Google's Pixel 11 lineup could see RAM cuts or lower starting configurations because of the global memory shortage, with leaks suggesting the base model may drop from 12GB to 8GB while Pro models could add 12GB versions below the current 16GB tier. The Verge reports: There will be 16GB configurations available for each, but adding a lower-spec model could mean the 16GB version is getting a price hike. However, the silver lining is that the specs from MysticLeaks also include camera upgrades and brighter displays for the Pro models. The RAM shortage is pushing other phone makers, including Samsung, to raise prices, too.

fjo3 shares a report from The Times: More than two-thirds of babies under two use screens, a report has found, and some are exposed for up to eight hours a day. Nearly a third of newborns were found to be watching screens for more than three hours a day, while almost 20 percent of infants of four to 11 months used screens for more than an hour a day. The report comes after the government issued guidance that children under two do not use screens at all, apart from communal activities such as video-calling relatives.

In a review of the current research, researchers found evidence linking screen time to poorer outcomes for children, including an increased risk of obesity, short-sightedness, sleep and behavioural difficulties, and later challenges with friendships. [...] The research also revealed why children and parents use screens, with families reporting children doing so for educational purposes, entertainment, play and to communicate and bond with others. Parents, meanwhile, used screens to occupy or distract children, which helped caregivers to complete domestic duties, paid employment and other caring responsibilities. Nearly a quarter of parents -- 23.6 percent -- either had no childcare or were not aware of the government's early years offer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: When the Call Federal Credit Union outside Richmond, Va., was robbed at gunpoint in 2019, the suspect took $195,000 from the bank's vault and fled before the police arrived. A detective interviewed witnesses and reviewed the bank's security footage. But with no leads, the officer relied on a so-called geofence warrant to sweep up location data from all the cellphones in the vicinity of the bank for the 30 minutes before and after the robbery. The data he gathered eventually led to the identification and conviction of Okello T. Chatrie, now 31, a Jamaican immigrant who came to the United States in 2017.

Geofence searches have become increasingly popular as a tool for law enforcement, but critics say they put at risk the personal data of everyday Americans and violate the Constitution. Mr. Chatrie challenged the use of a geofence warrant in his conviction, in a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday. The justices will examine how the Constitution's traditional protections apply to rapidly changing technology that has made it easier for the police to scoop up vast amounts of data to assemble a detailed look at a person's movements and activities.

It has been eight years since the court last took up a major Fourth Amendment case involving the expectations of privacy for the millions of people carrying cellphones in the digital age. In that 2018 case, the court ruled that the government generally needs a warrant to collect location data drawn from cell towers about the customers of cellphone companies. The court has also limited the government's ability to use GPS devices to track suspects' movements, and it has required that law enforcement get a warrant to search individual cellphones. In Mr. Chatrie's case, the government did obtain a warrant, but one that his legal team said was overly broad, violating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Pres: Okello Chatrie's cellphone gave him away. Chatrie made off with $195,000 from the bank he robbed in suburban Richmond, Virginia, and eluded the police until they turned to a powerful technological tool that erected a virtual fence and allowed them collect the location history of cellphone users near the crime scene... Now the Supreme Court will decide whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches... Chatrie's appeal is one of two cases being argued Monday...

Civil libertarians say that geofences amount to fishing expeditions that subject many innocent people to searches of private records merely because their cellphones happened to be in the vicinity of a crime. A Supreme Court ruling in favor of the technique could "unleash a much broader wave of similar reverse searches," law professors who study digital surveillance wrote the court... In Chatrie's case, the geofence warrant invigorated an investigation that had stalled. After determining that Chatrie was near the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian around the time it was robbed in May 2019, police obtained a search warrant for his home. They found nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bands signed by the bank teller. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison. Chatrie's lawyers argued on appeal that none of the evidence should have been used against him. They challenged the warrant as a violation of his privacy because it allowed authorities to gather the location history of people near the bank without having any evidence they had anything to do with the robbery.

Prosecutors argued that Chatrie had no expectation of privacy because he voluntarily opted into Google's location history. A federal judge agreed that the search violated Chatrie's rights, but allowed the evidence to be used because the officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly.

The Washington Post reports that some teachers are now implementing "brain breaks" in their classrooms to cope with shorter attention spans, "including limiting screen time; cutting the time students spend on one activity; adding more engaging, hands-on projects; and practicing meditation." Some teachers say the efforts are helping, at least a little... To engage students, teachers say they often feel the need to deliver teaching not only in shorter bursts, but also in more entertaining ways. "The new word is 'edutainment,'" said Curtis Finch, superintendent of Deer Valley Unified School District in Arizona. "How can you make your lesson applicable, interactive? Teachers are going to have to be more engaging for students...."

In a kindergarten classroom at McKinley STEAM [a K-8 public school], students start the day with a meditation. The classroom of two dozen children is perhaps its quietest during this short activity every morning. Imagine you're in the Arctic, a voice from a meditation video tells them, with snowflakes melting on your skin. Silently, the children lay down on the carpet and close their eyes for a moment. After the meditation, the students gather in a circle and do a few deep breathing exercises before taking turns proclaiming what they are capable of each day. "I can be a good student," one little boy said before the child next to him replied: "I can listen to the teacher." The goal is that these mantras will stay with the children hours later, when they have to sit through the more tedious lessons of the day.
An instructional coach at McKinley STEAM says the strategies are working students aren't reaching for their phones during class and sometimes actually get drawn into lessons.

The article also explains why some teachers find this necessary: In recent years, educators say, it has grown more challenging to get students to pay attention. Eighty-eight percent of respondents in an international survey from 2025 of more than 3,000 teachers believed their students' attention spans were getting shorter. In a study published last year about kindergarten through second-grade classrooms in the United States, 75 percent of teachers said attention spans had dropped since the coronavirus pandemic, when the use of laptops and other technology for schooling spread rapidly. A growing body of research says that excessive screen time and short-form content such as TikTok videos are part of the problem. At least 36 states, including Ohio, have laws requiring schools to have some form of a cellphone ban.

There is debate over whether screen time reduces people's ability to focus or their desire to — many developmental experts lean toward the latter, suggesting that it is possible to help students regain longer attention spans.

America's National Science Board (NSB) "was established in 1950 to guide the governance of the National Science Foundation," writes the Washington Post, "in an unusual structure within the federal government that echoes the setup of a company board in the private sector. It helps guide an agency that operates Antarctic research stations, telescopes, a fleet of research vessels and supports basic science research in laboratories across the United States." (NSF research has helped evolve the technology used in MRIs, cellphones and LASIK eye surgery.)

But yesterday President Trump fired all 24 members of the National Science Board (NSB), the body that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF), reports Science magazine: In addition to advising the administration and Congress on national science policy, it has statutory authority to oversee the actions of the $9-billion NSF, setting policy and approving large expenditures. Its presidentially appointed members, typically prominent academics and industry leaders, serve 6-year terms, with eight members chosen every 2 years....

Keivan Stassun, one of the dismissed board members, says the mass firing is the latest indication that the White House is ignoring the board's authority and dictating policies at NSF, which has been without a permanent director since Sethuraman Panchanathan resigned exactly one year ago. Stassun, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University who was appointed to the board in 2022, thinks the board's public criticism in May 2025 of Trump's proposed 55% cut to NSF's current budget — which Congress ultimately ignored — antagonized the administration. "Maybe one way to say it from the administration's perspective," Stassun says, "is that this group of presidential appointees was advising the Congress to not follow the president's wishes."
The Washington Post adds that "The White House did not immediately respond to inquiries about why the members were terminated."

A report says Samsung's mobile division could post its first-ever annual loss in 2026, as rising memory costs, tougher competition, and pressure across products like foldables and smartwatches weigh on the business. SammyGuru reports: Samsung boss TM Roh reportedly told company leaders that the mobile (MX) business could lose money this year. That warning has clearly rattled management. The MX unit has long been a key pillar for Samsung. That's why the idea of it slipping into the red is a serious concern for the company's overall performance.

If this prediction holds, it would mark the first time the MX business reports a yearly loss since its inception. That's a sharp turn from its track record so far. It also raises bigger questions about future growth, rising competition, and how Samsung plans to steady the ship in its mobile division.

And it's not like the challenges are easing up. Samsung's foldable market share in the US, where it currently enjoys a dominant position, doesn't look as solid as before, and Apple could shake things up if it enters the segment. On top of that, market reports suggest Samsung's overall smartwatch share could dip in 2026. The Galaxy S26 series seems to be selling well for now, but whether that's enough to move the needle is still up in the air.

alternative_right writes: A new technology has been proposed that could fundamentally solve the issue of smartphones overheating during high-spec gaming or extended video streaming. Researchers at KAIST have discovered the principle of processing signals using the minute vibrations of magnets (spin waves) instead of electrons. This method significantly reduces heat generation and power consumption while enabling instantaneous frequency switching within the several GHz range. This breakthrough is expected to pave the way for smart devices with less heat and longer battery life, as well as ultra-low-power, high-speed computing. Professor Kab-Jin Kim from the Department of Physics said: "This study is a case that proves we can implement and control the nonlinear dynamics of magnons -- the principle of information processing using magnetic vibrations -- in actual nano-devices, which had previously only been proposed in theory. It will serve as an important foundation for the development of a new information processing paradigm using spin waves instead of electrons."

The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: A ban on mobile phones in schools in England is to be introduced by the government to ensure that "critical safeguarding legislation" is passed. The government will table an amendment to the children's wellbeing and schools bill in the House of Lords after the bill was held up by peers on opposition benches. It will make existing guidance on mobile phone bans in schools statutory, a move that ministers have resisted until now.

The government had consistently argued that the vast majority of schools had already banned mobile phones, and that there was no need to add a legal requirement. They finally capitulated, however, describing it as "a pragmatic measure" to get the bill through. [...] The bill is regarded by many as the biggest piece of child protection legislation in decades and includes proposals for a compulsory register for children who are not in school, a crackdown on profiteering in children's social care, and a "single unique identifier" to help agencies track a child's welfare.

"Nevada quietly signed an agreement earlier this year with a company that collects location data from cellphones, allowing police to track a device virtually in real time," reports the Associated Press. "All without a warrant." The software from Fog Data Science, adopted this January in Nevada through a Department of Public Safety contract, pulls information from smartphone apps in order to let state investigators identify the location of mobile devices. The state is allowed more than 250 queries a month using the tool, which allows officers to track a device's location over long stretches of time and enables them to see what Fog calls "patterns of life," according to company documents from 2022. It can help them deduce where and when people work and live, with whom they associate and what places they visit, according to privacy experts... Traditionally, police must obtain a warrant from a judge to access cellphone location information — a process that can take days or weeks. And while cellphone users may be aware that they are sharing their location through apps such as Google Maps, critics say few are aware that such information can make its way to police...

Other agencies in Nevada have been known to use technology similar to Fog. In 2013, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department acquired something known as a cell-site simulator that mimics cellphone towers and can sweep up signals from entire areas to track individuals, with some models capable of intercepting texts and calls. Police have not released detailed information about the technology since then.
"Police in other states have said the technology (and its low price tag) has helped expand investigatory capacity," the article adds.

But it also points out that Fog Data Science has a web page letting individuals opt out of all their data sets.

The Associated Press looks at the small-but-growing "rebellion" against attention-hogging devices, citing "a growing body of literature calling for people to move away from screens and pay attention to life." D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science at Princeton University and one of the authors of " Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement," making him a pillar of the growing backlash against the corporate harvesting of human attention. Along with MS NOW host Chris Hayes' bestselling " The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource," his work is part of a growing body of literature calling for people to move away from screens and pay attention to life. Burnett says the "attention liberation movement" is about throwing off the yoke of time-sucking apps. People "need to rewild their attention. Their attention is the fullness of their relationship to the world"....

There are several dozen "attention activism" groups across the United States and Canada, and the movement has also cropped up in Spain, Italy, Croatia, France and England. Burnett said he expects it to spread further.
Some examples cited in the article:

• "More than a dozen millennials gathered in a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn and placed their phones in a metal colander before two hours of reading, drawing and conversation."

• A few miles away "Nearly 20 people in their 30s stared at their cellphones for a few minutes. Then they set them down and looked at their bared palms for a while. Then those of their neighbors."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.

Samsung says it's thinking about bringing "vibe coding" to future Galaxy phones, allowing users to describe apps or interface changes in plain language and have AI generate the code. TechRadar interviewed Won-Joon Choi, Samsung's head of mobile experience, to learn more about the plans. Here's an excerpt from their report: As noted by Won-Joon Choi, the usefulness of vibe coding on smartphones is that it opens up the "possibility of customizing your smartphone experience in new ways, not just your apps but your UX." He added, "Right now we're limited to premade tools, but with vibe coding, users could adjust their favorite apps or make something customized to their needs. So vibe coding is very interesting, and something we're looking into." [...]

Samsung recently debuted the Galaxy S26 series of phones and made a point to not call them smartphones -- they're "AI phones" now. This certainly rang true with the majority of upgrades to the devices being AI software-focused, like the new Now Nudge and expanded Audio Eraser tools, with the biggest hardware bump for the base models coming via the 39% improved NPU processing (the processor in charge of on-device AI tasks). It also teased the debut of Perplexity on its phones, joining as an alternative to the Gemini assistant, and teased the possibility of other AI models getting the same treatment in the future.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from U.S. News & World Report: U.S. health officials plan a new study investigating whether radiation from cellphones may affect human health. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said the research will examine electromagnetic radiation and possible gaps in current science. The initiative stems from numerous concerns raised by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has linked cellphone use to neurological damage and cancer.

"The [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] removed webpages with old conclusions about cell phone radiation while HHS undertakes a study on electromagnetic radiation and health research to identify gaps in knowledge, including on new technologies, to ensure safety and efficacy," HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said. He added that the study was directed in a strategy report from the president's Make America Healthy Again Commission.

Some webpages from the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say current research does not show clear harm from cellphone radiation. The National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, says that "evidence to date suggests that cellphone use does not cause brain or other kinds of cancer in humans.".

Last June the Trump organization announced sales of a $499 "T1" smartphone with a gold-colored case. But though they originally were scheduled for release in August, this week a customer service representative for the wireless carrier told CBS News the device will be pushed back again, now until the end of January, "attributing the delay to the recent U.S. government shutdown."

Some context from The Independent: Shortly after the phone was first announced, language describing it as "Made in the USA" was removed from its official website with the vague claim that the devices are "brought to life" in the United States posted in its place... Other information about the phone has also changed or been removed since its first unveiling, The Verge has reported. Trump Mobile initially indicated the T1's screen measured 6.78 inches, but now claims it is 6.25 inches. It also said the phone had 12GB of RAM; however, that claim has now also disappeared.

As the wait for the T1 continues, Trump Mobile has begun offering refurbished Samsung S23s, S24s, and Apple iPhone 15s and 16s for sale on its site, which appear to have no specific Trump branding and are priced considerably higher than customers might pay elsewhere.

An anonymous reader shared this report from The Guardian: A Texas father used the parental controls on his teenage daughter's cell phone to find and help rescue her after she was kidnapped at knifepoint while walking her dog on Christmas, authorities allege... Her father subsequently located her phone through the device's parental controls, the agency's statement said. The phone was about 2 miles (3.2km) away from him in a secluded, partly wooded area in neighboring Harris county... She then managed to escape with a hand from her father, who called law enforcement officials, said the statement from the Montgomery sheriff's office.
The suspect has since been arrested and charged.

Jolla is "trying again with a new crowd-funded smartphone," reports Phoronix: Finnish company Jolla started out 14 years ago where Nokia left off with MeeGo and developed Sailfish OS as a new Linux smartphone platform. Jolla released their first smartphone in 2013 after crowdfunding but ultimately the Sailfish OS focus the past number of years now has been offering their software stack for use on other smartphone devices [including some Sony Xperia smartphones and OnePlus/Samsung/ Google/ Xiaomi devices].
This new Jolla Phone's pre-order voucher page says the phone will only produced if 2,000 units are ordered before January 4. (But in just a few days they've already received 1,721 pre-orders — all discounted to 499€ from a normal price between 599 and 699 €). Estimate delivery is the first half of 2026. "The new Jolla Phone is powered by a high-performing Mediatek 5G SoC," reports 9to5Linux, "and features 12GB RAM, 256GB storage that can be expanded to up to 2TB with a microSDXC card, a 6.36-inch FullHD AMOLED display with ~390ppi, 20:9 aspect ratio, and Gorilla Glass, and a user-replaceable 5,500mAh battery." The Linux phone also features 4G/5G support with dual nano-SIM and a global roaming modem configuration, Wi-Fi 6 wireless, Bluetooth 5.4, NFC, 50MP Wide and 13MP Ultrawide main cameras, front front-facing wide-lens selfie camera, fingerprint reader on the power key, a user-changeable back cover, and an RGB indication LED. On top of that, the new Jolla Phone promises a user-configurable physical Privacy Switch that lets you turn off the microphone, Bluetooth, Android apps, or whatever you wish.

The device will be available in three colors, including Snow White, Kaamos Black, and The Orange. All the specs of the new Jolla Phone were voted on by Sailfish OS community members over the past few months. Honouring the original Jolla Phone form factor and design, the new model ships with Sailfish OS (with support for Android apps), a Linux-based European alternative to dominating mobile operating systems that promises a minimum of 5 years of support, no tracking, no calling home, and no hidden analytics...

The device will be manufactured and sold in Europe, but Jolla says that it will design the cellular band configuration to enable global travelling as much as possible, including e.g. roaming in the U.S. carrier networks. The initial sales markets are the EU, the UK, Switzerland, and Norway.

What happened when a school in Los Angeles gave a sixth grader an iPad for use throughout the school day? "He used the iPad during school to watch YouTube and participate in Fortnite video game battles," reports NBC News.

His mother has now launched a coalition of parents called Schools Beyond Screens "organizing in WhatsApp groups, petition drives and actions at school board meetings and demanding meetings with district administrators, pressuring them to pull back on the school-mandated screen time." Los Angeles Unified is the first district of its size to face an organized — and growing — campaign by parents demanding that schools pull back on mandatory screen time. The discontent in Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the country, reflects a growing unease nationally about the amount of time children spend learning through screens in classrooms. While a majority of states prohibit children from using cellphones in class, 88% of schools provide students with personal devices, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, often Chromebook laptops or iPads. The parents hope getting a district that has over 409,000 students across nearly 800 schools to change how it approaches screen time would send a signal across public school districts to pull back from a yearslong effort to digitize classrooms....

[In the Los Angeles school district] Students in grade levels as low as kindergarten are provided iPads, and some schools require them to take the tablets home. Some teachers have allowed students to opt out of the iPad-based assignments, but other parents say they've been told that they can't. Parents can also opt their children out of having access to YouTube and several other Google products... The billion-dollar 2014 initiative to give tablet computers to everyone became a scandal after the bidding process appeared to heavily favor Apple, and it faced criticism once it became clear that students could bypass security protocols and that few teachers used the tablets. Currently, the district leaves it up to individual schools to decide whether they want students to take home iPads or Chromebooks every day and how much time they spend on them in class...

Around 300 parents attended listening sessions the district held last month about technology in the classroom. Nearly all who spoke criticized how much screen time schools gave their children in class, pointing to ways their behavior and grades suffered as students watched YouTube and played Minecraft... Several also asked district officials to explain why children as young as kindergartners were asked to sign a form to use devices in which they promised they would honor intellectual property law and refrain from meeting people in person whom they met online. "Is it possible for children to meet people over the internet on school-issued devices?" one father asked. The district officials declined to answer, saying it was meant to be a listening session.
In 2022, Los Angeles Unified started requiring students to complete benchmark assessments on educaitonal software i-Ready, the article points out, which generates unique questions for each students. "But parents and teachers are unable to see what children are asked, in part because the company that makes the program considers them proprietary information..."

One teacher says his school's administartors are requiring him to use i-Ready even though it doesn't have any material for the science class he's actually teaching. He's also noticed some students will use answers from AI chatbots, bypassing the school's monitoring software by creating alternate user profiles. But the monitoring software company suggests the school misconfigured their software's settings, adding "More commonly, when students attempt to bypass filtering or monitoring, they do so by using proxies."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

CNN's prediction for 2026? "Any device that uses memory, from phones to tablets and smartwatches, could get pricier." But will it be a little or a lot?

The article cites an analysis from multinational strategy/management consulting firm McKinsey & Company which found America's data center demand could continue growing by 20 to 25 percent per year" through 2030. "That's prompted memory manufacturers like Micron and Samsung to shift their focus to data centers, which use a different type of memory, meaning fewer resources for consumer products. (Jaejune Kim, executive VP for memory at Samsung, said in October that their third quarter saw strong demand for memory for AI and data centers, and that they expected the supply shortage for mobile and PC memory to "intensify further.") Memory prices are rising for consumer products because major manufacturers are instead ramping up production for AI data centers as artificial intelligence companies boom. "It's pretty much brutal and crunched across the board," said Yang Wang, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research.

The International Data Corporation, a global market research firm, reported earlier this week that the smartphone market is expected to decline by 0.9% in 2026 in part because of memory shortages. Memory prices are expected to surge by 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and may climb an additional 20% early next year, Counterpoint Research said last month... TrendForce, a research firm that follows the semiconductor industry, estimates memory price hikes have made smartphones 8% to 10% more expensive to produce in 2025 (higher production costs don't always translate into higher consumer prices for a variety of reasons).

Some smartphones could cost more as soon as early next year, said Nabila Popal, a senior research director for the International Data Corporation. Cheap Android phones may see the biggest impact, since less expensive products usually have thinner margins. "It's going to be almost impossible for them to not raise prices" of cheaper Android phones, said Popal. Companies may also postpone phone launches to focus on expensive models that may be more profitable. The average selling price for smartphones is expected to climb to $465 in 2026, compared to $457 in 2025, according to Popal, putting the smartphone market at a record high value of $578.9 billion.

But the pendulum is expected to swing back in the other direction late next year as the supply chain adjusts, according to Popal and Wang, potentially bringing prices back down or at least capping increases.

India is weighing a proposal to mandate always-on satellite tracking in smartphones for precise government surveillance -- an idea strongly opposed by Apple, Google, Samsung, and industry groups. Reuters reports: For years, the [Prime Minister Narendra Modi's] administration has been concerned its agencies do not get precise locations when legal requests are made to telecom firms during investigations. Under the current system, the firms are limited to using cellular tower data that can only provide an estimated area location, which can be off by several meters.

The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), which represents Reliance's Jio and Bharti Airtel, has proposed that precise user locations should only be provided if the government orders smartphone makers to activate A-GPS technology -- which uses satellite signals and cellular data -- according to a June internal federal IT ministry email. That would require location services to always be activated in smartphones with no option for users to disable them. Apple, Samsung, and Alphabet's Google have told New Delhi that should not be mandated, said three of the sources who have direct knowledge of the deliberations.

A measure to track device-level location has no precedent anywhere else in the world, lobbying group India Cellular & Electronics Association (ICEA), which represents both Apple and Google, wrote in a confidential July letter to the government, which was viewed by Reuters. "The A-GPS network service ... (is) not deployed or supported for location surveillance," said the letter, which added that the measure "would be a regulatory overreach." Earlier this week, Modi's government was forced to rescind an order requiring smartphone makers to preload a state-run cyber safety app on all devices after public backlash and privacy concerns.

A severe spike in global DRAM prices has pushed Samsung Semiconductor to refuse a long-term RAM order from its own sibling, Samsung Electronics. The move is forcing the smartphone division into short, expensive renegotiations, which will likely mean higher costs for consumer devices. PCWorld reports: Samsung subsidiaries are, naturally, going to look to Samsung Semiconductor first when they need parts. Such was reportedly the case for Samsung Electronics, in search of memory supplies for its newest smartphones as the company ramps up production for 2026 flagship designs. But with so much RAM hardware going into new "AI" data centers -- and those companies willing to pay top dollar for their hardware -- memory manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are prioritizing data center suppliers to maximize profits.

The end result, according to a report from SE Daily spotted by SamMobile, is that Samsung Semiconductor rejected the original order for smartphone DRAM chips from Samsung Electronics' Mobile Experience division. The smartphone manufacturing arm of the company had hoped to nail down pricing and supply for another year. But reports say that due to "chipflation," the phone-making division must renegotiate quarterly, with a long-term supply deal rejected by its corporate sibling. A short-term deal, with higher prices, was reportedly hammered out.