Samsung has given us our first chance to check out its upcoming smart glasses in person, revealing two new designs and the first specs in the process, including an impressive 9-hour battery life. The glasses, developed in collaboration with Google and the eyewear brands Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, are due to launch this fall.

Google and Samsung have been teasing the new glasses for some time, and revealed the first two designs at I/O in May. Now there are two more frames: Both are unsurprisingly boxy, with a new set of squared off black glasses from Gentle Monster, and a more rounded, red-brown pair from Warby Parker. Jaein Choi, the executive vice president running Samsung’s mobile experience division, told CNBC that there are “more designs” on the way.

This was our first chance to see any of the four frames in person, though Samsung wouldn’t let me try them on — or even hold them up to my face. They’re all impressively light — not much heavier than the thick-rimmed acrylic glasses I used to wear, and barely bigger than them either. Speaker and microphone grilles are hidden along the stems, a single button sits on the right with a power switch tucked inside on the left, and of course there’s a camera and recording LED mounted on the front. Much like Meta’s collaborations with Ray-Ban and Oakley, these basically look like normal glasses most people would happily wear — privacy connotations aside.

The new glasses will be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chip, the same silicon that powers Meta’s latest smart glasses. Samsung says they’ll run for up to nine hours on a single charge, while the accompanying charging case delivers up to seven additional charges. 

You’ll be able to use either Google Gemini or Samsung’s Bixby with the glasses, though the AI features themselves sound pretty familiar: message summaries, live translation, navigation guidance, and analysis or description of what’s captured by the cameras.

Speaking of, just like Meta’s, there is a recording LED for when the camera is capturing video. Choi told Bloomberg that, like Meta’s, the glasses will prevent recording if they detect the LED has been blocked or obscured. That hasn’t been enough to prevent Meta’s from being branded “pervert glasses,” so we’ll have to see if Samsung and Google have other plans for tackling what Choi called an “an industry-shared problem.”

Samsung still isn’t revealing a firm release date or price for the upcoming glasses, but Choi described them as a “premium” product.

A year after overhauling its Z Fold phone with a radically thinner design, Samsung has changed things up again, this time altering the shape entirely. The Z Fold 8 is wider than any of Samsung’s previous foldables, and shorter too, a size and shape somewhere between Samsung’s traditional Flip and Fold models.

In photos, I wasn’t impressed by the squat shape. In person, to my surprise, it feels great, and almost immediately intuitive. If you want to get a feel for it yourself, grab your passport — the Z Fold 8 is about the same height and less than half an inch more narrow.

This isn’t Samsung’s only new foldable this year, and in fact, its lineup just got more confusing. The Z Fold 8 may be the official follow-up to last year’s impressive Z Fold 7, but in truth the Z Fold 8 Ultra is the straightforward sequel. That phone has the same squarish inner screen as previous Z Fold phones and a similar triple rear camera. The name feels like a sly trick to get around this year’s inevitable price hikes: Samsung slapped “Ultra” on the box of its highest-end model to help cover for pricing the phone at $2,099.99, up $100 from the Z Fold 7.

Meanwhile, with its wider screens and stripped back cameras, the Z Fold 8 feels less like a sequel and more like a spinoff. And it almost — almost — looks like a bargain at $1,899.99, down $100 on its nominal predecessor.

Samsung isn’t the first to the Z Fold 8’s form factor. Huawei’s Pura X Max launched in April with a similar shape, though it’s only available in China. Apple is widely expected to be next, using a similar passport-esque shape for its first iPhone foldable in September. In truth, elements of this design are even older: The Fold 8 is almost exactly the same width as Google’s first-gen Pixel Fold, though a good deal shorter, bringing foldable phones full circle.

I’ve been skeptical about the return of the wider foldable, which in photos looks squat and uncomfortable, too wide to use naturally while closed and too short to feel expansive when open. The industry tried this design once and moved on, so why — other than Apple’s potential adoption — should we give it a go again?

Samsung’s answer is that its two Z Fold 8 models are designed for different users and different uses. The Z Fold 8 Ultra, tall and thin when closed and similar to a square when open, is meant to be a multitasking monster, useful for running apps in split-screen, giving you the equivalent screen space of two regular 6.5-inch phones side by side. The wider Z Fold 8 is instead about consumption: Its 4:3 aspect ratio is equally natural for watching Netflix shows in landscape as it is for reading ebooks in portrait, and at 201g, it’s light enough to hold comfortably in one hand.

Or, as Samsung’s marketing department puts it, the Fold 8 is for “joy-maxxing,” and the Ultra is for “power-maxxing.” I sit through these presentations so that you don’t have to, folks.

The 4:3 display isn’t widescreen, so you’ll still get letterboxing at the top and bottom when watching most videos, whether on YouTube or a streaming service. But unlike Samsung’s previous squarish Folds, which weren’t much wider than simply turning your phone on its side, opening the Z Fold 8 up really does fit more video onto your screen, and the wider aspect ratio will be much more natural for gaming too. It feels less like a foldable and more like a tablet and is all the better for it.

I’m still a little uncertain whether I like how the Z Fold 8 feels closed — the way I use foldables the majority of the time. The width of the 10:16 cover display is less noticeable than I expected, and I got used to using the phone this way remarkably quickly, but I’m worried it might feel less comfortable if you stick the phone in a case. The reduced height proves an unexpected blessing here, making it easier and more comfortable to stretch across the screen one-handed than on larger slab phones like the S26 Ultra. A lot will depend on how well apps adapt to the shorter screen, though Samsung has already announced that Instagram is on board with optimizations.

There are other considerations to the Fold 8 than its new shape. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, optimized together with Samsung, makes this about as powerful as any other flagship out there. The 120Hz OLED main display is the same in specs as the Fold 8 Ultra’s, including an impressive peak brightness of 3,000 nits and a new anti-reflective coating to reduce glare. It supports the same new software features as the Z Fold 8 Ultra, including the official launch of Gemini Intelligence task automation and a proactive AI feature called Now Nudge that pops up with cross-app suggestions to add an event to your calendar or send someone an email.

For the first time, Samsung has caught up with its Chinese competition and adopted silicon-carbon batteries, a new type of lithium ion cell that incorporates a small amount of silicon alongside the graphite in the anode. Silicon-carbon batteries can squeeze higher capacities into smaller spaces, but they come with a downside: The highly reactive silicon is less stable, and there are fears that silicon-carbon batteries will lose capacity more quickly over time.

The 4,800mAh battery capacity of the Fold 8 isn’t an enormous jump from the 4,400mAh in the Fold 7 and pales in comparison to the biggest foldable battery around, Honor’s 6,660mAh Magic V6. A cautious approach to silicon-carbon is understandable from Samsung, which still bears the scars of the disastrous Galaxy Note 7 battery, which prompted a full recall of that phone in 2016 over safety concerns.

“Silicon-carbon cells must be carefully managed,” BD Yang, executive vice president of Samsung’s core component technology team, told The Verge, emphasizing Samsung’s work to manage silicon reactivity, swelling, and long-term cell stability, rather than prioritizing energy density alone. He called the Fold 8’s battery an “end-to-end improvement” over previous generations, combining higher capacity with “dependable performance.”

Less encouraging are the cameras. Unlike Samsung’s previous Fold models, the Fold 8 is limited to two rear cameras, with no telephoto to be found. Both the main and ultrawide lenses use 50-megapixel sensors, which looks like an upgrade for the ultrawide, but means the main lens might be worse than the Z Fold 7’s 200-megapixel shooter — though we won’t know for sure until Samsung shares detailed specs like the sensor size and aperture and I get the chance to put the cameras to a more thorough test in my review. Still, Samsung’s foldable cameras already lagged behind its best slab phones, and the Fold 8 only appears to make matters worse.

It’s also fallen behind the foldable competition in a few key ways. All three of Samsung’s new foldables remain limited to IP48, meaning they lack the comprehensive dust protection of Google’s Pixel 10 Pro Fold. And while Samsung says it’s overhauled the hinge and display stack with a new titanium-alloy film and a titanium plate below it, the changes aren’t enough to make the display crease anywhere near as subtle as on Oppo’s Find N6. Better are new magnets, which make the phone easier to open one-handed, and help it close with a satisfying click — though Samsung is still stubbornly refusing to integrate the internal magnets required for full Qi2 charging support.

I won’t really know whether the Fold 8’s form factor is for me until I’ve spent more time with the phone, but after an hour or so, I’m surprisingly sold. I’ve never figured out a way to replace my work laptop with a foldable phone, but I could easily see one supplanting my tablet, which has been mostly relegated to a portable screen for in-flight entertainment. And with a bigger battery to boot, the Z Fold 8 might just last ’til I land.

Still: $1,900 is an awful lot for any phone, and especially one that’s suffered such an obvious camera downgrade. It feels like even more considering this is an almost untested design, a new format that could be the future of foldables (especially if Apple has anything to say about it), but might arrive to the muted response that greeted last year’s Galaxy S25 Edge. An hour isn’t enough to know for certain either way, but after trying the Z Fold 8 in person, I’m already a fan.

The Trump phone was never a serious phone. Not when it was announced last June, in dodgy renders and with an incoherent spec sheet. Nor when Trump Mobile admitted — just two weeks later — that it wouldn’t be made in the US. Not even when the company revealed the final phone, first to me over a video call in February and then to the world in April through a short commercial with the slick sheen of AI.

It’s now on sale for $499, past the days of its tenuous, ever-shifting release dates. A few buyers even have the phone, The Verge among them, though more still seem not to.

It’s clear now that the T1 is a real phone, but that doesn’t mean it’s a serious one. Still, for the next thousand words or so, I will try to take it seriously.

T1 Phone 8002 (gold version)

Score: 3

Pros	Cons
It actually exists 3.5mm headphone jack MicroSD card slot It basically runs stock Android	Almost everything else

Where to Buy:

• $499 at Trump Mobile

A serious phone wouldn’t look like this 

The T1 Phone is a curved slab of cheap gold plastic, the smartphone equivalent of a pair of knockoff wraparound Oakleys. The gold finish — more yellow in certain light, though it certainly does shine and shimmer — is tacky in every sense, with a sticky friction that makes it feel distinctly unpleasant to the touch. My phone arrived with a tiny scratch in the top-right corner. 

The phone is fairly thin, and light, but its excessively curved waterfall display feels immediately dated. It also loses one of the chief advantages of that design — better in-hand feel — thanks to the oddly angular frame, which juts into my palm as I hold it. 

Almost every detail speaks to bad design. There’s the American flag logo, missing a stripe. The fact that “Trump Mobile” appears on the back twice, in two different orientations and two different fonts. Or the camera module, where the three lenses are spaced at irregular intervals.

There are things to like. The 3.5mm headphone jack will have its fans, as will the microSD card slot inside the phone, or the fact that the phone ships with a case, charger, and braided USB cable. These are things that a certain type of Android fan has lamented the absence of for years.

I, for one, am more excited to be reviewing a phone with a notification light again, a true treat that I thought we’d lost forever. It’s a glimpse of a better world, one I didn’t expect from Trump Mobile of all companies. But like the curved screen, even these welcome touches betray that this is a dated, old-fashioned phone, one based on an old HTC design that already felt like a throwback two years ago.

A serious phone would work outside the US 

I live in the UK, meaning I may well have the only Trump phone outside of North America. It cannot maintain any signal stronger than 2G, meaning I can use it for texts and calls but not for data. As best as I can tell from digging through the T1’s FCC certification documents, the phone simply doesn’t support the network bands commonly used in Europe.

The T1 Phone isn’t sold in Europe, and that misshapen flag makes its target market clear. But even Americans get to go on vacation every once in a while. From my experience, it seems unlikely that the T1 would work anywhere in Europe and perhaps not anywhere in the world outside North America.

A serious phone would use more than the minimum hardware

At first glance, the T1’s spec sheet might seem impressive enough: a 120Hz OLED screen, a 5,000mAh battery, a triple rear camera with 50-megapixel sensors.

But the truth is you could find similar specs on almost any $200 Android phone and superior ones on phones sold at this price. Hardware like this is cheap and commodified, something that’s only beginning to change thanks to the ongoing memory crisis. Here, amusingly, the T1 is generously specced: 512GB of storage and 12GB of RAM come as standard. Those, along with the inclusion of wireless charging, are the only things that really stand out on this spec sheet.

Despite all that RAM, and Qualcomm’s modestly capable Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset, the T1 is often sluggish. It sometimes stutters when switching apps or triggering animations, making even basic apps like Duolingo frustrating to use. This hardware isn’t flagship, but it should certainly be more capable than this. I can only assume Trump Mobile didn’t develop the sort of software and firmware performance optimizations that other manufacturers do, handicapping the phone from the start. 

I suspect the camera’s limitations are for similar reasons. The three rear lenses and single selfie camera take basic, functional photos, at least in good light — with the exception of the 8-megapixel ultrawide, which is uniformly poor.

Other phone manufacturers spend millions optimizing their image pipelines, and none of that work is evident here. Daylight photos are vivid and oversaturated, nighttime shots are noisy, and the telephoto shows no signs of electronic stabilization at all, making it feel shaky and unstable. Incredibly, by default every shot is overlaid with a strangely small T1 watermark — as if anyone should want to take credit for these photos.

A serious phone would have made more effort in its software

As the Trump phone lurched haltingly toward its launch, the going assumption from many was that it would be a bloated mess, loaded with spyware, crypto apps, and MAGA-themed experiences, putting the president’s leering face front and center.

The truth is rather more mundane. It runs Android — the nearly two-year-old Android 15, to be precise — with almost no modifications at all. This is, in fact, about as close to what the nerds call “stock” Android as you’re ever likely to get these days. 

The only preinstalled apps that are out of the ordinary are Truth Social, Trump’s own social media network, and Doctegrity, a telehealth platform that’s included with Trump Mobile’s $47.45 cell service. Beyond that you get a single Trump Mobile wallpaper and those photo watermarks, and that really is that. 

In a sense, that’s a good thing — I’m hardly lamenting the lack of bloatware. But there’s also no sign that Trump Mobile has the ability or the intent to optimize its phone’s software or deliver any features beyond the minimum. 

More worryingly, Trump Mobile hasn’t announced how long it will support the phone with software updates. When I spoke to executives from the company in February, they seemed confused by my question about how many Android version updates the phone would receive, though they did insist that customers won’t “be locked into what’s there today.” For now, that means a 2024 version of Android with a February 2026 security patch; I wouldn’t hold my breath for either to be updated any time soon.

A serious company would put more effort in

In a strange way, the T1 Phone isn’t all that terrible, but only because it proves how hard it actually is to make a truly terrible phone these days. It’s easy enough to throw together the baseline hardware, stick Android on top, and call it a day. For better or worse, that’s more or less exactly what Trump Mobile has done. Between the simple software and the dated hardware features, the T1 is an oddly compelling phone for some old-school Android fans, but Trump Mobile got there entirely by mistake.

This isn’t a serious phone. It’s a marketing stunt that got out of hand, a way to grab attention and juice the subscriber count for an overpriced cell service with the president’s name on it.

Trump Mobile doesn’t care about this phone. And after the year of reporting on it that’s led to this review, I’m thrilled to finally say: Neither should you.

Meta is in breach of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a preliminary investigation has found, over the “addictive” design of Instagram and Facebook. It’s likely to be forced to redesign both apps and could face a fine of up to $12 billion.

The European Commission said Meta “did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design on the physical and mental wellbeing of users, including minors and vulnerable adults.” It singled out features like personalized recommendations, autoplay, and infinite scroll, arguing that they “fuel the user’s urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain into ‘autopilot mode.’”

The report also criticizes the tools Meta provides to help limit users’ use. It says that time management tools can be easily dismissed; parental controls require technical expertise, effort, and time on behalf of the parents to be effective; and that Meta’s mental health awareness measures are too limited to mitigate the risks.

Meta may have to redesign both Facebook and Instagram, according to the Commission. It suggests disabling features like autoplay and infinite scroll by default, implementing effective screentime breaks, and making the recommendation algorithm “less engagement-oriented.”

The European Commission’s investigation began in May 2024, and is separately assessing Meta’s age verification tools and content protections for minors. Meta will now have the chance to defend itself, but if the Commission’s decision is made final, Zuck and Co. could face a noncompliance fine of up to 6 percent of its worldwide annual turnover. In 2025, that was $200.97 billion, meaning a potential fine of up to $12 billion.

The decision comes as the EU considers implementing a blocwide ban on social media for under-16s, with a report from the European Commission due on that matter next Monday. In August, Meta faces a trial in the US over whether its apps are intentionally addictive, with four states reportedly pushing for combined penalties of up to $1.4 trillion.

“Protecting the physical and mental health of Europeans must be a priority for social media platforms,” said Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s tech policy chief. “The Digital Services Act provides a clear framework to hold platforms accountable for the addictive design and effects of their services. We are fully committed to enforcing our legislation in Europe.”