Author: News Room

Editor’s note: Amazon Prime Day will run from July 8th through 11th, but if you want to get a head start on your shopping, we’ve compiled a guide to the best early Prime Day deals you can already get.Robot vacuums are impressive devices that will clean your floors well and — thanks to bigger batteries and better robot brains — rarely get tired of doing their job. Over the last few years, they have gone from being utilitarian devices that sweep your floor to full-fledged home robots that can vacuum and mop your home and then trundle off to clean…

Here at this website, my colleagues and I follow our beats closely, from wearable tech and laptops to influencer culture and federal policy. Last year, I asked a bunch of staff at The Verge to pretend to be trend forecasters for a lighthearted collection of what’s hot and what’s not. Some of the predictions really held up: many would say the US Supreme Court continues to be out, congestion pricing in New York is decidedly in despite attempts to kill it, and cats are, as ever, a bit of both.Predicting future trends — and having a pulse on what’s happening…

Editor’s note: Amazon Prime Day kicks off on July 8th; however, if you want to get a head start on your online shopping, we’ve rounded up the best early Prime Day deals you can already get.It’s hard to buy a bad pair of wireless earbuds these days, and with constant discounts and deals wherever you look, now is as good of a time as any to splurge on the pair you’ve been eyeing. The market has come a long way since the early era of true wireless earbuds when we had to deal with mediocre sound quality and unreliable performance,…

The British Grand Prix podium usually sparkles with heritage, from the champagne showers to the iconic Royal Automobile Club (RAC) trophy. But this year, it’s about bricks. For the first time ever, the Formula 1 winners at Silverstone are being handed Lego trophies. And yes, they’re full-sized, fully built and totally amazing. To mark the 75th anniversary of the first-ever Formula 1 World Championship race – held right here at Silverstone in 1950 – Lego and Formula 1 teamed up to create something unexpected: four LEGO-built trophies, inspired by the historic RAC design, and handed to the top three drivers…

The world of Chromebooks has its MacBook Air. Lenovo’s latest Chromebook Plus 14 is an Arm-based thin-and-light with good specs, excellent battery life, a great keyboard, all-around solid build, and a fantastic OLED screen. But the best part is that its bright and punchy 14-inch panel comes standard on the base $649 configuration or as a touchscreen for $749. That’s cheaper than both the OLED-equipped Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus and Acer Chromebook Plus Spin with an IPS screen. It’s also faster than either with more RAM.The new Chromebook Plus 14 could be a go-to laptop for just about anyone —…

I don’t often get asked about the phones I’m testing when I’m out and about, unless it’s a folding phone. Then I usually hear some version of the same thing: “Oh, I thought about getting one of those! But then I just got a [insert slab-style phone name here].” My anecdotal data matches the actual sales figures; there are many more people curious about folding phones than there are buyers of folding phones. Samsung would very much like that to not be the case, and, by all indications, it’s about to pull out all the stops at at its Unpacked…

Meet the best PS4 controller options that you can customise, tweak and tune for a better button-bashing experience It’s a fact of gaming that you’ll spend hours gripping the same gamepad. Just as with the best gaming headset, that gamepad should be the best you can buy? Well, worry not. We’ve spent weeks gaming for your benefit. It’s hard work testing the best PS4 controller options out there! But we’ve found the ones you should consider if you’re looking to upgrade your PS4 controller. Whatever PS4 controller you decide to get, it should feel fine in the fingers. And have…

Black Mirror suggests a future where we’ll never be free from computers, because they’ll be inside our heads. Today’s headset manufacturers salivate at that thought, but (for now) at least let you peel off the digital layer when you’ve had enough of their gadgets being glued to your face. Me? I’d settle for something less dystopian: a smartphone as the ‘one device to rule them all’. The dream’s long felt elusive – until now, because Android 16’s desktop mode might finally usher in the future I’ve long wanted. For years, the whole phone-as-desktop idea was largely the preserve of Samsung’s DeX, a feature that sounds…

The new Fairphone 6 is smaller and more modular than older models in the series, but it’s just as repairable. The phone picked up a perfect score in iFixit’s teardown test, despite no longer offering tool-free battery replacements.It helps that the only tool you do need — throughout the phone — is a T5 Torx screwdriver, and only seven screws sit between you and a battery swap. Fairphone itself has shown you can get from shutdown to reboot with a new cell in just two minutes, so it’s still a simple swap. The company says that the screws are required…

After two sell-out collaborations, Zenith and Time+Tide have dropped the final instalment in their surf-inspired trilogy – and it’s a sun-bleached stunner. Meet the Defy Skyline Skeleton White Surfer Ceramic, a limited edition of just 100 pieces that swaps moody titanium for something fresher: full white ceramic. Like its “Night Surfer” predecessors, this is a skeletonised version of Zenith’s boldest sports watch, with the same sharp lines and distinctive star-shaped bridges. But this time, it’s in a more summery variant. The 41mm case is ultra-light and scratch-resistant, with 100m water resistance and a screw-down crown – so yes, you can…

The sweeping layoffs announced by Microsoft this week have been especially hard on its gaming studios, but one Xbox executive has a solution to “help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss”: seek advice from AI chatbots. In a now-deleted LinkedIn post captured by Aftermath, Xbox Game Studios’ Matt Turnbull said that he would be “remiss in not trying to offer the best advice I can under the circumstances.” The circumstances here being a slew of game cancellations, services being shuttered, studio closures, and job cuts across key Xbox divisions as Microsoft lays off as many…

After releasing the Phone 3a and 3a Pro budget smartphones earlier this year, Nothing has shown off its latest handset. With a starting price of $799/£799, Nothing is putting this device in flagship territory, and it looks like it comes with the chops to match. The new smartphone is available to pre-order from today, and will begin shipping out to customers later this month. Nothing’s Phone 3 looks a little different from its predecessors. The circular glyph matrix takes pride of place at the rear, next to an asymmetrical three-camera setup that’s very like-it-or-hate-it. The white on black LEDs can…