The Motorola Edge 40 Pro, Motorola’s new premium phone, has top specs, a triple rear camera, a sharp display with a high refresh rate and one of the fastest charging rates among phones you can buy. That gives Android phone fans an alternative to Samsung, but only if they’re in Europe or Latin America, as Motorola hasn’t announced when (or if) this phone will come to the US.

The Motorola Edge 40 Pro has a starting price of 899 euros (roughly $980, £780, AU$1,440), pitting it squarely against top-tier phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus ($1,000, £1,049, AU$1,649). It’ll be available across Europe in the coming days, with a slower rollout to select Latin American markets in the coming weeks.

The Motorola Edge 40 Pro is a follow-up to last year’s Motorola Edge Plus 2022 (don’t mind Motorola’s confusing naming), a phone we felt was a good top-tier choice with a cleaner version of Android than other handsets. The new Edge 40 Pro improves on its predecessor in nearly every way, even if it may be tough to notice some of the incremental boosts to performance and screen quality.

For instance, the Edge 40 Pro is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, which Motorola says has 35% faster CPU performance and 40% better battery efficiency than the silicon in last year’s Edge Plus 2022. This should put it toe-to-toe with other top Android phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S23 series. It packs 12GB of RAM and comes with 256GB or 512GB of storage space.

The new Motorola phone’s big 6.67-inch display brings back the stylish waterfall-style curved edges, and has a maximum refresh rate of 165Hz, up from 144Hz in its predecessor, making gaming, watching shows and scrolling the internet or menus even smoother. It also supports Dolby Vision HDR and HDR10 Plus for a wide gamut of colors.

While the Edge 40 Pro’s main suite of 50-megapixel standard and 50-megapixel ultrawide cameras may not have changed from last year’s phone, it did swap out its predecessor’s 2-megapixel depth sensor for a 12-megapixel 2x telephoto lens. But instead of zooming in, it seems this will be used mostly to add depth in portrait modes. If you want a phone with zoom capabilities, you’ll want to opt for the Samsung Galaxy S23 series. Otherwise the Edge 40 Pro will likely take comparable photos to other premium phones; take a look at comparison photos in our review of its predecessor, the Edge Plus 2022 to get an idea.

The Edge 40 Pro also inherits its predecessor’s 60-megapixel front-facing camera, though selfies should benefit from the new chipset’s Cognitive Image Signal Processor that uses AI to optimize different areas of each picture (subjects, buildings, background) separately for more true-to-life photos. Like the Edge Plus, the new phone can take video in up to 8K resolution or in 4K with HDR10 Plus for far more diverse color shades.

But one area the Edge 40 Pro could stand above its competitors is quickly refilling battery: It supports up to 125-watt recharging, just a hair faster than the 120-watt charger that comes with the Xiaomi 13 Pro. Qualcomm says its charger can fully juice up a dead battery in 23 minutes, or, in the time it takes to listen to a couple songs, get enough battery life to last through the day.

The Edge 40 Pro battery’s 4,600-mAh capacity is respectable and roughly equal to the Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus’ 4,700-mAh battery, but the latter is capped at 45-watt charging, so Motorola’s phone takes the lead on paper. The Edge 40 Pro also supports 15-watt wireless charging and 5-watt power sharing to charge up other devices.

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For years gig workers have been shuttling passengers, delivering dinners and shopping for goods, often putting their own safety at risk without getting the benefits full-time employees enjoy. Now the US Federal Trade Commission has clarified its policies for any companies in the gig economy that deceive and exploit their workers. 

“Protecting these workers from unfair, deceptive and anticompetitive practices is a priority, and the Federal Trade Commission will use its full authority to do so,” the agency said in a blog post Thursday.

In a 17-page policy statement the FTC explicitly outlined bad company actions and policies, such as how restrictive and nonnegotiable contracts may harm workers by stifling free speech or keeping them from seeking new work while employed, which could violate Section 5 of the FTC Act. The commission also put the gig industry on notice that it will investigate any sign of backdoor agreements between companies to fix wages or other forms of anticompetitive action. And it warned against making “misleading claims about the costs and benefits of gig work.”

Companies employing gig workers at a massive scale, such as Uber and Lyft, have proposed statewide initiatives and bankrolled campaigns to prevent their contract workers from becoming full employees with benefits. That includes 2020’s Proposition 22 in California, which voters approved. Despite a judge ruling the proposition unconstitutional, it remains in effect as appeals run their course.

The companies argue that the gig model gives people job flexibility and freedom they wouldn’t have otherwise. Critics counter that workers are being taken advantage of and that the motive is financial: Lyft and Uber, for instance, stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year if worker status changes. The gig economy is expected to generate $455 billion in annual sales next year.

Read more: ‘A Totally Different Ballgame’: Inside Uber and Lyft’s Fight Over Gig Worker Status

Uber didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, and Lyft declined to comment, directing CNET to the Flex Association, which includes companies like Lyft, Uber, Grubhub, Doordash and Instacart that contract large numbers of gig workers. 

“What’s missing from the FTC’s policy statement is the perspective of those very workers the agency seeks to protect,” Flex Association CEO Kristin Sharp said in a statement. “We welcome an open dialogue with the FTC so we can share more insights into the ways our members support app-based earners and their communities.” 

Read more: Best Tax Software for Self-Employed in 2022: File Late Taxes Now, or Estimate Quarterly Taxes

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T-Mobile spent $304 million to scoop up thousands of additional spectrum licenses in the latest FCC auction of frequencies to expand its 5G service to cover more people in rural and underserved areas.

While T-Mobile was far and away the biggest winner in the FCC Auction 108, this wasn’t a surprise, as the frequencies covered the 2.5 GHz spectrum that the carrier has been using for its midband 5G network. Neither Verizon nor AT&T secured spectrum in the auction, according to FCC filings. 

The 7,000 county-based licenses that T-Mobile acquired in the auction plug holes in its overall 5G network, providing service for 81 million people “primarily in rural areas,” according to a T-Mobile press release. The carrier has been building out its 5G network for years, but its latest efforts seek to shore up service in more remote areas without much coverage. Last month, T-Mobile announced a partnership with SpaceX to use Starlink satellites to cover signal dead zones.

Read more: T-Mobile Is Dangling 3 Months of Free Data to Lure You to Switch

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Apple unveiled the iPhone 14 lineup last week with the usual fanfare, but an early indicator suggests that fans aren’t clamoring for the base models and instead are focused on the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max. 

The iPhone 14 might be the loser of Apple’s new phone lineup.

Notable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in a blog post on Monday that preorders for the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus are “worse than iPhone SE 3 and iPhone 13 Mini.” 

There are a couple likely reasons why consumers are avoiding the baseline iPhone 14 models. Those phones didn’t receive any of the more exciting features coming to the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max, like the faster A16 processor and sharper 48-megapixel main camera. In addition, consumers don’t feel the price difference between the $800 iPhone 14 and $1,000 iPhone 14 Pro thanks to big promotions from carriers and generous trade-in values from Apple. 

In 2022, it’s easier than ever to go Pro.

“In terms of the base [iPhone 14] compared to the price points, it’s just too compelling to do [iPhone 14 Pro],” said Dan Ives, managing editor of equity research at Wedbush Securities. “The carrier discounts and promotions are significant.”

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This continues the evolution of the Pro models from a nice-to-have luxury to a must-get purchase for anyone upgrading to a new iPhone. The gap between the two lines has widened considerably over the years, starting with just size, then camera and now a whole set of features including the new camera cutout and the heavily touted Dynamic Island feature. Anyone who wants to show off the fact they have a new iPhone will have to pay extra for the physically different one. 

It doesn’t hurt that Apple likely turns a higher profit on those Pro models. 

Carriers are helping with the upgrade game. With $800 to $1,000 off new iPhones, carriers are incentivizing consumers to opt for pricier Pro and Pro Max phones. But there’s another undercurrent that’s bolstering sales right now: Around 240 million of the 1 billion iPhones have been in their owners’ hands for three and a half years or more, according to Ives’ research, and those people may upgrade. 

When they do, they’re less likely to pick the baseline iPhone 14. There’s not much new over the iPhone 13 released last year or the iPhone 12 in 2020, leading CNET’s Patrick Holland to say that “there’s no compelling reason to upgrade from either of those phones” to the new iPhone 14. It doesn’t get a new chipset, misses out on the sharper main camera and lacks the fun “Dynamic Island” app bubble as well as the always-on display, all features that make the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max more advanced than last year’s phones.

At least the $900 iPhone 14 Plus has a larger screen than the baseline iPhone 14 despite not getting any extra features, and it could be more endearing to consumers than the iPhone 13 Mini, which appealed to a loyal but niche subset of Apple phone buyers. But for just $100 more, consumers can opt for the iPhone 14 Pro.

The dominance of the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max may have surprised even Apple, as preorders for the higher-tier phones now list delivery windows into mid- and late October. While reports indicate Apple ordered 90 million iPhone 14 series phones for the holiday quarter, which is on par with how many iPhone 13 series phones it shipped last year for the same period, the spike in preorders for the Pro and Pro Max models could mean Apple has to increase its orders for the holidays — if not, stores could run out of the higher-tier iPhones in a month.

Preorders after launch are a relatively stable predictor of iPhone sales over the last five years of holiday seasons. While sales could level off after this initial bump of early adopters, it’s likely that despite inflation and more conservative consumer spending toward the end of the year, this could be a big holiday season for Apple.

“It would be one for the record books in Cupertino,” Ives said. 

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Just three years after the first mainstream 5G phones like the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G launched, global shipments of 5G phones have just surpassed those of 4G phones, according to an analyst.

You’ll have to squint to see it, but the graph tweeted by Counterpoint partner and research vice president Neil Shah does show 5G phones made up 49.9% of phones shipped globally over 4G phones at 49.7% (the remaining 0.4% are 3G phones) as of the second quarter of 2022. That’s winning by a hair, but it shows a clear trend as consumers phase out their older devices and buy new phones capable of connecting to 5G networks.

US carriers have been pushing 5G adoption, with Verizon, which started the year saying a third of subscribers had 5G phones, making it cheaper to get top-tier 5G phones with generous promotions. Consumers aren’t just buying pricier phones either, as 5G has trickled down to mid-range and budget phones, too. 

Read more: Does Your Next Phone Really Need 5G? How to Decide

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Google has added a new batch of free features for Android phones to help share lots of files at once, warn deaf users about alarming sounds and watch YouTube videos together.

Like many other little feature drops, the ones Google introduced Thursday via blog post are a bit of a grab bag, but they’re quality-of-life improvements in several categories. Android owners can use Nearby Share — the AirDrop-like local sharing feature — to instantly mass-send files to multiple Android devices signed in to the same account at once, and they’ll receive the file even if their device is turned off.

While the Sound Notifications feature had previously warned deaf and hard-of-hearing users about specific sounds like fire alarms, running water and door knocks, users can now add their own custom list of sounds to trigger notifications — whether that’s a siren, a bird whistle or the iconic Slack knock-knocking sound.

Google TV also has a new feature for the blind and low-vision community, with a new curated library of movies with audio descriptions. To find the list, press the Google Assistant button and ask “Search audio description movies.”

You can also group watch videos on YouTube or play a handful of classic games like Uno or Heads Up with up to 100 friends through Google Meet thanks to new live-sharing features, accessible through the triple-dot button on the bottom right of the menu bar. 

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On the same day the iPhone 14 was unveiled, the crowning event of the Code 2022 conference was the announcement of a permanent online memorial to Steve Jobs, Apple’s iconic co-founder and longtime CEO.

On Wednesday, Recode’s Kara Swisher led Apple current Apple CEO Tim Cook, former lead product designer Jony Ive and Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs in a warm discussion of his lasting impact that now includes a website devoted to the tech legend called the Steve Jobs Archive.

The archive is being created by an archivist and lead historian who consulted with Powell Jobs, Cook, Ive and others who worked with Jobs over the years. While the archive’s online presence doesn’t have much right now beyond a few of the tech icon’s more famous speeches, it will eventually display more artifacts and materials that reflect his philosophy. 

It’s “much more about ideas,” Powell Jobs said, especially Jobs’ notion that understanding how human design governs our lives means you can change it, interrogate it and stretch it to make human progress.

“Everything that you’re born into, the design of everything around you, the clothes that you wear, all of these decisions were made by someone else,” Powell Jobs said. “As humans, we have a responsibility to put things back into that pool of human existence in a way that benefits us.”

For instance, the first item that greets visitors is this email Jobs sent in late 2010, roughly a year before he died. 

The Steve Jobs Archive will live online along with some programs and other products. Among the collection will be memories of Apple’s co-founder culled from interviews of hundreds of people who knew him. There will also be a body of stuff that’s “just Steve,” as Ive described, which will help folks get the sense of how he saw the world.

While rich with stories and notions about who Jobs was and the legacy he left, the announcement of the archive was the only bit of news from the discussion. Powell Jobs spoke of when he came back to Apple in 1997 and hewed its large product line down to just four models and of his power to say “no” — not just to bad ideas but to great ones that didn’t fit. 

“It speaks to the clarity and crispness of his thinking, and making those four things the best things on the planet,” Powell Jobs said. “He talked about leaving behind a body of work the way an artist does.”

Jobs’ vision for Apple was at the intersection of liberal arts and technology, Cook explained, noting that those who followed have deliberately chosen not to make decisions how he would have made them (at Jobs’ own request), but they kept the company at that crossroads of human-inspired design.

“We always think about the humanity of the story of the person behind the product,” Cook said. 

Despite Apple’s turnaround success in the 2000s, Jobs could still be surprised. Apple’s co-founder had always assumed vicariously that his work would have enormous influence. But Ive recalled one day at lunch, the volume of the iPod Nanos sold in the world struck Jobs in a new way — that they were all directly touching people. 

“It thrilled him, not because the goal was huge volume, but to be so relevant,” Ive said.

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai headlined the opening day of the Code 2022 conference on Tuesday and revealed very little under questioning from host Kara Swisher, but he may have shown more than he knew: it looks like he was wearing the Pixel Watch that’s slated to come out on Oct. 6.

Pichai discussed a lot about Google’s greater business but didn’t talk about any devices we’re expecting to be announced soon, like the Pixel 7 smartphone. But as Bloomberg’s Apple journalist Mark Gurman first noticed, photos of Pichai revealed a very unique-looking smartwatch on his wrist. 

Based on our photos of the event, it looks like Pichai probably wore a Pixel Watch, judging by how closely it looks compared to the photo of the circular dial, green-banded watch on Google’s teaser site. 

Google already acknowledged that its next big product launch event would be Oct. 6, and given all the info Google has already openly published, we can expect the Pixel 7 phones, the Pixel Watch, and possibly the Pixel Buds Pro. 

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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This holiday season, Santa Claus is making a list and checking it twice. But will he include Apple’s iPhone 14 in this economy? 

Apple’s iPhone 14 launch event this week will serve as the unofficial kickoff for the holiday shopping season. As usual, the phones are expected to start at $700 and go past $1,000, making them expensive even in the best of circumstances.

But this holiday season will be far from the best circumstances, as experts predict consumer spending to be notably lower than last year. People are expected to lower their budgets as persistent inflation drops purchasing power and the specter of a recession is pushing companies to enact price hikes and lay off staff.

See also: How to Watch Apple’s ‘Far Out’ Sept. 7 Event

iPhones historically have good sales, but it’s an exception and not a guarantee. The reality is that the economic situation makes it hard to guess whether consumers will embrace Apple’s phones, and while there’s enthusiasm among some people for the device, it’s unclear whether that can overcome the dour feelings everyone seems to have. 

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Consumers are already saving however they can on essentials by buying no-name brands, so this holiday season they’ll probably be a lot more selective when it comes to big-ticket items, said Angelica Gianchandani, professor of marketing at University of New Haven’s Pompea College of Business.

“[Consumers are] going to pick for the value, and they’re really going to look to the retailers for sales and discounts and promotions,” Gianchandani said. 

Consumers may spend between 30% and 40% less this holiday season, predicts Marina Koytcheva, vice president of forecasting at CCS Insight, which could lead them to put off buying pricey electronics. While Apple’s fan base of more affluent buyers aren’t as strained by economic trends as others, even they are feeling the crunch: “A growing share even of those buyers is showing more caution, suggesting that this Christmas season will be challenging for everyone,” Koytcheva said.

The good news is that some parts of the market may bounce back in 2023. A new report from market researcher IDC expects this year’s smartphone shipments to have declined 6.5% compared with last year thanks to global economic conditions before the phone industry rebounds to 5.2% predicted growth in 2023. 

Things will get worse before they get better.

Down in the dumps

A lot of people are seeing red when they look at where the economy’s headed over the next few months, and that’s not just the holiday decorations. Consumer confidence is slowly recovering from its lowest point in nearly a decade back in July, according to the Conference Board. The Fed is making unprecedented moves, raising interest rates to lower inflation, which could cool consumer spending. 

The tech industry, in turn, has started feeling the aftershocks of inflation and turmoil — Facebook parent company Meta admitted that shrinking ad sales led to its first-ever revenue drop, Google ad sales were similarly down, and Snap just announced it was laying off one in five of its employees in a companywide restructuring.

Apple so far seems to be powering through. The company fared better than its tech peers, as CEO Tim Cook explained during an earnings call in July that even though iPhones were the last to the 5G game, connectivity to the next-gen networks is a catalyst for growth.

Apple’s ability to actually get its iPhones into people’s hands is a feat in and of itself these days, analysts say, thanks to supply chain shortages and COVID lockdowns in China, which have disrupted manufacturing for everything from cars to phones to garlic. But Apple says it’s been able to largely work beyond those issues, with Cook reporting sales growth in nearly every region during last quarter’s earnings call. The company expects to sell just as many iPhones this holiday season as it did last year, given how many iPhone 14 units it ordered, Wedbush analysts said, pointing out that around a quarter of the 1 billion iPhones actively used are 3.5 years old or older and likely ripe for an upgrade.

So even though we aren’t expecting many improvements in the iPhone 14 over last year’s model, it’ll be far more advanced than the 3-year-old iPhone 11. All of Apple’s other services and accessories like Apple Watches that require iPhones mean it’s probably a question of when, not if, they’ll upgrade. 

“I don’t think there’s a single feature that makes you buy a phone. More and more it’s the package you get,” said Carolina Milanesi, analyst at Creative Strategies.

Some early pandemic issues, like supply chain shortages, have cleared up, though not for everything — ask anyone who’s still trying to buy a PS5. But we’re spending differently now, too, as the online ordering sprees that started at the beginning of the pandemic have finally tapered off. This year, inflation rose to seriously impact spending on smartphones and other market segments. PC and tablet sales may continue to slump into 2023, IDC predicted.

Along with Apple, other premium brands selling pricey products like Lululemon may still be selling better than everything else, but it isn’t clear which big-ticket items will make it into consumers’ spending budgets. Experts expect people will simply buy less this holiday season, and we’ll get a better idea how they’ll be spending — and what they’ll be spending on — once we’ve tallied up September’s spending totals on back-to-school items and Labor Day escapes, which serve as a bellwether for the holiday season.

Consumers could simply wait for more discounts that drop earlier every year ahead of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals seasons. Or they may buy refurbished instead of new, which dovetails with the growing consumer desire to buy more sustainable products.

“People are just being very careful of what they choose. They want to make sure there’s meaning to how they spend their money and time,” Gianchandani said.

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While all eyes are on Apple ahead of next week’s iPhone 14 launch event, Verizon may have another incentive to get iOS users to sign up for its 5G service: including Apple One, the bundle of all Apple services, as a free perk.

Verizon may include Apple One with its priciest “5G Get More” tier, according to MacRumors. That tier, which costs $90 for one person per month, has a list of perks that currently includes Apple Arcade or Google Play Pass and Apple Music, along with Hulu, Disney Plus and ESPN Plus, as well as 600GB of Verizon cloud data. 

The Apple One bundle would include other services like Apple TV Plus, Apple Fitness Plus, Apple News Plus and 50GB of iCloud storage, all of which typically costs $15 per month for one person. 

Verizon declined to comment.

Read more: Best Cheap Phone Plans: Affordable Alternatives to Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile

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