flagship phone
flagship phone at Spoot: Spotted Early is a file of 3 stories. The newest of them: “Vivo's Pro Max fills the gap but loses the Ultra's best camera tricks”, “The S26 Ultra hides your screen for $950, and that's the whole pitch”, and “Honor's new flagship packs a camera Arri helped shape and a battery that refuses to quit”. Vivo's X500 Pro Max is the first flagship to sit between the Pro and Ultra tiers, which sounds like a tidy bit of product segmentation until you notice what fell through the gap. 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 flagship phone story on Spoot: Spotted Early, newest first.
Vivo's Pro Max fills the gap but loses the Ultra's best camera tricks
Vivo's X500 Pro Max is the first flagship to sit between the Pro and Ultra tiers, which sounds like a tidy bit of product segmentation until you notice what fell through the gap. The 35mm main camera and that world-beating ultrawide from the X300 Ultra? Neither made the trip. What you get instead is a genuinely impressive camera system with 17 stops of dynamic range and the same excellent telephoto as the Ultra, plus a 7,800mAh battery and a 1440p, 144Hz display. That is not a consolation prize. But this phone is defined as much by what it leaves out as what it packs in, and if the aperture side of things interests you, Halide's new update gives the iPhone 18 Pro's aperture the fine-tuning it deserved. Different phone, same obsession with the fiddly bits.
The S26 Ultra hides your screen for $950, and that's the whole pitch
The S26 Ultra costs $950 to hide your screen, and honestly, that feels like the right price for the paranoia. Samsung's 6.9-inch flagship drops to $949.99 at Amazon, a solid $450 off its usual tag, and the headline trick is an adjustable privacy display that blanks out the whole screen, or just bits of it, for anyone peeking from a steep angle. The rest of the phone doesn't suffer for it. The camera hardware gets dual telephoto lenses and a 200-megapixel main sensor, which matters more in low light than any spec sheet suggests. It's still a big phone, though slimmer than the S25 Ultra. The S Pen is along for the ride. For a device this size, hiding your business from strangers feels less like a gimmick and more like a survival instinct.
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.