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Samsung showed off new Galaxy Buds 2 Pro wireless earbuds at its August unpacked eventalongside the Galaxy ZFold 4, Z-Flip 4 and the Galaxy Watch 5 line. They cost $230 (£219, AU$349), and will ship on Aug. 26.

Like the previous Galaxy Buds Pro, Samsung’s pumping up how the wireless earbuds support what it calls 360 audio, which should allow for a surround-sound experience. But to make use of this, the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro need to be connected to a supported Galaxy phone with at least Android 8.0 and Samsung’s One UI 4.1 overlay.

The Galaxy Buds 2 Pro also support 24-bit hi-fi audio, but that feature also requires a Galaxy phone that has Samsung’s One UI 4.0 or above.

Aside from those Galaxy-only enhancements, the wireless buds do have active noise cancellation and a battery that is rated for 20 hours with noise cancellation on. Without noise cancellation, Samsung says the buds can stretch to 30 hours between charges.

The Galaxy Buds 2 Pro have a water resistance level of IPX7 for water and sweat, making them good for the gym or a rainy day, and they come in three colors: Bora purple, white and graphite.

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The Galaxy Buds line often has inventive designs (I’m still looking for a sequel to the bean-shaped Galaxy Buds Live), but it’s a bummer that it’s continuing the industry trend of requiring a matching phone for the best sound quality. Google’s new Pixel Buds Pro also require a Pixel phone for its spatial audio, and Apple is fairly notorious for including all kinds of perks for AirPods users when paired with Apple’s devices.

Long gone are the days when a consumer electronics company could simply announce a phone and call it a day. At this morning’s big launch event in Beijing, Xiaomi followed up its foldable news by handing the stage over to CyberOne. The bipedal humanoid robot joined Lei Jun onstage, greeting the CEO and handing him a long-stem flower.

At first glance, the robot isn’t exactly Atlas or Digit, in terms of locomotion, but it’s still a promising demo and very much not a person in a spandex suit (not that anyone would do that). It’s the latest sign of Xiaomi’s growing robotics ambitions, which began with vacuums and have since expanded to include last year’s Spot-esque CyberDog.

Image Credits: Xiaomi

We’ve seen plenty of consumer brands flex some robotic muscle at events like this, including Samsung and LG, so it’s tough to know where CyberOne falls in the spectrum between serious pursuit and stage spectacle.

Lei Jun was quick to flex the company’s investment in the category, noting, “CyberOne’s AI and mechanical capabilities are all self-developed by Xiaomi Robotics Lab. We have invested heavily in R&D spanning various areas, including software, hardware and algorithms innovation.”

There’s an extremely broad range of claims here, including the ability to read human emotions. Xiaomi notes:

Humanoid robots rely on vision to process their surroundings. Equipped with a self-developed Mi-Sense depth vision module and combined with an AI interaction algorithm, CyberOne is capable of perceiving 3D space, as well as recognizing individuals, gestures, and expressions, allowing it to not only see but to process its environment . In order to communicate with the world, CyberOne is equipped with a self-developed MiAI environment semantics recognition engine and a MiAI vocal emotion identification engine, enabling it to recognize 85 types of environmental sounds and 45 classifications of human emotion. CyberOne is able to detect happiness, and even comfort the user in times of sadness. All of these features are integrated into CyberOne’s processing units, which are paired with a curved OLED module to display real-time interactive information.

Image Credits: Xiaomi

Equally broad are the promised real-world applications, ranging from manufacturing assistance to human companionship. There will be plenty of use for both of these feature sets in the future, but that’s a long walk (so to speak) from today’s demo. For the time being, it probably makes the most sense to view CyberOne as something of an analogy to, say, Honda’s Asimo: a promising experiment that’s serves as a good brand ambassador for some of the work being done behind the scenes.