Author: News Room
The grid is a comfortable place to live.The app grid, I mean: the rows and rows of app icons on your iPhone’s homescreen. It’s familiar. Safe. It’s how I’ve lived with my various phones over the past decade. But at some point, it started to feel oppressive. All those icons staring at me in the face, vying for my attention. The clutter! The distracting little notification badges! The grid was a reasonable way to organize apps when I had like, ten of them. There are sixty on the iPhone I’m using now, and I set it up from scratch a…
If you’re still figuring out what your Apple smartwatch is really for, this list of over 40 great apps will help you find out. There are thousands of apps for Apple Watch. The tiny snag is that most of them aren’t much cop. Some misunderstand how a wearable is best used, and demand you spend too long with your wrist in front of your face, while others only briefly impress. And some apps have arrived on Apple Watch to great fanfare, only for them to meekly disappear after a while. That’s not good enough for us. We want apps that are clever…
When it comes to entertainment and education, we can choose from podcasts, videos, games, live performances, or books, one of the oldest and still most popular ways to learn something new or escape (at least temporarily) from today’s troubled world. We asked the staff of The Verge what their favorite reads were in 2024. Their answers ranged from fantasy and science fiction to histories of engineering and clothing to autobiographies, insights on body image, and more.Read on, and see if there’s anything here that you want to check out during the holidays.Barbara Krasnoff, reviews editorWhen recommending novels, I usually try…
It’s an infamous gaming series with plenty of competition among its stellar line-up, yet Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas remains among the very best crime sims across the entire bullet-ridden, vehicle-thieving genre. With a cast of colourful characters, diverse gameplay that has your crime-y mitts in everything from dancing minigames to dabbling in casino ownership, plus a truly engaging story, there’s no wonder it was the biggest-selling title on the PlayStation 2. Now celebrating its 20th year of release, we look back on how GTA: San Andreas set the new standard for not only crime sims but all sandbox games…
Amazon’s Prime Video had a bunch of strong releases in 2024, ranging from a surprisingly great video game adaptation to a visually pleasing fantasy spinoff. There’s even an update to the raunchiest superhero show in streaming. It had plenty of other series worth watching, too — even with the pesky commercial breaks Prime Video started showing during shows and movies. Here’s our list of some of the best shows that came out on Prime Video this year.It’s hard to find a television adaptation of a video game that stays true to the source material, but Prime Video’s Fallout does just…
Apple is working on a new smart doorbell camera that uses Face ID to unlock your door, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. The camera could be released by the end of 2025 “at the soonest,” Gurman writes.The lock would work just like your iPhone, automatically unlocking your door when you or another resident looks at it. Like biometric login info on other Apple devices, the camera would be equipped with the company’s Secure Enclave chip that stores and processes Face ID information separately from the rest of the system’s hardware.Gurman writes that this device will…
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 65, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get ready to take up all your phone’s storage space, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This is the last Installer of the year! I’m taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays, and I hope you’re getting some relaxation in too. Thank you so much to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter, emailed me your recommendations, told me I’m a lunatic about to-do lists, and generally been part…
You’re here because you want to buy the best Blu-ray player around to go with your 4K TV. We know, that doesn’t make grammatical sense, but that’s more than likely what you typed into Google before you found yourself reading these very words, so hopefully we can let that slide. So whether you want to embrace the glory of physical media, or simply want to replace your busted PS3 so that you can carry on enjoying your collection of carefully curated discs, this is the page for you. The best Blu-ray players you can buy today: Panasonic DP-UB9000 The most…
After spending a small fortune on Christmas presents, the last thing you want is to get caught short by missing batteries or an uncharged device on the big day. And if you’re not used to a particular brand or piece of tech, it can be easy to overlook common hurdles such as registration screens, memory card woes, and saved data transfers. Luckily, we’ve got your back. We offer our definitive tips on making Christmas Day as stress-free as possible when it comes to sorting out your tech gifts. Now all you have to worry about is not burning that roast.…
In the latest version of the Files by Google app, summoning Gemini while looking at a PDF gives you the option to ask about the file, writes Android Police. You’ll need to be a Gemini Advanced subscriber to use the feature though, according to Mishaal Rahman, who reported on Friday that it had started rolling out.If you have the feature, when you summon Gemini while looking at a PDF in the Files app, you’ll see an “Ask about this PDF” button appear. Tapping that lets you ask questions about the file, the same way you might ask ChatGPT about a…
Choosing the best amplifier is an important decision you’ll find yourself making when it comes to setting up your home Hi-Fi or home theater system. If you’ve got active speakers (i.e. ones that plug in directly to the wall), then you won’t need an amp. But if you’re looking to tinker and tweak and have more flexibility with upgrades over the years, passive speakers — which will require an amp to power them — are the way to go. Read more: Best smart speaker: smart home speakers with Google, Alexa and Siri built-in Not only can you swap out components…
Asus has announced the Asus NUC 14 Pro AI, the first Copilot Plus-capable AI mini PC that crams an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor into a form factor resembling a black M4 Mac Mini. First introduced at IFA in September, Asus is providing a little more detail about the mini PC’s specs than it did before, but still isn’t saying it will become available or how much it will cost.The NUC 14 Pro AI will come in five CPU configurations, from the Core Ultra 5 226V processor with 16GB of integrated RAM to a Core Ultra 9 288V processor with…