Most impressive is battery life. There’s a 5,100-mAh cell, and this phone easily lasted two full days of average use. Even heavy users should expect to get through a full day without requiring a top-up. When you do need to recharge, you can use the included 68-watt charging adapter or a wireless charger. Motorola is one of the few phone makers to still include a charger in the box.
Where it loses points is the camera system. A 50-megapixel primary camera is joined by a 50-MP ultrawide and a 60-MP selfie camera. In my photo comparisons, the Edge+ took some sharp shots, but it had a hard time keeping up with the $499 Google Pixel 7A. Motorola’s results are often oversaturated and overly brightened, and they tend to deliver slightly off skin tones. In low light, I frequently had to retake photos because the first result was blurry. If the camera is important to you, I’d avoid buying any Motorola phone. Consider the Pixel 7A or Samsung Galaxy S23 instead.
Motorola promises three Android OS upgrades and four years of bimonthly security updates.
This phone is the result of a rare (public) partnership between Motorola and its parent company, Lenovo. If you’re familiar with Lenovo’s popular line of ThinkPad business laptops, the ThinkPhone (7/10, WIRED Recommends) tries to emulate the look, down to a red, customizable button on the left side of the phone that’s meant to look like the red nub on a ThinkPad’s keyboard. Technically, it’s an enterprise phone, but you can buy it unlocked at Motorola or Lenovo, and I like it!
It’s similar to the Edge+ in many ways, though there are some small changes that explain the slightly lower price. For starters, it doesn’t have a curved glass display, though you might like that. The OLED screen is a little smaller at 6.6 inches, with a refresh rate that goes up to 144 Hz. It’s powered by the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset, which is still a flagship processor but isn’t as powerful as the Gen 2.
Still, the 5,000-mAh battery lasts two days, and there’s a 68-watt charger in the box, along with wireless charging support. It retains an IP68 rating for water resistance, has NFC for tap-to-pay support, and comes with 256 GB of storage.
There’s a 50-MP primary sensor, a 13-MP ultrawide, and a 32-MP selfie camera. I actually preferred many of the photos from the Lenovo ThinkPhone to some of the shots I took on the Motorola Edge+, but these cameras still don’t measure up to their peers.
Motorola promises three Android OS upgrades and four years of bimonthly security updates.
A Folding Moto
Motorola’s first folding smartphone from 2020 had a lot of flaws, but its successor levels up the game in a few ways. The Razr+ (7/10, WIRED Recommends) is a folding flip phone—essentially, it’s like a traditional phone you can fold in half. Yes, you can flip open the phone to answer a call and flip it shut to end it.
When it’s closed, the larger 3.6-inch OLED exterior screen can show you notifications, apps, and handy widgets to check the weather, calendar events, and news. It even lets you play simple games. You can also use the superior primary cameras—which would typically be on the “back” of the phone but are now at the front—to snap selfies and use this external screen as a viewfinder. They’re some of the sharpest selfies you’ll snap.
I finally got my hands on a Flipper Zero. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a noob-friendly version of the kind of penetration testing tools that security experts use to test the safety of systems. It packs a wide range of antennas, including RFID, sub-GHz radios, and NFC, which allows it to scan, analyze, and speak to everyday wireless devices that most of us don’t think much about.
While others have used their Flipper Zeros to test their car or hotel’s security or to make ATMs spit out cash, I had much loftier goals in mind. I got mine a few weeks before Tears of the Kingdom came out. As most Nintendo fans know, the collectible Amiibos figurines aren’t just toys. They can be used to get special rewards in games—like Link’s legendary horse Epona—and you can’t earn those rewards any other way. That’s fun for fans who can buy the figurines, but a bummer for anyone who doesn’t want to chase down collectibles just to get a special horse.
This is where my Flipper Zero comes in. I’ve been using it to score as many legendary horses as I can.
Whitehat Hacking?
Photograph: Flipper Zero
Amiibos have NFC tags in their base—specifically, NTAG215 tags that allow someone to write around 500 bytes of data. While that data is write-only, it’s not really under lock and key. Unlike, say, the NFC chip in your credit card, which has more robust security, an Amiibo can easily be read and copied.
This has led to community-driven projects around exchanging Amiibo codes. Since it’s easy to scan Amiibos, and the data they store is so small, a single 4-GB SD card could store millions of Amiibo codes. That’s a little overkill, considering there are only a couple hundred Amiibo figures in total, plus a few hundred Amiibo card codes. A complete collection of every Amiibo in existence fits into just a couple of megabytes.
Most of them aren’t very relevant to Tears of the Kingdom, but every single one will spawn at least a few generic consumable items, like meal ingredients. Zelda-themed Amiibos, of which there are 26, have better rewards, including weapons, shields, paraglider fabrics, and unique armor sets that are either exclusive to the Amiibos that spawn them or are relatively difficult to earn in game.
Each Amiibo can only be used once per day, but this limit also applies to each unique Amiibo. If you happened to have two of the same Amiibo—say, the Link figurine from Super Smash Bros. that can sometimes spawn Epona—you can use each one every day. Of course, buying multiple figures just to double your chances of spawning a horse costs a lot more than simply waiting a day. Community code collections, however, make it much easier—and cheaper—to try multiple times.
Amazon’s family of Alexa-enabled devices is vast. From the spherical Echo to the swiveling Echo Show 10, you can get Alexa into your home in many ways. These devices can answer your questions, help you order essentials, set timers, play all sorts of audio content, and even function as the control hub for your growing smart home. These are our favorite Echo- and Alexa-compatible speakers for every home and budget.
The best time to buy any Amazon speaker is during a major sale event like Black Friday or Amazon Prime Day, as there usually are steep discounts. If you’re trying to decide which smart devices might be best for you, be sure to check out WIRED’s picks in our roundups: Best Smart Speakers, Best Smart Displays, and Best Bluetooth Speakers. We also have guides on setting up your Echo speaker, creating Alexa routines, and Alexa skills that are actually fun and useful to help you get started.
Updated June 2023: We’ve updated pricing throughout this buying guide.
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The software experience is almost like a miniaturized version of the Pixel Tablet I recently reviewed. There’s a taskbar at the bottom of the screen that you can drag up in any app. Press an app and drag it to one side of the screen and you’ll launch it in split-screen mode—that’s pretty much it. There are no other unfamiliar gestures or controls you need to learn.
Split-screen is fantastic when you have apps that don’t look scrunched up. I’ve used Chrome with Telegram to send my partner suggestions on where to order dinner without having to juggle apps. I’ve looked at my calendar and responded to people on emails and Slack to tell them when I’m free. I’ve had a phone call with my local utility company as I looked up my account number on the right-hand screen. None of this was impossible on a normal phone, and having these abilities just makes the little things so much easier.
Google says it updated more than 50 of its apps to make use of larger screens on tablets and folding phones, and the results are great. Gmail’s two-pane view lets you see your list of emails on the left, and the content opens up on the right screen. Google Maps gives you a desktop-like experience where you can see the location on the right and details about a place on the left. Chrome doesn’t offer up desktop mode by default, but you do get tabs at the top to quickly switch between them.
There are a few apps I love opening up the Fold for, like Reddit Sync, my favorite third-party Reddit app (that’s about to die in a few days). It displays Reddit posts on the left screen and opens the thread on the right, so you can scroll through comments and easily tap on the next post to move on. This rings true even in messaging apps like Telegram, Google Messages, and WhatsApp. Airtable and Google Calendar look fantastic too.
But naturally, not all apps are created equal. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are a few of the many apps that aren’t optimized for big-screen Android and open up with black areas on the side of the display. You can expect this situation to improve as foldable devices gain more popularity, but it may be a while.
As for the cameras, there’s nothing to worry about. The hardware isn’t as good as what you’ll find on the Pixel 7 Pro, but it gets close, and you still end up with the same great Pixel camera experience. There’s a 48-MP main camera joined by a 10.8-MP ultrawide and 10.8-MP telephoto with 5X optical zoom. The exterior selfie camera is 9.5 MP, and the inner selfie camera is 8 MP. You might think the innermost camera is quite poor, but it’s not. It easily earns a win over the inner camera in Samsung’s Fold4 with well-exposed selfies.
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
Google Pixel Fold, main camera. This is Tobu and he is very cute. There wasn’t a lot of light in this room but my pup’s face is tack sharp, and the colors are realistic.
There’s a reason why pizza is the menu choice of picky preschoolers, hungry teenagers, and discerning foodies alike. With enough cheese, tomato sauce, and arugula, homemade pizzas are a complete meal. They’re irresistible, easy to make, and customizable for a wide range of dietary preferences.
Until recently, an aspiring pizzaiolo had no choice but to crank up their kitchen oven to the standard 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, the best outdoor pizza ovens can heat up as high as 900 degrees—the perfect temperature for making a crisp Neapolitan pizza in minutes. For the past few years, I’ve memorized recipes, perfected my dough-tossing technique, and made hundreds of pizzas. You don’t have to limit yourself to pizza, either; I’ve seared steaks and pan-fried broccoli in ’em. Here are my—and my waistline’s—favorites. For those with limited access to outdoor spaces, I’ve included an indoor option and an oven that fits on a small deck, balcony, or patio.
Be sure to check out our many other buying guides, including the Best Portable Grills, Best Grills, and Best Camping Stoves.
Updated June 2023: We added the Ooni Volt and the Yoder Smoker Oven, added an honorable mentions slide, and added some toppings we like.
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