Motorola Razr Ultra 2026 debuts innovative battery tech, Pentagon inks deal with 7 AI companies

The newly unveiled Motorola Razr Ultra 2026 introduces an important new technology to U.S.-focused smartphones: a silicon-carbon battery. It means the company has effectively beaten Apple, Google and Samsung to the new kind of cell in the States. Energy density is the primary benefit of silicon-carbon. The dynamics of phone design for foldable models makes the compactness that silicon-carbon can manage especially useful. As a result, the Razr Ultra 2026 has squeezed a 5,000mAh cell into the new phone, instead of the 4,700mAh battery found in last year’s model. Forbes

The Pentagon said on Friday it had reached agreements with seven leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. “These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare,” the Pentagon said in statement. The companies had agreed to the US military’s deployment of their technology for “any lawful use”, according to the Pentagon. Guardian

Millions of you in the United States could be eligible for compensatory PSN credit, and it’s all because of a $7.85 million class action lawsuit which Sony has agreed to settle. This is one of many similar legal battles the Japanese giant is currently fighting, and it all pertains to the manufacturer’s decision to stop selling digital game vouchers via retail. While you can still snag denominations of PSN credit from most major third-party stores, the platform holder famously ceased selling game-specific vouchers in April 2019, which entitled you to purchase digital games from a variety of different shops. PushSquare

A group of iLamps in Morocco. Image: Conflow Power Group

There have been many attempts to put data centres in unusual places over the years – Microsoft put a data centre under the sea, Elon Musk has suggested putting them in space. Now a UK firm is betting on data centres using thousands of connected smart lampposts, and has signed a formal agreement with a Nigerian state to deploy 50,000 of them. Warwickshire-based Conflow Power Group Limited (CPG) says networked together its solar-powered iLamp units “double as a revenue-generating distributed AI data centre”. However, some experts have told the BBC the tech isn’t a substitute for the powerful data centres needed to run the toughest AI tasks. BBC 

When DeepSeek, a Chinese chatbot, was released in January last year, more than $1tn (£740bn) was wiped from US markets over fears that Beijing had successfully caught up to Silicon Valley in the AI race. DeepSeek, little known outside AI circles, appeared to have developed a system that could match the likes of ChatGPT and Claude despite lacking the billions in funding or enormous data centre resources of its rivals. But before long, suspicions emerged about how the Chinese company had got there. OpenAI claimed that DeepSeek had been improperly trained by siphoning information from the US company’s own systems. Telegraph 

The Honor 600 Pro adopts a more premium look and feel compared to previous phones in the series, adding to the sensation that Honor is gunning harder than ever for the flagship brigade. Its new look has clearly (and some might say shamelessly) been influenced by the iPhone 17 Pro, which, in conjunction with Honor’s iOS-imitating Magic OS 10 software, effectively results in a more affordable alternative to Apple’s flagship phone. Indeed, certain design elements — like the 600 Pro’s skinny bezels and IP69K certification — actually beat the iPhone 17 Pro. Tech Radar