Technologies

A Mystery Phone, Found in the Desert, Slowly Reveals Its Secrets

The Samsung phone had been lost for a decade. Then Katie Elkin found it.

Everyone who loves mysteries secretly hopes that one day life will drop an intriguing puzzle into their lap for them to solve. Maybe not an Agatha Christie-type crime, but something that will send them on a real-world chase to connect the dots and land at a satisfying conclusion.

That’s exactly what happened to Katie Elkin, a retired teacher with a penchant for mysteries. «I’m 84 and I have lived a full, wonderful life,» she tells me over a video call from her home in Prescott, Arizona.

Until now, Elkin’s mysteries have largely been genealogy-based. She recounts an extraordinary story about making friends with a woman from California and discovering that their grandfathers had trained together in the Army and then shipped out to France in World War I on the same day. «That’s my whole life,» she says. «It’s coincidences.»

On this Friday in February, we’re talking about another coincidence in Elkin’s life — one of finding a phone, lost for a decade in the desert, and Elkin’s attempt to reunite it with its owner.

Our phones are immensely personal items, serving both as memory banks that store our most precious data and as portals that connect us with every important person in our lives. These days, if we lose them, tracking technology means there’s every chance we could be quickly reunited with them, but that hasn’t always been the case.

Those disappearances can be high-stress moments for anyone — just ask Apple about the unreleased iPhones it lost back in 2010 and 2011, which, coincidentally, were around the same time it introduced the Find My iPhone feature. But even today, recovering a lost phone means relying to an extent on the goodwill and honesty of the person who found it. Many people will choose to do the right thing in this scenario, and some — like Elkin — will go above and beyond to help out a stranger.

On a sunny day just before Thanksgiving, Elkin and her husband drove about 10 minutes west of the city to spend some time outdoors. Prescott is surrounded by national parks and ponderosa pine forest, but on this day, Elkin was headed to the desert — not for a hike, she says, but an «amble.»

Rather than taking the well-marked trail popular with hikers and ATVs, Elkin instead split off onto a lesser-known path «obliterated by the grasses and the weeds.»

It was Elkin’s dad who taught her that if she wanted to spot something, she should look for it — sage advice that’s served her well over the years. «He was always finding change,» she says. «And I can do that too. I always find animals. If we’re driving, I can see them in the woods … I’m always looking for something.»

Looking for a vague something can turn up the oddest of things, and on that particular day, the something Elkin found was a dusty, beaten 2012 Samsung Gusto 2 lying on its side, clamshell open in the scrub.

Elkin picked up the phone, thinking she would give it to a neighbor boy who liked to take electronics apart. But when she got it home, she was struck by another idea — what if she could get the phone to turn on?

Like many of us with a drawer full of mystery cables, Elkin has kept all the cords and wires that have come with the electronics she’s purchased over the years. She dug through her stash and found a charger that fit the Gusto (she still has no idea what it was used for previously).

When CNET reviewed the Gusto 2 — a simple flip phone that came out the same year as the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S3 — we said: «the construction seems strong enough to withstand multiple drops and endless opening and closing.» Our instincts about its potential resilience were, it turns out, correct.

«I couldn’t believe it when it came up charging,» Elkin says. It took a little while, but when the phone turned on, she was ecstatic. «I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I wonder who this phone belongs to?’ And so that was when the mystery began.»

The quest for answers

Elkin went into the text messages and started to piece together the Gusto owner’s life, clue by clue. The owner worked in a cafe, she seemed to have family connections in Chicago, she was a renter and a keen hiker. Her name was Maddie.

The other thing Elkin noticed was that the last message was marked Saturday, May 16. It was the only evidence she had to indicate when exactly the phone might have been lost. She went to the internet and looked up which years May 16 had fallen on a Saturday. Two possible answers cropped up — 2020 and 2015.

Elkin’s internet research didn’t stop there. She took one of the commonly texted numbers in the phone and did a reverse lookup. «And bingo! I found a woman’s name that had that phone number,» she says. But when she called the number, it was disconnected.

«I said to myself, who would know where she is?» says Elkin. «Her dad would know.» She found a number listed under «daddio,» performed another reverse lookup and found the name of a man living in Chicago. «I was so excited because I was getting close,» she says.

On Dec. 30, Elkin’s birthday, she called the number, but no one picked up. She had to leave a message. «I was really disappointed, because I wanted to talk to somebody,» she says.

Ten minutes later, her phone rang, but when she picked up, it wasn’t a man on the other end of the line. «It was Maddie, the owner of the phone,» she says. «She had come to Chicago to visit her dad for the holidays.»

Elkin and Maddie talked for around 10 minutes. «She was amazed,» says Elkin. «We were both amazed.» Maddie didn’t want her phone back, but it turns out she had lost it in 2015 after hiking in the exact spot that Elkin had found it.

The little phone that could

For a decade, the little Gusto had been lying out in the desert. Unlike some parts of Arizona, Prescott has four seasons, with all the minus temperatures, scorching heat, snowfall and summer storms that come with them. The Gusto weathered every storm, and battered and bruised as it was, it still came back to life.

We have little expectation these days that our phones will last us a long time, and we rarely get all the life out of our devices that they’re capable of offering us. Rather than seeking to get them repaired, once they fail us in one respect, we tend to seek out replacements. Most Americans hang onto their phones for an average of 2.5 years, according to a Reviews.org survey.

It turns out, though, that some phones are built to last, and the Gusto was one of them. After Elkin had spoken with Maddie, she reached out to Samsung to let them know her story. «I said to myself, ‘Does Samsung require some kudos for having a product that lasted that long?'»

Any tech company would. My own first phone, a 2002 Sagem MW 3020, gave up the ghost simply by being exposed to the concept of water while wrapped up inside a backpack on a rainy day. In spite of the best efforts of phone-makers to increase display resiliency, many people are still walking around out there with cracked screens.

For as long as we’ve had mobile phones, they’ve been vulnerable pieces of kit. But whatever secret sauce Samsung put inside the 2012 Gusto 2 shows that it was more robust than most — even though it was lying open with its main screen exposed when Elkin found it.

At the time we reviewed the Gusto 2, we gave it a score of 7 out of 10, with points knocked off for its subpar screen resolution and a smaller-than-usual headphone jack. It’s too late for us to go back and revise that score in light of what we know about how robust the phone is 14 years later, but it’s entirely possible that the «problems» we highlighted actually played into the Gusto’s long-term survival.

Elkin still doesn’t know what she’s going to do with Maddie’s Gusto, although a friend has suggested that Samsung clad it in gold and put it on a pole at headquarters. Samsung is clearly proud of the phone’s durability, having put me in touch with Elkin, but is also undecided about how to celebrate the life the Gusto 2 has lived. In spite of Elkin’s love for mysteries and my suggestion that the FBI recruit her, she isn’t about to start a detective agency to reunite other people with their lost possessions. «It’s just a hobby,» she laughs.

That’s a shame. As someone who’s lost more than one phone over the years, I would dearly love to be reunited with my missing technology, and I’m sure there’s a market for Elkin’s skills. Not every phone is as resilient as the Gusto. Most devices that have taken such a battering would likely refuse to even turn on.

Perhaps there’s a longevity challenge for all phone-makers. I can’t promise CNET would be able to replicate this scenario in our reviews testing process, but in an age of disposable tech, it would be lovely to give extra points for truly hard-earned durability.

Technologies

Amazon Speeds Up Delivery Even More With 1- and 3-Hour Options

The retailer says the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities, with discounted shipping for Prime members.

Same-day delivery apparently isn’t fast enough for some Amazon shoppers. The retail giant said on Tuesday it’s adding new shipping options that will get products to front doors within a one- or three-hour window.

The company said in its announcement that the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities across the US, while the three-hour option is now live in more than 2,000 areas. Amazon’s web page at amazon.com/getitfast shows whether those options are available to shoppers for their location. More than 90,000 products will be available for those shipping windows, the company said.

For those who can’t get those services (including the author of this post, who lives between Austin and San Antonio in Texas), a message will display: «3-hour delivery is currently unavailable. Check back at a later time or shop products with Same-Day delivery below.»

Pricing for the faster delivery options is not cheap: It’ll cost you $20 for one-hour delivery and $15 for three-hour delivery for those without an Amazon Prime account, or $10 and $5 for customers who subscribe to Prime.

Last year, the company rolled out faster Amazon delivery options to 4,000 additional areas.

In a video of the podcast Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, hosted by Amazon’s CEO of worldwide stores, Kandace Kapps, the director of the company’s same-day strategy team, spoke in more detail about the challenges of fast shipping. Kapps discussed shifts in customer buying habits over the last few years, such as more people buying household essentials like toilet paper on Amazon.

She said that Amazon can deliver so quickly by placing same-day delivery hubs close to customers in metro areas and by getting products ready to ship within 15 minutes, aided by warehouse robots.

«I think customers are going to continue to get magically surprised by how fast we can deliver to their doorstop,» Kapps said.

Herrington said fast shipping increases sales: «When we speed up the service, the probability that somebody buys a product from us goes up.»

Other retailers, including Walmart, have been adding same-day delivery options or exploring other ways to speed up shipping times to compete with Amazon.

Removing buyers’ moments of hesitation

Part of Amazon’s strategy, which has involved a massive buildout of locations, deployment of thousands of trucks, deals with other delivery services and investment in logistics software, is actually pretty simple: being there when people need last-minute items or make impulse buys.

«It’s about removing the last moment where you would’ve reconsidered the purchase,» said Stephanie Carls, retail insights expert at coupon and promotional-code website RetailMeNot, a sibling site of CNET. «It changes how you shop, not just how fast you get things.»

Carls said that Amazon’s super-fast delivery is removing the timeframe when people might change their minds about a purchase.

«There used to be a gap between deciding to buy something and actually having it. That’s when you’d price check, rethink it, or decide you didn’t need it after all,» she said. «This closes that gap.»

The retail expert said that competitors, including Walmart and Target, have been speeding up delivery times in some markets. Still, they’re not matching Amazon’s scale or product range at those speeds or levels of consistency.

«And that’s what starts to make everyone else feel slow,» Carls said. «Amazon’s advantage is how tightly connected its technology, inventory and delivery networks are, which makes this level of speed more repeatable.»

Technologies

Dog Health Goes Digital With New AI Chatbot

Fi Intelligence allows you to ask questions of a specially tailored pet health chatbot, but it’s not meant to replace vet visits.

It might be time to rethink what it means to be sick as a dog. On Tuesday, Fi, a smart pet technology company, announced a new AI-powered chatbot to help owners stay on top of their dog’s health using a blend of personal information and generalized dog breed data.

The AI agent, which the company is calling Fi Intelligence, is integrated directly into the Fi app. It has access to all the information gathered about your dog across the entire suite of Fi products, including the Fi Series 3 Plus and Fi Mini dog collars, as well as information and documents uploaded by the pet owner. The service is for dogs only (not cats, rabbits or other pets).

If you already own a Fi smart collar, existing data will be incorporated into the AI agent’s dataset to help it answer your questions.

When creating Fi Intelligence, the company identified a multitude of common questions that dog owners have, including whether their animal friend is walking or sleeping enough, or scratching more than usual. The chatbot was created to help owners find answers to these questions quickly and easily, according to Fi.

Fi designed its agent to answer these questions using a mix of general information about a dog’s breed, personal information and biometric data gathered by Fi smart pet collars.

Pet owners can ask the chatbot questions in plain English and get back detailed responses. Fi Intelligence is equipped to answer general questions, contrast your dog’s current data to previous time periods and compare your dog’s data to other dogs of the same breed.

Fi says its chatbot is different from general-purpose AI agents because it has been trained on a proprietary dataset containing «the largest repository of real-world canine activity, sleep and behavior data in the world.»

Fi Intelligence doesn’t replace a trip to the vet — and the company stresses it’s not supposed to. Rather, the agent is supposed to grant owners «informed confidence» about their dog’s health and can help them «show up [to the vet] with specific, documented observations drawn from weeks of continuous data.»

«The strongest signal from our beta was that owners aren’t using this to replace their vet,» said Fi’s Vice President of Product Darrell Stone. «They’re using it to show up better prepared.»

According to Fi, the Fi Intelligence integration will provide the most complete dog health profile available in the app so far. Fi Intelligence is available to all Fi members immediately.

Technologies

Nvidia Teases DLSS 5 and Gamers Aren’t Impressed

The new AI technology is making some big changes to video game graphics that hardly anyone seems to like.

Nvidia opened its GTC conference with a keynote by CEO Jensen Huang, revealing the company’s latest tech. Among the raft of the company’s AI developments, gamers were treated to the imminent version of its AI-powered upscaling and optimization technology, DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), touted as the «biggest breakthrough in computer graphics».

Nvidia published a video illustrating how DLSS 5 can enhance graphics in Resident Evil Requiem, Starfield and other games, showing before-and-after takes. But gamers weren’t thrilled. In fact, the response to DLSS 5 resembles more of a collective backlash, replete with memes, ridicule and outrage.

Gamers were quick to point out that DLSS 5 transformed the original graphics into something vastly different. Some called the visuals «AI slop» because they look like «yassified» AI-generated filters.

Many worry that DLSS 5 could deviate from a creator’s specific artistic vision. Critics also fear that if this technology becomes the industry standard, video game graphics might start to look the same, losing their unique visual identity.

«Everything about this is a betrayal of these game’s artistry,» said YouTuber The Sphere Hunter in a post on X Monday. «Painting over handcrafted, intentional 3D art with shiny, wrinkly, sunken-in, porous, puckered, fraudulent, filtered nonsense is deeply disrespectful. If you want this, just watch gen-AI videos all day.»

Countless memes mocking the tech’s exaggerated features flooded the internet. Others on social media parodied the effects DLSS 5 could produce in other games.

Ok, you convinced us, NVIDIA DLSS 5 is coming to «Copycat» too 😅 pic.twitter.com/WT2qRRz9EC

— Copycat // OUT NOW 😻 (@GameCopycat) March 17, 2026

In a Q&A on Tuesday, Huang addressed the backlash from gamers, calling them «completely wrong.» Huang underlined that DLSS 5 «enhances and adds generative capability, but it doesn’t change the artistic control» and that «it’s in the direct control of the game developer.»

The team at Digital Foundry, which specializes in game technology and hardware reviews, called it «disruptive and transformative» but was generally positive about it, though they saw some hiccups.

«[The images] looked a little bit uncanny, I would say, but definitely the overall portrayal of those characters is much more sophisticated,» said Oliver Mackenzie, video producer and writer for Digital Foundry.

Bethesda’s official X account replied to comments from members of Digital Foundry about Starfield and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, both published by Bethesda.

«This is a very early look, and our art teams will be further adjusting the lighting and final effect to look the way we think works best for each game. This will all be under our artists’ control, and totally optional for players,» the publisher said.

DLSS 5 is set to be released sometime in the fall.

What is DLSS?

Nvidia first released its DLSS tech back in 2018 with its RTX 2080 card: The RTX architecture introduced the Tensor cores, which are essential for accelerating the calculations used by the DLSS AI. The deep learning technology was designed to upscale images and video from low resolution in real time to achieve higher frame rates.

Gamers weren’t impressed at first, but later versions of the technology did perform better in games that supported it. DLSS 4, released last year and tweaked to 4.5 as of January, made significant improvements to detail rendering, reducing motion artifacts, boosting frame rates, and generating more realistic lighting via path tracing (which incorporates interactions with ray-traced lighting).

What does DLSS 5 do?

DLSS 5 works a bit differently than previous versions of the technology. According to Nvidia, DLSS 5 shifts from processing simple pixels to understanding 3D elements. By deconstructing characters into specific components — such as skin, hair and clothing — the AI can render them more consistently. This results in faster performance and much more realistic details, especially for textures and lighting.

Game developers control how DLSS 5 enhances images and to what degree, ensuring it matches the game’s aesthetic. The demo video showcased some positive enhancements, but others looked like sweeping changes to the characters and the environment.

Which games will support DLSS 5 at launch?

On Monday, Nvidia released a list of games slated to support DLSS 5:

AION 2
Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Black State
Cinder City
Delta Force
Hogwarts Legacy
Justice
Naraka: Bladepoint
NTE: Neverness to Everness
Phantom Blade Zero
Resident Evil Requiem
Sea of Remnants
Starfield
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
Where Winds Meet

What cards will support DLSS 5?

Nvidia has yet to provide a list of GPUs that will support the new technology. In an FAQ, the company says it will release a list of supported cards closer to its release.