A smartphone that’s modular, easy to repair and more sustainable than competitors? That’s how the Dutch electronics-maker Fairphone markets its latest device, which is now available in the US.

The Fairphone 6 Plus with Android 16, which works on AT&T and T-Mobile’s cell networks and costs $650 through the company’s website and on Amazon, comes in cobalt blue, horizon black and forest green.

The 6 Plus is a modest hardware upgrade from the original 6 model released last year. It has a new Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 chip and 12GB of RAM, up from the previous 8GB, but the same 6.31-inch OLED screen, 50MP main camera and 256GB capacity.

The big selling point of Fairphone’s devices is that they are easier to repair and more sustainably built. A screwdriver can be used to swap out 12 parts of the phone, including the display, battery, cameras and SIM tray. The phone has a five-year warranty, and the Android software is supported until 2033, according to its website. Highlighting its sustainability efforts, Fairphone says it is 100% e-waste neutral and that its phones are made with 50% recycled or fair factory-made materials.

Modular for life

Fairphone

Flagship smartphones from top phone-makers, including Apple and Samsung, are typically difficult, if not impossible, for most consumers to repair or replace parts on, and doing so can void product warranties. A cottage industry of repair stores, in addition to repair services that hardware makers offer themselves, can fix problems such as failing batteries or broken screens, but repairs can be costly.

There’s also an environmental component: Having the ability to repair your own device could extend its lifecycle. That’s one of the reasons consumer advocates have pushed for right-to-repair laws in all 50 states.

Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association, was pleased to hear the hear that the 6 Plus would be available in the US. “I’m sure there will be a lot of consumer interest and interest in teardowns and evaluations.”

A year ago, the teardown site iFixit gave the Fairphone 6 its highest repairability rating, 10 out of 10.

After several decades away from the loudspeaker category, Rotel is getting back into the game with the Amora 5, a passive two-way bass-reflex standmount speaker that marks a significant expansion of the company’s product lineup. Best known for its amplifiers, CD players, DACs, and other source components, Rotel is now extending that system approach all the way to the final link in the chain.

Priced at $999 per pair, the Amora 5 is designed to deliver a wide, open stereo image with low distortion, strong resolution, and a claimed frequency response of 48 Hz to 28 kHz. The compact standmount combines custom drive units, a precision-tuned crossover, and a rigid MDF enclosure, and while Rotel has clearly engineered it to pair naturally with its own electronics, the Amora 5 is intended to work just as comfortably in systems built around competing amplification.

The Tweeter

The 1-inch (25 mm) silk-dome tweeter is mounted within an aluminum surround ring for rigid, secure installation, while a geometrically shaped ABS faceplate minimizes diffraction and provides a smooth transition to the cabinet baffle.

Mid/Bass Driver

The 6.5-inch (165 mm) woven-fiber composite midrange/bass driver incorporates a rigid aluminum frame to maintain mechanical stability and proper driver alignment. This design helps reduce structural vibration while maintaining consistent performance. A 2.5 kHz crossover integrates the tweeter and midrange/bass driver to deliver a balanced frequency response, focused imaging, and an open soundstage.

The Cabinetry

The rigid MDF cabinet provides a stable acoustic foundation for the drive units, helping to minimize unwanted resonance. A rear-mounted bass-reflex port is tuned to extend low-frequency response down to 48 Hz while maintaining controlled bass performance.

Connection Terminals

For connectivity, the Amora includes dual sets of gold-plated speaker terminals that support standard single-wire or bi-wire connection options.

Grille 

The included speaker grille uses acoustically transparent fabric to maintain a clean appearance without compromising performance. It attaches magnetically and can be easily removed when desired.

“Rotel’s success has always been built on trusted engineering, long-term relationships, and a shared passion for music,” said Peter Kao, Managing Director of Rotel and third-generation member of the founding family. “With the Amora 5, we extend the Rotel experience through the final stage of the system, giving our global partners and customers a more complete path from source to speaker.”

Rotel Amora 5 Speaker Specifications

The Bottom Line 

Rotel is making an interesting move. After more than three decades away from the loudspeaker category, a company best known for amplifiers, CD players, DACs, and other electronics is getting back into the game with a single model rather than launching an entire speaker family.

That may be the most interesting thing about the Amora 5. There is nothing particularly exotic about its two-way architecture, 6.5-inch woven-fiber midrange/bass driver, silk-dome tweeter, or rear-ported MDF enclosure. Instead, Rotel appears to be taking a relatively conservative approach with a $999/pair standmount designed to complement the electronics it already sells.

The problem is that $1,000 is one of the most competitive price points in the loudspeaker market. The QUAD Elegan 1 sells for $995/pair, while the newly introduced Wharfedale Denton 1S is $999/pair and the Q Acoustics 5020 is also currently $999/pair.

There are also less expensive alternatives that could make the decision even more difficult. The KEF Q3 Meta is $899.99/pair, the larger Q Acoustics 3030c is $799/pair, and Triangle’s Borea BR04 is $625/pair.

Rotel’s biggest advantage might therefore be the name on the front rather than any revolutionary piece of loudspeaker technology. Existing Rotel owners now have the option of building a complete system from a familiar brand, and dealers could make the Amora 5 more compelling by pairing it with integrated amplifiers such as the DX-5 or A8.

Returning to loudspeakers after more than 30 years will certainly get Rotel some attention. Convincing buyers to choose the Amora 5 over some very established competition at the same price will be the harder part.

Price & Availability

The Rotel Amora 5 bookshelf (stand-mount) speakers will be available for $999/pair ( €999 / £999) in matte black or matte white through authorized Rotel dealers in August 2026. 

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On Tuesday, OpenAI announced a new batch of security policies focused on containing security incidents while models are being tested. The new safeguards include more detailed monitoring of models during the development process, as well as greater emphasis on alignment and security during the post-training process.

“As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow,” the company said in a blog post. “Our standards for monitoring, alignment, and security must stay ahead of those risks.”

The new measures are one of the first public changes in OpenAI’s safety practices since the immediate aftermath of the Hugging Face incident, which was disclosed on July 21.

OpenAI representatives said that the measures are not a direct response to the Hugging Face incident but were also provoked in part by the cybersecurity capabilities of the forthcoming Astra model, as well as the overall pace of progress in AI development.

In the same post, OpenAI disclosed that it had paused reinforcement learning (RL) for two weeks following the Hugging Face incident but had since restarted many of the less-risky models.

“Our largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold while we conduct smaller-scale training and evaluations to assess model behavior, validate our safeguards, and establish more evidence of alignment before proceeding,” the post reads.

Speaking to reporters, OpenAI’s VP of research, Amelia Glaese, emphasized that the strictness of the controls would increase as models became more capable, with the largest models facing the greatest scrutiny.

“We have put in place requirements and expectations for safe development,” Glaese told reporters. “Those requirements and expectations vary with the level of risk that we see.”

OpenAI has been criticized for poor network security practices in the wake of the incident, which saw models escape their training environment by compromising a tool on its network that had access to the internet. The new safeguards include stronger network isolation practices, although the specifics remain vague. Under the new system, the post says, “a single compromise of a workload or supporting service does not, by itself, allow for unauthorized access to the Internet, or other internal networks.”

The strongest safeguard is the monitoring system, which will examine tool actions, available reasoning traces, and activity logs for a variety of unauthorized behavior. OpenAI says it aims to issue alerts within 30 minutes of the concerning activity.

OpenAI estimates that the compute burden of that monitoring will be roughly 20% of whatever process is being monitored. The company promised further details on the system in a forthcoming blog post. The company’s official postmortem analysis of the event is also still pending.

Hertility’s research conducted the ‘largest study ever undertaken’ in this area, across five years.

Hertility, an Irish-founded UK and Irish healthcare provider for women, has today (19 August) published the “largest study ever undertaken” in the region on female testosterone levels.

Published in the Journal of Endocrinological Investigation, Hertility assessed data from 30,453 women aged between 18 and 74 who accessed at-home hormone testing in England, Scotland and Wales between September 2020 and August 2025.

What was discovered is that hormone levels decline progressively throughout adult life, falling by approximately 1.4pc each year from a woman’s 20s onwards, with no abrupt perimenopausal cliff edge, which is the term often used to describe the sudden, ‘cliff-like’ drop in hormones. 

Testosterone plays a crucial role in many of the body’s functions, such as libido, mood, bone mineral density, muscle mass and metabolic function and also forms part of the assessment of conditions including PMO and androgen deficiency. However, the data has thus far not kept pace with developments. 

Currently, in both Ireland and the UK testosterone is typically measured using the immunoassay method. The ‘normal’ ranges that inform the tests are frequently based on just two small validation studies which took data from only 149 women across two broad age ranges 20 to 49 and the over 50s.  

Additionally, that cohort was screened only for BMI and hormonal contraceptive use and it failed to exclude hirsutism, which is excessive hair growth, PMOS, which is formerly PCOS and other markers of androgen excess. 

As a result, the research found that the dependence on arguably outdated data means “some women are still being falsely reassured and others investigated unnecessarily after their testosterone levels are tested.”

Failing averages

The report suggested that tests based on averages are failing women, particularly when it is shown that testosterone variation widens with age. 

Consider for a moment a woman of 25, within a bracket of 19 to 59 years olds, whose results may be regarded as normal, but who may have a counterpart whose results are flagged as abnormal and investigated because she is being compared against a system that was not designed to reflect her age. 

The report noted, “genuine hormonal disruption is masked as being ‘normal’ while normal physiology is escalated as abnormal and both outcomes contribute to the diagnostic delays that continue to characterise women’s health.

“Instead of using a single cut-off point, the researchers modelled where testosterone levels typically fall at every single year of age. This means a woman’s result can be shown as its precise position within the normal range for her age, providing one piece of evidence to be weighed alongside her symptoms, cycle history, medication use and a clinical examination.”

Hertility’s report is calling on clinical laboratories, assay manufacturers and guideline bodies to use age-specific, age-continuous hormone ranges rather than a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to women’s health. They should also aim to share the criteria that formed the basis of their study so clinicians can make an informed decision. 

Commenting on the report, Dr Helen O’Neill, the CEO of Hertility and associate professor in reproductive and molecular genetics at UCL, said, “When a woman has a hormone test, she is looking for an answer about her own body. 

“What she receives is a comparison against an average and too often an average drawn from a few dozen women, decades ago, grouped into age brackets so broad they are almost meaningless.

“Averages are not neutral, they flatten the range of normal human variation, masking real hormonal disruption in some women while manufacturing false alarm in others.

“Precision medicine requires reference data of sufficient scale and rigour that an individual can be interpreted as an individual. Better reference ranges will never replace clinical judgement, but they change what clinical judgement has to work with, and set a standard for what should be expected before any hormone result is described as normal or abnormal for a woman.”

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Watch England vs Pakistan live streams as the 1st Test from Headingley, Leeds, begins a three-match series full of intrigue. Joe Root returns as England captain as the backlash from the hosts previous series continues, while Babar Azam’s visitors seek a rare away series victory.

“Bazball” is finally over, with coach Brendon McCullum let go from the Test gig days after Ben Stokes announced a shock international retirement after England’s 2-1 defeat by New Zealand in June. Stephen Fleming, another Kiwi, doesn’t take the reins as the new Test coach until the winter so Marcus Trescothick is in interim coaching charge here.

As the resident NBN and home-internet expert for TechRadar Australia, I spend much of my time looking out for the best internet deals, and there are almost invariably a number of compelling options at every different speed tier — and these can be a great way to sense-check if you’re overpaying for your current NBN service.

When choosing deals, much of my decision-making revolves around two easily identifiable metrics: price and typical evening speed (TES). Typical evening speed is something all internet service providers (ISPs) have to disclose before you sign up for a plan. In essence, it tells you the download speed you can realistically expect to achieve during the busier evening hours of 7pm to 11pm. Being able to view the TES also means you can easily identify which ISPs ultimately offer better value — i.e. the ones advertising fast evening speeds at competitively low prices.

Spector was the creator behind Deus Ex.

Systems

It seems like Nvidia’s not getting back into the Middle Kingdom anytime soon

Chinese web giant Baidu yesterday told investors it sees good days ahead for its Kunlunxin chip biz, because local buyers won’t have alternatives.

Baidu has previously said it plans to spin out and float Kunlunxin, which makes CUDA-compliant inferencing chips that it uses for its own cloud services and has sold to the likes of Huawei and ZTE, who use them in kit they sell to Chinese telcos.

Speaking on the company’s Q2 earnings call, Dou Shen, executive veep of Baidu’s AI Cloud Group, said Baidu is working to list Kunlunxin and will have concrete info to share soon.

“From a business perspective, we remain very confident in Kunlunxin’s long-term growth and commercial potential for a few reasons,” he said. One of those reasons is that demand for inferencing continues to rise, and Baidu thinks that trend will continue for the long term.

His second reason was that China’s domestic market has “significant growth potential” because supply of AI chips is “likely to remain constrained for some time.”

“Against this backdrop, customers are increasingly seeking high performance, reliable, and cost-efficient domestic AI chips.”

Those remarks are notable in the context of the US government’s policy to allow Nvidia to resume sales of its products into China, and Beijing’s response of giving itself a veto over any purchases by local companies.

After Washington banned Nvidia from selling its products in China, the company said that decision cost it $10.5 billion in six months. In its most recent results announcement the GPU giant said it had not won any revenue in China after the USA’s policy reversal, and is “uncertain whether any imports will be allowed into the country.”

And now Baidu is saying Chinese buyers are looking to local chips due to supply challenges.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has argued that the Trump administration should encourage chip sales to China, to cement the USA’s dominance of AI. Beijing has encouraged adoption of local tech, in part to reduce dependence on US products.

Baidu’s earnings included strong growth for its AI business, which saw revenue from cloud infrastructure rental rise 50 percent year over year to almost $1.1 billion, and revenue from the company’s GPU cloud surge 283 percent year-over-year, trumping the 184 percent growth in the last quarter.

Those numbers are modest compared to the likes of AWS, Google, and Microsoft – and also a fair way down the charts among Baidu’s Chinese competitors. The company believes owning its own stack of models, infrastructure, and chips will mean it can deliver AI services at keen prices and give it a market advantage. Alibaba makes similar claims and is arguably far ahead of Baidu in terms of model-making capabilities.

But Baidu has the robo-cab field to itself with the Apollo Go service, which execs said provided over one million fully autonomous rides around the world in Q2.

Back on the web, execs enthused about low hallucination rates for the company’s consumer-AI services, and an 83 percent year-over-year increase in the number of daily active users for Baidu’s ERNIE assistant – which saw the number of conversations users stage daily more than triple.

Overall revenue grew just four percent year-over-year to $3.9 billion, meaning Baidu’s AI cloud is the company’s growth engine. ®