You'll Probably Be Using Some Of These Gadgets From MCW 2025 Very Soon
Here are six tech gadgets from MWC Barcelona that got the internet buzzing.
Xiaomi debuted its latest Xiaomi 15 Ultra phone to a chorus of enthusiasm.
The China-based company partnered up with camera manufacturer Leica to boost the phone's photography game, and give it a competitive advantage over its rivals. The Xiaomi 15 Ultra boasts a next-gen quad camera system and a Summilux optical lens that gives photos a professional look.
The phone also has Qualcomm's (QCOM) latest processor — the Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform, and a slew of AI integrations — including Google's (GOOGL) Gemini — built into the phone.
It goes on sale later this month, starting at roughly $1,623 (€1,499).
Fancy phone lenses were all the rage in Barcelona this year.
Chinese phone maker RealMe unveiled a brand new concept phone that you can transform into a high-end mirrorless camera by attaching interchangeable lenses via an adapter.
The phone, which is currently just a concept device, features two DSLR-like lenses: a 73mm and a much bigger 234mm, equivalent to 3x and 10x DSLR-level optical zooms.
'This is more than just a concept; it is a promise of what's to come,' RealMe head of product marketing Francis Wong said in the company's unboxing video.
Lenovo (LNVGY) introduced a ThinkBook AI PC called 'codename Flip' at the MWC 2025, although it is as of yet still an early concept.
This PC not only boasts AI-powered workflows thanks to an Intel (INTC) Core Ultra 7 processor, but it also has a bending OLED display that folds outwards, enabling the ThinkBook to transform from a compact 13-inch laptop to a vertically expanded 18.1-inch screen, ideal for document viewing. Or you can fold the screen backwards to 'Share mode,' when you're working with someone else sitting across the table from you and want to share your screen with them, or you can fold all the screens in to resemble a tablet.
Although it was first unveiled in January at Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event, Samsung's latest Galaxy S25 phones — and particularly the Edge model, which Samsung deemed its thinnest yet — stole the spotlight.
We still don't know much about the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge. Visitors at the MWC 2025 didn't receive any information on it, and were not allowed to touch it. But we do know that like the rest of the Galaxy S25 series, and much like the other buzzy phones debuted at MWC, it will have a host of AI integration features (including built-in Google Gemini features) and advanced camera technology.
The super-thin phone is likely to launch in the coming months, as rival Apple (AAPL) is also reportedly readying to unveil a super-thin phone of its own with the highly anticipated and rumored iPhone 17 Air.
Lenovo also caught attention with another concept: a PC that runs on solar energy.
The device has a solar panel that leverages 'black contact cell' technology to achieve an over 24% conversion rate, which Lenovo claims is 'one of the highest in the industry.' Just 20 minutes of direct sunlight can power the PC for one hour of video playback, according to the company. That means if you live somewhere that gets enough sunlight, you might not need to worry about charging ports and cables if you want to work outside on a bright day.
Much like the foldable Flip PC, Lenovo's Yoga Solar PC is still an early concept and the company didn't share a production plan.
London-based Nothing's new 3A and 3A Pro smartphones were all the rage in Barcelona this week, and not just for their AI features, which include an assistant that compiles important information from photos and screenshots you deem essential. The phones also drew attention for their fun designs and relatively low price point.
The phones, which boast a futuristic-looking translucent back and LED lights that flash whenever you receive a notification, start at $379 for the 3A and $459 for the 3A Pro. Both devices are available now for pre-order in the U.S., as part of the company's beta launch in the U.S. market.
This story originally appeared on Quartz, our sister site, on Friday, March 7.
For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNBC
an hour ago
- CNBC
Ethereum turns 10: From scrappy experiment to Wall Street's invisible backbone
CANNES — Ten years ago, Vitalik Buterin and a small band of developers huddled in a drafty Berlin loft strung with dangling lightbulbs, laptops balanced on mismatched chairs and chipped tables. They weren't corporate titans or venture-backed founders — just idealists working long nights to push a radical idea into reality. From that sparse office, they launched "Frontier," Ethereum's first live network. It was bare-bones — no interface, no polish, nothing user-friendly. But it could mine, execute smart contracts, and let developers test decentralized applications. It was the spark that transformed Ethereum from an abstract concept into a living, breathing system. Bitcoin had captured headlines as "digital gold," but what they built was something else entirely: programmable money, a financial operating system where code could move funds, enforce contracts, and create businesses without banks or brokers. One year earlier and 520 miles away in Zurich, Paul Brody got a call from IBM security: A kid was wandering the lab unattended. "That's not a child," Brody told them. "That's Vitalik. He's a grown-up — he just looks really young." At the time, Buterin had just founded Ethereum. The blockchain was still in its alpha stage, an early build of what would become a $420 billion platform rewiring Wall Street and powering decentralized finance, NFTs, and tokenized markets across the globe. Brody, then leading a research team at IBM, remembers how quickly the idea clicked. "One of the guys on the research team came to me and said, 'I've met this really interesting guy. He's got a really cool like a version of bitcoin, but we're going to make it much faster and programmable,'" he said. "And when he said that to me, I thought, 'That's it. That is what I want. That is what we need.'" With Buterin's help, IBM built its first blockchain prototype on Ethereum's early code, unveiling it at CES in 2015 alongside Samsung. "That was how I ended up down this path," Brody said. "I was done with all other technology and basically made the switch to blockchain." Even now, as EY's global blockchain leader, Brody remembers feeling a pang of envy. "This is a kid, and it doesn't matter," he said. "I was jealous of Vitalik… to be able to do that." He added, "I don't think opportunities like that could have been surfaced when I was that age." Now, a decade later, that experiment has quietly rewired global markets. "It's very impressive, just how much the space has succeeded and grown into, beyond pretty much anyone's expectations," Buterin told CNBC in Cannes on the sidelines of the blockchain's flagship event in Europe. Buterin said the change over the past decade has been staggering. Ten years ago, he recalled, the crypto community was "just a very small space," with only a handful of people working on bitcoin and a few other projects. Since then, Ethereum has become "this big thing," Buterin said, with major corporations now launching assets on both its base layer and layer-two networks. Parts of national economies are beginning to run on Ethereum infrastructure, a far cry from its cypherpunk origins. But Buterin warned that mainstream adoption brings risks as well as benefits. One concern is that if too few issuers or intermediaries dominate, they could become "de facto controllers of the ecosystem." He described a scenario where Ethereum might appear open, but, in practice, all the keys are managed by centralized providers. "That's the thing that we don't want," he said. Two years earlier in Prague, CNBC met Buterin at Paralelní Polis, a sprawling industrial complex turned anarchist tech hub in the city's Holešovice district. The building's labyrinthine staircases and shadowed corridors felt like a physical map of the crypto world itself — part resistance movement, part experiment in reimagining power. It was a place built on Václav Benda's concept of a "parallel society," where decentralized technologies offered refuge from state surveillance and control. It's the kind of place where Buterin, a self-described nomad, found himself at home among cypherpunks and cryptographic idealists. At the time, Buterin described crypto's greatest utility not in speculative trading, but in helping people survive broken financial systems in emerging markets. "The stuff that we often find a bit basic and boring is exactly the stuff that brings lots of value," he told CNBC at the time. "Just being able to plug into the international economy — these are things that they don't have, and these are things that provide huge value for people there." Even in Prague, where coders worked to make payments fast and censorship-resistant, the technology felt like a resistance movement — privacy-preserving, anti-authoritarian, a lifeline in countries where banking collapses were common and money couldn't be trusted. This year, Buterin keynoted Ethereum's flagship conference at the Palais des Festivals — the same red carpet venue that hosts movie stars each spring. It was a fitting symbol of Ethereum's journey: from underground hacker dens to a network that governments, banks, and brokerages are now racing to build upon. Brody, who currently leads blockchain strategy at EY, says what matters most is how deeply Ethereum is integrating into traditional finance. "The global financial system is really nicely described as a whole network of pipes," he said. "What's happening now is that Ethereum is getting plumbed into this infrastructure," Brody continued, noting that until recently, crypto operated on entirely separate rails from traditional finance. Now, he said, Ethereum is being wired directly into core transaction systems, setting the stage for massive financial flows — from investors to everyday savers — to migrate away from older mechanisms toward Ethereum-based platforms that can move money faster, at lower cost, and with more advanced functionality than legacy systems allow. Stablecoins — digital dollars that live on Ethereum — power trillions in payments, tokenized assets and funds are moving on-chain, and Robinhood recently rolled out tokenized U.S. equities via Arbitrum, an Ethereum-based layer two. Circle's USDC — the second-largest stablecoin — still settles around 65% of its volume on Ethereum's rails. According to CoinGecko's latest "State of Stablecoins" report, Ethereum accounts for nearly 50% of all stablecoin activity. Between Circle's IPO and the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act, now signed into law by President Donald Trump, regulators have new reason to engage with, rather than fight, this transformation. Data from Deutsche Bank shows stablecoin transactions hit $28 trillion last year — more than Mastercard and Visa combined. The bank itself has announced plans to build a tokenization platform on zkSync, a fast, cost-efficient Ethereum layer two designed to help asset managers issue and manage tokenized funds, stablecoins, and other real-world assets while meeting regulatory and data protection requirements. Digital asset exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken are racing to capture this crossover between traditional securities and crypto. As part of its quarterly earnings release, Coinbase said this week it's launching tokenized stocks and prediction markets for U.S. users in the coming months, a move that would diversify its revenue stream and bring it into more direct competition with brokerages like Robinhood and eToro. Kraken announced plans to offer 24/7 trading of U.S. stock tokens in select overseas markets. BlackRock's tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, launched on Ethereum last year, offering qualified investors on-chain access to yield with real-time redemptions settled in USDC. Even as newer blockchains tout faster speeds and lower fees, Ethereum has proven its staying power as the trusted network for global finance. Buterin told CNBC in Cannes that there's a misconception about what institutions actually want. "A lot of institutions basically tell us to our faces that they value Ethereum because it's stable and dependable, because it doesn't go down," he said. He added that firms frequently ask about privacy and other long-term features — the kinds of concerns that institutions, he said, "really value." Different institutions are choosing different layer twos for different needs — Robinhood uses Arbitrum, Deutsche Bank zkSync, Coinbase and Kraken Optimism — but they all ultimately settle on Ethereum's base layer. "The value proposition of Ethereum is its global reach, its huge capital flows, its incredible programmability," Brody said. He added that the fact it isn't the fastest blockchain or the one with the quickest settlement times "is secondary to the fact that it's overall the most widely adopted and flexible system." Brody also believes history points toward consolidation. He said that in most technology standards wars, one platform ultimately dominates. In his view, Ethereum is likely to become that dominant programmability layer, while Bitcoin plays a complementary role as a risk-off, scarcity-driven asset. Engineers, he said, "love to work on a standard… to scale on a standard," and Ethereum has become precisely that. Tomasz Stańczak, the newly appointed co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, sees the same pattern from inside the ecosystem. "Institutions chose Ethereum over and over again for its values," Stańczak said. "Ten years without stopping for a moment. Ten years of upgrades with a huge dedication to security and censorship resistance." When institutions send an order to the market, they want to be sure that it's treated fairly, that nobody has preference, and that the transaction is executed at the time when it's delivered. "That's what Ethereum guarantees," added Stańczak. Those assurances have become more valuable as traditional finance moves on-chain. Ethereum's path hasn't been smooth. The network has weathered spectacular booms and busts, rivals promising faster speeds, and criticism that it's too slow or expensive for mass adoption. Yet it has outlasted nearly all early competitors. In 2022, Ethereum replaced its old transaction validation method, proof-of-work — where armies of computers competed to solve puzzles — with proof-of-stake, where users lock up their ether as collateral to help secure the network. The shift cut Ethereum's energy use by more than 99% and set the stage for upgrades aimed at making apps faster and cheaper to run on its base layer. The next decade will test whether Ethereum can scale without compromise. Buterin said the first priority is getting Ethereum to "the finish line" in terms of its technical goals. That means improving scalability and speed without sacrificing its core principles of decentralization and security — and ideally making those properties even stronger. Zero-knowledge proofs, for example, could dramatically increase transaction capacity while making it possible to verify that the chain is following the rules of the protocol on something as small as a smartwatch. There are also algorithmic changes the team already knows are needed to protect Ethereum against large-scale computing attacks. Implementing those, Buterin said, is part of the path to making Ethereum "a really valuable part of global infrastructure that helps make the internet and the economy a more free and open place." Buterin believes the real change won't come with fireworks. He said it may already be unfolding years before most people recognize it. "This type of disruption doesn't feel like overturning the existing system," he said. "It feels like building a new thing that just keeps growing and growing until eventually more and more people realize you don't even have to look at the old thing if you didn't want to." Brody can already see hints of that future. Wire transfers are moving on-chain, assets like stocks and real estate are being tokenized, and eventually, he said, businesses will run entire contracts — the money, the products, the terms and conditions — automatically on a single, shared infrastructure. That shift, Brody added, won't simply copy old financial systems onto new technology. "One of the lessons from technology adoption is that it's not that we replace like for like," he said. "When new things come along, we tend to build on a new technology infrastructure. My key hypothesis is that as we build new financial products, it will be attractive to build them on blockchain rails — and we'll try to do things on blockchain rails that we can't do today." If Brody and Buterin are right, the real disruption won't make headlines. It'll simply become the way money moves, unseen and unstoppable.
Forbes
3 hours ago
- Forbes
Google's Pixel 10 Pro Pricing Hides Its Subtle Influence
The upcoming 'Made By Google' event on Aug. 20 will see the launch of the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro families. Recent leaks point to an aggressive pricing strategy that consumers will welcome. Yet Google can extract more value out of the Pixel 10 family than the sticker price. Pixel 10 And Pixel 10 Pro Pricing First up, the current expectation for US prices: The four main models will be priced similarly to the Pixel 9 family. Specifically, the Pixel 10 will start at $799 for the 128 GB model, the Pixel 10 Pro starts at $999, the Pixel 10 Pro XL at $1,199 for 256 GB and the Pixel 10 Pro Fold at $1,799 for 256 GB. Samsung bumped up the prices of the Galaxy Z Fold 7 over the Z Fold 6, and Apple is expected to do the same with the various iPhone 17 Pro models compared to last year's 16 Pro portfolio. Google has decided to stick with the pricing. This will make the new handsets look more attractive to consumers in a head-to-head comparison with the competition. It also offers a certain level of convenience for those looking at the year-on-year evolution. Yet Google can find more value in the package, value that looks to have been passed on to the consumer Pixel 10 Pro BLOCK OF THREE First of all, the Pixel 10 family can shape the smartphone market. The obvious point here is the aforementioned price point. With the Pixel 10 family staying at the lower price point, it pushed other manufacturers to keep their similarly specced handsets at the same level if they want to continue looking competitive. Then you have the tone it sets for the hardware that Google would like to see at each price point. The user experience of the Pixel 10 is set to be enhanced with the addition of a third lens in the main camera. The 'base model' of premium brands has typically launched with two lenses; Google is clearly looking to redefine that part of the spec sheet through the Pixel 10 and leverage it across the Android ecosystem. That will benefit Android as a whole, and anything that benefits Android benefits Google. Finally, you have AI, and this is perhaps the most tangible benefit for Google. Artificial intelligence is one of the key features reshaping not just smartphones but the entire digital ecosystem. Google has been leaning heavily into its AI-powered assistant, Gemini, while it continues to add more AI-based features into its own software stack and Android. Again, this adoption pushes the market towards Google's vision of artificial intelligence on a mobile device. By having a first-mover advantage and establishing this as the way forward, it makes it harder for other platforms and manufacturers, such as Apple's Intelligence on the iPhone. As for the tangible, to make the best use of Gemini and Google's AI suite involves a subscription to Google AI Pro or Google AI Ultra. Trial memberships to these services are available with the purchase of a Pixel device, creating an easy on-ramp to an ongoing subscription, which in turn pulls the consumer even closer into Google's cloud system while pushing back others. The Google Advantage In The Pixel 10 And Pixel 10 Pro The Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro will undoubtedly garner critical acclaim and continue the commercial success of the previous Pixel handsets. Additionally, Google will use these handsets to maintain premium pricing across the smartphone market, promote an increase in specifications at each price point, and bring more users into Google's vision and implementation of artificial intelligence. Google is expected to launch the Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10 Pro XL, and Pixel 10 Pro Fold on Aug. 20, with retail sales to follow the following week. Now read the latest Pixel 10 Pro, Samsung Galaxy, and Android headlines in Forbes' weekly smartphone news digest...
The Verge
4 hours ago
- The Verge
Samsung's Galaxy Watch 8 just came out and you can already save $50
If you're looking to upgrade an older Android smartwatch, or want to give wearables a try for the first time, Samsung's Galaxy Watch 8 is a compelling choice. It has a new design, lets you access Google's Gemini AI from your wrist, and has a handful of new health and wellness features. It launched on July 25th, but you can already get the 40mm model on sale for $299.99 ($50 off) from Samsung. Amazon has the watch for full price, but is offering a $50 promotional credit toward a future purchase if you use the code APSUE5MBXB6Y at checkout. Samsung's latest smartwatch features a new squircle design, Gemini, and some new health features like an Antioxidant Index and Running Coach. The Galaxy Watch 8 is squircle shaped, which may be divisive, but allows it to lay flatter and Verge reporter Victoria Song found it fit more more comfortably on her wrist in her review. The change also let Samsung make the watch thinner than the Galaxy Watch 7, and yet we still found it can still last more than a day on a charge. While it's not a huge departure from its predecessor, it could be a good upgrade for anyone with a Galaxy Watch 5 or below, and Samsung's new discount counteracts the $50 price increase means you're not paying any more than the Galaxy Watch 7 cost at launch. If you've gotten used to Google Gemini on your smartphone or computer, the Galaxy Watch 8 will let you access it from your wrist – we created playlists, checked the weather, and have previously asked Gemini whether it's necessary to scrub a sweet potato before peeling it. On the health and wellness side, the Galaxy Watch 8 can track steps, your heart rate, blood oxygen level, steps, and activity. If you have a Samsung Galaxy phone, you use the smartwatch to take an EKG or detect sleep apnea. A new feature called Running Coach will put you through a 12-minute run test, give you a grade from one through 10, and create a workout program based on your performance. It also includes sensors designed to detect whether you're eating enough fruits and vegetables, but we found it can be fooled by colorful objects, including a Cheeze-It. The Galaxy Watch 8 is also available in a 44mm size, and that model is also on sale for $379.99 ($50 off) from up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we've tested sent to your inbox weekly. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Brandt Ranj Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Deals Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gadgets Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Samsung Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Smartwatch Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Wearable
