smartphones

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The 2025 Moto G Stylus has a sharper display and “enhanced” stylus for $400

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There aren’t many phones these days that come with a stylus, and those that do tend to be very expensive. If you can’t swing a Galaxy S25 Ultra, Motorola’s G Stylus lineup could be just what you need. The new 2025 Moto G Stylus is now official, featuring several key upgrades while maintaining the same $400 price tag.

The Moto G Stylus 2025 sticks with the style Motorola has cultivated over recent years, with a contoured vegan leather back. It comes in two Pantone colors called Gibraltar Sea and Surf the Web—one is dark blue and the other is a lighter, more vibrant blue. They look like fun colors. Moto’s language makes it sound like there could be more colors down the road, too.

The spec sheet paints a picture of a solid mobile device, but it won’t exceed expectations. Motorola moved to a Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 processor, which runs at a slightly higher clock speed than the Gen 1 it used in the 2024 model. It also has 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage in the base model. An upgraded version with 256GB of storage and the same 8GB of RAM will be available, too.

Specs at a glance: Moto G Stylus 2025
SoC Snapdragon 6 Gen 3
Memory 8GB
Storage 128GB, 256GB
Display 2,712 x 1,220 6.7″ pOLED, 120 Hz
Cameras 50 MP primary, f/1.8, OIS; 13 MP ultrawide, f/2.2; 32 MP selfie, f/2.2
Software Android 15 (Hello UX)
Battery 5,000 mAh, 68 W wired charging, 15W wireless charging
Connectivity Wi-Fi 6e, NFC, Bluetooth 5.4, sub-6 GHz 5G
Measurements 162.15 x 74.78 x 8.29mm; 191 g

With the modest mid-range chipset, the 2025 Moto G Stylus should have excellent battery life. The company promises more than 40 hours of average usage from the 5,000 mAh cell, and it recharges at an impressive 68 W with a USB-PD cable. It also has speedy 15 W wireless charging. You often don’t even get charging that fast on flagship phones, including the Pixel 9 series.

Making mid-range a little less mid

Motorola opted to upgrade the screen on this device, moving to a 6.7-inch pOLED at an impressive 2,712 x 1,220 resolution. It retains the 120 Hz refresh rate of its predecessor and jumps to 3,000 nits of peak brightness (more than double that of last year’s phone). We haven’t seen this display in real life, but on paper, it checks all the boxes you’d expect from a much more expensive phone.

The phone’s raison d’être has been upgraded, as well. Motorola says the stylus for the new phone is 6.4 times more responsive. Moto is vague about how this was achieved—the stylus itself is still just a capacitive nub rather than an active stylus like you’d see on an expensive Samsung phone. The 2025 G Stylus display reportedly has lower latency, making the stylus input less laggy.

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Nothing on Phone 3a Pro design: “Some people will hate it”

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Nothing, the smartphone venture from OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, is on its third generation of Android smartphones. The Nothing Phone 3a and 3a Pro will be officially announced on March 4, but there won’t be much left to reveal. Not only has Nothing teased the phones a few times, there’s also a new video highlighting the Nothing Phone 3a Pro’s design. In it, Nothing’s design team speaks at length about how they tried to incorporate the chunky camera module, but what they came up with is going to be divisive.

As we approach 20 years since the iPhone made touchscreen smartphones the default, the form factor is very fleshed out. Some of today’s most popular smartphones have almost reached the point of anti-design—flat, unremarkable bodies that are intended to be covered up with a case. There’s something to be said for that when most people slap a sheet of plastic on their phone and only remove it once in a blue moon. Nothing, however, designs phones with transparent panels and glowing “Glyphs” that are intended to be seen. In the case of the 3a Pro, there’s also a camera module so big it’s sure to stand out.

People generally want big screens and big batteries that don’t make phones too thick or heavy. Some components have shrunk or been dropped entirely to free up space (a moment of silence for the dearly departed headphone jack). Camera modules, however, can’t shrink infinitely. Smaller lenses and sensors have an impact on image quality, so expensive phones often have gargantuan camera arrays that can make phones top-heavy. For example, look at the Google Pixel 9 series, which features a camera bump that towers above the rest of the back.

The Nothing Phone 3a Pro isn’t a flagship device, but it’ll have more cameras than the Nothing Phone 3a that will release at the same time. The new design video shows off the phone’s three rear-facing sensors: a 50MP primary, an 8MP ultrawide, and a 50MP periscope telephoto (focal length unknown). The Nothing Phone 3a Pro has three of those glowing Glyphs on the back, framing the enormous camera module. The phone’s PCB also needed some tweaks to make room for the folded periscope assembly, which is much thicker than the other sensors.

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Niantic uses Pokémon Go player data to build AI navigation system

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Last week, Niantic announced plans to create an AI model for navigating the physical world using scans collected from players of its mobile games, such as Pokémon Go, and from users of its Scaniverse app, reports 404 Media.

All AI models require training data. So far, companies have collected data from websites, YouTube videos, books, audio sources, and more, but this is perhaps the first we’ve heard of AI training data collected through a mobile gaming app.

“Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System (VPS), which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse,” Niantic wrote in a company blog post.

The company calls its creation a “large geospatial model” (LGM), drawing parallels to large language models (LLMs) like the kind that power ChatGPT. Whereas language models process text, Niantic’s model will process physical spaces using geolocated images collected through its apps.

The scale of Niantic’s data collection reveals the company’s sizable presence in the AR space. The model draws from over 10 million scanned locations worldwide, with users capturing roughly 1 million new scans weekly through Pokémon Go and Scaniverse. These scans come from a pedestrian perspective, capturing areas inaccessible to cars and street-view cameras.

First-person scans

The company reports it has trained more than 50 million neural networks, each representing a specific location or viewing angle. These networks compress thousands of mapping images into digital representations of physical spaces. Together, they contain over 150 trillion parameters—adjustable values that help the networks recognize and understand locations. Multiple networks can contribute to mapping a single location, and Niantic plans to combine its knowledge into one comprehensive model that can understand any location, even from unfamiliar angles.

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Samsung quits updating Galaxy Z Fold 2 that came out in 2020 for $2,000

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In February 2022, Samsung started promising up to four generations of Android OS and One UI upgrades to “select” Galaxy devices, as well as “up to five years of security updates.” And in January, it announced moving to seven years of security and OS updates, matching a move from Google. However, the Fold 2 wasn’t included in Samsung’s list of “select” Galaxy devices.

Thus, one could have estimated that the Fold 2 might stop receiving OS and security updates by 2024, four years after its debut. But it’s still hard to reconcile with paying four figures for a phone that became a security risk after four years, despite functioning properly otherwise. Apple, by comparison, now promises at least five years of security updates. Apple only started making that promise in 2023 with the iPhone 15 series. However, the current-generation iOS 18 is supported by iPhones released in 2020, like the second-generation iPhone SE, and even older ones, like the iPhone XR that came out in 2018. Arguably short-lived expensive devices like the Fold 2 are part of the reason some activists are pushing for the FTC to require that smart devices state on their packaging how long they’ll receive updates.

However, unlike iPhones, Samsung phones aren’t all powered by a proprietary chip, making promises of upgrades require commitments from third-party vendors, like Qualcomm. With Qualcomm known for being resistant to longer chip life cycles in the past, seven years of updates is progress for Samsung users—just not those who invested in the Z Fold 2.

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Faulty Samsung update leaves owners of bricked Galaxy phones with few options

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Samsung issued a software update on October 2 that bricked some older Galaxy smartphones. While Samsung has stopped the update from rolling out further, those with broken phones have received a harsh reminder of the importance of data backups.

On Wednesday, numerous people online started complaining about their Samsung phones being stuck in a bootloop (you can see examples here, here, and in newer comments here).

A Samsung spokesperson confirmed to Ars Technica that an update to Samsung’s SmartThings Framework app for managing smart devices caused the problems:

We are aware that a limited number of Galaxy smartphones running on Android 12 are rebooting continuously during an update to the latest version of the SmartThings app.

Samsung “immediately suspended the update” after learning of the problem and is “working to resolve the issues,” the company’s spokesperson said. According to user reports online, Samsung has issued a new update that people can download without their phones breaking.

However, owners of older affected phones, namely the Galaxy S10 series, Galaxy Note 10 series, Galaxy M51, and Galaxy A90, have been unable to power their devices on to roll back the update. Many users who already manually or automatically installed the update are still dealing with bricked devices.

A harsh reminder

Users with bricked Galaxy phones were initially met with a difficult choice: Go without their phone or perform a data-erasing factory reset.

Samsung’s statement to Ars advised customers to “contact the Samsung Contact Center” for support, but it’s unclear if a fix can be employed that doesn’t wipe the phone.

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