foldable phones

Louis C.K. on Conan explains why he won't give his kids cell phones. He argues that phones keep people from sitting with sadness and being alone with their thoughts, and that kids lose empathy when they cannot see another person's reaction.

A binaural audio demo, the 'Virtual Barber Shop', that places a barber moving around your head. It works best with headphones and closed eyes.

A concept video from Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center showing Morph, a flexible, self-cleaning, shape-changing phone imagined through nanotechnology.

A short demo of Inferno, the Plan 9 descendant operating system, running on an Android phone as Hellaphone. It shows calls, SMS and data working. The video quality is rough because the camera was held in front of the screen.

A short clip from the Diablo Immortal announcement at BlizzCon 2018 in which a Blizzard representative asks the booing audience if they do not have phones.

A 37C3 talk by Kaspersky researchers on Operation Triangulation, a zero-click iPhone attack that targeted their own colleagues. They describe capturing every stage of the chain, four zero-days and a previously unknown spyware active for years.

An art project by Simon Weckert in which 99 smartphones pulled in a handcart create a fake traffic jam on Google Maps. A green street shows as red, which diverts cars to other routes.

LEMMiNO's 25-minute documentary on the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. It walks through the official investigation's findings and the leading theories, including satellite data and hydrophone recordings.

A five-minute CGP Grey explainer arguing that a phone is effectively an extension of your mind, and that any backdoor or master key into encrypted devices will inevitably be abused or leaked. It frames the encryption debate as locks that are either unbreakable or absent.

The official trailer for the documentary General Magic, about the secretive Apple spinoff that tried to build a handheld communicator in 1990 and whose ideas shaped the smartphone era.

A two-minute satirical short film in which a woman leaves her phone at home and notices how everyone around her is absorbed in their screens. It became a viral comment on phone distraction and social disconnection.

A short Techquickie explainer on why laptop webcams are much worse than phone cameras. It covers sensor size, image processing, and the interface differences between laptops and phones, with input from a Logitech engineer.

A one-minute clip of Steve Jobs at the D3 conference in 2005 discussing virtual reality. He compares VR headsets to headphones for video, an analogy later applied to Apple's Vision Pro.

A 1940 Bell Telephone educational short teaching customers how to use their new dial phones and why the change was happening. It is a period piece about rolling out a new technology to ordinary people.

A 2007 video review of the Neonode N1m phone, which uses touch gestures including a swipe to unlock. It was published just before the iPhone's launch.

A 1979 BBC Tomorrow's World segment where Michael Rodd tries an experimental British cordless mobile phone prototype.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why electronic voting is a bad idea, arguing that paper ballots are transparent, auditable and hard to tamper with at scale. He covers why moving voting to phones, tablets or computers undermines trust and verifiability.

Veritasium explores planned obsolescence, from the Phoebus lightbulb cartel to printers and phones. It explains how companies deliberately shortened product lifetimes and why products aren't better.

Emily Shea, a Fastly engineer with repetitive strain injury, describes using voice dictation as her main way of programming. She covers homophones, custom vocabulary and building her own voice commands to write Perl.

Alexei Navalny phones an FSB chemical-weapons specialist, posing as a senior official, and gets him to describe the 2020 Novichok poisoning and its cover-up. The video is in Russian; HN commenters point to English subtitles.

Bo Burnham's song from his special Inside, a satirical take on internet culture, attention and extremism.

Footage from a camera on a Space Shuttle solid rocket booster from liftoff through descent, with audio enhanced by Skywalker Sound from the original camera microphones. The sound is real, not foley.

Smarter Every Day shares a binaural audio recording of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch made by Trevor Mahlmann, with explanations of the sounds including the sonic booms of the landing boosters. It is meant to be heard with headphones.

Matthew Cole's Black Hat 2013 talk on operational security failures by CIA operatives. It covers the Abu Omar case and how sloppy tradecraft with cell phones exposed officers through call records and metadata.

Course outline for Stanford's online GNSS course, introducing how GPS works and the many uses of satellite navigation. The series pairs short lectures with backyard experiments using smartphones.

A demo of the 8pen, a gesture-based keyboard replacement for touchscreens that lets users enter text by moving around a circle. It is meant for phones, remotes and game controllers and mimics handwriting.

The Verge's documentary on Handspring and its Treo, a smartphone that came a decade before the iPhone. It tells how a small team tried to build the modern smartphone and was held back by carriers and timing.

JerryRigEverything tours Li-Cycle to show how lithium-ion batteries from EVs, phones and tools are recycled. It walks through the process of shredding batteries and extracting materials.

Marques Brownlee reviews the Humane AI Pin and calls it the worst product he has reviewed, arguing almost no one should buy it. He explains why smartphones still beat it as a daily carry device.

Tobias Engel's 31C3 talk shows how weaknesses in the SS7 telephone signaling network let companies and attackers locate, track and manipulate phones from anywhere in the world, with precision down to about 50 meters.

A short Apple promotional video about Liam, a robot that disassembles old iPhones so their materials can be recovered. It frames the robot as part of Apple's product life cycle and recycling story.

Big Clive tears down a smart meter with a wireless modem found among fly-tipped materials. He examines its internals and checks conspiracy claims about microphones, cameras and 5G.

A DeepSec 2010 conference talk by Ralf Philipp Weinmann on attacking the baseband processor of mobile phones rather than the application processor. It covers how open-source GSM base stations make malicious-tower attacks practical against neglected GSM stacks.

A Rocky Mountain IPv6 Taskforce talk in which T-Mobile's Stephan Lagerholm explains how the carrier went IPv6-only using DNS64 and 464XLAT, with a live Android demo and best practices.

JerryRigEverything puts the iPhone Air through scratch, bend and durability tests and is surprised that the ultra-thin phone proves very tough. The video is sponsored by dbrand cases.

A creator runs an informal live test of whether Google or Facebook listen through the microphone to target ads, using Chrome on Windows 10. The description admits the methodology is flawed, including that live streaming itself records the microphone.

A short clip of the Google I/O 2018 demo in which Google Assistant's Duplex phones a salon and a restaurant to make appointments. The calls sound like a natural human conversation.

Hugh Jeffreys tears down the iPhone 12 and assesses its repairability, focusing on how parts are serialized and tied to the device so swapping components between phones does not work.

Clip from The Dark Knight in which Batman uses a sonar-based system that turns phones into a city-wide surveillance network.

Hugh Jeffreys tests the iPhone 14 Pro and finds that swapping genuine parts between phones disables features, concluding that third-party repair is not really viable despite Apple's Self Service Repair program.