Technology

The Morning After: A humanoid robot and a foldable phone from the same company

TMA

Xiaomi had a busy Thursday. It revealed a new slimmer foldable smartphone to go up against Samsung’s just-announced Galaxy Z Fold 4, then made that appear dull when its own humanoid robot prototype walked on stage. The Xiaomi CyberOne is 177cm (5.8 feet) tall, weighs 52kg (115 pounds) and is, apparently, a Leo. It comes before Tesla’s humanoid vision arrived as a real-world prototype. But there’s some definite style overlap.

The CyberOne is the second product out of the Xiaomi Robotics Lab, after the CyberDog from August 2021. The humanoid machine has a face in the form of a curved OLED panel, it can see the world in 3D and hear with two microphones to identify “85 types of environmental sounds and 45 classifications of human emotion.” I don’t think I even have that emotional range. Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun said each CyberOne would cost between 600,000 and 700,000 yuan (about $89,100 to $104,000), so it’ll be sometime before the robots hit mass production, if ever.

— Mat Smith

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Jared Mauch just received $2.6 million in funding.

Given a choice between settling for pathetically slow internet speeds from AT&T or paying Comcast $50,000 to expand to his rural home, Michigan resident Jared Mauch chose another way: starting his own fiber internet service provider. Now, he’s expanding his service from about 70 customers to nearly 600, thanks to funding aimed at expanding access to broadband internet. He’ll need to expand from 14 to about 52 miles of fiber to complete the project, including at least a couple of homes that require a half mile of fiber for a single house.

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It looks less like a Razr, too.

Motorola

Another foldable appears – this time to go up against the Galaxy Z Flip 4. Motorola’s last Razr was a nifty folding smartphone and $1,500 fashion statement, but the weak hardware struggled. Now, the company has revealed the Razr 2022, a foldable that might live up to that kind of price, thanks to a true flagship-class Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor and an upgraded, more expansive screen. The curved chin and top camera notch has been nixed in favor of an all-screen design, removing a lot of that Razr design DNA.

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The Mix Fold 2 is also Xiaomi’s second device with a Leica camera.

TMA

Xiaomi

Xiaomi’s Mix Fold 2 is the Chinese brand’s second foldable phone, featuring a surprising thickness of just 5.4mm, opened — barely enough to house a USB-C port — and…

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