Retro computing brand Commodore has brought its pre-internet sensibilities to the mobile phone market with a $500 flip handset that proudly ships without social media, email, a web browser, or most of the things people typically buy smartphones to use. The company unveiled the device, dubbed Callback, this week and pitched it as a privacy-focused antidote to doomscrolling. Built in partnership with Finnish outfit Jolla, whose Sailfish OS traces its roots back to former Nokia engineers, the Linux-based handset attempts to split the difference between a feature phone and a smartphone. If your idea of progress is deleting half the apps on your phone, Callback may be for you. Commodore has removed email, social media, web browsing, workplace chat apps, and AI assistants, while bringing back physical controls and T9-style texting. Instead, buyers get a flip phone with a 48 MP Sony camera, FM radio, HD audio support, a selection of Commodore-themed games, and enough Android compatibility to run "99 percent" of Android applications through Sailfish OS's compatibility layer. "Phones were fun. Then they got too smart for their own good, and ours," said Commodore chief executive Peri Fractic, who said the idea grew out of his own efforts to reduce screen time before becoming a father. The company leans heavily on privacy as a selling point, promising no hidden data collection, no account sign-ins, encrypted storage, and what it describes as a "private not profit" business model. For many tech veterans, however, the real selling point may simply be the badge on the front. Long before smartphones, app stores, and algorithmic feeds, Commodore systems occupied bedrooms, classrooms, and living rooms around the world. For a generation of geeks, the brand still evokes cassette tape loading screens, SID-chip soundtracks, and countless hours spent typing programs from magazine listings. That's also why the company keeps getting resurrected. Commodore International collapsed in 1994, but the brand has spent much of the intervening decades bouncing between various owners eager to capitalize on the affection still attached to the name. Callback will initially launch in five versions, ranging from a $500 BASIC Beige model to a $640 Founders Edition complete with a 24-carat gold Commodore button. Whether nostalgia translates into sales remains another matter. Privacy-focused and minimalist phones have appeared regularly over the past decade, such as Punkt, usually attracting plenty of headlines and relatively few customers compared with the hundreds of millions of mainstream smartphones sold each year. Still, for anyone nostalgic for the days when hanging up the phone actually ended the conversation, Commodore has an answer: snap it shut and walk away. ®

The UK government is preparing to kick under-16s off social media and clamp down on a range of online features aimed at children, declaring that Big Tech has had its chance to police itself and failed. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans on Monday to ban under-16s from social media as part of a package that also includes new restrictions on livestreaming, stranger contact, disappearing messages, and AI companion chatbots. The legislation is expected to be introduced before Parliament's Christmas recess, with the new rules due to take effect in spring 2027. "Parents want to keep their kids safe and happy, but the online world has made that harder than ever," Starmer said. "I've heard firsthand from families crying out for change and we will do right by them." The prime minister reserved his sharpest criticism for the technology industry. "This is a line in the sand," he said. "Tech giants had their chance and failed, but we're stepping in to protect children, back parents, and set a new normal for future generations." The government is pitching the move as a direct response to parental concerns. According to its Growing Up in an Online World consultation, 91 percent of parents who responded supported a minimum age of 16 before social media platforms can offer services to children. More than four in five respondents said the risks of social media outweigh the benefits for children, while 88 percent said fewer children would be exposed to inappropriate or harmful content if age restrictions were introduced. Ministers also point to evidence that many parents are simply exhausted by the battle over screen time. Three-quarters of respondents said restrictions would lead to fewer arguments at home, while 77 percent said schools and teachers would find it easier to manage children's digital behavior. The government said it intends to follow Australia's model by targeting user-to-user platforms whose primary purpose is social interaction and user-generated content. That would include services such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X. The social media ban is only part of the package. Ministers also want to restrict a range of features they say expose children to harm, including stranger contact, explicit image sharing, livestreaming, and AI companion chatbots. Those restrictions would remain in force by default for 16 and 17-year-olds as well to avoid what ministers describe as a "cliff edge" when children turn 16. Ministers are also examining further measures for under-18s, including overnight social media curfews and mandatory breaks in infinite scrolling, with additional details expected in July. The government said it will seek to avoid some of the problems encountered in Australia by requiring what it describes as "highly effective age assurance" measures. Whether those systems prove any better at telling teenagers from adults remains unclear: recent age-verification trials have already produced examples of youngsters reportedly bypassing checks using little more than a drawn-on mustache. Ofcom, which will be responsible for enforcing much of the regime, signaled support for the government's plans. "So far, Ofcom has driven some of the strongest changes of any online safety regulation in the world, from widespread age checks to grooming protections for children," a spokesperson said. "But the industry needs to go much further to make people safe. The government has entrusted us to build on this progress with new measures to protect children, and we're ready to work closely with them as the detailed regulations take shape." But not everyone is convinced the government has found the right answer. James Baker, Platform Power and Freedom of Expression Programme Manager at the Open Rights Group, warned that lawmakers risk repeating a familiar pattern. "Every failed attempt to make children safer online is followed by more surveillance and censorship," he said. "Children have rights too and these policies will harm their free expression and privacy rights, and push them into less regulated spaces. Meanwhile the business models driving harms are untouched." Others questioned whether the measures can realistically be enforced. Mark Jones, an online harms specialist and partner at law firm Payne Hicks Beach, noted that the consultation closed only weeks ago and warned that determined teenagers have a habit of finding ways around restrictions. "A social media ban only helps if it is genuinely enforceable," Jones said. "If large numbers of young people simply circumvent the restrictions, parents will just lose visibility into where their children are actually spending time online rather than reclaiming any control." The political case for the crackdown appears relatively straightforward, but the practical one is less so. The government now has to persuade social media companies to enforce the rules and teenagers not to find ways around them. ®

MPs looking for proof that smartphones and social media are rotting children's brains got a less satisfying answer from neuroscientists on Wednesday: nobody can really prove it. Appearing before the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee this week, three researchers spent much of the session explaining that concern and evidence are not quite the same thing. Asked what evidence exists on the impact of digital devices on infants and young children, Professor Denis Mareschal, director of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, replied: "There is very little, if any, causal research in the early years. Almost everything is correlational." MPs kept coming back to the question – and the experts kept coming back to the same answer. When questioned about social media's impact on adolescents, Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the University of Cambridge was equally cautious. "What evidence do we have of the impact of digital devices or social media on the adolescent brain?" she asked. "Almost nothing. There are a few small studies, but they haven't been replicated, and they're purely correlational." However, that didn't stop the witnesses from expressing concern. Blakemore noted that adolescence is a period when reward systems in the brain are highly active while regions involved in self-control are still developing. "Even as adults, it's really hard to put our phones down if we're seeing constantly interesting things, but as a child or an adolescent whose prefrontal cortex is developing, it's even harder," she said. For Dr Dusana Dorjee, a senior lecturer in psychology in education at the University of York, the bigger concern was displacement. Children learn self-regulation through conversation, play, sport, and social interaction, she said, which can be crowded out by excessive screen use. "What would children do if they were not on their devices?" she asked. "They would interact with others, they would play, they would have multi-sensory input that digital devices can't provide." The researchers were also reluctant to throw every screen into the same bucket. Mareschal pointed to evidence that video calls can help families stay connected, while Dorjee drew a distinction between educational apps and endlessly scrolling whatever an algorithm decides comes next. MPs also wanted to know whether neuroscience could settle one of the liveliest arguments in the debate: how old a child should be before they're allowed onto social media. "What neuroscience can't do is pinpoint a precise age," Blakemore said. "The individual differences in brain development are vast." AI companions also got their turn in the hot seat, and the answers were even fuzzier than they were for social media. "We don't really have any evidence, and that's one area where I think we really urgently need new evidence," Blakemore said. "We need to think about, and this is the research question, how children and young people are interpreting AI chatbots, and whether they're interpreting them just like they would be interpreting a friend's behavior and suggestions and mental states." If there was a takeaway from the hearing, it was that concern about digital childhood is running well ahead of the evidence needed to settle the argument. ®

ON CALL 你好 Nǐ hǎo, dear reader, and welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your stories of translating technical trauma while delivering transcendent tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Jackson" who told us about his time providing tech support in a university's biology department. "It was sometime in the mid-2000s and our IT group at the time consisted of myself, my boss, and a part-timer," he told On Call. "We were a very casual IT group; nothing in the way of any formal policies or standards for anything at all. If someone needed a new PC, we just ordered parts and assembled them ourselves." The department's PC fleet therefore had a diverse gene pool, with no two machines possessing the same bill of materials. "This was fine by me – I enjoyed building them and it never really caused any issues that I couldn't handle," Jackson told On Call. "Until one day we got a panicked support call from one of the secretaries who claimed that her PC just rebooted and then started talking to her." Jackson and his colleagues didn't believe a word of it until the secretary stopped talking and placed her phone next to the talking PC. "I could clearly hear a muffled voice repeating a message of some sort," Jackson told On Call. There was nothing for it but to visit the PC, which he found hung in the middle of a Power-On Self-Test, flashing an alphanumeric error code and unmistakably playing a voice through its internal speaker. In Chinese! Jackson rebooted the machine and it ended up in the same state, reciting the same message. Chinese isn't a language in which Jackson is fluent, so he had no idea what the PC was trying to tell him. "After poking around in the BIOS, I found the culprit," Jackson revealed. "This particular model of motherboard had a 'talking error BIOS' whereby certain POST codes triggered the playback of a friendly, spoken error message, with Chinese set as the default language." Jackson found the relevant BIOS settings, changed the default language to English, and the next time he rebooted the machine it helpfully let him know: "Your floppy drive may not be connected properly." In his mail to On Call, Jackson hypothesized that the PC's CMOS battery died, so the BIOS was unable to access its stored settings and reverted to factory settings that assumed the presence of a nonexistent second floppy drive. "It triggered a feature I didn't even know the motherboard had!" Jackson told On Call. Have you found yourself flummoxed by a feature you didn't know about? If so, click here to send On Call an email – we'll assume that's a feature you know well – so we can tell your story on a future Friday. ®

It won't be making smartphones great again. The long-awaited Trump-branded smartphone has finally arrived, and it appears to be exactly what many suspected: an existing handset in gold drag. Repair biz iFixit got its hands on the Trump Mobile T1 after the device became available in May, and its teardown found the model is essentially an HTC U24 Pro with cosmetic tweaks and a Trump-friendly gold finish. It was almost exactly a year ago that the Trump Organization unveiled the Trump Mobile cellular service and heralded the coming of the T1 Phone, described as "a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States." Few expected the gilt gadget to live up to that promise, as there are effectively no mass-market smartphones built in the US, with the possible exception of Purism's Liberty Phone, which is priced at a challenging $1,999 for those who absolutely must have a smartphone made outside China. Despite accepting $100 deposits to pre-order the coveted handwarmer, Trump Mobile failed to deliver the device by August last year, as promised, and many started to believe it would never show up. But it arrived this May amid claims that the Trump Mobile website was leaking customer data to anyone who sent an HTTP POST request. The nerds at iFixit passed the Trump Phone through a CT scanner alongside an HTC U24 Pro to confirm that the internals of the two devices are almost an exact match. They even went so far as swapping the main board of the T1 for that of the HTC phone, and showed that it not only fits, but the phone still works. One difference iFixit noted is that the multichip package housing the 12 GB of LPDDR5 memory and 512 GB of storage is from Micron, whereas the corresponding package in HTC's phone is supplied by SK hynix. The HTC U24 Pro is a mid-range smartphone that was launched almost exactly two years ago in June 2024. It is based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 platform, has a 6.8-inch display, and came with Android 14 at launch, whereas the Trump phone features Android 15. In other words, it's a fairly unremarkable smartphone, sprayed gold and marketed to Trump fans for a promotional price of $499. To be fair, as iFixit makes clear, this is not a bad price for a device like this, so aureate wannabes are not being overcharged here. But as iFixit also makes clear, the device may be assembled in Florida, but it was designed in China and the vast majority of its parts have been sourced from and made in China as well. ®

London's Metropolitan Police and Apple have agreed to share stolen device identifiers, building intelligence they hope will curb the capital's phone theft epidemic. These identifiers will help both organizations track which stolen devices reconnect to mobile networks, giving law enforcement better insight into where the criminal networks behind the thefts operate. The Met has access to stolen device information, such as serial numbers, provided by victims. Apple has access to data indicating when a device has been reactivated and where it's being used. Together, the two organizations believe this combined intelligence will help stamp down on the thefts that have ravaged London's streets for years, earning the city the unofficial title of "phone theft capital of Europe." "If stolen phones cannot be reactivated, their value collapses, and so does the incentive to steal them," said Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley. "We are driving up the risk for offenders while cutting off the reward. "Policing is playing its part. In the West End, where this crime was most concentrated, phone theft has fallen by 50 percent through relentless, targeted policing. But we have also gone further by working directly with Apple to address the global market that has allowed this crime to thrive. "This is an important step, but it must not stop here. If you are stealing phones in London, the reality is changing fast. The opportunities are shrinking, the risks are rising, and we are determined to dismantle this criminal model completely." The intelligence-sharing pact follows months of pressure on both the Met and tech companies to take action. Dame Chi Onwurah, chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in December, asking why companies like Apple had not implemented cloud-based blocking or IMEI-linked device locks. Apple launched Stolen Device Protection in January 2024 and has since expanded default-on protections with the iOS 26.4 update, but there has long been a feeling that not enough was being done to tackle London's phone thefts. Rowley reiterated the ultimatum he issued to tech companies in March, demanding that they implement methods of reducing the value of stolen devices, or the UK will push through legislation. The collaboration with Apple is an extension of that, and the Met said Samsung and Google are also making security changes. Google uses several mitigations, including the need for authentication after a factory reset in order to return devices to working order, and an AI-powered feature that detects when devices are snatched and automatically locks the screen. A spokesperson at Google told The Register: "Android's theft protection features provide added security for billions of people, including Londoners. We have expanded default-on protections for UK devices, such as Remote Lock and Theft Detection, and we assist law enforcement with device recovery. Phone theft causes real distress and harm, and we work closely with the Met to protect all those who use our devices." Samsung said last year that it was working with the Home Office to deploy similar measures to tackle phone thefts. It implemented theft-detection tech similar to Google's that locks the screen when the device registers a possible snatching-related movement. It also requires biometric authentication to make security changes when devices are in unfamiliar locations, among other features. Not enough In spite of these actions, the Met announced today that it has asked the Home Office to start drafting anti-phone-theft legislation. "The Met has asked the Home Office to begin preparing legislation to introduce minimum technical standards so that any phone stolen in the UK is effectively unusable," it said. "These standards are complex, but we must be ready to act if industry fails to deliver. "Public support for stronger measures is clear, with 83 per cent of people backing the permanent blocking of stolen smartphones." It added: "While enforcement activity will continue, the Met is clear that the long-term solution lies in collapsing the criminal market." The Register has asked Apple to comment. A Samsung spokesperson said: "Samsung is fully committed to protecting customers with the very latest anti-theft feature technology. We recognise how distressing phone theft can be and have worked at pace to make a significant amount of security enhancements to help address this issue. "We would also like to reiterate that we have completed several requests from both the Home Office and the Met Police to demonstrate how seriously we take phone theft crime." The spokesperson added: "We believe this issue is a collective responsibility and we will continue to work with key stakeholders to help tackle phone-theft crime." The Met said it has almost halved rates of phone thefts in Westminster, with officers making hundreds of arrests and seizing thousands of devices. Thefts are down 45.8 percent, according to data gathered between January and May, although the picture across the wider city is a little less optimistic. The number of theft and robbery offenses in which a mobile phone was stolen has fallen by 14,000 in the last 12 months, representing an 18 percent decrease from the previous year. So far in 2026, overall offenses are down 20.6 percent compared to the same period in 2025. These arrests and seizures were secured through focused periods of enforcement action, namely through Operation Reckoning sprints, the fifth instalment of which concluded on Wednesday. The ten-day operational crackdown on phone thefts across London began on June 1 and resulted in the arrest of "prolific and violent phone thieves," the execution of search warrants at shops suspected of handling stolen devices, and the deployment of pursuit drivers to detain thieves on e-bikes. One visit to a single shop in April saw officers seize more than 1,000 suspected stolen phones and arrest four men between the ages of 22 and 63 on suspicion of handling stolen goods, as well as drug possession with intent to supply. Operation Reckoning is just one initiative targeting phone theft. The Met said last year that in September it dismantled a phone-robbing gang thought to be responsible for roughly half of all phone thefts in London – part of Operation Echosteep. ®