Author: News Room

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on falling robots and the US-China AI race, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. I’ve admitted my fondness for robot fail videos on Stepback before, and let me tell you the World Humanoid Robot Games did not disappoint.The five-day event, which wrapped this week in Beijing, brought high drama, and brought it well. One robot, made by smartphone maker Honor, lost a leg mid-sprint, while others tripped…

Chess.com has done one thing, and one thing very well, for almost 20 years, but now it’s going beyond its domain name. The biggest name in online chess quietly launched its first companion site in beta back in May: Gambit, a free online poker website where players can learn the game without risking any real money. Now Gambit’s ready to really get the ball rolling with its first livestreamed event and collaborations with content creators, and Chess.com is planning to branch out into even more games from here.Chess.com’s chief growth officer, Albert Cheng, told The Verge the company chose poker…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 142, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, how is it almost September already, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I’ve been remembering Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, and Peter Cullen, absorbing everything in Rockstar’s big GTA VI preview, wondering if Apple will announce a foldable iPhone at its September event, getting sucked into Summoning Salt’s latest speedrunning documentary about competitive Tetris, listening to Weird Al’s new Tiny Desk concert (“The Saga Begins!”), and getting a Reuben from…

Apple’s September event is usually the fruit company’s biggest consumer hardware moment of the year, and the 2026 version looks set to follow that tradition with a new range of iPhones. The ‘Surprise and shine‘ event is now set for Wednesday 9 September. Yet there will be some key differences this time around. So what’s set to be different this year? Multiple reports suggest that Apple will look to break its regular yearly cycle of iPhone launches as smartphone development slows. Rumors suggest that the standard iPhone 18 would launch in Spring 2027 instead, possibly alongside an iPhone 18e. What…

Range anxiety with electric cars isn’t what it used to be – Volvo has even started referring to ‘range comfort’ instead – and today’s EVs can manage 300, 400 or even 500 miles between visits to the charge station. Add in EV charging being quicker than ever, often adding hundreds of miles of range in just a few minutes at an ultra-rapid charger, and for many drivers the long-range driving abilities of EVs have reached, or even eclipsed, those of petrol and diesel equivalents. We’ve driven some of the world’s longest-range EVs over the past few months, including the BMW…

I used to be an avid hiker and would try to go backpacking a few times a year. I always dreamed of thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, but life kind of got in the way. (Turns out jobs, wives, and children aren’t thrilled with the idea of you disappearing for three months.) But I’ve been longing to reconnect with my love of the outdoors and just recently took my kids on their first camping trip. So I discovered A Trail Tale at a really opportune time. It’s an interactive trail journal created by Andy Moliski with help from his brothers Adam…

BYOK is a no-frills, single-purpose gadget that 90 percent of people will find absolutely frivolous. But for those who spend a significant chunk of their lives putting words to virtual paper, there is an obvious allure. Personally, I think it’s at its best when you just stick to the bare minimum, focusing on pure text drafting. Certain users, though, need more. They want BYOK to take notes, they want to use it for writing screenplays, or maybe they want to organize a sprawling novel.Balancing the wants and needs of these more demanding users has been a challenge that BYOK founder…

Joseph Fink is the cocreator and cowriter of Welcome to Night Vale, arguably the most important fiction podcast ever. He’s also the creator of the noir podcast Unlicensed and Alice Isn’t Dead, which takes some of the conspiratorial cosmic horror of Night Vale and turns it into fodder for a more serious series about relationships, trauma, and the open road. There’s also a sequel series out now called Don’t Tell Alice that takes the story down an even darker path in which protagonist Keisha is the one with a secret.Joseph is also an accomplished author. In addition to co-writing the…

What do you want from a flip phone when it’s closed? A simple interface, perhaps notifications and a widget or two, for handling the basics? Or a fully fledged Android experience shrunk down for the Flip form factor? For years, Samsung has insisted on the former, even as some fans — and Razr rival Motorola — have pushed for the latter. With the Galaxy Z Flip 8, Samsung has given in.Although the Z Flip 8’s hardware is almost unchanged year-on-year, Samsung has fundamentally rethought how this phone is meant to be used when shut. The cover screen feels more like…

As audio-focused generative tools and platforms have gotten more sophisticated, the internet has become increasingly filled with AI-generated music whose melodies and vocals are algorithmically derived from the work of human artists. While some of the people pumping out this kind of content immediately own up to using AI, others have denied using the technology until increasing public scrutiny forced them to tell the truth. For musicians – especially those creating art in technologically-focused spaces like electronic dance music – the increasingly complicated question of what is “real” and what isn’t feels particularly urgent and personal … Read the full…

The Game Boy Advance was where it started to go wrong. I bought a flash cart to dabble in the burgeoning homebrew scene and discovered there were emulators for Nintendo’s handheld. I’d dabbled in emulation before on the PC and Mac, but the thought of carrying around chunks of gaming’s history in my pocket? Well. It’s probably not a great admission to say it became a bit of an obsession, but… it became a bit of an obsession. On the Game Boy Advance, there were huge technical limitations, due to the hardware’s piddling performance and dinky screen resolution. But my…

Google is now automatically expanding its AI search summaries at the top of the results page for some searches, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable. The change, when it kicks in, pushes the typical list of links from a search much farther down Google’s results page; instead of seeing part of an AI Overview with a “Show more” button you can click, you’ll Google will show a full AI Overview at the top of your search, an “Ask anything” box under that, and then the list of links. It can lead to a lot of scrolling.It’s unclear exactly what Google’s…