Notes on AI, tools, and tech.
Buy a Chinese phone in Shenzhen and fly it to Texas, and you moved the phone without moving the warranty. Coverage follows the country where you paid, not the brand on the back. Most people learn this the expensive way. Something breaks in month nine. They look up the nearest service center. The answer is … Read more
A Chinese phone with no Google Play looks fine for about a day. Then your bank app says the device isn’t certified. And it won’t open. Google Play is really two things sharing one name. There’s the store. That part is easy to replace. Under it sits a bundle of background services. That layer is … Read more
Wi-Fi 7 sounds like a simple number bump. It is not, because the upgrade that matters lives in the 6GHz band, and phones built for mainland China ship without it. Regulators there handed that spectrum to mobile networks instead of Wi-Fi. What 6GHz Actually Buys You The result is a strange split. The same model … Read more
Travel eSIMs are the default way to get mobile data abroad now. Most phones bought in mainland China refuse them. The failure shows up at the worst possible moment, when you are scanning a QR code in an airport. Run the ten-second check before you fly. What an eSIM Actually Is An eSIM is a … Read more
A few months ago, tap-to-pay quietly stopped working on imported Xiaomi, vivo and OPPO phones. Google Wallet opened fine and the cards were still listed. The failure only showed up at the register. Every affected phone was built for the Chinese market. So what actually happened? The story starts with an update. In August, Google … Read more
Chinese phones work in the US, but not all of them, and not on every carrier. The band list, the IMEI database, and one voice standard called VoLTE decide whether your phone is a phone or a paperweight. Here is the short version first. Bands are the easy part now. Most Chinese flagships sold since … Read more
Last December, a strange phone went on sale in China. It could open your apps, find the right buttons, tap them for you. Here was an AI assistant that could actually control your phone. Only 30,000 units existed. They sold out in 48 hours, and resellers soon asked around $1,110 for a phone that retailed … Read more
Honor published a battery spec sheet this week that reads like a typo. The Magic9 Super Edition, arriving September 28, carries an 11,000mAh battery in a body 8.1mm thick that weighs 227 grams. The standard Magic9 gets 8,000mAh. The Pro Max gets 8,800mAh. For comparison, the biggest battery Apple or Samsung sells in the United … Read more
Xiaomi just held the most revealing phone launch of the year, and the interesting part wasn’t the phone. It was the apology. Lei Jun, the company’s founder, stood on stage and pre-explained the price before anyone could complain. Memory has gotten very expensive, he said, so the new Xiaomi 18 Fold starts at $1,540, and … Read more
Three companies, seventy-two hours In early September 2026, three companies showed a new foldable phone. All inside the same week. Huawei, Xiaomi, and Apple. And each one is aimed at a different buyer. Huawei went first, on September 7, with the Mate XT2. It starts around $2,800. Xiaomi followed the same evening with the 18 … Read more