For this week of Tech Unboxed, our community was engaged with rumors that the iPhone 17 Air will be very slm at the expense of a small 2800mAh battery. Amidst our coverage at COMPUTEX 2025, HONOR officially unveiled the 400 series globally and Xiaomi unveils its own flagship chip, while NCAP makes its return.
Here are the Tech Unboxed stories you need to know for the Week of May 17-23:
A slim iPhone, at what cost? If the Galaxy S25 Edge is not disappointing enough with its 3900mAh battery, the iPhone 17 Air might be a bigger disappointment with its 2800mAh battery inside its 5.5mm thin chassis.We don’t understand why brands are pushing for slim phones, but Apple might utilize silicon-carbon tech to give the iPhone 17 Air a bigger battery, along with AI features to maximize battery life and bringing back battery cases like it last did for the iPhone 11 series.
NCAP is back. Ahead of the long-awaited EDSA rehabilitation happening on June 13, the Supreme Court has lifted the TRO on NCAP and will be implemented immediately to areas covered by MMDA like EDSA and C5. While this means drivers will be more disciplined on the road as cameras can catch traffic violations, there are still concerns regarding NCAP that haven’t been addressed properly since it was suspended in 2022. We just hope that MMDA gets things sorted, and that its single ticketing system will make paying fines less of a hassle.
Xiaomi going for the Apple Route. Years after the Surge S1, Xiaomi unveiled their new in-house chip with the XRING O1 that’s used on the 15S Pro and Pad 7 Ultra. This is not an ordinary midrange chip, as the XRING O1 has enough power to rival and outdo 2025 flagship chips like the Apple A18 Pro and Snapdragon 8 Elite. Both are only available in China for now, but it definitely got everyone curious at how Xiaomi managed to create their own flagship chip, and how it can create new competition for Qualcomm and MediaTek.
6 Years of Updates for the HONOR 400 series. Aside from the HONOR 400 series going global, returning to using a 200-megapixel rear camera, and boasting AI image-to-video generation, the bigger news is HONOR promising 6 years of software updates, which is one of the best software update commitments for a midrange Android phone. That sounds good on paper—especially with HONOR’s promise of rolling out Android 16 to the 400 Series and Magic7 series by the end of 2025–but we have to see them pull it off.
A busy week with COMPUTEX. Outside of everything involving AI, there are several interesting releases at COMPUTEX 2025. Some of our favorites include MSI’s new Ryzen Z2 Extreme-powered Claw A8, Acer’s sleek gaming laptop that can house as much as 192GB(!) RAM, ASUS ROG’s intriguing split gaming keyboard with magnetic switches, and probably the most beautiful laptop that has stunning Japanese artwork.
NVIDIA and AMD launched their new entry-level GPUs with the RTX 5060 and Radeon RX 6090 XT respectively, so we expect to see more affordable gaming desktops and laptops soon. Of course, we can’t imagine how 10 Filipinos spent half a million Pesos on MSI’s insane Dragon-themed laptop that has an RTX 4090 and the fastest SSD in the market.
That wraps up this week in Tech Unboxed. What’s your favorite story among the bunch?
