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Android is the best and worst thing about Googlebooks

I’ve been testing two Googlebooks: this Asus model, and HP’s too.

My first week with the new Android-powered laptops has been about as rocky as anyone's, but I've slowly learned to like them, even if love still feels a ways off. Every moment that's impressed me has been thanks to Android, whether I've been accessing a native version of a useful app or quickly checking my phone notifications from the laptop user interface.

But man, sometimes it just sucks.

Phone connectivity is flaky, app casting is awkward, and file-sharing seems to be flat-out broken. And that's just the interaction between a Googlebook and a phone - I have a whole other set of gripes about the limitations of native Android apps on a $ …

Read the full story at The Verge.

No Man’s Sky is coming to the iPhone and iPad

A screenshot for the video game No Man’s Sky.

The No Man's Sky universe is about to get a little bit smaller - but in a good way. Hello Games announced that its long-running sci-fi exploration game will be coming to iOS, with versions for both the iPhone and iPad available starting on October 28th.

According to Hello's Sean Murray, the mobile version of the game is essentially the full No Man's Sky experience. "I guess I should say this is not No Man's Sky Lite," he wrote in a blog post. It includes all of the game's many, many updates that have come out since launch - like the gigantic Voyagers expansion from last year - and the only major features missing will be multiplayer and the …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The OnePlus 16 is the company’s most interesting phone in years

Today the OnePlus 16 launched in China, the company's first flagship phone since quitting both the US and European markets this summer. As luck would have it, it also looks like the company's best phone in some time.

Like most OnePlus phones, the 16 is positioned around performance, with a Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chipset, and up to 1TB of storage and 16GB of RAM. That's backed up by an enormous 9,000mAh silicon-carbon battery, one of the biggest seen in any Android flagship yet. 100W wired and 50W wireless charging complete the power setup.

On the display front, the phone jumps to a 185Hz OLED panel for the first time. That'll no …

Read the full story at The Verge.

CMF’s first wireless speakers look like musical milk cartons

The CMF Speaker S and Speaker M standing side by side in orange and turquoise color options.

The CMF Speaker Series are the first portable Bluetooth speakers from the budget-focused brand that Nothing created but is in the process of spinning off into an India-based standalone subsidiary. As with many of CMF's products, like the Headphone Pro that launched a year ago, the new speakers deliver affordability alongside unique designs and bright color options that help them stand out from the competition. While the company doesn't directly cite a grocery store's dairy aisle as the inspiration for its latest hardware, it's hard not to look at these and immediately see electronic milk cartons.

There are two versions of the CMF Speaker Se …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Fitbit Edge is for folks who don’t want to go totally screenless

A person wearing a Fitbit Edge with a hibiscus colored strap while doing a quad stretch in a matching pink outfit and sneakers.
The leaked specs turned out to be spot-on, but there are some neat software updates too. | Image: Google

The Fitbit Edge may not be Google's best-kept fitness-tracking secret, but as of today, its existence is official.

The tracker sits smack-dab between the recently launched Fitbit Air and the more powerful Google Pixel Watch 5 in the company's current wearable lineup. Basically, if you have smartwatch fatigue but don't want to give up notifications, this is Google's answer to the aging Fitbit Charge 6.

Much of the Edge's specs were previously leaked, but the tracker has a 46 percent larger OLED display compared to the Charge 6, a physical side button, and is a smidge thicker at 11.5mm. It also sports a replaceable battery that gets about a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft’s new AI chip makes it less reliant on Nvidia’s GPUs

Microsoft’s Maia 300 chip. | Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is announcing its third-generation Maia in-house AI chip today, designed to be the "primary AI inference system" for Microsoft's products and services. Maia 300 not only improves the cost and efficiency of running AI workloads in the cloud, it's also more capable of handling the latest reasoning models and agentic tasks.

Maia 300 will start being rolled out to production in 2027, and it has been designed with efficiency in mind. "We expect Maia 300 to deliver 40 percent more tokens per megawatt compared to leading GPU-based systems," says Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft's cloud group. "And in a full 96-acceler …

Read the full story at The Verge.

How Apple can win the smart home

Apple’s second-gen HomePod. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

This week, Apple is hosting its first-ever dedicated smart home event. While the company hasn't shared details about what it will reveal at the "Welcome Home experience" in New York City on Tuesday, October 13th, it doesn't take an army of internet sleuths to deduce we'll get news about Apple Home - specifically, new hardware. Apple finally seems to be taking the smart home seriously.

According to Bloomberg, Apple will release a smart home display alongside a refreshed HomePod Mini and Apple TV. The display, which MacRumors reports may be called HomeView, is arguably Apple's first dedicated Apple Home hardware since it launched the HomeKit …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Inside the mini factory where GM builds its EV future

GM’s Battery Cell Development Center

If you're driving through GM's sprawling campus in Warren, Michigan, you'd likely ignore the pair of adjacent, anonymous white buildings tucked away in the upper reaches of the 710-acre space.

Inside those buildings, which total half a million square feet together, is a massive construction project that's still in progress. Once completed, it will house GM's new Battery Cell Development Center, where the automaker is working furiously to build new prototype cells with the goal of slashing the cost of its EVs.

GM has to build faster and cheaper to meet its goal of selling affordable EVs in much higher volumes. Those EVs will have to compete …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A college in Illinois tried to cancel its Flock contact and it refused

BOULDER, CO - MARCH 5:A Flock Safety license plate recognition camera is seen near the intersection of Marine Street and Arapahoe Avenue in Boulder on Thursday, March 5, 2026. (Photo by Matthew Jonas/MediaNews Group/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images) | MediaNews Group via Getty Images

In April of 2025, Elgin Community College had six Flock safety cameras installed to "enhance the safety and security of students." But by September of that year, the school's administration grew concerned that Flock was sharing data with Customs and Border Patrol, that camera feeds were not properly secured, and that both law enforcement and the company's employees were abusing access to the data.

So in October of 2025, Elgin Community College requested Flock to remove its cameras. According to Elgin's President Peggy Heinrich, Flock rejected the request, saying it had not violated its contract. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, school o …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Silicon Valley is falling in line with Trump’s attempt to rename AI

Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., from left, Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI Inc., Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., US House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, US President Donald Trump, Lisa Su, chair and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), Nikesh Arora, chief executive officer at Palo Alto Networks Inc., and Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., during a meeting with tech executives on artificial intelligence in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. The gathering follows a surge in concern about AI potentially posing a threat to humans. Photographer: Tierney L. Cross/The Washington Post/Bloomberg via Getty Images

When President Donald Trump announced his plans to rebrand artificial intelligence as "super intelligence," you'd be forgiven for being skeptical that it would catch on. While most of the broader population is sticking with AI, some of Silicon Valley's most powerful are falling in line and trying to give Trump the great AI rebrand he so desires.

That Elon Musk was quick to jump on board, promising to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, isn't surprising. When, hours after Donald Trump declared that "The White House considers anyone that uses the term, 'Artificial Intelligence,' as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, 'Super I …

Read the full story at The Verge.