Tech
Xiaomi launches 17 Ultra smartphone, an AirTag clone, and an ultra slim powerbank
Xiaomi today launched a slew of gadgets ahead of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona including a camera-focused flagship smartphone, an AirTag clone, Xiaomi Watch 5 smartwatch, and an ultra slim power bank.
The China-based company has partnered with camera maker Leica to co-brand its Xiaomi 17 Ultra smartphone. As part of the partnership, it is using Leica lenses and creating filters in the style of the German camera company.
The phone has a 50-megapixel main sensor with an F/1.67 aperture and a 1-inch sensor. But the main attraction is the 200-megapixel telephoto camera that has a variable focal length of 75mm-100mm equivalent. That means you can zoom optically between 3.2x and 4.3x. The phone also has a 50 MP ultrawide camera with an f/2.2 aperture.

Also notable: The phone packs a 6,000 mAh battery (the Chinese version comes with a bigger 6,800mAh battery). The phone could be charged using a 90W USB PD-PPS, and it supports Xiaomi’s Hypercharge wireless tech at 50W.
The device has a 6.9-inch Xiaomi HyperRGB OLED display protected by Xiaomi’s own Shield Glass 3.0. The company has picked Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, which was also used in the recently launched Galaxy S26 series.
The company is also releasing a special Leica edition phone to celebrate 100 years of the camera company. The device has a durable aluminum-alloy body with a nickel-anodized finish. Xiaomi has also added a Leica theme on the software side.

The device has a rotating ring that mimics zoom on a physical camera. The special edition also has a “Leica Essential mode,” which has filters that recreate photos in the style of Leica M9 and Leica M3.
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Xiaomi launched the Xiaomi 17 with a larger 6,330 mAh battery, which can be charged at 100W using the company’s HyperCharge tech.
The company is also launching two photography add-ons for the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. The 17 Ultra Photography Kit is a Bluetooth-connected snap-on that has a two-stage shutter button and a video recording button.The Xiaomi 17 Ultra Photography Kit Pro aims to mimic a physical camera with a leather finish, a video recording button, a detachable shutter button, and zoom control. This kit snaps on using a USB-C connection and also has a 2,000 mAh battery for its operation. Using this add-on, users can also use a new fastshot mode on the phone.

Through this launch, the company is making these devices available in the EU and the UK. The Xiaomi 17 starts at €999, and the Xiaomi 17 Ultra starts at €1,499. The Leica edition comes with 16GB RAM and 1TB storage, and is priced at €1,999. The Xiaomi 17 Ultra Photography Kit is priced at €99.99, and the Xiaomi 17 Ultra Photography Kit Pro is priced at €199.99.
Apart from phones, the company also launched a bunch of other devices, including a scooter. Xiaomi said that its Electric Scooter 6 Ultra has 1200W peak power and 75km of range. The scooter has 12-inch all-terrain tires with front and rear disc brakes. It has a three-inch TFT display to measure things like speed and range. The scooter starts at €329.99 with five different versions, with the top version priced at €799.99.

The company also launched a new Xiaomi tag, an AirTag-like device, which works with both Apple Find My and Google Android Find Hub. The tag weighs just 10 grams and has a button cell battery that lasts over a year. You can also play a sound remotely to find the tag or the time at which the tag is attached. The company is pricing this tag at €14.9 for one and €49.99 for a pack of four.

What’s more, the company released a slim power bank with just 6mm of thickness. The powerbank weighs 98 grams and has a 5,000 mAh battery capacity. It can charge devices at 22.5W through a wired connection and at 15W through a wireless connection. The powerbank is magnetic, so it can stick to supporting phones like iPhones, and charge them wirelessly. The powerbank is priced at €59.99 for black and silver colorways. It also has an orange colorway priced at €64.99.

Xiaomi launched its new smartphone, Xiaomi Watch 5, with a 930mAh battery that could last up to six days. The smartwatch has a round 1.54-inch AMOLED display and supports gestures to dismiss calls or alarms. The watch can also prepare a health report in 60 seconds by using metrics like heart rate, blood oxygen, stress levels, sleep duration, sleep heart rate, and sleep SpO₂. The watch is priced at €299.99.

The company also launched a €69.9 Redmi Buds 8 Pro earbuds with active noise cancellation and up to 33 hours of battery life.
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.

Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”

Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.

Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.

It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”

