Marques Brownlee

"It's basically erased any imperfections and kept the horizon locked. You couldn't tell I was upside down at all."

"This is officially the best video stabilization I've ever seen in a smartphone. So, as long as you turn on this S26 Ultra's horizon lock right there and hit record, you can have the least steady hands in the world."

"If you thought you were being slick by watching Instagram reels on your Meta AI glasses like I am right now"

"If you thought you were being slick by watching Instagram reels on your Meta AI glasses like I am right now"

"We are all the way at OnePlus 15 now, which solid phone. I've been daily-ing it for a couple months."

"I wouldn't crown it necessarily the absolute best set of smartphone cameras, but I would still crown it the best overall most fun smartphone camera shooting experience that I've ever had."

"This is the world's first ultrasonic chef's knife and I had to try it. So I got my hands on it. The handle will send shock waves through the knife blade at 30,000 times per second."

"I use a tool that I've talked about in the past actually on my Mac called Raycast. And it's awesome."

"They said, no problem. We take PayPal. So, I had to open up PayPal on my computer, send the money to Vertu"

"By the way, no generative AI is being used to create this video. Just a whole lot of Blender."

"I wish YouTube would bring annotations back. Do you guys remember the annotations feature?"

"I showed the AnTuTu benchmark score for each of these phones next to each other"

"It never lets you pick a better source like the Apple Watch that I'm literally wearing in that review"

"This is a real 16 by 9 10-inch landscape tablet that you can literally fold and put into your pocket. It just makes so much more sense than the square."

"This just happens to be the only Samsung phone that they'll let you run Samsung DeX on its own, without being connected to a monitor."

"I actually used a phone this year that got me not two but three full days of like all day carefree high brightness mixed use. like 10 plus hours of screen on time from a 7300 mAh battery. This phone has me so excited about what the next years of smartphones could turn into."

"It was Galaxy S25 Ultra for a long time and then it was Pixel 10 Pro for a long time and now lately it has been OnePlus 15 in my pocket."

"People always want to know also what's the phone that I used the most during the year, which I mentioned in a previous video, but I will say it was Galaxy S25 Ultra for a long time."

"There were a bunch of other foldables that I saw and one other one that I actually daily drove this year for an extended period of time and it was this one, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. And this one is really nice. While using it closed, it's basically all the goodness of just a regular Pixel 10 Pro."

"This car also happens to have wireless Apple CarPlay and it's nice. I think it is the biggest, nicest window of wireless CarPlay I have ever seen in a car"

"This car here I've been driving for the last two weeks is called the Xiaomi SU7. This is a $42,000 car that feels like a $75,000 car if it were made here in the US"

"So, I went on Twitter and Threads this past week and asked you guys for your hottest takes and got quite a few of them."

"I can go play Il America by Wolf Gang Gartner on Spotify and it hears that by Wolf Gang Gartner now playing on Spotify."

"Siri is bad, okay? But it is actually pretty functional at like the extreme basics, right? When you're just asking a simple factual based question like, 'What is the weather in Raleigh?' it can typically do okay at that."

"I have Relay for Reddit, which is a paid app. There's not that many good Reddit apps anymore for obvious reasons, but I do pay the five bucks a month for this one."

"I have actually mostly been sticking to the iPhone 17 Pro in Orange and not the Max."

"Among all the stuff that I've tested this year, the phones that I've gone back to the most have been Galaxy S25 Ultra, then Pixel 10 Pro and now this OnePlus 15."

"You've got Waze, you've got the ChatGPT app, the Google Home app."

"Notion is the one that we use at the studio for keeping track of everything."

"I basically live in the TickTick app. It's how I remember to do anything in life."

"I actually have the Arc Search here, the Arc browser app, which I no longer use on the desktop because they're kind of not paying attention to it anymore. But it is still kind of useful to have mobile sync from a couple of spaces I have set up."

"I use the Raindrop.io app to save links and I use that because the Pocket app also died this year. I used to use Pocket all the time for this and now it's gone. So I use Raindrop.io for the exact same thing."

"It's kind of like a nice, cross-platform Airdrop and file sharing app, but it's actually more than just Airdrop because it can do it wherever your devices are. So I can Blip something to someone across the country if they have an account. It's super useful for file sharing, link sharing, all that stuff."

"I also still use Pocket Casts for all of my podcasts on the go. There's a bunch of different podcasts apps, but that's the one I've stuck with."

"CARROT, over on the left is my new weather app of choice. Essentially what CARROT did was clone the Dark Sky layout that made it so good, but then also gave us a whole bunch of customization with other stuff, like weather sources."

"Copilot is a finance tracker app and then Superhuman for email."

"This one here is called Neuecast. I use Pocket Casts most of the time, but Neuecast is one that I found that might replace Pocket Casts for me. It's a really clean layout and just shows me my most recently updated podcasts from all the ones I'm subscribed to."

"What Athlytic does is takes the information from the Apple Watch and from Apple Health, aggregates it all and gives me a lot of that same information that the Whoop would. I like Athlytic."

"There's another app called Flighty, which is, as someone who's flown quite a bit lately, one of the most useful apps of all time. It basically just pulls the data directly from the source and often notifies me before the airline app would."

"My authenticator app is Authy, that's a great iPhone app."

"I've just been airdropping things back and forth, like pictures, and it's just been working."

"My Pixel 10 can now airdrop to any Apple device I want. So, I just need everyone who has a Pixel 10 to understand that you can AirDrop now. It just works."

"I have been using this phone for a couple weeks now, and there are some things about it that are actually better than a regular phone. I hate to admit it, but also there are absolutely some things about it that are not worth it."

"That's genuinely really sick! This is a hardware-level control over the pixels on the display that can be turned on or off whenever."

"My take is the Ultra feels like a little bit of a refresh and it's a cool place to try this privacy screen thing. I'm very excited to see it in person and try it out, looks pretty sick!"

"Quick Share works natively like with AirDrop. If you have Apple devices and Google Pixels, they can file share between them and it's kind of sweet."

"I think my favorite OnePlus phone of all time would be the OnePlus 7T Pro. That thing I genuinely believe I could still use today and be totally happy with."

"I think Gemini on Android phones is already really good. They've looped in now a lot of the old Google Assistant features. So Gemini as a product is really good."

"Circle to Search is one of the absolute most useful AI features to me of the entire last 5 plus years where you can circle whatever's on your screen."

"this is Epic Spaceman, one of my favorite creators and of course a massive help with this video"

"In trying to make my point that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 was really, really good"

"This is a device that's actually starting to make foldables make sense to me. For the right person who knows what they're getting into, this can be worth it."

"If you deleted all the slab phones in the world somehow and made me daily drive something that folds, it would be this one. Not because it's the thinnest or has the best specs or the best cameras. It doesn't. But it's just it's the most rock solid across the board and usable as a daily in every way."

"The iPhone 17 Pro which also leveled up again this year both in the photo and video departments. The larger main sensor looks really good. They also bumped to a 4x telephoto which I think is the right move. And these iPhones are still the undisputed king of video."

"This phone is now a 6.9 inch full-size smartphone when it's unfolded, which is massive. But now more than ever, you can use this phone when it's folded in half, which doesn't just make it easier to pocket, but it also lets you use the full 4.1 inch corner to corner cover screen a lot more."

"This is a 6.8 inch screen size and packs in a huge triple camera system on the back, including a 200 megapixel telephoto sensor. There's a ton of RAM and storage. There's a custom button. They put the camera control in there from the iPhone. And there's a giant 7500 mAh silicon carbon battery, which is ridiculous. It's an awesome phone."

"This is a really big phone that is really loaded with features. First of all, it's a 6.9 inch phone, so basically as big as a phone gets before as a tablet, but it also feels like the most phone you can get if you're trying to maximize everything. Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which is shaken out to be the most powerful chip of the year."

"This is the Fairphone 6, a phone that looks relatively normal, but that's the point because this just so happens to be the most repairable, the most sustainable, and most modular phone basically of all time. And that is no small feat."

"What they've ended up with is a phone that feels crazy. It feels impossibly light. It looks impossibly thin. It kind of resembles a piece of jewelry in many ways, but also really appeals to the minimalist in me. It's just one of those phones that feels so good in the hand and is so impressive."

"Shout out to the base iPhone 17 for finally stepping up to the plate and doing all the things that the base iPhone should. Flagship chip, really good cameras, great software obviously, but also the new promotion display, a massively upgraded selfie camera, some kind of sweet new colors. It's actually a good deal this time around."

"Pixel 9a has got to be on anybody's list who's after a more compact option. This is a 6.3 inch screen and they did a lot of things. Still great software from being a Pixel. Really good cameras on the back."

"This phone feels as good as anything they've made, and that's a good thing. Like, it's got a huge screen. And it's got a really, really big battery, decent cameras, decent software, headphone jack. This is one of the best phones under $200."

"For $279, this phone is modular, cheap, and fun. They built a phone that feels like it's literally double the price. This is a 6.8 inch 120 Hz screen that's actually good-looking and bright. There's a 5,000 mAh battery, so the life is actually pretty good."

"If you have a Pixel 10 or 10 Pro, update your phone. It just works now."

"This S26 Ultra obviously doesn't have a screen protector on it. But if I just turn on privacy screen, it turns off individual pixels to achieve the exact same effect, which is pretty sick."

"This time, the S26 is $900, the S26+ is $1,100, and the S26 Ultra is $1,300."

"They also added their own version of Magic Queue, which they're calling now Nudge, which basically lives in the keyboard and gives you suggestions of things to bring in from other apps."

"And there's also some big claimed improvements with Bixby now being LLM-powered. New Bixby could be good."

"They all got the spec bump we expected: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy. We've seen this non-Galaxy version of the chip be excellent already."

"And then of course Galaxy Fold, which is super early and risky."

"Like the Galaxy Note Edge back in the day where like one side of the display curved over the bezel for the first time."

"It seemed like such a ridiculous omission to take out MagSafe."

"Quick Share works natively like with AirDrop."

"The Tensor G5 is their latest chip and for years the Pixel has had the A series comes out a little later but it actually has the flagship chip."

"Inside, it's even the same Tensor G4 chip from last year."

"It's covered in a slightly newer Gorilla Glass 7i instead of Gorilla Glass 3."

"Can we just pull up the Pixel 9A really quick right next to it? Okay, they're actually the same."

"Welcome to your first look and hands-on with the brand new Google Pixel 10A."

"but this is the Honor Power 2. Yes, it's absolutely a clone of the iPhone, but it's also thinner than the iPhone and has a 10,000 mAh battery"

"like enabling the ultra thin ones like Galaxy S25 Edge and iPhone Air because they could be super super thin, but still with silicon carbon have normal battery capacities"

"like enabling the ultra thin ones like Galaxy S25 Edge and iPhone Air because they could be super super thin, but still with silicon carbon have normal battery capacities"

"So, this is an iPhone 17 Pro Max. It has about a 5,000 mAh battery"

"I remember when the new OnePlus flagship came out last January, and it made this huge jump from 5,400 mAh straight to 6,000 mAh by going with silicon carbon"

"But in other markets where people can just use WhatsApp and be happy about it, then there's way more hardware competition"

"So, this is an iPhone 17 Pro Max, but this is not an iPhone 17 Pro Max."

"This is the Honor Power 2. And if you want an Android phone, but you don't want your friends to know you have an Android phone, well, this might be tempting."

"It had all these flagship specs with the latest gen Snapdragon 800 series chip and it was $300 somehow which was unreal."

"Some tried to make the transition smoothly and gracefully like Asus with the ROG phone."

"There was Pocophones and Sony Xperia phones and Nothing phones and all sorts of stuff in between."

"It was running CyanogenMod. So this developer friendly clean no bloatware experience."

"Now they had their own flavor of Android Oxygen OS, which was this super smooth and fast optimized software."

"It's running the same software as other Xiaomi flagships, HyperOS 3 on top of Android 16."

"I also shot most of my Tesla Model Y performance review on the autofocus channel with this phone in video mode and it looks great."

"It has a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, LPDDR5X RAM, UFS 4.1 storage, so performance is pretty great for a camera."

"It's running the same software as other Xiaomi flagships, HyperOS 3 on top of Android 16."

"I kind of love the circular volume buttons with the plus and minus on them, kind of a throwback to like the 2010s with the iPhone 4 days."

"You probably remember the Xiaomi 17 Pro and Pro Max from last year, which pretty clearly took after the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max as far as design."

"So this is a Leica camera, but now this is the Xiaomi 17 Ultra Leica Edition."

"Google's paid Apple billions of dollars over the years to be the default search engine in Safari."

"Siri, as you know, now will kick out to ChatGPT for any complex request that is too much for Siri to handle."

"The Snapdragon 8 Elite chip inside is great"

"I remember seeing that on the Galaxy S9 back in the day and it was pretty useful. Like that was an innovation to control the amount of light hitting the sensor"

"You might remember a video I did a couple years ago on those Caviar phones. And as ridiculous as those were, you could pretty clearly see their angle for trying to charge so much for a phone"

"Windows XP is the most widely used desktop operating system. Good times."

"And now the latest version, M5. And every year, there's some slide or some graphic with an impossibly big number of transistors on one chip"

"I can walk around on the keyboard deck of this MacBook Pro, which is now the size of an apartment building"

"In my top five Android 16 features video, I said and this latest update is almost purely aesthetic, especially in this first beta"

"It's just the iPhone Air. You obviously knew what I meant"

"In the OnePlus 13S review, I correctly said up to half a terabyte of storage, but the on-screen graphic accidentally says 1 TB of storage"

"In my Nothing Phone 3 review, when complimenting the display, I mentioned that it has a 1000Hz touch sample rate"

"The iPhone 17 base is actually slightly narrower and slightly taller than the base iPhone 16"

"The iPhone 17 base is actually slightly narrower and slightly taller than the base iPhone 16"

"My AirPods Pro 3 review talking about the new heart rate feature. I said apparently it's using its own algorithms and software"

"In the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max review, I compared it to the iPhone 17 Pro Max. Naturally, it's what everyone wanted"

"In trying to make my point that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 was really, really good"

"In my PowerBeats Pro 2 review, I actually quoted my pre-release briefing in a meeting with Apple and Beats"

"In my OnePlus 15 review, I talk about the ceramic back and how tough it is"

"In the final section with the Nikon Z9, I said with a 24 megapixel stacked CMOS sensor, semi-stacked officially"

"In the Xiaomi SU7 car review, when talking about the prices of the car, I used the local price in Chinese yuan converted to US dollars"

"For the Tesla Model 3 Performance price, I used the US price of $55,000"

"And it doesn't really work with every carrier. Like Verizon, you can forget about it"

"I was inspired to do this and to make this video by Tom Scott in 2023 he did a video going back over all of his previous mistakes"

"OnePlus 13 did end up working just fine with Verizon, like a lot of other previous OnePlus phones"

"In my Samsung Galaxy S25 review, when talking about why Samsung plays it safe in the US, I used OnePlus as an example"

"I wrote iPhone 16 Air accidentally. There obviously is no iPhone 16 Air"

"In my Nothing Phone 3a/3a Pro review, I said the phone would be getting six years of software updates"

"In my Nothing Phone 3a/3a Pro review, I said the phone would be getting six years of software updates"

"In my M4 MacBook Air review, I accidentally called it a MacBook Pro once near the end"

"In my Bionic Ability hand review, I talk about the way that users will control the hand with EMG technology"

"In my CMF Phone 2 Pro review, I said this year it's also modular, but doesn't work with basically any of the accessories from that last CMF phone"

"Samsung actually still does fit a vapor chamber in the S25 Edge. They've made one that's thinner and wider, and they deserve credit for that"

"They're essentially the same ones as the ZFold 7. The cover display up front is also essentially the same as the ZFold 7."

"This is technically not the first trifold smartphone. This is the Huawei Mate XT that I made a video about back in 2024."

"It's a Snapdragon 8 Elite 4 Galaxy inside. It's obviously only a year old, so still a really great chip."

"The Galaxy S25 Edge is another one. Again, not a product that anyone in particular was asking for or needs, but a much more brutalist really rectangular version of the ultra thin smartphone. And it actually has a flagship main camera and a little bit more of a usable battery."

"This phone I really liked. This is the OnePlus 13S. S for small, allegedly, and it did a lot of things great. Pretty simple, small, strong, and slick design, smooth, and smart software."

"This is an attachment lens, a Hasselblad telephoto attachment that you put the case on the back of the phone, you attach this to the case, and then this turns into a 10x optical zoom on this already really good 200 megapixel telephoto that takes sometimes shockingly usable really good far zoom shots just for fun."

"The phone that I tested this year with the largest capacity battery which is this chunk right here. This is a Dooji S200 Ultra 11,000 mAh silicon carbon battery."

"I also want to give one more shout out to the Vivo X300 Pro. Came out late this year. Also ridiculously good cameras. Really really impressive sensors and huge sensors. Just not quite as refined as I thought they were going to be."

"This is the Realme GT8 Pro. And you see this camera bump, which kind of looks maybe a little bit generic, but there's two screws on it. It came with a screwdriver so you could pop this camera bump off and change it out to a different shape."

"Like I know people wanna compare this to Porsche Taycan. This is not Porsche Taycan levels of sporty, but it's like one notch below that, which is still really good"

"But it kinda handles on the same level of Model 3 performance or BMW i4. This is a really capable car"

"Already those are specs on paper on the level of like a Tesla Model 3 performance, which today costs like $55,000"

"There's been a million advancements in AI assistance over the past few short years, like Google's Gemini getting way better, more capable, and faster."

"But also Amazon's new Rufus AI powered assistant. And of course, all the game-changing advancements with LLMs that aren't even necessarily assistants."

"Also, things like home automation, if you have HomeKit stuff, that works. Okay."

"People use Claude and Perplexity and ChatGPT all the time for all kinds of stuff. These things have, you know, in the past few years become super high usage tools and have changed the landscape of business."

"People use Claude and Perplexity and ChatGPT all the time for all kinds of stuff. These things have, you know, in the past few years become super high usage tools and have changed the landscape of business."

"But people don't realize how popular the Ford F-150 actually is. It's been the number one bestselling truck in America for like 46 years straight or something like that."

"Like this actually reminds me of one of the hot takes from last time or like 2 years ago I did this video and someone's take was that the Cybertruck would outsell the Ford F-150 by 2026 which that obviously aged poorly."

"I mean they've been a thing for years from Boston Dynamics back in the day and they've gotten more and more advanced all the way up till now."

"You've probably seen my video on the Neo, which is a soft cloth little 60 lb humanoid chore robot thing."

"And the vacuum is a little Roomba on the ground."

"People use Claude and Perplexity and ChatGPT all the time for all kinds of stuff. These things have, you know, in the past few years become super high usage tools and have changed the landscape of business."

"Google found a way to make Quick Share, which is the Android protocol, work with AirDrop."

"The whole world, including myself, was baffled at the lack of magnets in the iPhone 16 when that came out."

"That could still be a dozen exploding Note 7s like it was in 2016"

"And also, it reads a lot like it was written by ChatGPT. I'm not even going to link to it."

"Apple continued for the last couple of months to just spin their wheels and Siri continued to suck."

"It's basically like a Spotlight search replacement for Mac because Spotlight has also been dog water for years."

"They're using a Sony IMX906 sensor, which is the same as we've seen in Samsung's A55 and the Honor 200 and a bunch of other sub $500 phones"

"The Pixel 9's fingerprint reader was in fact also ultrasonic. It was still bad and it was still one of my biggest annoyances"

"In my Pixel 10 review, I said my personal biggest annoyance with the Pixel 9 was the optical underscreen fingerprint reader was kind of slow"

"The mission was actually pretty simple here. Apple was looking to create a new entry-level iPhone at the bottom of the lineup. So, they made a smaller, less premium iPhone basically by taking things out of the base phone. But no, the starting price was $5.99. Just a crazy swing in a miss here."

"The Nothing Phone 3 was sort of a uniquely disappointing phone this year. Not because it was a particularly bad phone, but it was just a big delta between what their very passionate fans were hoping and expecting from this phone and what they actually delivered."

"Really just the fact that the Magic Mouse's design still now in 2025 hasn't changed since I was in high school and it's still like $80 and it still has all the downsides it has from all those years ago is crazy to me."

"Order me one of those new shirts from mkbhd.com. That would be my task."