland pharmaceutical company, a Tampa medical device manufacturer, a California engineering firm, a Virginia drone manufacturer, and a California doctor’s office.

Prosecutors said the Tampa medical device company paid $1.27 million after its servers were encrypted and it received a $10 million ransom demand in May 2023, with the payment laundered and split three ways with Martino.

While other companies whose networks were breached by Goldberg and Martin also received ransom demands ranging from $300,000 to $10 million, the indictment does not indicate whether they received any additional payments.

“These defendants exploited specialized cybersecurity knowledge not to protect victims, but to extort them,” said U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones on Thursday. “They used ransomware to lock down critical systems, steal sensitive data, and pressure American businesses into paying to regain access to their own information.”

“We strongly condemn these former employees’ criminal behavior, which violated our values, ethical standards, and the law. When we learned about the conduct, we immediately terminated both individuals,” DigitalMint CEO Jonathan Solomon also told BleepingComputer earlier this month after Martino pleaded guilty.

The FBI previously linked the BlackCat ransomware gang to more than 60 breaches between November 2021 and March 2022.

In a separate advisory, the bureau added that the cybercrime operation collected at least $300 million in ransom payments from more than 1,000 victims through September 2023.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

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from the maybe-try-being-less-of-a-perv dept

Former judge Roy Moore made quite a name for himself while attempting to convert his sketchy judicial career into a presumably equally sketchy career as US senator. Prior to his run for office in the 2018 mid-term election, Moore had already been suspended from the Alabama bench for a long list of violations:

1. disregarding a federal injunction.
2. demonstrated unwillingness to follow clear law.
3. abuse of administrative authority.
4. substituting his judgment for the judgment of the entire Alabama Supreme Court, including failure to abstain from public comment about a pending proceeding in his own court.
5. interference with legal process and remedies in the United States District Court and/or Alabama Supreme Court related to proceedings in which Alabama probate judges were involved.
6. failure to recuse himself from pending proceedings in the Alabama Supreme Court after making public comment and placing his impartiality into question.

A normal person may have decided to recede from the public eye and head to the private sector. But because Trump was now president, Roy Moore decided his past judicial indiscretions made him a perfect GOP candidate for a contested Senate seat.

Then came the steady stream of personal indiscretions, which began shortly after Moore tossed his tainted hat into the ring. The list of sexual misconduct allegations is so voluminous it requires its own Wikipedia page.

Moore’s alleged interactions with females as young as age 14 added to the self-inflicted damage Moore had created while still an Alabama judge.

Multiple entities reported on this. Moore responded by issuing legal threats and filing lawsuits. He also sued comedian Sacha Baron Cohen over being duped into an “interview” with a supposed Israeli newscaster (Baron Cohen) who subjected Moore to a supposed “pedophile detection device” created by the Israeli Army. The “device” lit up when Moore was scanned.

Moore’s cause of action in that case was one of the best worst things I’ve ever seen:

Had Judge Moore and Mrs. Moore known that Defendant Cohen had fraudulently induced Judge Moore into this interview, which as a “set up” to harm and thus damage Plaintiffs and the rest of their entire family, Judge Moore would not have agreed to appear.

Amazing. It’s like arguing in traffic court that if you had known there would be a speed trap set up to catch speeders, you wouldn’t have been speeding when you passed through it.

Suffice to say, Roy Moore has been suing a lot and losing a lot. Somehow, his lawsuit against a political action committee (the Senate Majority PAC) survived several motions to dismiss and was handed over to a jury. This jury awarded Moore $8.2 million in damages because the ad run against Moore’s Senate campaign featured consecutive (sourced!) quotes that may have led viewers to believe he had attempted to talk a 14-year-old “Santa’s helper” into sex while working at a Gadsden, Alabama shopping mall.

While it’s true the consecutive quotes dealt with two separate sets of allegations — the first being Moore’s banishment from the mall for constantly sexually harassing female workers and the second being a separate conversation with the “Santa’s helper” — the jury decided these quotes appeared close enough to each other in the PAC’s ad to infer a connection between these two otherwise unrelated incidents.

In 2019, Moore sued the Senate Majority PAC, claiming that the group libeled him and subjected him to false light invasion of privacy by suggesting that he sought sex from a 14-year-old girl working as a “Santa’s helper” at a shopping mall in Gadsden, Alabama.

At issue was an ad aired by SMP in the closing weeks of the election that included several frames displaying quotes from the news articles about Moore’s alleged conduct. One frame quoted a New American Journal article that reported “Moore was actually banned from the Gadsden Mall . . . for soliciting sex from young girls.” An immediately subsequent frame quoting the same article read “[o]ne he approached ‘was 14 and working as Santa’s helper.’”

While that may have been enough to convince a jury to give Moore an unearned win and $8.2 million in PAC cash, the Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court says [PDF] what’s seen in the ad doesn’t actually add up to a win for Roy Moore.

First off, even Roy Moore admits the quotations used in the ad are factually direct quotes from other sources.

Here, frame 2 of SMP’s ad contained the following quote: “Moore was actually banned from the Gadsden Mall . . . for soliciting sex from young girls.” The frame included a citation for the quote, and Moore admits that this quote is an accurate excerpt from the cited article. Frame 3 contained the following language: “One he approached ‘was 14 and working as Santa’s helper.’” The frame included a citation for the direct quote, and Moore does not dispute that the directly quoted phrase—“was 14 and working as Santa’s helper”—was an accurate excerpt from the AL.com article.

Since Moore has conceded that, all he can argue is that the quotes appearing consecutively in SMP’s ads add up to SMP deliberately creating a narrative that those making the ad absolutely knew wasn’t true (the actual malice standard).

Nope, says the Eleventh:

Lastly, Moore contends that SMP must have intended or recklessly disregarded that the ad conveyed the defamatory implication because SMP vetted or fact-checked the ad before publishing it. Moore asserts that because SMP’s research team “read all of the articles” cited in the ad and attempted to ensure the ad’s accuracy, and none of the articles supported the assertion that Moore solicited a 14-year-old girl working at the mall for sex, it necessarily follows that SMP intended, or recklessly disregarded, the ad’s defamatory implication. We disagree.

Before we get to the conclusion that undoes the jury verdict, let’s pause for a moment to appreciate the fact that Moore’s argument here isn’t that he did not solicit a 14-year-old girl for sex, but that he did not solicit a 14-year-old girl for sex at this particular mall.

Given that it’s come to this, it would have made far more sense for Moore to simply maintain his innocence and hope that his GOP voting bloc would simply issue a “who among us” shrug at the long list of alleged sexual harassment. Instead, Moore’s appears to be trying to line his pockets while being forced to state things like this on the public record, which includes the “had I known I was being tricked, I never would have agreed to be tricked” detailed in the opening of this post.

Anyway, this is how it’s going for Moore:

In sum, Moore points to, and our independent review has revealed, no other evidence in the record showing that SMP intended or recklessly disregarded that its ad implied that Moore solicited sex from Miller when she was 14 and working as Santa’s helper. Because the evidence discussed above is inadequate to support a finding of the necessary intent to defame for purposes of actual malice in a defamation-by-implication case, Moore’s defamation and false-light claims necessarily fail. As a result, the jury verdict cannot stand.

Moore is still out whatever he’s paid to fail repeatedly in US courts. He can, of course, appeal this ruling. But I can’t imagine the Supreme Court cares one way or another about Moore’s attempts to enrich himself by portraying protected speech as defamation. Moore did a considerable amount of damage to his own reputation long before he started suing. Whatever reputational damage has occurred since is so incremental it’s a rounding error. It certainly isn’t $8.2 million.

Filed Under: 11th circuit, 1st amendment, bogus defamation lawsuit, defamation, failure, free speech, roy moore

Microsoft has released the KB5083631 optional cumulative update for Windows 11, which includes 34 changes, such as a new Xbox mode for Windows PCs, enhanced security and performance for batch files, and performance improvements for launching startup apps.

KB5083631 is a preview update that lets admins test Windows bug fixes, improvements, and new features, before they’re generally available during next month’s Patch Tuesday release. However, unlike cumulative updates, monthly optional updates do not include security fixes and only roll out quality improvements.

With the April 2026 optional update, Microsoft has improved the performance of launching apps listed under Settings > Apps > Startup when the device starts.

It also added a new Xbox mode for Windows 11 PCs (e.g., laptops, desktops, and tablets), which provides a full‑screen interface that puts games front and center while minimizing background distractions. Users can enter Xbox mode from the Xbox app, Game Bar settings, or by using the Windows logo key + F11 keyboard shortcut.

Additionally, this month’s preview update introduces improved security and performance for batch files and CMD scripts, a change that first rolled out in February to Windows 11 Insiders in the Beta and Dev channels.

“Starting with this release, administrators can enable a more secure processing mode for batch files. This mode prevents batch files from changing during execution,” Microsoft explained.

You can install KB5083631 by opening Windows Settings, clicking on Windows Update, and then on ‘Check for Updates.’ However, since this is an optional update, you will need to click the ‘Download and install’ link if you don’t want to install it manually from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

​KB5083631 update highlights

Once installed, this optional non-security update will update Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 devices to builds 26100.8328 and 26200.8328, respectively.

The April 2026 preview update comes with dozens of other changes, some of the more important ones highlighted below:

• You can now experience haptic feedback on supported input devices when performing certain actions, such as aligning objects in PowerPoint, snapping, or resizing windows. Haptic feedback can be managed in Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Mouse, Touchpad, or Pen > Haptic signals.
• [Secure Boot] With this update, Windows quality updates include additional high-confidence device-targeting data, increasing the coverage of devices eligible to receive new Secure Boot certificates automatically. Devices receive the new certificates only after demonstrating sufficient successful update signals, thereby maintaining a controlled, phased rollout. For more information, see Windows Secure Boot certificate expiration and CA updates.
• [Authentication (Kerberos)] This update improves Kerberos authentication for Remote Desktop sessions that use Remote Credential Guard, addressing error 0xc000009a.
• [Windows Security] This update improves event logging related to CVE‑2024‑30098 by including the name of the affected application. This change makes it easier to identify applications that rely on smart card certificates and may need updates following recent security changes.
• This update removes a white flash that could appear when opening This PC or while resizing the Details pane in dark mode.
• This update improves the reliability of relevant explorer.exe processes so they stop after File Explorer windows are closed.

Microsoft also noted that updated Secure Boot certificates are rolling out to replace the original 2011 certificates that will expire in late June 2026. In January, Microsoft first revealed plans to refresh expiring Secure Boot certificates on eligible Windows 11 systems, after warning admins in November to update the security certificates before they expire.

It also added that some Windows Server 2025 devices with “an unrecommended BitLocker Group Policy configuration” will boot into BitLocker recovery and require users to enter the BitLocker recovery key on the first restart after deploying the KB5083631 update.

Earlier this month, Microsoft also released an out-of-band update to fix the March 2026 KB5079391 preview update, which was pulled due to 0x80073712 errors during installation.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

Claim Your Spot

Broadcasting rights for soccer are split by territory, competition, and broadcaster — which means the service you need in London is completely different from the one you need in Los Angeles or Lagos. This guide cuts through that complexity. It covers the best official, legal streaming services for soccer in 2026, region by region, with accurate rights information drawn from official broadcaster and league sources.

Before diving into each region: rights deals expire, change, and get renegotiated. Always verify current availability on the official broadcaster’s website or use the Premier League’s official broadcasters directory to confirm the rights holder in your country. This guide reflects confirmed deals as of May 2026.

Free Options Worth Knowing First

United States

The US soccer streaming market is fragmented but well-covered. No single subscription gives you everything, but the major competitions are each cleanly assigned to one platform. Here’s how it breaks down for 2025–26:

Peacock carries the full 380-match Premier League season, making it the essential subscription for EPL fans in the US. If you also follow the Champions League and Serie A, adding Paramount+ covers both — these two subscriptions handle the majority of elite European club soccer in one setup.

The one caveat worth knowing: some Premier League matches air exclusively on the USA Network (cable channel), and their live stream is not included in the Peacock subscription — only replays are available. If you’re a cord-cutter, Fubo or YouTube TV bundles give you the USA Network live. You can also read our guide on how to watch football without a cable TV subscription for a full breakdown of cord-cutting options.

United Kingdom

The UK has the most competitive and densely covered soccer streaming market in the world — with the trade-off being that you often need multiple subscriptions to follow all the major competitions. The good news for 2026: the World Cup is completely free.

The FIFA World Cup 2026 will be broadcast free in the UK across BBC iPlayer and ITVX, covering all 104 matches — the most comprehensive free-to-air World Cup coverage available anywhere. For club football, Sky Sports remains the flagship subscription, but the cost of following all competitions can add up quickly when TNT Sports and Amazon Prime Video are also required for Champions League coverage.

Australia

Australia punches well above its weight for soccer streaming coverage, with two platforms covering the vast majority of elite football — one paid, one entirely free for the World Cup.

Stan Sport carries both the Champions League and every Premier League match in Australia, making it the most efficient single subscription for Australian fans of European club football. Stan Sport is an add-on to the base Stan subscription and is available on smart TVs, tablets, and mobile.

Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

beIN Sports is the dominant — and in many cases, exclusive — provider of elite soccer in the MENA region. Its TOD streaming app extends that coverage to any internet-connected device.

beIN Media Group holds exclusive Premier League broadcast rights across 24 MENA territories through the 2027–28 season, with all 380 matches available live on beIN Sports channels and via the TOD streaming app. For the Champions League, the same group holds exclusive rights across 33 markets in the region through 2026–27. If you’re in the MENA region, a beIN/TOD subscription is the single most comprehensive option available.

Europe (Germany, Spain, Italy, France)

Broadcasting rights in continental Europe are complex — each country has its own rights structure, and in most cases at least one major platform per country holds a dominant position. The table below covers the major markets:

DAZN is the closest thing to a pan-European soccer streaming platform, with rights across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and France for various competitions. Coverage varies significantly by country, so always verify on your national version of the DAZN website before subscribing. For La Liga specifically, DAZN extended its rights deal in Germany and Austria for five years and added Switzerland — making it the confirmed home of Spanish top-flight soccer in the German-speaking market through at least 2029–30.

Canada

Canada’s soccer streaming landscape has simplified in recent years. DAZN Canada holds a dominant position for European club football, making it the main subscription for Canadian fans.

What’s Coming: UEFA’s Own Streaming Service

The fragmented rights landscape described above may change significantly in the coming years. As of March 2026, UEFA is actively considering launching its own direct-to-consumer streaming service for the Champions League, with a trial reportedly planned from 2027 — initially targeting large Asian markets where existing broadcast deals are weaker. If launched, this would allow fans to subscribe directly to UEFA for Champions League coverage, bypassing national broadcasters. This is worth monitoring if you follow the UCL closely, as it could simplify (or complicate) your subscription setup depending on how existing rights deals are structured at renewal. For companion apps for live scores and stats alongside your stream, we cover those separately.

Frequently Asked Questions

Xiaomi phones are a little tough to judge. After all, these guys do everything, from making phones to laptops and sometimes even record-breaking electric SUVs. The Xiaomi 17 is a bit like the quiet kid that never gets noticed, simply because its bigger brother, the 17 Ultra, is on a streak of collecting all the best smartphone camera awards. But here’s the thing: most people won’t ever splurge that much money on a non-Samsung or Apple Ultra flagship. The main sales driver will always be the base model, and that’s the question I had in mind. Can the Xiaomi 17 go head-to-head with the OPPO Find X9 and the vivo X300, especially since it’s more expensive than both? You can thank AI for that.

To answer this very question, I got the Xiaomi 17 for review and took it with me on a work trip to Phuket, Thailand. Here, I used the phone to capture about 500 photos in the summer heat, with temperatures soaring to 40 degrees, and constant GPS navigation to put the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC through its paces. Spoiler alert, I really do love this phone, but there are a few quirks, too. Here’s why.

Design & Hardware

If Apple were ever going to make an Android phone, then they’d probably design something like the Xiaomi 17. I wouldn’t describe the build as flashy, but it’s super elegant and reminiscent of past Xiaomi flagships. I talked about this in my X300 Pro review, as creating a brand identity to compete against Samsung and Apple is super important, and Xiaomi has listened. While I was using it daily, many of my friends and family asked me what Xiaomi phone I was using—note the wording: “Xiaomi phone,” meaning they knew it was a particular brand, and that’s important. The Chinese smartphone maker said they thought of every curve, and I’ll just say it straight: the 17 is the best-feeling compact phone I’ve held this year.

The corners are crafted to perfection, the width is spot on, and even the way the aluminum frame blends into the glass without an abrupt edge makes carrying the phone a very enjoyable experience. Beyond that, the back glass is frosted to prevent the phone from slipping off glass surfaces, and the side frame doesn’t let go of its color inside a case.

Speaking of color, you get plenty of options, but my favorite is definitely the blue variant, as it has that breezy summer vibe. The buttons are tactile and positioned where your hand would naturally rest.

Moving to the camera module, Xiaomi has taken the iPhone route of individual stove-top camera cutouts. There are four of them (one houses the flash), and aside from the fact that dust is difficult to get out from between, I do quite like them. The ultrasonic fingerprint scanner is positioned at a comfy place where your thumb would naturally rest. I used it on the beach with wet hands, and it worked perfectly fine. Besides, the phone is IP69-rated for dust and water resistance, meaning it should technically withstand a swim. Did I dare take it inside the water on the beach? Absolutely not, because the IP rating is only for fresh water, and seawater can cause irreversible damage.

Display

I’ve said this before that all flagship displays are essentially the same, and that holds true for the Xiaomi 17, too. The phone features a 6.3-inch 1220 x 2656 OLED display, with an adaptive 120Hz refresh rate. This time, Xiaomi has trimmed the bezels even more for a more premium look, and I’m a fan. The panel is exceptionally color-accurate and vibrant for content consumption, as evidenced by my 3-hour run of The Pitt season 2 on the flight to Thailand. Even the HDR performance is exceptional.

Xiaomi claims a peak brightness number of 3,500 nits. Sadly, I don’t have a light meter to put the claim to the test, but from my experience using the panel in the 12 noon sun at Phi Phi Island, it’s plenty bright for outdoor use. The texts were legible, and I could use the phone for GPS navigation without squinting.

When it comes to durability, I usually don’t like to test that part myself and instead rely on user reports. However, I accidentally dropped the Xiaomi 17 on a concrete floor. The result was surprisingly good. I dropped it, without a case, from a tripod at chest height, meaning that, while the phone was in the air, all sorts of scary thoughts came to mind, including how much this repair was going to cost me. Thankfully, the phone escaped with only minor damage to the frame.

Performance & Software

Performance is what makes or breaks the smartphone experience, and it’s no surprise to anyone that the Xiaomi 17 delivers top-of-the-line performance. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the best Android processor in the market, and it’s coupled with 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM and up to 512GB of UFS 4.1 internal storage. The results? The Xiaomi 17 is an absolute joy to use. It flies through the UI like nothing, and there’s ample headroom for literally any task. That being said, the phone runs on HyperOS 3, which, for the uninitiated, is a very altered version of Android that resembles more like iOS.

I don’t have a problem with the look, especially since HyperOS is one of the smoothest Android skins, with silky animations and a lot of customization. My issue is that, unlike other Chinese skins that allow you to tone down the iOS-ness, Xiaomi doesn’t.

For example, the notification shade is divided into two sections: the quick control and the panel. I don’t like that, but when I went digging in the settings to find a way to merge them, there wasn’t. Also, the back gesture is enabled in the keyboard, so when I tried deleting long text, it would often send me back instead.

There are a few silver linings I wish others would copy from HyperOS, one major one being the lockscreen customizations. There are so many options, and every one of them looks gorgeous. As this is 2026, there’s a host of AI features, such as object eraser, image upscaling, and inpainting. I tried them all, and they work exactly as you’d expect. The company also promises about six years of major software updates and security patches. This is better than vivo’s five years.

Benchmarks & Gaming

As this is a review, I also ran a series of benchmarks to test the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5’s limits. The phone scored 3,415 in Geekbench’s single-core test and 10,008 in the multi-core test. These are insane numbers, especially when compared with the likes of the vivo X300 Pro and the Find X9, which score about 20%-30% lower in multi-core tests. The story remained similar on AnTuTu, where the Xiaomi 17 handsomely beat its Chinese rivals, scoring 3,423,349.

As expected, this performance translates extremely well in gaming. I’m a former PUBG (BGMI) eSports player, and my results were exceptional. The phone maintained 120 FPS gameplay even at high settings without a hint of stutter. I also like Xiaomi’s thermal management, which kept the phone from overheating during both gaming and photo capture in Thailand’s hot summer.

Battery Life & Charging

After all the chatter about the small form factor, you may expect the Xiaomi 17 to compromise on the battery life, just as other Apple and Samsung phones do. Well, you can’t be more wrong, as the Xiaomi 17 packs an even bigger battery, 6,330mAh to be precise, than the 17 Ultra. And the results are just fantastic. On the morning of my Thailand flight, I unplugged the phone at 5 am. I then continued using the phone for the rest of the day, including the three hours of The Pitt on the flight and map navigation when reaching Phuket airport. I ended the day with 20% remaining, and at 3 am the next morning, I had 20% remaining. For a more typical person, you’d be looking more at two days of usage without a hitch.

When it was finally time to charge, Xiaomi, unlike Samsung, bundles a 100W fast charger in the box that charges the phone from 20% to 80% in just 30 minutes. You also get 50W of reverse wireless charging, though that requires a specific charger.

Cameras

If a phone doesn’t fold in half or has dual screens, the only way to differentiate itself is through the cameras. They are the main reason why people lean towards a certain brand, and recently, both OPPO and vivo have been killing it. However, I think there’s room for a third king: the Xiaomi 17. Like others, it also houses a triple-sensor array, led by the 50MP LightFusion 950 sensor, a 50MP JN1 60mm telephoto, and another 50MP OV50M ultrawide lens. Colors are handled by Leica, and that’s the main strength of the Xiaomi 17. The photos it takes, with the different Leica filters, have a certain character you won’t find anywhere else. Every phone takes similar photos these days, and it’s these color profiles that matter the most.

Still, if you’re not a fan of poking around with the cameras, the default Leica Authentic profile produces colors that are very close to natural, with highlights and shadows handled extremely well. The details are crisp and plenty, the HDR performance is mostly spot on, and the contrast is slightly on the boosted side, which is what I like. Beyond the default camera profile, there are a myriad of filters, such as Negative, Positive, Sepia, Natural, Vibrant, and Blue. Each has a different style of capturing the colors and subject, and I really did find myself going through each and every one of them to decide which actually serves the scene the best. And the results speak for themselves. Every photo tells a different story, and that’s the Xiaomi 17’s biggest strength.

The telephoto lens is 2.5x, and I’d say the same about it, too. It serves as the main portrait camera, and the images deliver stellar detail, with excellent foreground separation and improved natural skin tones without the infamous beautification. Xiaomi doesn’t rely much on AI processing, so zooming past 5x-6x will result in blurry photos. Keep that in mind. The ultrawide hasn’t changed from the previous generation, so it still doesn’t have autofocus for macro photography. While it works great when the light is ample, I saw a significant drop in quality at night.

Speaking of the night, both the main and telephoto sensors benefit from Xiaomi’s mature image processing, which retains detail in shadows without making the image muddy or introducing noise. Videos, which can be shot at up to 8K, carry similar details in all lighting conditions, and I’m a fan. Sadly, it’s not all perfect. In Thailand’s heat, some of the videos I captured were choppy, even when I was in the hotel. This problem then carried over to India, where the first few seconds of every video would stutter. I’ve communicated this issue with the Xiaomi team, so a fix could be imminent. Overall, I love the Xiaomi 17’s cameras.

Verdict

Sure, the ₹89,999 price tag of the Xiaomi 17 might feel a bit much, considering it’s more than the vivo and OPPO competition. But the Xiaomi 17 brings a lot of things to the table. You get the best-in-class performance that’s miles ahead of the competition. A design that’s understated yet premium. Battery life that can easily last two full days, and cameras that, instead of being same same but different, induce a character to each and every photo that makes them more memorable. Of course, it’s not perfect. I’d like the camera bugs fixed and ultrawide performance improved, but overall, the Xiaomi 17 gets my recommendation.