It’s been known for months now that technology giant Lenovo is hosting its Tech World event at Sphere in Las Vegas during CES week. Like many other tech conglomerates, the world’s largest PC manufacturer by units shipped will put its main focus on AI. Lenovo says it’s a “Tech World experience unlike anything CES has seen before.” We’ll tell you where to livestream the event and what to expect so far.

How to watch the Lenovo CES 2026 event live

Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang will host the event on Tuesday, January 6 at 8PM ET. You can follow along to the livestream on YouTube once the event starts. (We’ve embedded the code below.)

What to expect

Lenovo is using the high-profile Sphere venue to share some of its tie-ins to the sports world, offering an exclusive look at how the company’s technology has “revolutionized F1,” Yang said in a press release. He’ll also preview the plans for leveraging AI at this summer’s FIFA World Cup, which takes place in the US.

After the event has wrapped up, pop singer Gwen Stefani will take the stage to perform.

As for real products, look for Lenovo to build on some of its successful launches from CES 2025. A year ago, we saw the portable Lenovo Legion Go S – the first third-party SteamOS handheld gaming device – as well as its “stretchy” laptop, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable that extends 2.7 inches taller with a touch of a button. To Lenovo’s credit, both products were actually released and available for sale within months, unlike the vaporware that seems to comprise the bulk of many companies’ CES announcements.

Lastly, don’t be surprised if we see some new Motorola smartphones, given that Lenovo is the parent company of the phone manufacturer. Maybe a new Razr foldable? We’ll find out either way on Tuesday evening.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/how-to-watch-lenovos-tech-world-event-at-ces-2026-130004053.html?src=rss

Instagram’s top exec Adam Mosseri expects AI content to overtake non-AI imagery and discussed the implications for the platform and users.

Mosseri shared his thoughts on broader trends he expects to shape Instagram in 2026. “Everything that made creators matter — the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn’t be faked — is now suddenly accessible to anyone with the right tools,” he wrote. “The feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything.” He added: “There is already a growing number of people who believe, as I do, that it will be more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media.”

Mosseri doesn’t address the risk that this will alienate many photographers and other creators who have already grown frustrated with the app — it looks like Instagram is leaning into the AI firehose. And hey: whatever keeps its users using it.

Mosseri suggests many complaints stem from an outdated vision of what Instagram even is. The feed of “polished” square images, he says, “is dead.” Instead of trying to “make everyone look like a professional photographer,” Mosseri says that more “raw” and “unflattering” images will be how creators can prove they are real — not AI.

Or you could leave Instagram?

— Mat Smith

The other big stories (and deals) this morning

• Netflix releases finale trailer for Stranger Things

• How to watch Samsung’s First Look CES 2026 presentation

• Meta buys startup known for its AI task automation agents

• TCL introduces its own take on a color Kindle Scribe

CES 2026: What to expect

First up, Samsung.

LG

CES kicks off this weekend. We’ve got a full preview that we’ll update in the run-up to the full show, but the major tech announcements will likely center on chips (ah, AI) and new TV tech (ah, CES). Intel is finally taking the wraps off its Panther Lake (Core Ultra Series 3) chips — the first to debut on the company’s 18A process. With a promised 50 percent performance boost, Intel needs to prove it can still compete with NVIDIA and AMD. Meanwhile, NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang will deliver a keynote at the Las Vegas show, while AMD’s Lisa Su teases Ryzen 9000-series refreshes and more.

This year’s TV obsession is Micro RGB. Samsung is going big — literally — with a Micro RGB lineup spanning 55 to 115 inches. LG, meanwhile, has its own Micro RGB Evo panels, boasting over a thousand dimming zones for that elusive “perfect” contrast. We’ll be on the ground in Vegas to separate the legitimate, exciting new tech from the marketing fluff and AI assistant tchotchkes. And remember me mentioning the celebrity CES parade? Well, will.i.am is back at CES, this time curiously involved with LG’s portable speakers. Check it off your CES bingo card.

Continue reading.

The era of foldable handheld consoles is coming

OneXSugar Wallet has a 4:3 foldable screen and a terrible name.

OneXSugar

OneXPlayer is quickly establishing itself as a company unafraid to get weird as hell. (Take, for example, its pseudo-foldable dual-screen console). This time, while it initially appears to be another standard dual-screen model, the Android-powered OneXSugar Wallet instead uses a single foldable screen. The OneXSugar Wallet was teased in a 54-second video on the Chinese video-sharing platform Bilibili. Retro Handhelds reports the Wallet uses an 8.01-inch OLED with a 2,480 x 1,860 resolution. That’s a 4:3 aspect ratio when unfolded, making it very retro-gaming friendly.

Given the foldable screen tech, the price might not be. OneXSugar hasn’t shared that detail yet.

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-engadget-newsletter-121544371.html?src=rss

Nokia, the Finnish company whose iconic ringtone was played an estimated 1.8 billion times daily at the height of its mobile phone dominance and whose 3310 “brick” sold 126 million units, has reinvented itself again — this time as a key piece of AI infrastructure. In October, Nvidia announced a $1 billion investment in Nokia and a strategic partnership to incorporate AI into telecommunications networks.

The company that was once worth $335 billion and controlled more than a quarter of the global handset market seemed destined for irrelevance after the iPhone’s 2007 arrival. A last-ditch bet on Microsoft’s Windows phone system in 2011 failed, and Nokia sold its devices division to Microsoft for $6.34 billion in 2014. Revenues had fallen from $44.27 billion in 2007 to $12.56 billion. Nokia rebuilt around its $2 billion acquisition of Siemens’ networks stake in 2013, then added French network provider Alcatel-Lucent for $18.32 billion in 2015.

Current CEO Justin Hotard, who took over in April, has pushed the company further into cloud services, data centers and optical networks. Nokia acquired optical specialist Infinera for $2.3 billion in February. The company’s optical technology enables information to pass between data centers, and it produces routers for cloud-based services.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Swiss minimal phone pioneer Punkt is back with another model, the MC03. The new handset continues Punkt’s focus on privacy, security and digital minimalism.

If you’ve never seen Punkt’s MP01 and MP02, the company’s gorgeously minimal dumb phone line, they’re something to behold. (The MP01 is quite literally a museum piece, in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.) Meanwhile, this new MC03 is the company’s second stab at a more practical touchscreen smartphone, following 2023’s MC02. What you lose in physical beauty and tactile buttons, you gain in flexibility.

As before, the smartphone runs the privacy- and security-focused AphyOS, based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The fork on the MC03 appears to borrow a page from the Light Phone line. Its UI includes a Light Phone-adjacent row of text for the most common shortcuts, like mail, contacts and calendar.

Punkt

The MC03 splits data into two sections. There’s The Vault, a secure enclave for apps Punkt has vetted for privacy and security. The second, Wild Web, gives you the freedom to install any Android app. To protect you while using that section, there’s Ledger, which Punkt describes as “strict, visible safeguards that allow easy privacy controls.” Much like Android’s Permission Manager, Ledger lets you define which data, sensors and background resources each app can access. In exchange for the tediousness of approving and denying permissions, you get more gradual control over your data.

All the apps from another Swiss company, Proton, are available in The Vault. (That includes Proton Mail, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, Proton VPN, and Proton Pass.) Proton founder and CEO Andy Yen said he hopes the collaboration can “inject a little more choice into the marketplace, giving users more ways to take control of their data and regain their privacy.”

Folks buying the MC03 aren’t doing so to get cutting-edge hardware. The phone has an OLED display with a high (120Hz) frame rate, great for showing off that clean, black UI. The MC03 has a removable 5,200mAh battery and a 64MP camera. The device is rated IP68 for water and dust resistance.

Shipments for the Punkt MC03 begin this month in the European market. The phone costs €699 / CHF699 / £610. As with its previous models, the MC03 requires a subscription. (Punkt frames this as paying to retain your data, rather than paying with your data.) One year of the subscription is included with your purchase. After that, you’ll have to pay €9.99 / CHF9.99 / £8.99 monthly. However, paying ahead for a long-term subscription lets you save up to 60 percent. You can learn more on the company’s website.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/minimal-phone-pioneer-punkt-is-back-with-a-new-privacy-focused-model-at-ces-110000705.html?src=rss

ASUS has informed its partners that prices on certain products will increase starting January 5, just days before the company is expected to unveil new hardware at CES. In a letter dated December 30 and obtained by Digitimes, the Taiwanese manufacturer pointed to rising costs for memory and storage components as the primary driver behind the adjustment.

The company specifically called out DRAM, NAND, and SSD pricing pressure stemming from what it described as “structural volatility” in the global supply chain tied to AI-driven demand. ASUS also cited shifts in capacity allocation by upstream suppliers and higher investment costs for advanced manufacturing processes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australia’s largest pension fund is planning to reduce its allocation to global equities this year, amid signs that the AI boom in the US stock market could be running out of steam. Financial Times: John Normand, head of investment strategy at the A$400bn (US$264bn) AustralianSuper, told the Financial Times that not only did valuations of big US tech companies look high relative to history, but the leverage being used to fund AI investment was increasing “very rapidly,” as was the pace of fundraising through mergers, venture capital and public listings.

“I can see some forces lining up that we are looking for less public equity allocation at some point next year. It’s the basic intersection of the maturing AI cycle with a shift towards Fed[eral Reserve] tightening in 2027,” Normand said in an interview.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starlink will lower the orbits of roughly 4,400 satellites this year as a safety measure, according to engineering VP, Michael Nicolls. In a post on X, Nicolls wrote that the company is “beginning a significant reconfiguration of its satellite constellation,” in which all satellites orbiting at around 550 kilometers (342 miles) will be lowered to around 480 km (298 miles). The move is intended to reduce the risk of collisions, putting the satellites in a region that’s less cluttered and will allow them to deorbit more quickly should an incident occur. 

“Lowering the satellites results in condensing Starlink orbits, and will increase space safety in several ways,” Nicolls wrote, also pointing to the coming solar minimum — a period in the sun’s 11ish-year cycle when activity is lower — as one of the reasons for the move. The next solar minimum is expected to occur in the early 2030s. “As solar minimum approaches, atmospheric density decreases which means the ballistic decay time at any given altitude increases – lowering will mean a >80% reduction in ballistic decay time in solar minimum, or 4+ years reduced to a few months,” Nicolls wrote.

The announcement comes a few weeks after Starlink said one of its satellites had experienced an anomaly that created some debris and sent it tumbling. Just a few days earlier, Nicolls posted about a close call with a batch of satellites he said were launched from China seemingly without any attempt to coordinate with operators of existing satellites in the space. With his latest announcement, Nicolls added that lowering Starlink’s satellites “will further improve the safety of the constellation, particularly with difficult to control risks such as uncoordinated maneuvers and launches by other satellite operators.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/starlink-is-lowering-thousands-of-satellites-orbits-to-reduce-risk-of-collisions-030509067.html?src=rss

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung has upgraded its Freestyle portable projector for 2026. The company announced a new model, the Freestyle+, ahead of CES, touting twice the brightness of its predecessor at 430 ISO lumens, and AI-powered screen optimization features. As with Freestyles past, the Freestyle+ offers 180-degree rotation and 360-degree audio. This one also supports Q-Symphony so it’ll work with some Samsung soundbars. Samsung hasn’t revealed much else in the way of specs or pricing, but it’ll be showing off the Freestyle+ at CES 2026, so we’re likely to learn more details soon. 

While previous iterations of Samsung’s compact projector offered automatic screen adjustment features, like auto focus and auto leveling, the Freestyle+ uses AI to take optimization a step further. With AI OptiScreen, as the company is calling it, the projector offers 3D auto keystone to fix distortion on uneven or non-flat surfaces, real-time focus when the projector is moved, automatic screen fit for compatible accessories and wall calibration to reduce visual distractions from the projection surface. It’ll also support Samsung’s Vision AI Companion. 

The company hasn’t announced a specific release date yet for the new projector, but says it’s targeting the first half of the year. It’ll be released in phases globally. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/home-theater/samsungs-latest-freestyle-portable-projector-is-brighter-and-smarter-014026804.html?src=rss