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Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 20.
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Getting a solid Android phone doesn't necessitate spending a small fortune. The best budget models strike a great balance between price and performance, giving you smooth everyday use without cutting too many corners. Whether you're scrolling social media, streaming your favorite shows or snapping photos of a night out, there's an affordable Android phone that can handle it all.
Cheaper phones have come a long way in recent years. Many now feature bright, fast displays, reliable cameras and battery life that lasts well into the next day. You might miss out on top-tier extras like the latest processor or ultra-high-resolution zoom, but what you get instead is value that makes sense. Some models even surprise with cameras that rival far pricier flagships, making them ideal for casual photographers or anyone who just wants to capture a great shot on the go.
We've tested budget Android phones from brands like Google, Samsung and OnePlus to find the ones that deliver the most for less. These are the models that prove you don't need a flagship price tag to get a dependable Android phone.
Best budget Android phones for 2026
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West Virginia's attorney general alleges that iCloud's end-to-end encryption is being used to store and distribute child sexual abuse material.
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Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Feb. 20, No. 515.
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We look at price, reach, perks and more to compare two of the biggest phone carriers in the US.
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The Boston startup uses AI to translate and verify legacy software for defense contractors, arguing modernization can't come at the cost of new bugs.
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 The most egg-shaped of all the egg campers, the British-developed Barefoot Caravan has been wowing camper fanatics with its shapely fiberglass since launching over a decade ago. Despite its compact, curvy size, it also boasts a 6.1-ft-peak (1.9-m) cabin with a private bath and convertible dinette. As with other RVs, though, Barefoot pricing has rise
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Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Feb. 20, No. 719.
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Mark Zuckerberg defended Meta's social media platforms and addressed his public persona in a Los Angeles courtroom.
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We found the iPhone Air to have a pretty decent battery life for such a thin-and-light phone, somewhere in the region of 27 hours if you're continuously streaming video. But it's still a phone, arguably your most used device on a daily basis, so you may need to top it up during the day if you're using it constantly. That's where Apple's iPhone Air MagSafe battery pack comes in, and it's currently on sale for $79.
This accessory only works with the iPhone Air, but much like the phone it attaches to, it's extremely slim at 7.5mmm, so crucially doesn't add so much bulk when attached that it defeats the point of having a thin phone in the first place. The MagSafe Battery isn't enormous a
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A study led by MIT researchers found that agentic AI developers seldom publish detailed information about how these tools were tested for safety.
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 Apple's older MacBook Air with the M1 chip is now out of stock on Walmart's website in the U.S., amid rumors of a new lower-cost MacBook coming soon.
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Space agencies and companies looking to set up lunar outposts should build far away from seismic activity.
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It's the last day here at KBIS. Follow along for the final moments of the 2026 show.
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NEW RESOURCES Tippah News: Mississippi auditor creates nonprofit spending database after finding state couldn't tally funding. "The Mississippi Office of the State Auditor said Wednesday it has launched an online Nonprofit Spending […]
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The state's attorney general said in a lawsuit filed on Thursday that the company declined to use tools that recognize the material stored on iCloud.
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The Celerity high-speed oven is an industry first. Its "golden heater" technology can cook a chicken three times faster than a normal oven.
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NEW RESOURCES Radio Free Europe: Archaeologists Launch ‘Virtual Museum' To Ukraine's Ancient Heritage. "An online museum launched on February 18 aims to make Ukraine's heritage accessible to the public, while many of […]
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Spending too much time figuring out what to watch? Netflix secret codes can open a whole new world of content.
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Wes Ott covers today's biggest tech stories, including Apple's March 4 event, where product reveals are expected. Amazon's Ring calls off its partnership with Flock following backlash from a controversial Super Bowl ad. Plus, Netflix is rolling out vertical video features for mobile this year.
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The Samsung phone had been lost for a decade. Then Katie Elkin found it.
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Fallout, Neighbors, and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters are just a few of the TV shows we're swooning over for February.
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Rivian suggests that vehicle owners can leave their phone at home (or perhaps in a glove box) and instead control some aspects of their EV using a new Apple Watch app. With a tap of your watch, you can unlock and lock the doors, sound the alarm and vent the windows. After the digital key is set up, R1S and R1T Gen 2 owners can unlock their vehicle automatically simply by walking up to it thanks to the passive car key feature.
It's possible to set the cabin temperature and a target state of charge by turning the digital crown on an Apple Watch. You also can choose four quick controls to put front and center in the app and add a battery status indicator to your watch face if you so wish. Rivian says it will update its Apple Watch app with new features in the future.
Rivian first enabled digital car key support on Apple, Google Pixel and Samsung devices back in December. Apple started supporting digital car keys on
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We sifted through the fine print to figure out how to score the best deal on all the major carriers in 2026
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The Meta CEO stuck to a playbook of repetitive answers and buzzwords in a landmark trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
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 Google is expanding its cross-platform file sharing feature to additional Android devices, allowing them to transfer files to an iPhone using the AirDrop protocol. AirDrop support for Quick Share is coming to the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL, and Pixel 9 Pro Fold over the next few days.
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Forum members discuss their discomfort with mass deportation efforts, debate how federal agents have interacted with civilians, and complain about their working conditions.
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 Amazon this week has a pair of discounts on a few AirPods models, including the AirPods 4 and AirPods Max. You can get the AirPods 4 for $99.00, down from $129.00.
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OpenAI's GPT-4o may have survived its first brush with going offline, but it won't be as lucky this time. OpenAI has officially retired GPT-4o, the ChatGPT model that was seen as more conversational and notoriously sycophantic, on February 13. The news of GPT-4o's end was first announced in a post on the OpenAI website in January, but the discontinuation also included GPT-5, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini from ChatGPT.
It's not the first time that OpenAI has delisted GPT-4o as an option for ChatGPT. In August, the AI giant sunsetted the GPT-4o model in favor of rolling out and prioritizing the latest GPT-5 model at the time. However, a wave of user complaints led OpenAI to restore access to GPT-4o but with no guarantee that it'll be around forever.
This time around, OpenAI doesn't seem very open to preserving access to GPT-4o, especially since it'll serve only a small portion of the user base. The company wrote on its website that "the vast majority of usage has shifted to GPT-5.2, with only 0.1 percent of users still choosing GPT-4o each day." On top of that, OpenAI is facing several
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NEW RESOURCES Dazed: Maison Margiela is opening up its archive to the public via Dropbox. "… alongside those four exhibitions and the Shanghai fashion show, the house has opened up its archive […]
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With prompt engineers among the workers most in demand in the wake of generative AI's arrival in the enterprise, it was inevitable that someone would investigate whether their role, too, could be automated, or at least facilitated, by AI.
And, indeed, a recent study focused on how to write the best prompts for a large-language model (LLM) AI to solve mathematical problems has found that another AI gets better results than a human. The study sought to determine whether human-generated "positive thinking" prompts—such as "this will be fun!" or "take a deep breath and think"—produce better responses. The results were mixed when using different LLMs.
To read this article in full, please click here
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More than 150 leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, ethicists and others have signed an open letter calling on generative AI (genAI) companies to submit to independent evaluations of their systems, the lack of which has led to concerns about basic protections.
The letter, drafted by researchers from MIT, Princeton, and Stanford University, called for legal and technical protections for good-faith research on genAI models, which they said is hampering safety measures that could help protect the public.
To read this article in full, please click here
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