Technology

AI afterlife, robot romance, and slow-burn slashers: the best of Sundance 2024

Published

2 years ago

February 4, 2024

AI afterlife, robot romance, and slow-burn slashers: the best of Sundance 2024

AI is the buzzword of the moment, and nowhere seems to be safe — even film festivals. This year’s edition of Sundance was a prime example. Multiple documentaries about the past and present of artificial intelligence made an appearance, and at least one film — the dark comedy Little Death — utilized generative AI as an artistic choice. There was even Love Me, a post-apocalyptic romantic comedy about two AIs in love.

Outside of AI, there was the usual crop of inventive horror movies, a coming-of-age story set during the good ol’ days of AIM, and a heartbreaking documentary that was set partially inside of World of Warcraft. In short: Sundance had range this year. And while we couldn’t catch everything, we did watch a lot, and came away with this list of our favorites.

Desire Lines

Directed by Jules Rosskam; no premiere date yet

As comfortable as many of us have become talking about and celebrating the sexual lives of cisgender queer people (and to a lesser extent those of trans / genderqueer women), that hasn’t really been the case when it comes to transgender men.

For all of the progress society has made toward its acceptance of The LGBTQ Community™, the very existence of trans men and their sexualities have historically been minimized in our conversations about the spectrum we understand human gender expression to be. That minimization — which is rooted in both sexism and homophobia — has tended to erase trans men from the larger queer historical record in ways that often feel like they can’t be undone.

But with Full Spectrum Features’ new hybrid documentary / narrative feature Desire Lines, filmmaker Jules Rosskam sets out to help right some of that wrong by centering trans men in a fascinating story about trans male sexuality and cultural memory. Rather than simply interviewing trans men about their identities, Desire Lines tells the fictional tale of Ahmad (Aden Hakimi), a soft spoken 50-something whose complicated feelings about being attracted to other men lead him to a metaphysical archive of queer lived experiences.

As both a trans man, and an immigrant originally from Iran, Ahmad arrives at the archive assuming that he won’t be able to see much of himself reflected in immersive, dreamlike memories preserved in the archive’s library for patrons to experience. But with each trip to the archive, Ahmad finds himself spending more and more time with researcher Kieran (Theo Germaine) while diving into snapshots from people’s lives depicted through dramatizations of actual events and Rosskam’s conversations with his interviewees. And as Ahmad becomes increasingly comfortable navigating the archive, and letting the stories of other queer men wash over him, the more he begins to understand that his desires are an essential part of who he is. —CPM

Image: Sundance Institute

Dìdi

Directed by Sean Wang; no premiere date yet

Sean Wang has likened his coming-of-age story to Stand By Me, only transposed onto his own upbringing. That means all of the awkwardness of adolescence, but set in the Bay Area in 2008, within a largely Asian American community. Instead of a group of friends, though, the story is centered mostly on Chris (Izaac Wang) as he struggles to deal with all of the usual troubles: friends, family, and romance.

There’s a specificity to Dìdi that really makes it work. Because it’s set in 2008, many of Chris’ problems revolve around the internet in some way. He chats with his crush on AIM, posts skate and prank videos on YouTube, and learns the extent of the rift with his best friend on MySpace. If you lived through that period of time as an extremely online person, the nostalgia will hit you hard. (For me it was the AIM chime, which brought me right back to childhood.)

All of those hyperspecific details make Dìdi feel remarkably true to life. That’s true of the cringy moments — Chris getting caught in a lie about watching A Walk to Remember, or blocking his friends on IM because he doesn’t know what to say — but also the heartwarming ones as well, like his difficult relationship with his mother. It’s a movie that captures all of those conflicting and angsty adolescent feelings and turns them into a story that will somehow make you root for a kid who pees in his sister’s lotion bottle. —AW

Image: Sundance Institute

Ibelin

Directed by Benjamin Ree; will stream on Netflix, but no premiere date yet

Ibelin is a heartbreaking story told in a particularly novel way. It’s a documentary about Mats Steen, who died of a degenerative muscular disease at 25 and, for much of the time before that, used video games as an escape. Toward the end of his life, that mostly involved losing himself in World of Warcraft for hours on end. The two sides of his life remained largely separate; while his parents obviously knew Mats played a lot of video games, it wasn’t until after his death they discovered the breadth and depth of the relationships he formed online.

In order to effectively explore both sides of Mats’ life, the film uses eight years’ worth of in-game dialogue alongside animations created inside of WoW to recreate important moments from his life. There’s playful flirting and guild in-fighting, but the most arresting scenes involve the real-world impact Mats had on his fellow roleplayers, including helping a mother better connect to her son. But while he became a source of strength and joy for his WoW companions, Mats largely kept his own struggles a secret.

Ibelin is a film that uses every tool at its disposal in an attempt to capture the totality of someone’s life, both IRL and online, and manages to do so beautifully. The doc was also one of several Netflix acquisitions at Sundance, so it’ll hopefully be streaming soon. —AW

In A Violent Nature

Directed by Chris Nash; releasing in theaters this year, followed by streaming on Shudder

Do you ever wonder what the likes of Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers do all day in between slashings? In A Violent Nature is just for you. It’s a classic-style slasher with a premise — troubled kid turns into an unstoppable killing machine, proceeds to haunt campground — that feels ripped right out of any number of Friday the 13th knockoffs. It’s the kind of movie where it’s hard to tell if the goofy dialogue is intentionally campy or not.

But what makes In A Violent Nature stand out in such a crowded genre is its viewpoint: you see the entire movie unfold from the villain’s perspective. And it turns out that they don’t do much at all; the film is a lot of walking around through the forest, occasionally scoping out prospective teens to kill, with brief punctuations of extreme violence.

This has a transformative effect on an otherwise derivative film. In A Violent Nature has no score, so for the most part you’re listening to the soothing sounds of nature as the killer lumbers through the woods, almost like Norwegian slow TV but horror. And the camera stays close behind the villain for most of the movie, reminiscent of third-person action games like Resident Evil. This lets the movie lull you into a false sense of security before dropping a particularly gruesome kill — which ends up hitting even harder given how intimate the view is. —AW

Love Machina

Directed by Peter Sillen; no premiere date yet

Were it not for lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, SiriusXM Radio would not exist as we know it, and there would not be nearly as many people living full lives while successfully managing their pulmonary hypertension as there are today. Though many of the companies Rothblatt founded have already changed the world in demonstrably significant ways, director Peter Sillen’s documentary Love Machina tells the story of how Rothblatt and her wife Bina have committed their lives to researching experimental technology meant to immortalize people by digitizing their consciousnesses.

Simply looking at the first iteration of Bina48, the robotic bust modeled after the real Bina and outfitted with limited chatbot-level speech capabilities, it’s hard to imagine her becoming the kind of android one would think of as a true facsimile of a human being.

But through its chronicle of how the robot’s potential has evolved in step with the development of technologies like ChatGPT, Love Machina provides a fascinating look into the Rothblatts’ minds, and tries to make their vision of the future seem like something worth really mulling over. —CPM

Love Me

Co-directed by Sam and Andy Zuchero; no release date

While the general premise of co-writer / director duo Sam and Andy Zuchero’s Love Me shares a number of similarities with Pixar’s Wall-E, the new film’s story is far more interested in unpacking what it would actually mean for a self-actualized robot to experience human feelings. Set thousands of years in the future when seemingly all organic life on Earth has long since gone extinct, Love Me tells the tale of how a solar-powered buoy (Kristen Stewart) makes contact with a satellite (Steven Yeun) in a way that puts them both on a path to transcending their original intended functions.

It’s because of the buoy’s first encounter with the satellite (a Voyager-like repository of human history left orbiting the planet) that the buoy (a machine meant to collect information about the ocean) starts to turn its camera upward in hopes of striking up a conversation. And it’s because of the satellite’s broadcasts about how it was built to assist any living beings that it might one day encounter that the buoy teaches itself to speak. And when the satellite opens up its massive archive of the internet to the buoy in order to confirm that it’s actually a person the way it says it is, the buoy’s ability to think its way through a CAPTCHA test is its first step toward discovering what it means to exist.

Like its two main characters, Love Me transforms in fascinating ways as it moves from a beautiful but desolate CGI physical world rendered in gorgeous detail to the more nebulous, initially low-resolution reality of a metaverse game that only exists for the buoy and the satellite. It’s in that reality that Love Me reveals itself to be both a clever comedy and an imaginative drama about the messiness of defining one’s self in relation to social media. —CPM

Image: Sundance Institute

The Moogai

Directed by Jon Bell; no premiere date yet

Sundance is typically a great place to find the next cult horror movie; last year’s edition of the festival, for instance, featured Talk To Me, Birth/Rebirth, and In My Mother’s Skin. In 2024, we have The Moogai — from the producers of both Talk To Me and The Babadook — which puts a terrifying folklore spin on the tragedy of Australia’s “stolen generations.”

The titular Moogai is a kind of boogeyman, but one that steals children. For Sarah (Shari Sebbens) — an aboriginal woman who was adopted by white parents and has a conflicted relationship with her birth mother — the creature’s appearance becomes a nightmare as she’s expecting her second child. At first, she shrugs off the visions and bad feelings, and thwarts her mother’s attempts at protection, thinking them superstition. But as the Moogai becomes harder to ignore, she finds herself fighting against everyone around her, none of whom believe her.

It’s a film that touches on serious and important issues — in addition to the impact of colonialism in Australia, it also explores the challenges of postpartum depression — and that only heightens the pure horror. The Moogai does an amazing job of being patient, keeping its monster largely hidden for most of the movie, building up the suspense before a brutal (and cathartic) finale. —AW

Sebastian

Directed by Mikko Mäkelä; no premiere date yet, but LevelK recently acquired the international distribution rights.

Even though powerfully graphic, honest portrayals of gay sex are an important part of Finnish-British writer / director Mikko Mäkelä’s sophomore feature Sebastian, the most provocative thing about the film is the way it contrasts the beauty of creating art shaped by personal experience and the business of commodifying one’s identity in pursuit of fame.

With every new piece of short, erotic fiction that 25-year-old writer Max (Ruaridh Mollica) shares with his peers for feedback, they become increasingly resolute that he has an unmatched talent for turning interviews with actual sex workers into the kinds of gripping, subtle dramas that the publishing world needs more of. But as much as it pleases Max to be respected for the authenticity of the voice he writes in, he works hard to keep secret the truth of how his work is inspired by his own experiences as a sex worker.

As it pulls you back and forth between Max’s two lives, Sebastian’s story challenges you to understand how both sex and sex work can be empowering modes of self-discovery when decoupled from shame. Max’s secret work is both cathartic for him and helps him create worlds on the page that feel real, because they partially are. But Sebastian also highlights how important it is to understand the intentionality behind creating art like Max’s — art that’s only honest to a point and also gunning for acclaim for its rawness. —CPM

Seeking Mavis Beacon

Directed by Jazmin Renée Jones; no premiere date yet

When developer The Software Toolworks first published Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing in 1987, it created an iconic video game character whose name would go on to evoke powerful memories of afternoons spent in high school computer rooms for millions of people across the globe. Though countless people have come to love Mavis for her confident smile and passion for touch typing, the story of Renée L’Espérance, the Haitian-born store clerk who became the face of the Mavis Beacon franchise, is far less known.

But with Seeking Mavis Beacon, filmmakers Jazmin Renée Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross seek to shine a bright light on L’Espérance’s life by unpacking the complicated story of how she was forced to fight to protect her image from the software company that had no idea it had created a Black pop cultural icon.

Through a series of interviews with Mavis Beacon’s developers, tech historians, and members of L’Espérance’s family, the investigative documentary digs into how — more than merely being Mavis Beacon — L’Espérance has always been a person with her own story to tell. And the documentary illustrates how some of that story is a textbook example of the many ways in which tech and entertainment can reinforce societal biases that people don’t always realize they’re absorbing. —CPM

Image: Sundance Institute

Veni Vidi Vici

Directed by Daniel Hoesl and Julia Niemann; no premiere date yet

The idea of the rich getting away with murder is taken to its extreme in this satire. Yes, making fun of the excesses of the ultra wealthy has become a genre of its own of late — from Saltburn to Glass Onion — but Veni Vidi Vici manages to carve out its own space with its particularly dark sense of humor.

It takes place as a serial killer, known simply as the “sniper,” is running rampant, taking out innocent bystanders from afar. Only it’s not really hard to tell who it is. A journalist has figured it out, as has a local gamekeeper. Everyone else keeps quiet lest they upset Amon (Laurence Rupp), head of the rich and powerful Maynard family. He’s a man who goes off on long hunting excursions, yet freely admits he would never hurt an animal. Who else could it be?

As Amon continues his killing spree, he gets increasingly brazen, daring somebody, anybody to successfully bring him to justice. At the same time, his teenage daughter Paula (Olivia Goschler) is soaking up all the worst lessons from her father; namely, the idea that if you can get away with something, you should definitely do it. The movie isn’t subtle here: early on Paula says, “Sticking to the rules? I’m too creative for that.”

Veni Vidi Dici makes the contrast between the family’s bloodthirsty desires and its picture-perfect image as stark as possible, and while it doesn’t necessarily have much new to say, it gets its message across clearly — and with lots of style and humor. Plus, it has the most disturbing ending of any movie I saw at Sundance this year. —AW

Technology

This Windows gaming handheld has a screen that folds in half

Published

11 hours ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

This Windows gaming handheld has a screen that folds in half

Lenovo put a foldable display on a gaming handheld. The Legion Go Fold Concept is a Windows-based handheld with a flexible POLED display, detachable Joy-Con-like controllers, and a folio case to turn the whole thing into a mini laptop.

You can use it as a standard Steam Deck-esque handheld with the display folded down to 7.7 inches and controllers attached at its sides, or you can unfold it for a bigger experience. When unfolded, the controllers can be repositioned to all four sides, allowing you to play with the screen in vertical or horizontal orientations.

In vertical splitscreen mode, you can put your game on one half of the screen and a second window (like your chat or game guide) on the other half. Horizontal fullscreen mode gives your game the full 11.6 inches of real estate in a 16:10 aspect ratio. To go into laptop mode, you remove the controllers and mount the handheld into a folio case with a stand, built-in keyboard, and trackpad. The controllers can be put into a separate grip mount to unify them as one gamepad.

There are a lot of ways you can use this folding handheld, including turning one of its controllers into a vertical mouse like on other Legion Go handhelds, but there’s one thing it doesn’t do: fold down to close and protect its screen. The Go Fold only folds outwards, so don’t expect a Nintendo DS or GameBoy Advance-like clamshell that closes for portability. Instead, it’s all about getting bigger than your average gaming handheld and offering more. (Though we’ve tried bigger before.)

The Legion Go Fold has some formidable specs: an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V Lunar Lake processor, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and a 48Whr battery. The plastic-covered OLED has a resolution of 2435 x 1712 and 165Hz refresh rate. And there’s even a second, circular toushscreen on the right controller, under the face buttons. It doubles as a touchpad and can be a support display, allowing you to swipe between extracted UI elements from a game (which I wouldn’t expect to be widely supported), a clock, system monitoring, or an animated GIF (just for fun).

During my brief in-person demo I didn’t get to play any graphically-intense games — just Balatro, which can practically play on a potato. The screen looked plenty sharp, but like any foldable there’s a crease down the middle; it’s very visible, but you learn to look past it and ignore it after just a bit. The build and feel of the whole thing felt a little fragile, and detaching and reattaching the controllers was definitely janky. Build quality will hopefully be improved if this device ever actually makes it to market.

The laptop mode was a pleasant surprise for me though. I did not expect a gaming handheld to double as a conventional computer you could get work done on. The Legion Go Fold’s case took quite a bit of fumbling before I set it up correctly, but it shouldn’t take too long to get used to if you actually lived with it.

Then again, I don’t know if anyone is going to be able to live with this thing — ever. I’d love for the Legion Go Fold to go from concept to real product like other out-there Lenovo ideas, but I shudder to think what it might cost. The Legion Go 2 is already priced well over $1,000. And with the ongoing RAMageddon crisis we’re living through, there’s no telling how much more expensive an actual Legion Go Fold would be if it came out in a year or more.

But even if it’s not the kind of foldable I expected, and even though it may never come out, it’s certainly cool. Now somebody please make a folding PC handheld that goes from kinda-big to really small. I think that’d be the one for me.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Technology

Iran networks suffer losses amid airstrikes, showing digital evolution of conflicts

Published

11 hours ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

Iran networks suffer losses amid airstrikes, showing digital evolution of conflicts

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

When missiles fly, we expect explosions. We expect smoke, sirens and satellite images. What we do not expect is silence.

On February 28, 2026, as fighter jets and cruise missiles struck Iranian Revolutionary Guard command centers during Operation Roar of the Lion, a parallel assault reportedly unfolded in cyberspace.

Official news sites and key media platforms went offline, government digital services and local apps failed across major cities, and security communications systems reportedly stopped functioning, plunging Iran into a near-total digital blackout.

According to NetBlocks, a global internet monitoring organization that tracks connectivity disruptions, nationwide internet traffic in Iran plunged to just 4 percent of normal levels.

That level of collapse suggests either a deliberate state-ordered shutdown or a large-scale cyberattack designed to paralyze critical infrastructure. Western intelligence sources later indicated the digital offensive aimed to disrupt IRGC command and control systems and limit coordination of counterattacks.

For the United States and its allies, the episode offers a stark reminder that modern conflict now blends airstrikes with digital warfare in ways that can ripple far beyond the battlefield.

In a matter of hours, modern conflict looked less like tanks and more like a blinking cursor.

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Iran’s national symbols stand in contrast to reports of a sweeping digital blackout that reportedly disrupted communications and critical systems across the country. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)

Iran internet shutdown: A country offline in real time

Reports described widespread outages across Iran. Official news sites stopped functioning. IRNA, Iran’s state-run news agency, went offline.

Tasnim, a semi-official news outlet closely aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, reportedly displayed subversive messages targeting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

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The IRGC, Iran’s powerful military and intelligence force, plays a central role in national security and regional operations. At the same time, local apps and government digital services failed in cities like Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz.

This was not one website defaced for headlines. It appeared systemic. Electronic warfare reportedly disrupted navigation and communications systems.

Distributed denial of service attacks, often called DDoS attacks, flooded networks with traffic to overwhelm and disable them.

Deep intrusions targeted energy and aviation systems. Even Iran’s isolated national internet struggled under pressure.

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For a regime that tightly controls information, losing digital command creates both operational and political risk.

Why cyber warfare matters in the Iran conflict

Cyber operations offer something missiles cannot. They disrupt without always killing. They send a signal without immediately triggering full-scale war. That matters in a region where escalation can spiral fast.

History shows Iran understands this logic. Between 2012 and 2014, Iranian actors targeted U.S. financial institutions in Operation Ababil. Saudi Aramco also suffered a major cyberattack.

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After Israeli strikes in 2025, cyberattacks targeting Israel surged dramatically within days.

Cyber retaliation lets leaders respond while limiting direct military confrontation. It buys leverage in negotiations. It creates pressure without necessarily crossing a red line.

But there is a catch. Every cyber strike risks miscalculation. And digital damage can spill into the real world fast if critical infrastructure is hit.

As military strikes targeted IRGC command centers, internet traffic inside Iran reportedly plunged to just 4 percent of normal levels. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)

If the blackout and strikes mark a turning point, Tehran has options. None are simple.

1) Cyberattacks against U.S. or allied infrastructure

Cyber retaliation remains one of Iran’s most flexible tools. It can range from disruptive attacks and influence campaigns to more targeted intrusions that pressure critical services. Recent expert commentary warns that U.S. cyber defenses and the private sector could face sustained testing.

2) Targeting U.S. drones and unmanned systems

Iran has used drones and electronic interference as signals before. Analysts continue to flag jamming, spoofing and harassment of unmanned systems as a way to raise costs without immediately striking large numbers of personnel.

3) Maritime attacks in the Strait of Hormuz

This risk is rising fast. An EU naval mission official reportedly said IRGC radio transmissions warned ships that passage through Hormuz was “not allowed”. Greece has also urged ships to avoid high-risk routes and warned about electronic interference that can disrupt navigation. Insurers are already repricing the danger, with reports of war-risk policies being canceled or sharply increased.

4) Support for allied or informal armed groups

Iran has long worked with allied forces and militias in the region, and some of those groups could step up attacks on U.S. interests or allied partners in retaliation, widening the clash without direct state-to-state engagement.

5) Limited ballistic missile strikes

Missile strikes remain a high-impact option, but they raise the odds of rapid escalation. Recent expert analysis continues to frame them as a tool Iran may use for signaling, especially if leadership feels cornered.

Tehran’s skyline, including the Azadi Tower, became the backdrop to a crisis shaped as much by cyber disruption as by missiles in the sky. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)

The escalation risk between the U.S. and Iran

Here is the uncomfortable truth. Neither Washington nor Tehran likely wants a full-scale regional war. In moments like this, military strikes rarely stand alone.

They often move alongside diplomacy. Leaders send signals. They apply pressure. At the same time, they try to leave room for talks.

But escalation has momentum. Each missile changes the equation. Each casualty raises the stakes. The more damage done, the harder it becomes to step back.

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Fear plays a role. So does pride. Domestic audiences demand strength. Leaders feel pressure to respond in kind. That is how limited strikes can spiral into something much larger.

What the Iran cyberattack blackout means for global cybersecurity

This episode highlights something bigger than regional tension. Nation-states now pair kinetic strikes with digital offensives.

Cyberattacks can blind communications, freeze infrastructure and disrupt financial systems before the world even processes the first explosion.

TRUMP TELLS IRANIANS THE ‘HOUR OF YOUR FREEDOM IS AT HAND’ AS US-ISRAEL LAUNCH STRIKES AGAINST IRAN

For businesses and individuals, that reality matters. Modern conflict no longer stays confined to battlefields.

Supply chains, energy grids and online platforms can feel the ripple effects. The blackout in Iran serves as a reminder that digital resilience is now a national security issue.

How to stay safe during rising cyber tensions

When a country’s internet can plunge to just 4 percent of normal traffic in hours, it is a reminder that cyber conflict can escalate quickly.

Even if the disruption happens overseas, global networks are interconnected. Financial systems, supply chains and online platforms can feel the ripple effects.

You cannot control geopolitics. You can control your digital hygiene. Here are practical steps to reduce your personal risk during periods of heightened cyber activity:

Install strong antivirus software to guard against state-linked phishing and malware campaigns that often spike during geopolitical conflicts.

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Keep devices updated so security patches close vulnerabilities that attackers often exploit during global cyber spikes.

WORLD LEADERS SPLIT OVER MILITARY ACTION AS US-ISRAEL STRIKE IRAN IN COORDINATED OPERATION

Use strong, unique passwords stored in a reputable password manager to protect your accounts if cyber retaliation campaigns expand beyond government targets. Check out the best expert-reviewed password managers of 2026 at Cyberguy.com

Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on financial, email and social accounts to safeguard access in case stolen credentials circulate during heightened cyber conflict.

Be cautious with urgent headlines or alerts about international conflict, since attackers frequently mimic breaking news.

Monitor financial accounts for unusual activity in case broader disruptions spill into banking systems.

When tensions rise, phishing campaigns often rise with them. Threat actors exploit fear and confusion. Staying disciplined with basic security habits makes you a harder target if malicious traffic increases.

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Kurt’s key takeaways

The reported cyber blackout inside Iran may signal a new chapter in modern conflict. Jets and missiles still matter. But so do servers, satellites and code. Leaders may try to contain the damage while showing strength.

Still, history shows how quickly careful plans can unravel once pressure builds. War today runs on electricity and bandwidth as much as fuel and ammunition.

When networks go dark, the impact does not stay on a battlefield. It spills into banking systems, airports, hospitals and the phones in our pockets. That is what makes this moment different.

If an entire nation’s digital systems can be disrupted in hours, how prepared is your community if something similar ever hits closer to home? Let us know by writing to us at Cyberguy.com

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Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on “FOX & Friends.” Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.

Technology

Soundcore new Space 2 promise improved ANC and sound

Published

23 hours ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

Soundcore new Space 2 promise improved ANC and sound

We finally have an update to the Soundcore Space One that launched two and a half years ago. At MWC 2026, Soundcore has announced the Space 2, which will be available in the US on April 21st in three colors — linen white, jet black, and seafoam green — for $129.99. That’s $30 more than the Space One’s original price.

According to Soundcore, the Space 2 have had a full-band noise cancellation upgrade with the focus of those improvements on the low-frequency sounds we all generally use ANC headphones to block — things like airplane, train, and bus engine sounds while traveling. The Space 2 use the same number of microphones as the Space One for noise canceling, instead relying on optimized mic placement and structure and materials improvements for the boost in performance.

Redesigned 40mm drivers incorporate dual layers in their design. There’s a silk diaphragm with metal ceramic that supposedly results in faster transient response — the driver’s ability to respond to sudden sound quickly and accurately — with better balanced sound reproduction. The Space One had great sound performance for the price, but I’m all for any improvement to sound performance accuracy. Like the Space One, the Space 2 will support LDAC high-res audio.

The headphones connect wirelessly over Bluetooth 6.1, although they do not support Auracast transmissions — an unfortunate exclusion. There’s also a 3.5mm jack for a wired connection.

Battery life has been increased to up to 50 hours with ANC and 70 hours with ANC off. This is up from 40 hours with ANC and 55 hours without ANC with the Space One headphones. With a five-minute charge the Space 2 get an additional four hours of listening.

The Space 2 will include many of the features found on the Space One. You can use HearID 3.0 to go through a series of sound samples to tune the headphones’ sound to your preferences. It worked well for me on the Space One to get them closer to a sound I liked, with a bit of the edge taken off the higher frequencies. There’s also a sensor that detects when you remove the headphones and stops playback so you don’t miss any of your music or podcast. They once again come with a cloth bag that matches the color of the headphones instead of a case, which is one change I wish Soundcore had made, as the cloth bag doesn’t offer as much protection if you tend to throw your headphones into your backpack or bag.

The Soundcore Space One were among the best budget ANC headphones when they came out, and still hold up to more recent releases. But with the bump in price to over $100 for the Space 2, there’s a bit more expectation on them. ANC performance continues to improve — and products get cheaper — across manufacturers, so the Soundcore Space 2 has some competition from companies like Sony, EarFun, and JLab. If the ANC on the Space 2 stands up to current budget headphones and they still sound as good and are as comfortable as the Space One, you can expect to see the new Soundcore Space 2 on many recommendation lists.