Technologies

I Went Hands-On With the OnePlus 15’s Camera and You Need to See the Results

What better first test run than taking it on a neighborhood photo safari?

The OnePlus 15 is the next premium handset from the Chinese phone-maker, and I just got my hands on it. To give its cameras a whirl, I took it out for a quick spin through a hip corner of Los Angeles.

The OnePlus 15’s big advantage is that it’s one of the first to run the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Qualcomm’s next-generation chip for high-end phones, which was launched in September. The system-on-a-chip has a big influence on how photos come out, processing every image captured through the rear cameras.

The OnePlus 15 has three 50-megapixel rear cameras, along with a selfie shooter on the front, and I took photos of my neighborhood flora and fauna using them all. While there’s a certain level of polish expected of premium phone cameras, this phone has something new: it’s the first major OnePlus handset released since the company’s partnership with Hasselblad ended. For years, OnePlus incorporated the iconic Swedish camera maker’s color science and image calibration in its cameras.

With Hasselblad gone, the OnePlus 15 features the debut of the DetailMax Engine, a loftily-titled computational processing system that aims to «present scenes as they truly are, without over-beautification or distortion,» as the company’s official blog post explained.

That means a new page for shooting photos on a OnePlus phone, which made me want to know what the OnePlus 15 is capable of. Join me through a casual tour of a vibrant Los Angeles neighborhood, taking the kinds of snapshots that make up the majority of everybody’s camera roll. I’ll need to spend a lot more time with the device to give it a comprehensive review.

Our first shot is of the outside of The Silver Lake House, a neighborhood Thai restaurant. While I clearly can’t resist a slight Dutch angle here, the blend of colors look distinct and not oversaturated — a win for true-to-life processing. I like the way the OnePlus 15 captured the light and shadows filtering through the trees, and the camera has handled the lens flare well without over-exposing that area. Also, notice the reflection on the chrome on the heat lamp.

Here’s a close-up of knick-knack plant vases on a windowsill overlooking the restaurant’s indoor tables. The light is really balanced, bright on the foreground outside the eatery and dimmer within — but colors and details are still visible inside. You can also pick out some detail in the reflections on the window of the street behind me.

I couldn’t resist this 1960s Ford Thunderbird sitting idly on the street, a cruising car from yesteryear resting in a hipper corner of LA. Note the texture of the dirt streaks over the paint contrasted against the shiny chromed metal surrounding the taillights. More importantly, despite the camera’s focus on the foreground, the OnePlus 15 still manages to capture the blue sky in the background, complete with details in the clouds.

I took this photo of a nearby dog park with the ultrawide lens, which preserves humdrum details in the brown dirt amid sprouted grass along the bottom.

Here’s an image of the same dog park that I took while zoomed in at 7x magnification. It has a lot of detail and color. But we can go further!

Here’s the dog park photographed at 120x magnification, the farthest this phone can zoom in. The image looked grainy as heck on the phone’s screen when I shot it, but that DetailMax Engine’s post-processing has done relative wonders, making this semi-recognizable despite a lot of smudging at the edges caused by noise reduction — look between the chain links. To be sure, this is not a great image — it’s nearly painterly — but the fact that it can zoom in this far and still serve up a photo with something recognizable is amazing.

Here’s a selfie featuring yours truly. I think this photo has good detail and shadow, but what most impresses me are the mountains in the distance, which can be seen to some degree through the classic Los Angeles haze (marine layer, not smog) occluding the air, not the OnePlus selfie camera.

For comparison, here’s a selfie I took at night. The color is fine, with decent details in the foreground, though they start to blur behind me — notice the bricks on the bottom right, the posters on the light pole on the mid-left, and especially the building over my shoulder.

Here’s the obligatory night shot of a Los Angeles street. While the city will never be dark enough to test the phone’s ability to capture constellations of stars in the night sky, this does show the contrast between warm streetlights and the bright neon. The details of the stucco pockmarked the walls of the bowling alley are clear, even from across the street. Look closely at the texture of the street’s pavement. It’s a granular mix of grays flecked with white spots. All the grime of the city, preserved by the OnePlus 15’s new shiny cameras.

That’s it for the first look at the OnePlus’ camera capabilities. Happy Halloween! And keep an eye out for my full OnePlus 15 review.

Technologies

Google Rolls Out Expanded Theft Protection Features for Android Devices

The latest Android security update makes it harder for thieves to break into stolen phones, with stronger biometric requirements and smarter lockouts.

Google on Tuesday announced a significant update to its Android theft-protection arsenal, introducing new tools and settings aimed at making stolen smartphones harder for criminals to access and exploit. The updates, detailed on Google’s official security blog, build on Android’s existing protections and add both stronger defenses and more flexible user controls.

Smartphones carry your most sensitive data, from banking apps to personal photos, and losing your device to theft can quickly escalate into identity and financial fraud. To counter that threat, Google is layering multiple protective features that work before, during and after a theft.

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At the center of the update is a revamped Failed Authentication Lock. Previously introduced in Android 15, this feature now gets its own toggle in Android 16 settings, letting you decide whether your phone should automatically lock itself after repeated incorrect PIN or biometric attempts. This gives you more control over how aggressively your phone defends against brute-force guessing without weakening security.

Google is also beefing up biometric security across the platform. A feature called Identity Check, originally rolled out in earlier Android versions, has been broadened to apply to all apps and services that use Android’s Biometric Prompt — the pop-up that asks for your fingerprint or face to confirm it’s really you — including third-party banking apps and password managers. This means that even if a thief somehow bypasses your lock screen, they’ll face an additional biometric barrier before accessing sensitive apps.

On the recovery side, Google improved Remote Lock, a tool that allows you to lock a lost or stolen device from a web browser by entering a verified phone number. The company added an optional security challenge to ensure only the legitimate owner can initiate a remote lock, an important safeguard against misuse.

And finally, in a notable regional rollout, Google said it is now enabling both Theft Detection Lock and Remote Lock by default on new Android device activations in Brazil, a market where phone theft rates are comparatively high. Theft Detection Lock uses on-device AI to detect sudden movements consistent with a snatch-and-run theft, automatically locking the screen to block immediate access to data.

With stolen phones often used to access bank accounts and personal data, Google says these updates are meant to keep a single theft from turning into a much bigger problem.

Technologies

Scientists Are Using AI to Help Identify Dinosaur Footprints

The Dinotracker app was trained on eight major characteristics of dinosaur footprints to quickly determine the species.

An international team of researchers has devised a futuristic tool to examine the footprints left by dinosaurs in our ancient past. The AI-powered app, Dinotracker, can identify dinosaur footprints in moments.

The research comes from a joint project by the Helmholtz-Zentrum research center in Berlin and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the paper on Monday.

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Identifying a dinosaur species from a footprint isn’t always easy. The footprint is hundreds of millions of years old, often preserved in layers of rock that have shifted over the eons since the track was laid.

Also, we still have a lot to learn about dinosaurs, and it’s not always clear which species left a footprint. Subjectivity or bias can come into play when identifying them, and scientists don’t always agree with the results.

Gregor Hartmann of Helmholtz-Zentrum, who led the project, told CNET that the research team sought to remove this propensity from the identification process by developing an algorithm that could be neutral.

«We bring a mathematical, unbiased point of view to the table to assist human experts in interpreting the data,» Hartmann said.

Researchers trained the algorithm on thousands of real fossil footprints, as well as millions of simulated versions that could recreate «natural distortions such as compression and shifting edges.»

How AI is being used on dinosaur tracks

The system was trained to focus on eight major characteristics of dinosaur footprints, including the width of the toes, the position of the heel, the surface area of the foot that contacted the ground and the weight distribution across the foot.

The AI tool uses these traits to compare new footprints to existing fossils, and then determines which dinosaur was most likely responsible for the footprint.

The team tested it against human expert classifications and found that the AI agreed with them 90% of the time.

Hartmann made it clear that the AI system is «unsupervised.»

«We do not use any labels (like bird, theropod, ornithopod) during training. The network has no idea about it,» Hartmann said. «Only after training, we compare how the network encodes the silhouettes and compare this with the human labels.»

Hartmann said that the hope is for Dinotracker to be used by paleontologists and that the AI tool’s data pool grows as it’s used by more experts.

Bird vs. dinosaur

Using Dinotracker, the researchers have already uncovered some intriguing possibilities on the evolution of birds. When analyzing footprints more than 200 million years old, the AI found strong similarities with the foot structures of extinct and modern birds.

The team says one possibility is that birds originated tens of millions of years earlier than we thought. But it’s also possible that early dinosaur feet just look remarkably like bird feet.

This evidence, Hartmann notes, isn’t enough to rethink the evolution of birds, since a skeleton is the «true evidence» of earlier bird existence.

«It is essential to keep in mind that over these millions of years, lots of different things can happen to these tracks, starting from the moisture level of the mud where it was created, over the substrate it was created on, up to erosion later,» he said. «All this can heavily change the shape of the fossilized track we find, and ultimately makes it too difficult to interpret footprints, which was the motivation for our study.»

Dinotracker is available for free on GitHub. It’s not in a download-and-use format, so you’ll have to know a bit about software to get it up and running.

Technologies

Belkin Is Ending Support for Wemo Smart Home Devices. Here’s What That Means for You

If you own certain Belkin Wemo devices, they’ll stop working as soon as Jan. 31. Here’s what to know before it happens.

Belkin is ending support for most of its Wemo smart home devices, a move that will shut down the Wemo app and cloud services and significantly reduce the functionality of many popular smart plugs, switches and sensors.

The change takes effect at the end of January, so you have only a few days to migrate compatible devices or start planning for replacements.

You can see the full list of affected devices on Belkin’s support page. Once support ends, features that rely on the cloud — including remote access, schedules and integrations with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant — will stop working. Those Wemo devices will no longer function as «smart» products, even if the hardware still powers on.

Since Belkin will also stop releasing firmware updates, affected devices won’t receive bug fixes or security improvements.

Belkin’s decision highlights a growing issue in the smart home world: Devices can stop being «smart» long before the hardware wears out.

Apple Home users get a limited lifeline

There is one major exception. Some Wemo devices that are compatible with Apple Home and HomeKit can continue working after the Wemo app shuts down, but only if you migrate them before the end-of-support deadline.

«Since the Wemo app will be ending, it’s very important that users switch to Apple Home/HomeKit by the end of the month,» says CNET smart home editor Tyler Lacoma. «Belkin has a long-term partnership with Apple, so for compatible devices, that transition is usually pretty simple.»

However, Lacoma warns that older Wemo products may not support Apple Home at all.

«If someone has a Wemo device that’s not on the list of Apple-compatible products, it won’t have much functionality left,» he says. «It won’t get firmware updates to fix bugs or improve security, so at that point, it makes sense to factory reset it and recycle it before the end of the month, then look for a replacement.»

Belkin has published a list of Wemo devices that support Apple HomeKit, and users need to complete the setup process before the Wemo app is retired. The following products will continue to work through Apple HomeKit:

Wemo Smart Light Switch 3-Way (WLS0403, WLS0503)
Wemo Wi-Fi Smart Light Switch with Dimmer (WDS060)
Wemo Smart Light Switch (WLS040)
Wemo HomeKit Bridge (F7C064)
Wemo Dimmer Light Switch (F7C059)
Wemo Mini Plugin Switch (F7C063)
Wemo Outdoor Plug (WSP090)
Wemo Mini Smart Plug (WSP080)
Wemo Stage Smart Scene Controller (WSC010)
Wemo Smart Plug with Thread (WSP100)
Wemo Smart Video Doorbell (WDC010)

What about refunds?

Belkin says customers with Wemo devices that are still under warranty when support ends may be eligible for a partial refund. You can find the warranty period for each device in the list of devices on Belkin’s support page linked above. Refund requests won’t be processed until after the end-of-support date, and eligibility will depend on the product and purchase date.

Because many Wemo products were released years ago, most people should not expect to qualify for a refund. We’ve reached out to Belkin to ask whether other products will lose support in the near future. We haven’t heard back at the time of publishing.

What Wemo owners should do now

If you own Wemo devices, the clock is ticking. Here’s what to do next:

Check whether your Wemo products support Apple Home and migrate them as soon as possible.
If your devices don’t support Apple Home, plan to replace them before support ends.
Consider recycling unsupported devices once they lose smart functionality.
Remove the Wemo app after services shut down to avoid confusion.

If you’re shopping for replacements, this is a good time to look at CNET’s list of the best smart plugs and review our guide on what to do when smart home devices lose support.