Android cuts telephoto camera and high-end AI features for lower price, but ends up a little lost in the mix

Google’s cheapest Pixel 9 offers almost everything that makes its top-flight sibling one of the best smaller phones available, cutting a few key ingredients to price match Apple and Samsung.

The Pixel 9 costs £799 (€899/$799/A$1,349) shaving £200 off the asking price of the stellar Pixel 9 Pro while sitting above the excellent value sub-£500 Pixel 8a from May. That pits the new Pixel directly against Apple’s new iPhone 16 and Samsung’s Galaxy S24.

Screen: 6.3in 120Hz FHD+ OLED (422ppi)

Processor: Google Tensor G4

RAM: 12GB

Storage: 128 or 256GB

Operating system: Android 14

Camera: 50MP + 48MP ultrawide, 10.5MP selfie

Connectivity: 5G, eSIM, wifi 7, UWB, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3 and GNSS

Water resistance: IP68 (1.5m for 30 minutes)

Dimensions: 152.8 x 72.0 x 8.5mm

Weight: 198g

In this week’s newsletter: Fashion loves a kooky accessory, but it is the sensible phone strap that is trending – and leaving hands free up and down the country

• Don’t get Fashion Statement delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Fashion is not averse to a ridiculous accessory. See, recently, a tiny Fendi lollipop holder, specifically tailored to the measurements of a Chupa Chups and yours for £440 , or a Gucci canvas pet carrier for £2,290. But, sometimes, a trend emerges that is – whisper it – practical and affordable. Enter, this summer, the jazzy phone strap – freeing the palms of everyone from parents and pub-goers to Hollywood stars.

Look around at rush hour, and commuters and tourists alike have their phones hooked on to corded straps and slung across sweaty torsos. Meanwhile, the finishing touch to gen Z’s OOTD videos on TikTok is to clip their phone on to a beaded strap and toss it around a wrist or shoulder.

The New Zealand-born photographer was planning to take a portrait of a farm owner when two animals caught his eye

For the last two years, Mark Aitken has been working on a photo series in Lapland. “It’s called Presence of Absence ,” he says, “and it explores the liminal and sometimes uncanny boundaries between life and death experienced by people living in this extreme climate and landscape.”

Aitken, who was born in New Zealand, raised in South Africa and has lived in London for years, took this photo in spring of this year, on a sheep farm. “Kukkola is a borderland hamlet in Finnish Lapland on the River Tornio, near Sweden. The farm has been running for 20 years and this lamb is one of about 100 born in March and April,” he says.

Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book blames social media for a decline in teenage mental health. But is he right?

When I was 13, two of my friends were arrested for shoplifting. Along with two boys in our year, they had decided to bunk off school – our suburban grammar school renowned for its academic excellence – and get the train to a shopping centre nearby. The day had been going well until they reached HMV, where a security guard asked them about the CDs they had hidden in their coats. Cue a call to the police, and some time in a cell at the local police station. By the end of the day, news had travelled to the rest of us via an SMS on our Nokia 3310 s and we gathered at one of our houses to discuss the situation. Most of us were crying.

It was but one dramatic moment in a lawless year. In year 7 we had been a fairly risk-taking group, but in the spring of year 8, a new girl joined our school and her arrival set things on fire. Beside the shoplifting habit, there was a lot of alcohol, stolen from parents’ cupboards or bought for us by strangers on the high street or by older siblings. We drank where teenagers have always drunk: in parks at night or during unsupervised parties at home. Blacking out was not uncommon, and more than once someone ended up in A&E. There was a lot of smoking, too, cigarettes and weed, and a lot of arguing about boys and each other (more crying there, too).

The AI’s errors can still be comical and catastrophic. Do we really want this technology to be in so many pockets?

Tech watchers and nerds like me get excited by tools such as ChatGPT. They look set to improve our lives in many ways – and hopefully augment our jobs rather than replace them.

But in general, the public hasn’t been so enamoured of the AI “revolution”. Make no mistake: artificial intelligence will have a transformative effect on how we live and work – it is already being used to draft legal letters and analyse lung-cancer scans. ChatGPT was also the fastest-growing app in history after it was released. That said, four in 10 Britons haven’t heard of ChatGPT , according to a recent survey by the University of Oxford, and only 9% use it weekly or more frequently .

Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of How AI Ate the World , which was published last month

Tech firms can do more, but it’s the government’s job to ensure children have safe places to play – and it’s not doing it

Three-quarters of children want to spend more time in nature. Having spent the Easter weekend trying to force four resistant teenagers off their phones and out for a nice walk over the Yorkshire Dales, admittedly I’ll have to take the National Trust’s word for this. But that’s what its survey of children aged between seven and 14 finds, anyway.

Kids don’t necessarily want to spend every waking minute hunched over a screen, however strongly they give that impression; even though retreating online satisfies the developmentally important desire to escape their annoying parents, even teenagers still want to run wild in the real world occasionally. Their relationship with phones is complex and maddening, but not a million miles off adults’ own love-hate relationship with social media; a greasy sugar-rush we crave but rarely feel better for indulging. Yet lately, longstanding parental unease over children’s screen habits has been hardening into something more like revolt.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

App-based cognitive tests found to be proficient at detecting frontotemporal dementia in those most at risk

A smartphone app could help detect a leading cause of early-onset dementia in people who are at high risk of developing it, data suggests.

Scientists have demonstrated that cognitive tests done via a smartphone app are at least as sensitive at detecting early signs of frontotemporal dementia in people with a genetic predisposition to the condition as medical evaluations performed in clinics.

Portable AI-powered devices that connect directly to a chatbot without the need for apps or a touchscreen are set to hit the market. Are they the emperor’s new clothes or a gamechanger?

Imagine it: you’re on the bus or walking in the park, when you remember some important task has slipped your mind. You were meant to send an email, catch up on a meeting, or arrange to grab lunch with a friend. Without missing a beat, you simply say aloud what you’ve forgotten and the small device that’s pinned to your chest, or resting on the bridge of your nose, sends the message, summarises the meeting, or pings your buddy a lunch invitation. The work has been taken care of, without you ever having to prod the screen of your smartphone.

It’s the sort of utopian convenience that a growing wave of tech companies are hoping to realise through artificial intelligence. Generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT exploded in popularity last year, as search engines like Google, messaging apps such as Slack and social media services like Snapchat raced to integrate the tech into their systems. Yet while AI add-ons have become a familiar sight across apps and software, the same generative tech is now making an attempt to join the realm of hardware, as the first AI-powered consumer devices rear their heads and jostle for space with our smartphones.