Infinix says the case stores up to 2 watts of this energy and transfers it to the phone when needed. The company also claims the case employs its “Sunflower” wireless charging technology, inspired by plants that orient themselves toward light. This enables the system in the case to “dynamically adjust the transmission path” to make sure it’s getting the most light possible within a 3-meter (roughly 10-foot) range. None of this is designed to keep your phone charged while you’re using it, but Infinix thinks it can help increase standby time when you’re off doing something else. —Julian Chokkattu
Huawei’s Tri-Fold Phone Unfurls a Big Screen
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Photograph: Simon Hill
The best folding phones are all about giving you more screen real estate, but can you have too much of a good thing? Huawei’s Mate XT is like the Honor Magic V3 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) but with an extra screen and fold. In truth, tri-fold is a misnomer since there are only two folds, but the three screens form a clever design that unfurls to a full 10.2 inches. It can also be used as a double screen at 7.9 inches, or a single screen in a traditional candy bar phone shape at 6.4 inches.
Fully unfolded, the Mate XT is just 3.6 mm thick, but you have two creases to contend with. Fold it up completely, and it’s 12.8 mm thick, and also kinda heavy. The hinges are slick, and it feels surprisingly durable, with a satisfying folding action. It has an IPX8 rating for dust resistance.
The Huawei Mate XT Ultimate relies upon Huawei’s own Kirin chipset and Harmony OS. The rest of the specs are solid and close to flagship, with a triple lens camera (50-megapixel main, 12-megapixel ultrawide, and 12-megapixel periscope telephoto), fairly large 5,600 mAh battery, 16 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of storage. But then you’d expect them to be considering the €3,500 price tag. If double the folds equaled double the screen size, it would be more tempting, but it doesn’t feel far away from a book-style foldable and you’re paying a premium for the novelty right now. It’s only available in specific markets, like the Middle East, at the moment, but it should be landing in Europe soon. —Simon Hill
When Cycling Glasses Meet Action Camera
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
Cameras on our faces seem to be an inevitable future. So why wear an action camera on your body when you can have it baked into your cycling glasses? That’s the pitch of BleeqUp Ranger. Right in the center of the glasses—UV400 and IP54-rated, by the way—is a camera that can record up to one hour of 1080p video. There’s a little battery accessory that clips to the back of a helmet, doubling as a tail light, and it boosts that video recording time to five hours in total. The arms of the glasses have speakers so you can play music, and they sounded pretty good in my brief demo in a very loud space. Naturally, there’s AI at play here but not on the glasses themselves. The algorithms analyze the footage and suggest the most interesting clips, putting them together into a highlight reel with minimal effort on your part. The glasses are launching on Kickstarter later this month for $499. —Julian Chokkattu
NTT Docomo’s MiRZA AR Glasses
Photograph: Simon Hill
I engaged in some guided Japanese calligraphy with the help of NTT Docomo’s AR glasses at MWC. They are big and chunky, but these glasses don’t have to be plugged directly into anything, and you can fix your content in space so it doesn’t move with your head. It was relatively easy for me to reproduce the symbol before me, despite my lack of artistic talent, and they could be used in the workplace to overlay engine parts or guide device repairs. While these glasses cost around $1,500 and are aimed primarily at businesses, NTT also showed me a new, lighter pair it has in the works, with a simplified display for navigation and notifications from a Bluetooth-connected phone. The next-gen MiRZA AR Glasses are aimed at Joe Public and will be closer to $500, but may require an AI subscription. —Simon Hill
Xpanceo Shows Off More Smart Contact Lens Prototypes
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
I wrote about Xpanceo at last year’s Mobile World Congress, and the company is back with more smart contact lens prototypes. One of these is a contact lens that could be recharged through a contact lens case, and another had biosensors that could analyze certain parameters in tear fluid to monitor glucose, cortisol, and more. Another prototype had a pattern on the lens that shifts in response to intraocular pressure, which can help detect glaucoma early, and there also was a Smart Contact Lens for AR Vision, which had an integrated microdisplay to show images. I was able to look through this one and read some text! The ultimate goal is to bake all of these prototypes into one product—the stuff of sci-fi dreams—but this kind of miniature technology is incredibly difficult to engineer. It will be a long while before a smart contact lens arrives on the market. —Julian Chokkattu
Solecooler Can Cool or Heat Your Aching Feet
Photograph: Simon Hill
Closing in on 30,000 steps for the day, my burning tootsies may have had something to do with Solecooler catching my eye amid a sea of strange inventions and startups. The kindly inventor, Bruno Aubert (a thermodynamics engineer) explained that these clever insoles heat your feet by up to 4 degrees Celsius, or, if you flip them, cool by 3.5 degrees. The beauty is that they are charged up by you walking on them, though they take a few minutes to get going (much like air conditioning). They cost €50 and come in one size, which you must cut down if you’re below size 14.
