Owners of some Uniden security cameras will benefit from a software update that adds a motion tracking feature, providing more comprehensive footage.
Uniden’s update, which is rolling out now, applies to cameras within the wire-free and solar-powered Solo X2K PT Pro range (as distinct from the App Cam Solo X2K model), which start at $279.95 in Australia. These cameras have pan and tilt functionality, covering a 350-degree range, but didn’t have automatic motion tracking until now.
Now, the updated cameras can follow subjects when they enter the field of view. It’s hoped that by adding the feature, there will be fewer blind spots and that footage will include more information if an incident occurs.
Consistent with Uniden’s other cameras, any recorded footage is saved to a rolling seven-day cloud storage allocation or locally via a microSD card.
It feels like a long time since we needed a dedicated scanner to digitise documents. Various phone apps have turned the devices in our pockets into portable scanners, but now they’re smarter.
When Samsung launched the new Galaxy S26 range last week, it also included a neat update to its document scan feature. Built into the camera app, the phone automatically recognises documents so you can scan them into a digital format.
That by itself is pretty standard these days, but the AI improvements are a nice touch. Samsung’s document scan feature can automatically touch up bad lighting or even remove any stray elements, like your finger holding the page down. Check out my video of the scanning in action; it’s pretty helpful and might make home scanners even more obsolete.
Valens Quinn attended Galaxy Unpacked in San Francisco as a guest of Samsung Australia.
Xiaomi has launched its latest phones in Australia, the Xiaomi 17 series, its newest flagship range that continues the brand’s big focus on photography through a partnership with Leica.
Included in the launch is the $1,799 Xiaomi 17 Ultra, which is joined by a standard $1,399 17 model. But the most interesting addition is the Leica Leitzphone. The $2,299 phone is still a Xiaomi device at heart, albeit with more prominent Leica branding.
On the back of the Leitzphone is a physical camera ring that rotates, aiming to emulate the feeling of zooming in with a traditional camera. It also sports a specially made camera UI and exclusive camera filters that reproduce the look of Leica’s M9 and M3 cameras.
From left to right: Xiaomi 17, 17 Ultra, Leica Leitzphone. Images: Xiaomi.
Otherwise, the Leitzphone shares nearly identical specs to the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Both have a 50MP main rear camera, joined by a 200MP 75-100mm telephoto lens, and a 50MP ultra-wide shooter. On the front is a 50MP camera, while the phone supports up to 8K resolution video recording.
Each of Xiaomi’s top-end phones includes a 6.9-inch OLED display, a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, and a 6,000mAh battery.
At the cheaper end of the scale, the base Xiaomi 17 is more compact, with a 6.3-inch OLED screen, but it has a slightly bigger 6,330mAh battery. It has the same processor, but with 12GB of RAM and a different camera stack. Aside from different sensors, the 17 has a 50MP main camera, a 50MP 60mm telephoto lens, a 50MP ultra-wide camera, and a 50MP selfie shooter.
Xiaomi 17 price and release date
Available to order now from Xiaomi’s Australian website, the new range starts from $1,399. Aussies can get the base Xiaomi 17 model in four different colours: Black, Venture Green, Alpine Pink, and Ice Blue. Its 256GB configuration costs $1,399, while the 512GB model costs $1,599. From now until 18 March, buyers get a $200 discount on the 512GB variant, which works out to be a free storage upgrade.
The photography kit includes a grip that makes the phone feel even more like a camera. Image: Xiaomi.
Meanwhile, the 17 Ultra comes in Black, White, and Starlit Green. A 512GB version costs $1,799, and the 1TB model costs $1,999. As mentioned before, the Leica Leitzphone variant sets Australians back $2,299. Xiaomi includes a $349 photography kit — which includes a Leica-inspired grip with a built-in battery and shutter button — with the Leitzphone for any orders made before 18 March.
The grip looks like a more brand-specific premium version of the Belkin Stage PowerGrip. At just under $100, Belkin’s attachment is a decent alternative, particularly if you don’t end up with a Xiaomi 17 Ultra or the Leica Leitzphone.
More Xiaomi gadgets
Along with the new phones, Xiaomi also debuted several other devices, including the Watch 5, Redmi Buds 8 Pro, and the Xiaomi Tag.
Xiaomi advertises the $499 Watch 5 as using “10 per cent silicon-carbon battery technology”, which is higher density, enabling more capacity in the same-sized battery. As a result, Xiaomi claims the watch lasts up to six days of regular usage or up to 18 days when used in power saving mode.
With the $29.50 Xiaomi Tag, the brand aims to introduce tracking technology that works seamlessly across Android and iOS devices. It supports both Apple’s Find My and Google’s Find Hub technology, providing an alternative to trackers like AirTags, Moto Tags, and Galaxy SmartTags.
Xiaomi’s new power banks are far thinner than many other devices. Image: Xiaomi.
Rounding out the latest additions is the $119 Redmi Buds 8 Pro, a pair of ANC earbuds designed to last up to eight hours on a single charge. If you need more juice, Xiaomi also launched the UltraThin Magnetic Power Bank, which houses a 5,000mAh capacity in a thin form factor. It retails for $129, but is down to $69.50 until the end of March.
Two new creative appliances have just landed in Australia: the Cricut Joy 2 and Cricut Explore 5, with both adding more tools, materials, and guidance to kickstart craft projects.
The Cricut Joy 2 is the sequel to the brand’s smallest cutting machine, made for creating your own labels, cards, and decals. Priced at $249, the Joy 2 comes as part of a bundle that includes an assortment of cardstock, vinyl, transfer tape, and iron-on sheets out of the box.
New to Cricut’s upgraded compact cutting machine is the ability to make fully coloured stickers. Its “Print Then Cut” sensor can recognise printed images and precisely cut around them, making the customised stickers possible.
Another upgrade comes in the form of the Cricut Joy 2’s ability to cut more materials. Cricut advertises compatibility with “75+” materials, up from the original Joy’s (and the Joy Xtra’s) 50+.
Launching at the same time, the Cricut Explore 5 is a slimmer iteration of an appliance that can do all sorts of cutting and design projects, including customised clothes. It’s 30 per cent smaller than the previous model, taking up less space.
In Australia, the Cricut Explore 5 costs $449 for the Essential Bundle, including many of the same materials as the Joy 2, albeit in larger sizes. Both appliances hit stores, including Spotlight and Officeworks, on 6 March.
Across Cricut’s entire range, the company has also updated its Design Space app. It’s a platform that helps control each device, including a library of designs and instructions for different crafts.
New to the updated platform are “Guided Flows” to help walk Cricut users through projects step-by-step, including what materials and tools they need. When using one of these guides, projects automatically apply the size of the selected medium (i.e. shirts or mugs), providing a preview of the end result.
A lot has been mentioned about Samsung’s new hardware, namely the impressive Privacy Display on the Galaxy S26 Ultra. But a lot of the new stuff this year is software-driven, like the Photo Assist image editing tool that relies on generative AI.
I tried Photo Assist during an early hands-on session, and it’s quite surprising how naturally it works. For those not confident in using traditional editing software, it makes it easy to move subjects while also adding subtle shadowing to retain a natural look.
One of the demos I saw let me add more drinks to a photo of a Korean buffet just by using a text prompt. Photo Assist did a good job of filling in the negative space with some rather realistic-looking beverages. It’s a pretty neat feature, and you can see it in action via this video.
Valens Quinn attended Galaxy Unpacked in San Francisco as a guest of Samsung Australia.
Almost identical to its predecessor, yet significantly worse in a few key ways, the Motorola Moto G57 is one to avoid.
As technologies mature, it’s only natural that each new release becomes evolutionary rather than revolutionary. When it comes to smartphones, you don’t expect leaps and bounds – each year’s new model is typically only an iterative upgrade on its predecessor.
Motorola’s broad range of handsets has been a pretty good example of this over the years, which is why it’s a surprise to see that the new $299 Motorola Moto G57 fails to make any headway on last year’s $299 Motorola Moto G56. Actually, it’s a major step backwards in terms of ruggedness, expandability and software support, which simply isn’t good enough.
Apart from the fact that it comes in a new range of fancy Pantone colours, the Motorola Moto G57 is indistinguishable from last year’s Moto G56. In turn, the G56 offered a few improvements on the old Moto G55, as it did on the Moto G54.
The new Moto G57 sticks with a 6.7-inch, 20:9 aspect ratio to ensure it’s tall but not too unwieldy. It’s still a plastic frame with a vegan leather back.
At first glance, the Motorola Moto 57 is a carbon copy of its predecessor. Image: Adam Turner.
It retains the Moto stock standard configuration of a well-placed power button on the right, incorporating the fingerprint reader, with volume buttons above.
The SIM card slot remains on the left, supporting one nanoSIM and one eSIM, but you lose the added advantage of microSD support for expanding the onboard storage.
Look closer, and it’s the same 2400 × 1080-pixel LCD panel, although it now boasts a High Brightness Mode of “up to 1050 nits”. This is only a smidgen brighter than the Moto G56’s 1000 nits, but still not enough to support HDR watching Netflix.
The rear camera is still dual lens, with the same 50 MP Sony main shooter that still lacks optical image stabilisation. It’s accompanied by an 8 MP ultrawide, along with a depth sensor and flash. Around the front, the selfie camera remains 32 MP.
Across the bottom of the handset, Moto G57 sticks with USB-C 2.0 30 W TurboPower charging, with no AC charger in the box. You’ll also find an old-school 3.5 mm headphone jack.
Motorola still includes a basic transparent protective case, while sticking with Corning Gorilla Glass 7i and MIL-STD 810H6 ruggedness.
One major disappointment is that it abandons the Moto G56’s IP68/IP69 design, which could survive a serious dunking and blasts from high-pressure water jets. Instead, the Moto G57 dials it back to IP64, which means it’s only splashproof and less likely to survive misadventure.
Motorola Moto G57 specifications and price
Display size
6.7-inch, 20:9 aspect ratio
Display resolution
2400×1080 pixel, 391 ppi
Display technology
LCD
8-bit colour
Refresh rate: 120 Hz8
Touch sampling rate: 120 Hz
Water Touch
High Brightness Mode: up to 1050 nits
Display Colour Boost
Bands
2G GSM, 3G WCDMA, 4G LTE, 5G Sub-6
Chipset
Qualcomm Snapdragon 6s Gen 4 (4nm) Mobile Platform with 4×2.4 GHz Cortex-A78 + 4×1.8 GHz Cortex-A55
The Moto G57 ships with Android 16 and minimal bloatware thanks to Motorola’s Hello UX. Yet when it comes to operating system updates, you get none. Nada. Zip.
That’s right, Motorola offers absolutely zero Android OS updates. At least it still throws in 2.7 years of bi-monthly security updates and a two-year warranty, but you miss out on the security and feature improvements of Android 17, which you’d get from other smartphone makers, even at this price range.
In comparison, Samsung’s similarly-priced Galaxy A17 gets an impressive six years of operating system updates and six years of security updates. Meanwhile, the Oppo A5 5G receives three Android OS updates and six years of security patches.
Keep in mind, Motorola’s lack of OS updates for the Moto G57 is not a technical limitation of the hardware; it’s a business decision. When Motorola restricted the last batch of budget Moto handsets to only one Android OS update, it told me the decision was “based on value proposition” rather than a hardware issue.
Reducing its support obligations to zero OS updates and downgrading the ruggedness are presumably some of the ways that Motorola has managed to avoid a price increase from last year’s G56.
It’s a shocking way to treat customers and puts them at unnecessary risk, considering that budget handset buyers almost certainly intend to hang on to their phone for more than 12 months. They’re also likely to be less tech-savvy users who are more vulnerable without software updates.
The Motorola Moto G57 won’t get even a single Android OS upgrade.
Looking under the bonnet uncovers one of the Moto G57’s few hardware changes, with Motorola swapping out MediaTek silicon for Qualcomm. It has also switched the IMG BXM-8-256 GPU for the Qualcomm Adreno 710. These sound like a step up, but wait until you see the benchmarking results before you get too excited.
Meanwhile, you’re still limited to 4 GB of physical RAM, although it’s now expandable up to 12 GB with RAM Boost, rather than 8 GB. As for onboard storage, you’ve still got 128 GB, but the SIM card slot no longer accepts a microSD card for expanding that.
When it comes to bands, the Moto G57 supports Australia’s sub-6 GHz 5G networks but not faster millimetre wave 5G, as you’d expect at this price point. It’s accompanied by Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.1.
To keep things chugging along, you’ve got the same 5200 mAh battery, which should easily be able to go for 24 hours before recharging if you don’t push it too hard.
If you’re looking around online, don’t get the Moto G57 confused with the Moto G57 Power, which packs a much bigger 7,000 mAh battery but isn’t offered in Australia.
Quality
The switch from MediaTek to Qualcomm silicon has been a mixed blessing, with Geekbench 6 results of 1,002 single-core, 2,733 multi-core and 1,798 GPU OpenGL. That’s a slight step down from the G56’s 1,039 single-core, but a step up from its 2,304 multi-core (the G56 wouldn’t run the OpenGL test).
All that is enough to muddle through simple day-to-day tasks, but the handset does feel a bit sluggish at times.
It’s a similar story when it comes to photography. The results are mediocre, although somehow a slight improvement on the old Moto G56 I dug out of its box (which is still running Android 15).
The Moto G57’s rear camera (left) is a clear improvement on the G56 (right), which likely comes down to software and image processing. Images: Adam Turner.The Moto G57’s selfie camera (left) also offers a slight improvement on the Moto G56 (right), but still isn’t much to get excited about. Images: Adam Turner.
Who is the Motorola Moto G57 for?
While Motorola can be commended for avoiding a price rise, cost-cutting measures mean the Moto G57 is less rugged, less expandable and less supported than its predecessor. Of all these shortcomings, it’s hardest to forgive providing zero Android OS updates, and hopefully, there is enough pushback that Motorola is shamed into doing better next time.
Last year, it felt like the mediocre $299 Moto G56’s primary job was to make the $499 Moto G86 Power look fancy and the $199 Moto G35 feel affordable. This time around, it feels like the mediocre $299 Motorola Moto G57’s job is to see how much Motorola can strip away and expect people not to notice.
It might’ve come a month later than usual, but Samsung followed through on its yearly launch cadence, announcing the Galaxy S26 range in San Francisco overnight. Paired with a new set of buds, Samsung’s new phones look familiar, with a lot of the heavy lifting left to AI features.
Of the lot, the Galaxy S26 Ultra was the standout, gaining an eye-catching Privacy Display feature that obscures the screen from unwanted onlookers. Samsung also announced the Galaxy Buds 4 range, led by major audio improvements to the flagship Galaxy Buds 4 Pro model.
As expected, given current economic factors, there were some price increases along the way. To help offset that, there are some compelling Galaxy S26 pre-order deals to help soften the blow.
As for everything else, read on for all the major announcements from Samsung’s latest Galaxy Unpacked event.
Price increases across the board
Amidst the backdrop of a global memory shortage, more expensive consumer technology was always on the agenda. One of the first major examples came courtesy of Samsung, with price increases across the entire Galaxy S26 range.
$50 more for the 256GB Galaxy S26 Ultra isn’t too steep a hit, but the next tier down is where it’s particularly noticeable. Compared to last year’s phones, the Galaxy S26 and S26+ are $150 pricier for the base storage configuration. Look at the next storage option, and you’ll see a $250 price hike.
No matter which way you slice it, that’s a steep increase.
Galaxy S26 Ultra Privacy Display stops snooping
Image: Samsung.
Samsung’s 2026 flagship phone improves in all the expected areas, while keeping some things the same. It has faster processing power, relying on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset to power its on-device smarts.
Privacy Display is the S26 Ultra’s biggest addition, a technology that helps obscure the screen when out in public. Often, the people who buy top-end phones use them for work, so the security of confidential files is a concern. Exclusive to the Galaxy S26 Ultra, Privacy Display makes it nearly impossible for passersby to read the screen.
When the feature is enabled, only the person viewing the screen head-on can see the displayed contents clearly. Everyone else sees the equivalent of a tinted window, with Samsung’s feature concealing the screen. People sitting next to you on the bus, or anyone peeking over your shoulder in public, can’t see a thing.
S26 range doesn’t support Qi2, but there are options
Image: Belkin.
Some punters hoped that Samsung would add native Qi2 wireless charging support to the new Galaxy S26 devices. They were partially let down by the lack of magnetic technology on show, but at least the S26 Ultra gained faster wireless charging speeds.
Fortunately, for prospective Galaxy S26 owners eager to use magnetic chargers, there are some workarounds. Samsung sells a magnetic charger that supports 25W wireless charging speeds on the S26 Ultra, but you’ll need a compatible case to benefit from the magnetic alignment.
Overnight, Belkin announced a range of accessories for the latest Galaxy phones, including a Qi2 charging dock capable of powering three devices simultaneously. To take advantage of the magnetic component of Qi2, Belkin’s Sheerforce cases include built-in magnets. When fitted with one of the cases, you can slap one of the Galaxy S26 phones on a Qi2 charger and not worry about alignment.
Sleeker Galaxy Buds 4 range steps up quality
Image: Samsung.
Samsung usually waits until midway through the year to announce new earbuds. The Galaxy Buds 3 Pro came out in July 2024, alongside the Z Flip 6 and Fold 6 phones. This year, Samsung decided to launch the Galaxy Buds 4 Pro and Buds 4 earlier, alongside its flagship S26 range.
Now with more compact stems and a nice brushed metal finish, the Galaxy Buds 4 look more stylish than the previous-gen earbuds. Most importantly, the Galaxy Buds 4 Pro have a larger woofer and better active noise cancellation, designed to improve the listening experience.
