camera island
Spoot: Spotted Early keeps camera island in one place: 3 stories so far. The section currently leads with “The X500 Pro Max sneaks in sideways with a better battery”, “Your phone's forgotten back side finally gets a starring role”, and “Honor's new flagship packs a camera Arri helped shape and a battery that refuses to quit”. Vivo added "Max" to the name, but the X500 Pro Max is essentially the X300 Pro's successor with a bigger battery squeezed in sideways. Spoot: Spotted Early New things, caught while they're still new and a little weird. Spoot finds fresh gadgets, clever inventions, crowdfunding campaigns,… The list below is every camera island story on Spoot: Spotted Early, newest first.
The X500 Pro Max sneaks in sideways with a better battery
Vivo added "Max" to the name, but the X500 Pro Max is essentially the X300 Pro's successor with a bigger battery squeezed in sideways. That battery is the headline here, a sly upgrade that lets the phone keep its camera-first personality without dying by dinner. The same imaging obsession remains, but now you might actually have enough juice to shoot all day. It's the kind of quiet improvement that matters more than a spec bump nobody asked for. For context on where phone cameras are heading, OPPO's Find X10 hands you 200 megapixels and asks where your tripod's been hiding, another device betting big on computational photography. The X500 Pro Max doesn't reinvent the formula. It just makes the formula last longer. That's the razor clam.
Your phone's forgotten back side finally gets a starring role
Flip the Honor X5d s over and you finally see the point of a phone's back side. For years, that slab of glass and plastic has been the forgotten sibling, the surface you smudge and ignore while the front screen hogs every glance. Honor disagrees. It has given the rear camera a starring role, turning the back into something you will actually think about. Budget phones usually make you choose between a decent screen and a decent camera. This one suggests you have been holding the wrong end all along. It is a small rebellion, and we are here for it. If you like phones that rethink the obvious, our piece on the Light Phone snapping shut against apps pairs nicely with this one. Stay curious. Stay spooty.
Honor's new flagship packs a camera Arri helped shape and a battery that refuses to quit
Honor's Magic 9 Pro Max has a camera island that looks like it was machined from a 1937 Arriflex 35 turret, complete with knurled grip texture, and that alone made me sit up straighter. The battery is colossal, the mossy green finish is genuinely handsome, and Arri's influence runs deeper than aesthetics: you get LogC3 capture and 14 preset Look LUTs baked in. That's a serious tool for anyone who wants cinema color without the rig. It's also Honor's first flagship since the Arri deal went public, so the pressure was on. I'm gently skeptical about whether the software holds up, but the hardware is talking loud. For more gadget weirdness, our piece on Philips' new toothbrush tracking your brushing is a fun contrast. Stay spooty.