Motorola’s new Signature 27 has it all if you can stomach the $1,600 price tag

Motorola is patching a hole in its US lineup with a non-folding flagship phone, but the pricing puts this device dangerously close to the company’s expensive tablet-style foldable. The long-rumored Motorola Signature 27 is real, featuring top-of-the-line specs, a super-bright OLED screen, and a ton of cameras. But all this high-end hardware won’t come cheap in the age of AI. Motorola’s new flagship smartphone will run a whopping $1,600 when it arrives later this month.

The Signature 27 is a completely new take on flagship smartphones from Motorola, leaving behind the middling legacy of the Edge series. However, you’ll still immediately clock this as a Motorola device due to its distinctive use of materials and Pantone colors. The phone is metal, ceramic, and glass, but the backs are textured polycarbonate. The device comes in Coal Smoke (black) or Capulet Olive (green) colors. The former has a “tactical weave” finish inspired by automotive design, and the latter is “textile-inspired.”

This device will include the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, the most powerful mobile chip Qualcomm offers right now. While some smartphones have flirted with 16GB of memory, that’s less common these days. The Signature 27 will have 12GB like Samsung’s base model flagships. However, there’s not going to be an upgrade option for more. You will, however, get a generous 512GB of storage.

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Agility Robotics’ Nasdaq debut invites scrutiny of humanoid robot market

Humanoid robots remain unproven at scale and have not yet achieved widespread commercialization, compared with industrial robots that have decades of proven track records in warehouses and factories. That frank acknowledgment is among the risks outlined in a securities filing by Agility Robotics—the first dedicated developer of humanoid robots to become a publicly traded company in the United States.

The robotics company, headquartered in Salem, Oregon, previously became the first to achieve full-time commercial deployment of humanoid robots at a customer warehouse in 2024. Now, Agility’s public listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange as of November 5 has come with financial disclosures detailing how the company plans to build a business around renting out or selling humanoid robots to perform manual labor.

“When we are doing robots as a service, it is much lower risk for customers to use it because they are getting a return on investment on day one,” Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics, told Ars. “Because they’re paying a rate that is comparable to the human labor rate, and that makes the economics pretty straightforward.”

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2026 iPad mini review: Maximizing the mini

The iPad mini has long felt like a niche product. It has earned a reputation as a quality tablet for people who want something small, comfortable, and portable, but its small screen and comparatively limited processing power have restricted its appeal, making it best suited to watching media or playing games.

With the 2026 version, the iPad mini is more competitive than ever. Its chip is current, its speakers are better, and, most impressively, it trades its 8.3-inch IPS screen for an 8.5-inch OLED that can hold its own against other premium tablets. There isn’t much more you can ask of an iPad this small.

But at just $50 less than the larger, more powerful iPad Air (11-inch), the iPad mini still has a hard time making a case for itself.

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[$] User namespaces + file capabilities = trouble

User namespaces are a key part of the
kernel’s toolkit for assembling containers; processes within a user
namespace can appear to have full root access to the system while gaining
no extra privileges in the wider system. At least, that is the intent. In
practice, keeping privilege contained within a user namespace has often
turned out to be difficult. As an example, consider this
small patch series
from Josef Bacik, which is intended to address some
situations where a process within a user namespace can elevate the
privileges of processes outside of it.

There’s a New Way to Automatically Back Up Your Android Photos for Free

If you’re an Android user looking for a way to save your photos and videos without maxing out your cloud storage space, your device may soon be able to back up automatically to your PC. As spotted by Android Authority, Google included automatic backups from Android to Windows via Quick Share in its release notes for Google Play services v26.43.

Use your PC as free local storage for photos and videos

Quick Share is a wireless file-sharing feature for Android that allows users to send photos, videos, and documents to nearby devices, including Windows computers and iPhones with AirDrop. The new automatic backup feature, which is likely to roll out gradually, uses Quick Share’s functionality to transfer copies of photos and videos on your phone to your PC when nearby.

Since these backups happen locally, you don’t need to rely solely on cloud storage in your Google account, nor do you need to remember to initiate transfers of photos and videos between devices. Plus, this is all free and doesn’t require a separate cloud service subscription. While you can back up your media to Google Photos, as of earlier this year, more data from your Android backups count toward your Google Account storage cap unless you exclude specific types. Alternatively, you can also cobble together a decent amount of cloud storage from other providers at no extra cost, but automatic backups between Android and Windows minimize the likelihood that you’ll forget to save data, and your PC provides plenty of space for free.

How Android Quick Share backs up to your PC

Once the feature is available on your device, you’ll be able to initiate backups in the Quick Share for Windows app. Your Android and Windows devices must be in close proximity and signed into the same Google Account. You can toggle Automatic backups on and change the settings for what gets backed up and to where. The transfers will then occur wirelessly in the background.

As Android Authority reports, early hints at this feature suggested that Samsung phones and PCs would be excluded from automatic backups, but the release notes don’t specify any further details.

Steam Frame Shows Strong Start as the 5th Most-used Headset on Steam

Steam Frame has only been out for a little over a month now, and is still heavily backordered. Still, Valve’s latest Steam Hardware Survey shows the headset is already off to a strong start.

The News

This is the first Steam survey to include Steam Frame, Valve’s standalone VR headset which natively supports SteamOS. You can learn all about Steam Frame in our deep dive review here.

The opt-in, randomized monthly survey now shows Steam Frame at fifth place on the platform, making for 5.49% of all headsets in use on Steam.

Courtesy Valve

Considering Steam Frame is still heavily supply constrained, as shipments now reach into 2027, immediately taking fifth place is a surprisingly fair result.

In contrast, Valve Index only managed to post a 1.46% share of all connected headsets in its first month on the Steam Hardware Survey.

Some of this could be explained by Quest 2’s sizeable loss of 3.57% since the September survey, which could suggest some portion of Quest 2 users upgraded to Frame.

Notably, Valve changed its survey methodology in March 2020. Previously, the VR hardware detection system was based on headsets connected at the time of survey. Now, the survey uses SteamVR records of headsets connected during the preceding month, making for a more fair picture of headsets used.

My Take

It will be interesting see whether Frame can outdo Index in the coming months/years. It took Index nearly two years to reach the second most-used VR headset on Steam, coming in right behind Quest 2 in Valve’s September 2021 survey.

Some of that feels like it might come down to price, but I’m not so sure. Valve Index launched in late 2019 at $999 for the full kit, including headset, two controllers, and two SteamVR base stations. In terms of inflation, that’s around $1,300 today.

Valve Index | Courtesy Valve

And that’s the same price as the most expensive Steam Frame 1 TB model, which notably doesn’t need a VR-ready gaming PC—although you’d probably be better off with one considering the comparatively small number of Frame optimized games.

The wrinkle in that calculation though is Index users had the option to upgrade piecemeal from other PC VR headsets, allowing them to purchase Index alone for $499 if they already owned HTC Vive controllers and SteamVR base stations.

Whatever the case, Frame has proven to be popular enough to surpass Index very early in its existence. And I’ll be charting its performance, so make sure to check back for more.

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