Phones

I had the chance to see the “privacy screen” that Samsung put on the Galaxy S26 Ultra in person at one of the brand’s stores. It has two levels of dimming, and at either level, the screen loses a lot of brightness for the person using the device (facing it; see this video), and although I wasn’t wearing glasses, I got the impression (and I wasn’t the only one) that the drop in resolution with the privacy screen enabled is noticeable (for some, even with it disabled).

For me, the significant emphasis Samsung places on a tangential feature supports a healthy trend I noticed years ago: phones became utilities, and buying one is now similar to buying a refrigerator.

Alerts fatigue, or would that be journalism fatigue?

The Guardian picked up an interesting finding (among many interesting ones) from the 2025 edition of the Digital News Report, perhaps the world’s largest press survey, produced annually by the Reuters Institute:

Analysis by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 79% of people surveyed on the subject around the world said they did not currently receive any news alerts during an average week. Crucially, 43% of those who did not receive alerts said they had actively disabled them. They complained of receiving too many or not finding them useful, according to the research, which covered 28 countries.

There was a time, around 2014, when phone notifications were seen as a phone’s “premium real state,” a battleground for people’s attention, who were already saturated by the volume of digital information.

Unsurprisingly, the notification area also ended up saturated and discarded as yet another digital dumping ground. I suspect many people don’t even care what’s there, accumulating dozens, hundreds of unread, ignored notifications.

The obvious focus of the Reuters Institute research, journalism, reminded me of an excellent short piece by Ricardo Fiegenbaum, a researcher at objETHOS, a research group from Federal University of Santa Catarina. A decidedly non-academic text [pt_BR] (in the best sense), in which he thinks aloud about journalism’s place today:

It’s in this mined, paradoxical, complex and uncertain terrain that I enter when I think about journalism. And every question that presents itself in this scenario — logical, ideological, pragmatic, technological, discursive, etc. — always leads me to the fundamental question: what are we talking about when we talk about journalism?

It’s a good question.

I suspect the fatigue transcends notifications and that much of what’s currently understood as “journalism” escapes one of the profession’s noblest definitions, one that Ricardo mentions: serving societies’ information needs.

From the archives: in 2022, in light of that year’s Digital News Report edition, I was asking myself — echoing Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso — who reads so much news anyway [pt_BR].

The (not so) futuristic technology of “Lazarus”

I’m currently watching an anime that the streaming service Max kind of threw in my face, Lazarus. The animation is stunning, and the soundtrack is awesome. It really reminds me of Cowboy Bebop, and not by coincidence: both series, separated by nearly 30 years, are directed by Shinichirō Watanabe.

The story of Lazarus takes place in 2052. There are several curious nitpicks, such as the nationality of the protagonist, our Brazilian Axel Gilberto. (A risky bet by the writers, suggesting that by ~2030 “Axel” will took over Enzo and Gael as popular foreigner boy names for newborns in Brazil.)

Right at the beginning of the fifth episode, “Pretty Vacant,” two technological details caught my attention.

The first was that Delta Medical, the company responsible for manufacturing the drug that drives the story, published the test results of the medication encoded in audio files on SoundCloud. Did you remember that SoundCloud still exists? I could bet that by 2052, SoundCloud will just be a footnote in some Wikipedia entry.

(By the way, someone noticed that in February 2024, SoundCloud changed its terms of use to give itself the right to use user content to train AIs. The future is now, and it’s dystopian.)

The other detail, which is kinda bad news, is that we will still be using phones, and the ones in the future will also have glass screens prone to breaking. Early in the fifth episode, the CEO of Delta Medical, Dr. Ahmed Rahman, throws his phone against the wall and *crack*, another shattered screen.

A murky future for Corning and a bright one for the case and screen protector industry — which products, apparently, Dr. Rahman wasn’t using. (My pet conspiracy theory involves manufacturers of phone cases and screen protectors, but that’s another story.)

Where are the small phones?

Bruno from Florianópolis (SC) asked:

Ghedin, do you think small phones that can be used comfortably with one hand have become a niche thing? Have major companies dropped making small phones, and will phones only continue to grow in size or stabilize at current sizes?

Great question! It’s almost a meme that, week in and week out, someone asks in our (Portuguese-written) discussion board if there are any small phones being sold. On my end, a recent and unpleasant experience with a gigantic phone brought my attention back to this gap in the market.

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A quick look at the iPhone 16e made in Brazil

I was at my parents’ during the Easter holiday when I came across an iPhone 16e. I asked the owner for permission to take a closer look at the spiritual successor to the best iPhone. What a responsibility!

Despite the new name and being part of the current iPhone family, the iPhone 16e is, for all practical purposes, a new iPhone SE: a Frankenstein phone, made up of parts from older versions (the base is the iPhone 14), some components from the latest model (A18 chip and 8 GB of RAM), and features missing due to Apple’s stingy upselling tactics (previously it was the night mode in the camera, unavailable; now, there’s no MagSafe).

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The iPhone with a button joke

In my iPhone SE (2022) review, I wrote that the “iPhone with a button” (Touch ID) became a recurring joke in Brazil. Explaining the joke is rarely a fun proposition, but hold on for a second; that’s interesting, I promise you.

A few months ago, random people started making jokes on Twitter associating Touch ID iPhones with poverty.

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The best iPhone

The iPhone SE is the most boring phone that ever existed. Almost nobody notices you have a new phone; when someone does, the conversation ends quickly and invariably in a sentence like “it’s just like the old one, only faster”.

I love this.

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