Tech
Which Samsung Galaxy Phone Should You Buy?
Other Samsung Phones to Consider
If you don’t see a Samsung phone mentioned in this guide, that might be because it’s not sold in the US and is a little harder to source for testing. But here are a few other Samsung phones I’ve tested to consider.
Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge for $1,220: Have you ever wanted a really thin and lightweight phone? No? Well, Samsung has an option for you anyway. The Galaxy S25 Edge (6/10, WIRED Review) sits in the middle of Samsung’s flagship lineup and matches several features of the Galaxy S25 Ultra, like a titanium frame, stronger front glass, and 4K 120 frames per second video recording. All the cameras even have autofocus. But it made several sacrifices to achieve its amazingly slim 5.8-mm frame (for context, the S25 Ultra is 8.2 mm thick). There’s no stylus, no telephoto camera, and worst of all, the battery capacity has been slashed. We’ve seen this before—thin phones have always compromised on battery life, and that’s no different here. I constantly had to baby this phone’s 3,900-mAh battery with average to heavy usage, and that’s just not acceptable. (The iPhone Air did it better.) If you find yourself constantly near a power source and you think you’ll enjoy the slim and light design, then go for it. Rumors suggest that the Edge did not perform well, and it may not see a successor in 2026.
Samsung Galaxy A17 5G for $200: On paper, the Galaxy A17 (5/10, WIRED Review) seems like a really great deal. Six years of software support, an AMOLED screen, expandable storage, and a decent camera. Unfortunately, it’s held back by lackluster performance. The problem is specifically the very limited 4 GB of RAM in the US model, which severely ruins the entire experience of using the phone. If you had to use your smartphone in an emergency, I would not trust the A17 to be reliable. But if your needs are extremely minimal, it may suffice.
Samsung Galaxy A36 5G for $395: The Galaxy A36 (6/10, WIRED Review) doesn’t quite measure up to its peers from Nothing and Motorola. Performance is just too choppy, and that’s not acceptable at this price. It’s manageable—it’s not so slow that it will frustrate—but you can do better. If your needs are very minimal, it’s an OK phone, and the camera system is good, with day-long battery life, a nice AMOLED screen, and 6 years of software updates.
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 or Galaxy Z Flip6: If you don’t want to pay a premium for a new folding phone, then consider 2024’s Galaxy Z Fold6 and Galaxy Z Flip7 (7/10, WIRED Review). The Fold6 has a close to “normal” smartphone experience on the exterior 6.3-inch screen. Open the phone up, and there’s a vast 7.6-inch AMOLED screen staring at your face, turning this folding phone into a tiny tablet. The Flip6 isn’t as nice as the newer Flip7—the bigger and brighter cover screen on the latest model is a step up—but it’s worth considering over the new Galaxy Z Flip7 FE. Technically, it’s nearly identical to that phone, but the FE uses a Samsung Exynos chip instead of a Qualcomm processor, and performance may not be as smooth. The main drawback? Battery life isn’t great. Make sure you don’t pay MSRP for these 2024 phones.
If you’re looking to save some cash, it’s fine to buy Samsung’s Galaxy S23 range or the Galaxy S23 FE from 2023, as long as the prices are a good deal lower than the original MSRP. (They’re hard to find at most major retailers.) These phones will still get support for a while, and they’re pretty great. I don’t think it’s worth buying anything older.
Should You Invest in Samsung’s Ecosystem?
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
Samsung is one of the few smartphone manufacturers that can match Apple in its hardware ecosystem. Not only does the company make smartphones, but you can also expand your experience by adding on a Galaxy Watch8 smartwatch, Galaxy Buds3 Pro earbuds, Galaxy Ring fitness ring, Galaxy Tab S11, and even a Windows-powered Galaxy laptop.
There are certain perks to this, like how some features on the Galaxy Ring and Watch8 are only available when paired with a Samsung phone, and its earbuds will automatically switch between Samsung devices based on what you’re using. There’s not much in the way of exclusive features when using a Galaxy phone with a Galaxy laptop, but features like Quick Share let you speedily send photos and documents between your devices.
Again, it’s not necessary, and these other devices might not be the right ones for you within their respective categories, but if you’re chasing hardware parity, you have that option with Samsung.
What Is Galaxy AI?
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
With the Galaxy S24 series, Samsung launched “Galaxy AI,” a selection of artificial intelligence features, many of which are powered by Google’s Gemini large language models. These enable smart features that may be helpful day to day, like real-time translations during phone calls, real-time transcriptions in Samsung’s Voice Recorder app, the ability to summarize long paragraphs of text in the Samsung Notes app, or change a sentence’s tone with the Samsung Keyboard.
In the Galaxy S25 series, Galaxy AI expanded to include Gemini as the default voice assistant and the ability for Gemini to work with multiple apps simultaneously. It also debuted Drawing Assist, which lets you sketch or enter a prompt and get an AI-generated image. Now, you can also use video in real-time with Gemini, even from the cover screen of the Galaxy Z Flip7.
You can find many of these features by heading to Settings > Galaxy AI to toggle them on or off. We have an explainer on how to limit Galaxy AI to on-device processing, too.
What Is Samsung DeX?
Courtesy of David Nield
Samsung’s DeX (short for “desktop experience”) launched in 2017, and it’s a way to plug in your Samsung phone to an external monitor and trigger a desktop version of the Android OS, all completely powered by the phone. You can find a list of compatible Samsung phones here—the Flip7 is the first Galaxy Flip to support DeX—and you’ll need a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, plus a cable to connect the phone to the monitor. (You can also cast DeX to select screens wirelessly.)
When in DeX mode, you can resize Android apps and have them all open in separate windows. It’s a proper computing platform, though you probably won’t want to use this as a permanent laptop replacement or anything of the sort. It’s great if you’re visiting another office, or working out of a coffee shop or airplane (if you have a portable display). We have a whole guide to setting up and using DeX here.
How I Test Phones
I’ve been reviewing smartphones for a decade, but one of my earliest smart devices was a Samsung Galaxy Captivate, which I got for “free” from my carrier at the time. After working during college, I finally saved enough cash for a Galaxy S3, my first flagship. I’ve spent years using Samsung phones in my personal life and began reviewing them for work not too long after.
With each Samsung smartphone, I always put my personal SIM card inside and spend as long as I can (a few weeks) using the phone as my own. I do camera testing and compare the results with similarly priced devices, I benchmark performance and play graphically demanding games to see how they fare, I try out all the new features, and even take calls to make sure that ol’ function still works fine.
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Tech
Cursor Launches a New AI Agent Experience to Take On Claude Code and Codex
Cursor announced Thursday the launch of Cursor 3, a new product interface that allows users to spin up AI coding agents to complete tasks on their behalf. The product, which was developed under the code name Glass, is Cursor’s response to agentic coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, which have taken off with millions of developers in recent months.
“In the last few months, our profession has completely changed,” said Jonas Nelle, one of Cursor’s heads of engineering, in an interview with WIRED. “A lot of the product that got Cursor here is not as important going forward anymore.”
Cursor increasingly finds itself in competition with leading AI labs for developers and enterprise customers. The company pioneered one of the first and most popular ways for developers to code with AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—making Cursor one of these companies’ biggest AI customers. But in the last 18 months, OpenAI and Anthropic have launched agentic coding products of their own, and started offering them through highly subsidized subscriptions that have put pressure on Cursor’s business.
While Cursor’s core product lets developers code in an integrated development environment (IDE) and tap an AI model for help, new products like Claude Code and Codex center around allowing developers to off-load entire tasks to an AI agent—sometimes spinning up multiple agents at the same time. Cursor 3 is the startup’s version of an “agent-first” coding product. According to Nelle, the product is optimized for a world where developers spend their days “conversing with different agents, checking in on them, and seeing the work that they did,” rather than writing code themselves.
Cursor is launching its new agentic coding interface inside its existing desktop app, where it will live alongside the IDE. At the center of a new window in Cursor, there’s a text box where users can type, in natural language, a task they’d like an AI agent to complete—it looks more like a chatbot than a coding environment. Press enter, the AI agent sets to work without requiring the developer to write a single line of code. In a sidebar on the left, developers can view and manage all of the AI agents they have running in Cursor.
What’s unique about Cursor 3, compared to desktop apps for Claude Code and Codex, is that it integrates an agent-first product with Cursor’s AI-powered development environment. In a demo, Cursor’s other cohead of engineering for Cursor 3, Alexi Robbins, showed WIRED how users can prompt an agent in the cloud to spin up a feature, and then review the code it generated locally on their computer.
Nelle and Robbins argue it doesn’t matter which interface developers are spending their time in—they just want people using Cursor.
Competing With the AI Labs
I visited Cursor’s office in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood last week. The startup is reportedly raising fresh capital at a $50 billion valuation—nearly double what it was valued in a funding round last fall—and has expanded into an old movie theater. Cursor employees used to toss their shoes in a pile by the door upon entry, but now there’s a row of large shoe racks, signaling one way in which the company is growing up.
Yet Cursor still feels like a startup. Employees tell me that’s part of the appeal of working there; the company can ship quickly and doesn’t feel too corporate. But as it finds itself racing to catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI in the agentic coding race, that scrappiness may not be enough. This battle—the one to create the best AI coding agent—may be Cursor’s most capital-intensive chapter yet.
Tech
Wilson Connectivity, Autonomous Systems team for in-building wireless service | Computer Weekly
Wireless communication technology provider Wilson Connectivity has announced a joint development partnership with Autonomous Systems to bring automated, digitally transformed capabilities to phases of in-building wireless infrastructure spanning initial deployment through ongoing optimisation.
The full network lifecycle management offering combines Wilson’s 30-year track record in distributed antenna systems (DAS), private 5G and Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) with Autonomous Systems’ cloud-based, artificial intelligence (AI)-ready monitoring platform to give enterprises real-time, automated visibility into their networks from day one of deployment through to ongoing optimisation.
The combined service is said to have the “genuinely interesting” quality of flipping the traditional models currently used by enterprises running DAS or private networks.
Most organisations that operate in-building wireless systems rely on reactive, manual processes to resolve connectivity issues. Technicians are dispatched only after problems are reported, leading to prolonged disruptions and higher operational costs.
Wilson’s product replaces that model with continuous, automated monitoring and active testing that measures actual quality of experience for voice, messaging, over-the-top and streaming. The system is designed to scale across healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, higher education and hospitality. It’s also multi-operator and works across active, hybrid and passive DAS, as well as private 5G and CBRS.
It is also optimised for multi-operator environments and scales across healthcare facilities, manufacturing floors, logistics centres, datacentres, K-12 schools, higher education campuses and hospitality venues where reliable connectivity is essential for operations and public safety communications.
Wilson’s Hybrid DAS is said to be built to be installed quickly to improve in-building wireless signal through multi-channel amplification for the most simultaneous bandwidth. This is said to result in users gaining more control and a lower total cost of ownership through remote network scanning and monitoring, and energy-efficient space-saving design.
Cell signals for all devices on all carriers can be enhanced up to 5G speeds with the Hybrid DAS service, which also delivers the precision of Bi-Directional Antenna amplification using enterprise-grade quality with fibre-optic transport. This is said to offer “the greatest” versatility, coverage and capacity.
“This is a major step forward for Wilson and for the customers who depend on us,” said Payam Maveddat, general manager for enterprise at Wilson Connectivity. “We’re no longer just providing coverage. We’re giving enterprises and their partners a complete, integrated solution that manages the entire network lifecycle with real-time intelligence. That means fewer truck rolls, faster problem resolution and a better experience for the people who rely on these networks every day.”
Said to be built to unify automated monitoring and management, the Autonomous Systems platform combines zero-touch visibility sensors with fully cloud-integrated workflow automation to streamline operations and accelerate decision-making. By transforming network and service data into actionable intelligence, Autonomous Systems says it can empower organisations to enhance efficiency, strengthen network resilience and optimise performance at scale.
“Wilson saw where the market was heading and made a strategic decision to lead their industry enabling full network life-cycle automation,” said Autonomous Systems CEO Steve Urvik. “Working together on this joint development, we’ve built something that gives Wilson’s customers and partners a level of integrated network visibility and control that simply wasn’t available in the market before.”
The service will be available globally in the second quarter of 2026. Pricing will be based on a combination of intelligent probe hardware and subscription-based remote monitoring.
Tech
Everyone Loves Lego! Here Are the Top Sets, Mugs, and Games for Every Lego Fan
To address the elephant in the room: Yes, Lego bricks are made of plastic. The company makes billions of tiny bricks that proliferate all over the world and all over your living room, and they will not biodegrade and cannot be recycled.
With that said, Lego bricks are machined to incredibly tight tolerances. Unless your dog chews on them, the bricks retain what Lego refers to as their “clutch power” for decades. Like so many others, my family became obsessed with Lego sets during the Covid-19 pandemic, and we still love them today. Years on, I have found no better way to while away a rainy afternoon than making tiny tyrannosaurs and pterosaurs with your son.
If you and your loved ones are also obsessed with Lego sets, we have some great gift ideas for you. If not, don’t forget to check out our other gift guides; Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are coming up sooner than you think.
Updated April 2026: We added the Throne Room, added more information about smart bricks, and updated links and prices.
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