Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 111, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you had a wonderful holiday season, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about gerrymandering and watch conventions and John […]
AI toys, companions, and robots have been everywhere at CES this year, but among the horde of waddling plushies and light-up emoji eyes, two stood out to me. HeyMates and Buddyo are each betting that the collectible figurine boom is going to come back with an AI-powered vengeance, letting us chat to sports stars and […]
We just gave the Lego Smart Brick our Best In Show award at CES 2026, and I wanted to stop by The Lego Group’s suite to get a last glimpse before I left Las Vegas. To my surprise, the company showed off one more feature I didn’t see during my first demo, perhaps the most […]
Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone’s whereabouts. As usual, we’re still waiting for a response. In the meantime, it’s nowhere to be found at CES 2026. CES isn’t a big smartphone show, but there have been more […]
If you choose to get an extra controller for your Nintendo Switch 2, you can spend a lot — and get a lot in return. Buying Nintendo’s own $89 Switch 2 Pro Controller, for instance, will net you the console’s only wireless controller with a 3.5mm headphone jack for private listening, not to mention great-feeling […]
It may have been one of the smallest devices announced at CES 2026, but Lego’s new Smart Brick was also one of the most talked about debuts of the show. We’ve recognized it as the “Best in show” in our CES 2026 awards, and following the Smart Play system’s launch earlier this week, the first […]
We saw a ton of cool new products at CES 2026, but not all of them made the cut when it came to deciding what was best of show. One of those products that we nevertheless think holds promise is Anker’s AeroFit Pro 2, which are wireless earbuds that can double as open-ear headphones. You […]
Accessory maker Nimble announced a new power bank at CES 2026 that will appeal to anyone who’s had to reluctantly share or loan their portable charger to someone else. The Champ Stack 10K looks like a typical 10,000mAh power bank that’s jumped on the built-in charging cable bandwagon, but it has one interesting difference: you […]
This year’s CES was an odd one. This is a conference usually dominated by futuristic, expensive TVs and futuristic, expensive cars, but those things weren’t what dominated CES 2026. Instead, Las Vegas was filled with new ideas about old gadgets and showed us a whole lot of really impressive hardware waiting on software to catch […]
Every January, the world of consumer electronics heads to Las Vegas to spend the first full week of the year in the desert presenting, prodding, and gawking at all the new gadgets and gear debuting at CES. The show has once again delivered an avalanche of products, both innovative and vaporous, that will shape the […]