Apple held its developer conference this week and introduced the upcoming iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 that will seed in their final versions in the fall.
Apple users will be able to move icons freely around an iOS homescreen, but the biggest story was Apple Intelligence, available for devices powered by the A17 and all M series chips. It’s all about personalized AI tools that help with your daily tasks – things like prioritizing notifications. There are also writing tools, available in all apps, for rewriting (with multiple versions), proofreading, or summarizing text. The Mail app also gets Smart Reply suggestions, and the ability to surface priority emails at the top of your Inbox.
Apple was keen to point out its AI is “grounded in your personal information and context” and it can reference what you’re looking at on your screen. But with Apple AI comes “powerful privacy”, thanks to on-device processing – this means the AI is aware of your personal data but not collecting your data.
Apple’s AI also lets you create images, fitting for your conversations based on your friends’ profile pictures. Sketch, illustration, and animation are the three styles in which you can create images using Apple’s Image Playground, which is built into many native apps but also available as a standalone tool. Every image is created on the device.
A big leap forward is coming to Siri, which was definitely in dire need of one. The assistant has a new look, and it promises to understand more natural language. Siri also remembers the context of your conversation, and you can now type to it. You can ask it questions about iOS features too. Apple’s rumored deal with OpenAI is real too, so now you get ChatGPT in iOS 18, which you can access through Siri. ChatGPT is also integrated into the systemwide writing tools.
The new OS versions should become official today.
That means that if your phone is running iOS 17, you can update it to iOS 18. You might not get all the features, though.
HTC is back with another phone announcement. The HTC U24 Pro comes with a 6.8-inch 1080×2436 OLED touchscreen with 120 Hz refresh rate and an unknown type of Gorilla Glass on top, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 SoC at the helm, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of expandable storage. It runs Android 14 and has an IP67 rating for dust and water resistance. It has a 50 MP main camera with OIS and f/1.88 aperture, an 8 MP f/2.2 ultrawide, a 50 MP f/2 2x optical zoom telephoto, and a 50 MP f/2.45 front-facing camera with autofocus. The U24 Pro is priced at €564 in the EU, which doesn’t make it an easy sell for sure considering all the competition from various Chinese brands in the space.
An image of the Nothing CMF Phone 1 surfaced, showcasing a phone in CMF’s signature color. The device is now rumored to cost INR 19,999 in India for the base model with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Keep in mind that this is the “box price”, which means deals and discounts are likely to take it down to INR 17,000 to INR 18,000. That would make it an interesting proposition for that market, considering the fact that it should come with the Dimensity 7300 SoC, Android 14 on board from day one, and support for 33W fast wired charging.
HTC is taking another crack at the smartphone business.
It’s definitely got a very distinctive design.
We also get a glimpse at the “Nothing Lock” accessory mount mechanism.
Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S24 FE will use the exact same main camera as the Galaxy S24, S23, and S23 FE, a new report claims. It will have 50 MP resolution and a 1/1.57″ sensor size with 1.0μm pixels. Meanwhile, the Xiaomi 15 Pro will bring a 50 MP main camera with a 1″-type OmniVision sensor – OV50K – a notable improvement over the OVX9000 inside the 14 Pro. The OV50K variation is not yet officially launched by the US-Taiwanese imaging company, but it should succeed the already impressive OV50H we’ve seen in the Honor Magic6 Pro, vivo iQOO 12 series and Motorola Edge 50 Ultra. The telephoto shooter will be powered by Sony IMX882, which is a step forward from the dated Samsung ISOCELL JN1. The 1/1.95″ Sony imager is considerably bigger than the 1/2.76″ Samsung sensor.
It is rumored to arrive towards the end of the year.
We got our hands on vivo’s first foldable to launch in international markets.
This feature is already being tested in the iOS version of the app.
The telephoto camera will be a Sony IMX882 with actual 3x optical zoom.