Technologies

Standalone AI Devices Are Back, Baby. The Note-Taking Plaud Note 3 Proves It

Plaud AI has already sold over a million AI devices. Is it time for you to add it to your tech collection?

There was a moment around 18 months ago when it felt like AI had unlocked an entirely new consumer technology category. The wearable Humane Pin and handheld Rabbit R1 were small, standalone devices that promised to be your AI personal assistants and threatened to be smartphone killers.

But almost as soon as the hype around them peaked, it died down again. The devices that hit the market during that initial wave of excitement overpromised and underdelivered, and today we remain just as reliant on our phones as ever.

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The tech industry hasn’t completely discarded the idea of standalone AI devices, which combine the power of sensors and large language models. Former Apple design visionary Jony Ive and OpenAI are working on their own AI-centric «screenless phone» concept. Meanwhile, smaller tech companies are also building interesting devices of their own — and making surprising successes of them.

I was recently introduced to Plaud AI, which has already sold over a million AI note-taking devices, and just unveiled its latest product, the Note Pro. This credit card-sized slice of tech perches on the table next to you and slides into a slim case on the rear of your phone for easy transportation. Its five microphones can capture audio up to 5 meters away, and 2 hours of charging will give you 50 hours of continuous recording time.

This third device from Plaud is an update to its original tabletop note-taking device (it also sells a wearable note taker) and comes with more powerful recording capabilities, along with a clutch of new features. First is the small AMOLED display along the top edge, which will display the recording status and battery life. The second notable adjustment is that the power button can also be pressed to highlight key parts of a conversation in real time.

The Note Pro has 64GB of built-in storage, but the core of its intelligence is in the companion smartphone app, which parses all the material the device captures, hopefully into something genuinely useful, intelligible and actionable. Plaud Intelligence relies on LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and is multimodal — meaning you can add in pictures and text, which it can analyze as a whole.

As with Plaud’s previous products, the Note Pro is designed for use in professional contexts and provides access to over 2,000 templates, including those designed for people working in specific fields — medical or legal, for example. As a journalist, I need to record many of my conversations and meetings, so I’ll be interested to see if Plaud can offer anything above and beyond Otter, which I usually rely on.

Note Pro vs. my phone: The real test

That brings me to the big question hanging over the Note Pro, which is why would I carry a separate device to record my meetings when my phone is more than capable? It’s a question I’ll attempt to answer as I test the device out in the coming week. Plaud CEO Nathan Xu laid out his vision for the Note Pro in a briefing, explaining why he thinks people would want to carry one themselves.

Xu said that he sees «lots of beauty in human intelligence,» but that he wants to help humans overcome our shortcomings — our limited memory span, tendency to get distracted and our inconsistent energy levels, are examples he gives. By applying the power of an LLM to our daily lives, AI can help pick up the slack, he said.

Yes, you could use an app on your phone to record a meeting and run it through AI, or rely on the AI tools built into Google Meet or Zoom, but they’re often captured in isolation. Instead, Plaud is with you all the time, filling in the gaps between those meetings, capturing nuggets from every conversation — including the face-to-face ones, which are often overlooked – and understanding them in the context of your entire day.

«Conversation is a form of intelligence — it’s where the ideas begin, the decisions are made and the meanings are shared,» Xu said. «So we exist to help people to capture, extract and utilize intelligence.»

There are other questions I still have about the Note Pro, largely based around privacy. Xu says Plaud’s privacy protections are «best in class,» which it will need to be if it’s capturing confidential and sensitive medical, legal or corporate discussions. Some doctors I’ve spoken to are already wary of using AI transcription services due to potential breaches of doctor-patient confidentiality, and many corporate environments may be resistant to people using these devices in the workplace.

A lesser, but still significant concern is how long it will take for me to lose the proprietary charging cable. The Note Pro is slimmer than a USB-C connector, so it’s clear why having its own charging connector is necessary, but it may prove tricky to keep tabs on.

I’ll be updating this piece with my impressions as I get to grips with using the Note Pro, but if you just can’t wait for that, it is available for preorder now for $179 (£169 or roughly AU$350) and will ship at some point in October.

Technologies

I Tested Honor’s Rival to Samsung’s Z Fold 7 and It’s a Skinny Powerhouse

The Honor Magic V5 is incredibly slim but it’s got more to like than just its size. Shame you can’t buy it in the US.

At only 4.1mm thick at its thinnest unfolded point, the Honor Magic V5 is incredibly skinny. In fact, the company has said it’s the world’s thinnest foldable measuring in just 0.1mm skinnier than Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7. That claim is debated — it depends whether you include the built-in screen protector or not — but we’re almost literally splitting hairs at this point. World’s thinnest or not, it’s mind-blowingly svelte.

Well, it blew my mind, anyway. The other foldables I’ve been using recently include Google’s Pixel 9 Pro Fold and the OnePlus Open, both of which feel positively bloated when held against the Magic V5. Getting my hands on Honor’s latest foldable made me realise just how far the technology has come in a few short years.

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But you’ll pay for that skinny design. Starting at £1,700, the Magic V5 is hardly what you’d consider cheap, although it’s around £100 cheaper than Samsung’s equivalent. Honor doesn’t sell its phones officially in the US, so for reference that UK price converts to $2,299.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks with the phone and here’s what I Iike about it.

Skinny design

It’s an obvious start, really. That thin body addresses my main concern about book-style foldables. It’s barely thicker than a regular phone when folded up, so it’s much easier to hold and easier to slide into a jeans pocket. Well, most of it is. While the phone’s body is only 8.8mm thick when shut, the camera unit protrudes an additional 7mm — almost doubling the overall thickness of the phone.

As a photographer I’ve never said this about a phone before but it’s almost a shame Honor didn’t really cut back on the cameras. I’d have loved to see what a foldable phone felt like that was so slender the whole way across.

While you’d probably imagine such a thin phone would be incredibly delicate, Honor actually boasted that it holds a Guinness World Record for the heaviest weight (104 kilograms) lifted by a foldable phone. How that actually translates to real-world durability over time remains to be seen, but the phone certainly felt sturdy in my hands-on time.

Its IP59 dust and water resistance will also help keep it safe from spilled drinks and other debris, but Google’s latest Pixel 10 Pro Fold takes the crown as the first foldable to offer IP68 resistance, giving it greater protection against dust or other particles getting inside and potentially harming the hinge.

The inner screen measures 7.95 inches and provides loads of room for videos or games. Like most book foldables, it has an almost square aspect ratio, so widescreen movies will still play as a strip through the middle. The crease isn’t especially noticeable under mixed lighting conditions. The outer 6.43-inch display fills the front of the phone and it’s bright and vibrant.

Powerful processor and Android software

The Magic V5 runs on the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chip and it put in some great results on our suite of benchmark tests. Navigating around the interface is swift and games like Genshin Impact and PUBG play well, even at max settings. They also look great when played on the massive inner display.

It runs Android 15 at launch although an update to Android 16 is expected later in the year. Honor has customized the interface with its own UI which makes various changes to the layout, apps and text, although it’s still easy to get to grips with.

It comes with various Honor AI tools built in, including an image editor that does things like object removal or expanding the canvas — the latter giving me the infinitely long arms I always dreamed of. It also includes the image-to-video generative AI tool that rocked my world previously by bringing my dad back to life. It works just the same here.

You’ll also find the usual array of Google AI tools including Gemini Live and Circle to Search. Honor says the phone will receive a total of seven years of software and security updates.

The phone has a 5,820-mAh battery, which should be good for at least a full day of mixed use, depending on what you get up to with it. Spend the whole morning streaming video on the massive inner screen and you’ll probably need to give it a top up later in the day. Doing so is quick, though: It supports 66W wired charging, as long as you have a compatible charger.

Solid cameras for a foldable

That massive rear bump houses three cameras: a 50-megapixel wide camera, a 50-megapixel ultrawide and a 64-megapixel telephoto camera providing 3x optical zoom. I’ve not spent much time testing the cameras, but from my early use I’d say they’re decent. But they can’t quite challenge today’s top camera phones like the iPhone 16 Pro or Galaxy S25 Ultra.

This is pretty much par for the course for foldable phones. Most companies tend to outfit their foldables with more midrange camera hardware in order to try and keep the already high price from going any higher. While the cameras on the V5 are certainly decent (especially for a foldable), if photography is your main consideration when buying a phone then it may not be the handset for you.

Is the Honor Magic V5 a good phone to buy?

Its slim design alone makes it one of the more impressive foldable phones I’ve held. It feels like a totally different level of device from earlier book-folding foldables like the OnePlus Open and it’s absolutely worth taking a look for that reason alone. Add in the powerful Qualcomm processor, the promised durability and the solid camera performance and the Honor Magic V5 has a lot to offer.

And it does it at a price that slightly undercuts Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7. Sadly, I haven’t had my hands on the Z Fold 7 so I can’t say how the two phones compare, but on paper it seems like it’s a close battle.

The main reason for those of you in the US to buy the Samsung over the Honor is simple; You can’t buy the Honor in the US. Everyone else, you’ll have a tougher time deciding.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for Aug. 28 #543

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Aug. 28, No. 543

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle is a tough one. The answers are long and a few of them are very tough to unscramble. If you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Do go on…

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Blah blah blah…

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

SOLE, TOLE, VERB, HATTER, GREY, STAVE, CHAT, HATE, VEIL, LATS, SALE, LIVE, CAUL, QUOTE

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

GABBY, VERBOSE, VOLUBLE, TALKATIVE, LOQUACIOUS

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is CHATTERBOX. To find it, look for the C that’s two rows over to the right and then five letters down in that row, and wind around.

Toughest Strands puzzles

Here are some of the Strands topics I’ve found to be the toughest in recent weeks.

#1: Dated slang, Jan. 21. Maybe you didn’t even use this lingo when it was cool. Toughest word: PHAT.

#2: Thar she blows! Jan.15. I guess marine biologists might ace this one. Toughest word: BALEEN or RIGHT.

#3: Off the hook, Jan. 9. Similar to the Jan. 15 puzzle in that it helps to know a lot about sea creatures. Sorry, Charlie. Toughest word: BIGEYE or SKIPJACK

Technologies

The Apple Watch Ultra 3 Could See Its Biggest Upgrade Yet

Clues in the iOS 26 public beta point to a larger display, expanded emergency features, and a few more surprises for Apple’s rugged smartwatch.

With Apple’s September 9 event officially in the books and rumors about its fall lineup gaining traction, the biggest clue yet about the new Apple Watches comes straight from the source. The notoriously secretive company may have tipped its hand regarding a new Apple Watch Ultra 3 in the public beta of iOS 26 (first spotted by MacRumors), where imagery reveals new screen specs that don’t match any current Apple Watch model on the market.

While Apple has yet to confirm the existence of the watch (and likely won’t until the event), the Ultra 3’s absence at last year’s launch along with its two-year upgrade cadence, make 2025 a prime candidate for its debut. Here’s everything we’re expecting for the Ultra 3 at Apple’s September event based on the latest reports, leaks and usual upgrade patterns.

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Apple Watch Ultra 3 design and display

If the leaked iOS 26 imagery holds true, the Ultra 3 will feature a slightly larger screen with a 422×514-pixel resolution (up from the Ultra 2’s 410×502 pixels). In keeping with Apple’s tradition of maximizing screen real estate without adding bulk to the already giant Ultra, the upgraded screen size wouldn’t increase the actual footprint and could be achieved by reducing the bezel size.

Apple Watch Ultra 3 performance

The Ultra is due for a performance bump to at least keep up with the S10 chip on the current Series 10 (the Ultra 2 runs on the S9 chip). The more likely scenario is that both the Ultra 3 and Series 11 get a new S11 chip that would typically bring faster performance and greater efficiency. The bump up in processing power could support new features such as enhanced GPS tracking, satellite connectivity, more advanced health monitoring and potentially some additional Apple Intelligence integrations like Workout Buddy which Apple announced in WatchOS 26 (and which I’ve started to think might be a bigger deal that it first appeared).

Apple Watch Ultra 3 satellite connectivity

One of the more intriguing Ultra 3 rumors comes from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who has reported that Apple is exploring satellite connectivity for the next Apple Watch Ultra model. This would enable emergency messaging and location sharing even in areas without cellular coverage.

If implemented, it could build on the Apple Watch’s existing lineup of potentially life-saving features like emergency SOS, fall detection and car crash detection to outdoor enthusiasts going off the grid or even people who live in remote areas.

Gurman’s report also suggests the Ultra may gain 5G connectivity, a step up from its current LTE-only support.

Apple Watch Ultra 3 health and fitness

Several rumored health upgrades for the Series 11 could also make their way to the Ultra 3, the most anticipated being blood pressure tracking. According to Gurman, Apple is already testing the feature, though accuracy challenges could delay a public release this year.

Blood glucose monitoring is another long-rumored addition, but it’s expected to be even further out than blood pressure tracking, making it highly unlikely for 2025.

In another Bloomberg report, Gurman says Apple is developing a broader AI health initiative, code-named «Project Mulberry,» aimed at bringing personalized health and fitness insights to the Apple Watch. This would build on Apple’s recently announced AI powered Workout Buddy which delivers personalized motivation for certain workouts with Watch OS 26. The Ultra’s durability and long battery life could make it an ideal platform for round-the-clock training guidance, though based on current rumors, the rollout may be better aligned with a 2026 release.

Apple Watch Ultra 3 battery life

The Ultra already boasts the longest battery life of any Apple device (save for the Airtag of course), with up to two full days or 72 hours in low-power mode. While there are no concrete leaks about changes in battery capacity, pairing an S11 chip with a more efficient display could result in significant gains — potentially approaching three days or up to four days in low-power mode. The faster charging Apple introduced with the Series 10 could also make its way to the Ultra line, reducing the amount of time the watch spends off your wrist.

Apple Watch Ultra 3 price and release date

Barring unexpected price hikes from tariffs or component costs, the Ultra 3 is expected to keep the same $799 starting price as the Ultra 2.

Apple typically unveils its new watches at the same event as the iPhone, which this year is expected in early September (date not yet announced). If the pattern holds, preorders should begin a few days after the keynote and arrive in stores (or at your doorstep) one to two weeks after that.