An anonymous reader quotes a report from IGN: Last year, Intel had the best iGPU on the market. This year, it's broken that record by over 70% with Panther Lake and it's a huge win for handhelds. "We've overdelivered" is how Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan categorized the Panther Lake launch during the company's CES 2026 Keynote address, and that really does seem to be the case. But the real highlight of the keynote speech wasn't the engineering behind Panther Lake, but rather the iGPU and the "handheld ecosystem" Intel is building to capitalize on the iGPU's performance gains.

Formerly known as the 12 Xe-core variant, the new Intel Arc B390 iGPU offers up to 77% faster gaming performance over Lunar Lake's Arc 140V graphics chip. Intel's VP and General Manager of PC Products, Dan Rogers detailed the Arc B390's performance gains and announced a "whole ecosystem" of gaming handhelds. That ecosystem includes partnerships with MSI, Acer, Microsoft, CPD, Foxconn, and Pegatron. So we'll finally see more Intel handhelds hit the market.

[...] Since Intel's Core Ultra 300 Panther Lake chip is built on Intel's proprietary 18A Foundry process node, it can be cut in a variety of different die slices. According to sources at Intel close to the matter, the company is planning a hardware-specific variant or variants of the Panther Lake CPU die. Currently branded as "Intel Core G3" these processors will be custom-built for handhelds. That means Intel can spec the chips to offer better performance on the GPU where you want it, with potential for even better performance than the current Arc B390 expectations.

Samsung's co-CEO TM Roh has warned that product price increases are "inevitable" as an unprecedented global memory chip shortage squeezes margins across the company's consumer electronics lineup -- from smartphones to televisions and home appliances.

The South Korean giant, one of the top two largest smartphone manufacturers, plans to double the number of mobile devices running its Galaxy AI features to 800 million units this year, up from 400 million at the end of 2025. Galaxy AI is powered by Google's Gemini model and Samsung's own Bixby assistant for different tasks. "As this situation is unprecedented, no company is immune to its impact," Roh told Reuters in his first interview since becoming co-CEO in November.

Samsung is working with partners on longer-term strategies to minimize the impact, he said. Market researchers IDC and Counterpoint predict the global smartphone market will shrink this year as the chip shortage threatens to drive up phone prices. The shortage is a boon to Samsung's semiconductor business but pressures margins on its smartphone division, the company's second-largest revenue source.

Last June the Trump organization announced sales of a $499 "T1" smartphone with a gold-colored case. But though they originally were scheduled for release in August, this week a customer service representative for the wireless carrier told CBS News the device will be pushed back again, now until the end of January, "attributing the delay to the recent U.S. government shutdown."

Some context from The Independent: Shortly after the phone was first announced, language describing it as "Made in the USA" was removed from its official website with the vague claim that the devices are "brought to life" in the United States posted in its place... Other information about the phone has also changed or been removed since its first unveiling, The Verge has reported. Trump Mobile initially indicated the T1's screen measured 6.78 inches, but now claims it is 6.25 inches. It also said the phone had 12GB of RAM; however, that claim has now also disappeared.

As the wait for the T1 continues, Trump Mobile has begun offering refurbished Samsung S23s, S24s, and Apple iPhone 15s and 16s for sale on its site, which appear to have no specific Trump branding and are priced considerably higher than customers might pay elsewhere.

MacRumors: Apple is not expected to release a standard iPhone 18 model this year, according to a growing number of reports that suggest the company is planning a significant change to its long-standing annual iPhone launch cycle.

Despite the immense success of the iPhone 17 in 2025, the iPhone 18 is not expected to arrive until the spring of 2027, leaving the iPhone 17 in the lineup as the latest standard model for over 18 months. This would mark the first time Apple skips an entire calendar year without releasing a new generation of its flagship non-Pro iPhone.

One-Netbook has unveiled the OneXSugar Wallet, the first gaming handheld with a folding OLED display. The Verge reports: The OneXSugar Wallet was announced on China's Weibo yesterday, but with few details about its features and capabilities. That folding OLED screen has a resolution of 2480 x 1860 pixels, and the handheld will be powered by an unspecified "Qualcomm gaming platform flagship processor," but its performance and emulation capabilities are unknown.

Based on photos and a video released by One-Netbook, the OneXSugar Wallet will feature a standard set of controls including asymmetrical thumbsticks, four action buttons, and a D-pad situated on either side of the lower half of its display. There are also shoulder buttons and triggers on the back of the handheld, and a pair of front-facing speakers flanking the top half of the screen. The biggest question is how much will the handheld cost...

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: MacRumors reports that Apple plans to expand iPhone and Apple Watch driver's licenses to 7 U.S. states (CT, KY, MS, OK, UT, AR, VA). A recent convert is the State of Illinois, whose website videos demo how you can use your Apple Wallet license to display proof of identity or age the next time you get carded by a cop, bartender, or TSA agent. The new states will join 13 others who already offer driver's licenses in the Wallet app (AZ, MD, CO, GA, OH, HI, CA, IA, NM, MT, ND, WV, IL).

There's certainly been a lot of foot-dragging by the states when it comes to embracing phone-based driver's licenses -- Slashdot reported that Iowa was ready to launch a mobile driver's license in 2014; they didn't get one until nearly a decade later, in late 2023.

An anonymous reader shared this report from The Guardian: A Texas father used the parental controls on his teenage daughter's cell phone to find and help rescue her after she was kidnapped at knifepoint while walking her dog on Christmas, authorities allege... Her father subsequently located her phone through the device's parental controls, the agency's statement said. The phone was about 2 miles (3.2km) away from him in a secluded, partly wooded area in neighboring Harris county... She then managed to escape with a hand from her father, who called law enforcement officials, said the statement from the Montgomery sheriff's office.
The suspect has since been arrested and charged.

After more than two decades of promises and false starts in the mesh networking space, the smart home standards that Apple, Amazon and Google have each championed are finally set to escape their respective brand silos and work together in a single unified network.

Starting January 1, 2026, Thread 1.4 becomes the Thread Group's only certified standard, bringing a crucial new capability called credential sharing. Devices from different manufacturers can now securely join the same mesh network -- an Amazon Echo Show and an Apple HomePod mini in the same house will both be able to control the same Nanoleaf lightbulb. This marks a significant departure from Thread 1.3, released in 2022, where each brand's mesh network connected only to devices from that same brand.

The Thread Group launched in 2014 as a coalition led by Arm, Google's Nest Labs, and Samsung, later welcoming Apple and Amazon into the fold. Thread 1.4 handles low-power smart home devices and sensors, but homes also need high-bandwidth connections for laptops and phones. Wi-Fi 7 mesh serves that purpose and the Matter protocol acts as a translation layer between the two different mesh networks. Both Wi-Fi 7 and Matter arrived in products on store shelves in 2025.

Adult children across the United States are increasingly reporting that their aging parents have developed what looks remarkably like the smartphone addiction [non-paywalled source] typically associated with teenagers, a phenomenon The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel has dubbed "phone-based retirement." A 2019 Pew Research Center study found people 60 and older spend more than half their daily leisure time -- four hours and 16 minutes -- in front of screens. Nielsen reported this year that adults 65 and up watch YouTube on their TVs nearly twice as much as they did two years ago. 40% of adults aged 59 to 77 reported feeling anxious without device access in a 2,000-person survey.

Ipsit Vahia, chief of geriatric psychiatry at Mass General Brigham's McLean Hospital, cautioned against treating all older adults as a monolithic group. The COVID-19 pandemic drove significant tech adoption among seniors as Zoom became essential for family gatherings, church services, and telehealth. Some research suggests device use may be linked to better cognitive function for people over 50, and Vahia noted that technology use in older adults appears to protect them from isolation and loneliness -- the opposite of its effect on teenagers.

Longtime Slashdot reader Randseed writes: With the likes of Google Nest, Ring, and others cooperating with law enforcement, I started to look for affordable wireless IP security cameras that I can put around my house. Unfortunately, it looks like almost every thing now incorporates some kind of cloud-based slop. All I really want is to put up some cameras, hook them up to my LAN, and install something like ZoneMinder. What are the most economical, wireless IP security cameras that I can set up with my server?

Jolla is "trying again with a new crowd-funded smartphone," reports Phoronix: Finnish company Jolla started out 14 years ago where Nokia left off with MeeGo and developed Sailfish OS as a new Linux smartphone platform. Jolla released their first smartphone in 2013 after crowdfunding but ultimately the Sailfish OS focus the past number of years now has been offering their software stack for use on other smartphone devices [including some Sony Xperia smartphones and OnePlus/Samsung/ Google/ Xiaomi devices].
This new Jolla Phone's pre-order voucher page says the phone will only produced if 2,000 units are ordered before January 4. (But in just a few days they've already received 1,721 pre-orders — all discounted to 499€ from a normal price between 599 and 699 €). Estimate delivery is the first half of 2026. "The new Jolla Phone is powered by a high-performing Mediatek 5G SoC," reports 9to5Linux, "and features 12GB RAM, 256GB storage that can be expanded to up to 2TB with a microSDXC card, a 6.36-inch FullHD AMOLED display with ~390ppi, 20:9 aspect ratio, and Gorilla Glass, and a user-replaceable 5,500mAh battery." The Linux phone also features 4G/5G support with dual nano-SIM and a global roaming modem configuration, Wi-Fi 6 wireless, Bluetooth 5.4, NFC, 50MP Wide and 13MP Ultrawide main cameras, front front-facing wide-lens selfie camera, fingerprint reader on the power key, a user-changeable back cover, and an RGB indication LED. On top of that, the new Jolla Phone promises a user-configurable physical Privacy Switch that lets you turn off the microphone, Bluetooth, Android apps, or whatever you wish.

The device will be available in three colors, including Snow White, Kaamos Black, and The Orange. All the specs of the new Jolla Phone were voted on by Sailfish OS community members over the past few months. Honouring the original Jolla Phone form factor and design, the new model ships with Sailfish OS (with support for Android apps), a Linux-based European alternative to dominating mobile operating systems that promises a minimum of 5 years of support, no tracking, no calling home, and no hidden analytics...

The device will be manufactured and sold in Europe, but Jolla says that it will design the cellular band configuration to enable global travelling as much as possible, including e.g. roaming in the U.S. carrier networks. The initial sales markets are the EU, the UK, Switzerland, and Norway.

What happened when a school in Los Angeles gave a sixth grader an iPad for use throughout the school day? "He used the iPad during school to watch YouTube and participate in Fortnite video game battles," reports NBC News.

His mother has now launched a coalition of parents called Schools Beyond Screens "organizing in WhatsApp groups, petition drives and actions at school board meetings and demanding meetings with district administrators, pressuring them to pull back on the school-mandated screen time." Los Angeles Unified is the first district of its size to face an organized — and growing — campaign by parents demanding that schools pull back on mandatory screen time. The discontent in Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the country, reflects a growing unease nationally about the amount of time children spend learning through screens in classrooms. While a majority of states prohibit children from using cellphones in class, 88% of schools provide students with personal devices, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, often Chromebook laptops or iPads. The parents hope getting a district that has over 409,000 students across nearly 800 schools to change how it approaches screen time would send a signal across public school districts to pull back from a yearslong effort to digitize classrooms....

[In the Los Angeles school district] Students in grade levels as low as kindergarten are provided iPads, and some schools require them to take the tablets home. Some teachers have allowed students to opt out of the iPad-based assignments, but other parents say they've been told that they can't. Parents can also opt their children out of having access to YouTube and several other Google products... The billion-dollar 2014 initiative to give tablet computers to everyone became a scandal after the bidding process appeared to heavily favor Apple, and it faced criticism once it became clear that students could bypass security protocols and that few teachers used the tablets. Currently, the district leaves it up to individual schools to decide whether they want students to take home iPads or Chromebooks every day and how much time they spend on them in class...

Around 300 parents attended listening sessions the district held last month about technology in the classroom. Nearly all who spoke criticized how much screen time schools gave their children in class, pointing to ways their behavior and grades suffered as students watched YouTube and played Minecraft... Several also asked district officials to explain why children as young as kindergartners were asked to sign a form to use devices in which they promised they would honor intellectual property law and refrain from meeting people in person whom they met online. "Is it possible for children to meet people over the internet on school-issued devices?" one father asked. The district officials declined to answer, saying it was meant to be a listening session.
In 2022, Los Angeles Unified started requiring students to complete benchmark assessments on educaitonal software i-Ready, the article points out, which generates unique questions for each students. "But parents and teachers are unable to see what children are asked, in part because the company that makes the program considers them proprietary information..."

One teacher says his school's administartors are requiring him to use i-Ready even though it doesn't have any material for the science class he's actually teaching. He's also noticed some students will use answers from AI chatbots, bypassing the school's monitoring software by creating alternate user profiles. But the monitoring software company suggests the school misconfigured their software's settings, adding "More commonly, when students attempt to bypass filtering or monitoring, they do so by using proxies."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

CNN's prediction for 2026? "Any device that uses memory, from phones to tablets and smartwatches, could get pricier." But will it be a little or a lot?

The article cites an analysis from multinational strategy/management consulting firm McKinsey & Company which found America's data center demand could continue growing by 20 to 25 percent per year" through 2030. "That's prompted memory manufacturers like Micron and Samsung to shift their focus to data centers, which use a different type of memory, meaning fewer resources for consumer products. (Jaejune Kim, executive VP for memory at Samsung, said in October that their third quarter saw strong demand for memory for AI and data centers, and that they expected the supply shortage for mobile and PC memory to "intensify further.") Memory prices are rising for consumer products because major manufacturers are instead ramping up production for AI data centers as artificial intelligence companies boom. "It's pretty much brutal and crunched across the board," said Yang Wang, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research.

The International Data Corporation, a global market research firm, reported earlier this week that the smartphone market is expected to decline by 0.9% in 2026 in part because of memory shortages. Memory prices are expected to surge by 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and may climb an additional 20% early next year, Counterpoint Research said last month... TrendForce, a research firm that follows the semiconductor industry, estimates memory price hikes have made smartphones 8% to 10% more expensive to produce in 2025 (higher production costs don't always translate into higher consumer prices for a variety of reasons).

Some smartphones could cost more as soon as early next year, said Nabila Popal, a senior research director for the International Data Corporation. Cheap Android phones may see the biggest impact, since less expensive products usually have thinner margins. "It's going to be almost impossible for them to not raise prices" of cheaper Android phones, said Popal. Companies may also postpone phone launches to focus on expensive models that may be more profitable. The average selling price for smartphones is expected to climb to $465 in 2026, compared to $457 in 2025, according to Popal, putting the smartphone market at a record high value of $578.9 billion.

But the pendulum is expected to swing back in the other direction late next year as the supply chain adjusts, according to Popal and Wang, potentially bringing prices back down or at least capping increases.

India is weighing a proposal to mandate always-on satellite tracking in smartphones for precise government surveillance -- an idea strongly opposed by Apple, Google, Samsung, and industry groups. Reuters reports: For years, the [Prime Minister Narendra Modi's] administration has been concerned its agencies do not get precise locations when legal requests are made to telecom firms during investigations. Under the current system, the firms are limited to using cellular tower data that can only provide an estimated area location, which can be off by several meters.

The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), which represents Reliance's Jio and Bharti Airtel, has proposed that precise user locations should only be provided if the government orders smartphone makers to activate A-GPS technology -- which uses satellite signals and cellular data -- according to a June internal federal IT ministry email. That would require location services to always be activated in smartphones with no option for users to disable them. Apple, Samsung, and Alphabet's Google have told New Delhi that should not be mandated, said three of the sources who have direct knowledge of the deliberations.

A measure to track device-level location has no precedent anywhere else in the world, lobbying group India Cellular & Electronics Association (ICEA), which represents both Apple and Google, wrote in a confidential July letter to the government, which was viewed by Reuters. "The A-GPS network service ... (is) not deployed or supported for location surveillance," said the letter, which added that the measure "would be a regulatory overreach." Earlier this week, Modi's government was forced to rescind an order requiring smartphone makers to preload a state-run cyber safety app on all devices after public backlash and privacy concerns.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A few years ago, Paul Wieland, a 44-year-old information technology professional living in New York's Adirondack Mountains, was wrapping up a home renovation when he ran into a hiccup. He wanted to be able to control his new garage door with his smartphone. But the options available, including a product called MyQ, required connecting to a company's internet servers. He believed a "smart" garage door should operate only over a local Wi-Fi network to protect a home's privacy, so he started building his own system to plug into his garage door. By 2022, he had developed a prototype, which he named RATGDO, for Rage Against the Garage Door Opener. He had hoped to sell 100 of his new gadgets just to recoup expenses, but he ended up selling tens of thousands. That's because MyQ's maker did what a number of other consumer device manufacturers have done over the last few years, much to the frustration of their customers: It changed the device, making it both less useful and more expensive to operate.

Chamberlain Group, a company that makes garage door openers, had created the MyQ hubs so that virtually any garage door opener could be controlled with home automation software from Apple, Google, Nest and others. Chamberlain also offered a free MyQ smartphone app. Two years ago, Chamberlain started shutting down support for most third-party access to its MyQ servers. The company said it was trying to improve the reliability of its products. But this effectively broke connections that people had set up to work with Apple's Home app or Google's Home app, among others. Chamberlain also started working with partners that charge subscriptions for their services, though a basic app to control garage doors was still free.

While Mr. Wieland said RATGDO sales spiked after Chamberlain made those changes, he believes the popularity of his device is about more than just opening and closing a garage. It stems from widespread frustration with companies that sell internet-connected hardware that they eventually change or use to nickel-and-dime customers with subscription fees. "You should own the hardware, and there is a line there that a lot of companies are experimenting with," Mr. Wieland said in a recent interview. "I'm really afraid for the future that consumers are going to swallow this and that's going to become the norm." [...] For Mr. Wieland, the fight isn't over. He started a company named RATCLOUD, for Rage Against the Cloud. He said he was developing similar products that were not yet for sale.