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 MWC 2026 officially gets underway on March 2 and will continue through March 5, but the announcements are already coming ahead of its start. We can always count on the annual tech event to bring tons of new phones, laptops and tablets, and we're expecting to see some robots and other gadgets too — plus plenty of AI news, of course. In addition to the announcements, MWC is our chance to get hands-on time with some of the most interesting new devices, like the Xiaomi 17 Ultra and Honor's Robot Phone.
Engadget's Mat Smith is on the ground in Barcelona, and we'll be updating this story as the week goes on to keep you in the loop on everything that caught our attention. Keep checking back here for the latest MWC news.
Honor The Robot Phone. (Image by Mat Smith for Engadget)Honor teased its Robot Phone this past fall and we just finally got a proper look at it at MW
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Honor's move into robotics feels like a bold move, and it turns out that its first humanoid has some bold moves of its own.
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Honor launched the Magic V5 in August 2025 and yet its successor is being announced just seven months later. Speak to Honor's representatives, and you can imply that it's racing to push the envelope against both its real competition (Samsung) and its anticipated one (Apple). With so little time between launches, you'll be unsurprised to learn that little has changed. The only other real reason this device has been pushed out so swiftly is because it'll help Honor retain the title of making the world's thinnest foldable. I'll leave you to decide if you think that's a valid enough reason to release a whole new smartphone so soon.
Last year, just one of the four Magic V5 colorways measured in at 8.8mm folded and 4.1mm open while the rest clocked in at 9mm and 4.2mm respectively. This year Honor is marking its own homework with a similarly generous spirit, with the white version of the Magic V6 measuring 8.75mm folded and 4.0mm open. The black, gold and red colorways will have to settle for the indignity of measuring 9mm folded and 4.1mm open. Now, I appreciate the engineering savvy necessary to make a device this slim, but this push for more thinness needs to stop. Last year's Magic V5 crossed the millimeters-wide rubicon from slender to dainty, to the point where, while holding it, I was worried about how durable it was. After all, foldables are regularly put through mechanical stresses that regular phones never have to deal with in normal duty.
Honor says the phone is well built to withstand the rigors of normal life, including a scratch-resistant display cover. The screen is impact-resistant, there's a far stronger hinge and it's rated for IP68 and IP69 dust and water resistance. Claims that, I'm sure, will be tested to its limits by sceptical review
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OpenAI has reached an agreement with the Defense Department to deploy its models in the agency's network, company chief Sam Altman has revealed on X. In his post, he said two of OpenAI's most important safety principles are "prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems." Altman claimed the company put those principles in its agreement with the agency, which he called by the government's preferred name of Department of War (DoW), and that it had agreed to honor them.
The agency has closed the deal with OpenAI, shortly after President Donald Trump ordered all government agencies to stop using Claude and any other Anthropic services. If you'll recall, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth previously threatened to label Anthropic "supply chain risk" if it continues refusing to remove the guardrails on its AI, which are preventing the technology to be used for mass surveillance against Americans and in fully autonomous weapons.
It's unclear why the government agreed to team up with OpenAI if its models also have the same guardrails, but Altman said it's asking the government to offer the same terms to all the AI companies it works with. Jeremy Lewin, the Senior Official Under Secretary for Foreign Assistance, Humanitarian Affairs, and Religious Freedom, said on X that DoW "references certain existing legal authorities and includes certain mutually agreed upon safety mechanisms" in its contracts. Both OpenAI and xAI, which had also previously signed a
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