It's the flip phone paradox: if you want to be more mindful about your mobile device usage, you need more screen, not less.
I know. But I swear it's true: with a bigger cover screen, you get more than just a new way to check notifications. You can actually get shit done. Things that are annoying or even impossible to do on a smartwatch, like sending a text or reading an email, are the perfect candidates for a larger-but-still-small screen. Best of all, you can avoid opening the phone altogether, which is a win for attention spans everywhere.
That's what makes the $1,099.99 Flip 7 kind of a big deal. It finally offers a proper edge-to-edge …
I bet you didn’t notice the squircle that much here. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
If last year's Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 was tried and true, this year's Galaxy Watch 8 is a bit more like tried and fine.
This isn't overtly bad. Most smartwatch newbies will be delighted by the $349.99 Galaxy Watch 8 - provided they can stomach the new squircle design. It's more that if you've been a fan of Samsung smartwatches, it feels like Samsung has more or less been retreading safe, dependable ground with incremental tweaks since the Galaxy Watch 5. Aside from Gemini, there's not much here that moves Android smartwatches forward. Truly, on the hardware side of things, the squircle is the Galaxy Watch 8's main talking point.
Alexa Plus’s AI agent can navigate websites and book things for you, but it needs to verify its dates.
One of the best features of Amazon's new Alexa Plus is that I don't have to "speak Alexa" anymore. I've been testing the voice assistant for about a week now, and it understands what I say, regardless of how I say it - there's no more need for precise phrasing to get Alexa to do what I want. This big shift underpins another headline feature of the revamped generative AI-powered assistant that I've been testing: agentic AI. But this one needs work.
The idea is I can talk to Alexa Plus as I would to a real personal assistant and ask it to do tasks, such as reserving a restaurant for my friend's birthday, finding an electrician to fix my brok …
The last few years have seen several smartphone makers pull back or totally abandon their mobile efforts. UK-based Nothing Technologies, however, is still trying to carve out a niche in the increasingly competitive smartphone market. Its tools have been quirky designs and glowing lights, along with a focus on markets outside the US. With the Nothing Phone 3, the company has brought its "first flagship" phone stateside.
Nothing didn't swing for the fences with the Phone 3's specs, but this device can hold its own with the likes of OnePlus and Google. Plus, it has that funky Nothing design aesthetic. There's a transparent back, a tiny dot matrix screen, and a comprehensive Android skin. But at the end of the day, the Nothing Phone 3 is not treading new ground.
Designing Nothing
Despite Nothing's talk about unique designs, the Nothing Phone 3 looks unremarkable from the front. The bezels are slim and symmetrical all the way around the screen. Under a sheet of Gorilla Glass 7i, it has a 6.67-inch 120Hz OLED screen with an impressive 1260 x 2800 resolution. It hits 4,500 nits of brightness, which is even higher than Google and Samsung phones (we're not seeing much difference in practice). It's more than bright enough to be readable outdoors, and the touch sensitivity is excellent—sometimes too excellent, as we've noticed a few accidental edge touches.
The X1 projecting a 90-inch image on an outdoor terrace over Starlink.
I seldom sleep in the same place for more than a couple of weeks at a time, so I'm a big fan of portable all-in-one projectors. They're small and set up quickly, making them ideal for vanlife, gaming parties, outdoor movie nights, or an evening in on the couch - but they usually sacrifice quality for convenience. Anker's new Nebula X1 projector promises to produce an incredibly bright and color-accurate 4K image with excellent sound while remaining portable and quiet.
Typically, if portability is at the top of your wish list, then sound and picture quality will suffer. Prioritize a cinematic experience and you're looking at an expensive, hu …
Nothing says that the Phone 3 is its "first true flagship phone," and it has put its money where its mouth is. The phone is getting a full US launch, and at $799, it costs exactly the same as a Pixel 9, Galaxy S25, or iPhone 16.
That makes reviewing the Phone 3 refreshingly simple, because there are only two real questions that matter: is this as good as those three? And will it be as good as what we're expecting from the new Pixel and iPhone models that are right around the corner?
The answer is going to come down to how much you like its unique look. The bad news for Nothing is that the Phone 3's design is more divisive than any out the …
I've been using the Galaxy Z Fold 7 for a week, and I've run out of ways to say "It's so nice." It's not essential, or life-changing; it's nice.
It's an understatement, though. Samsung joins the likes of Honor and Oppo in making a folding phone that's almost as thin as a regular phone, and it's a trend with real benefits. Compared to the previous six generations of Samsung folding phones, the Z Fold 7's inner screen feels like a bonus - one that doesn't require the sacrifice of carrying a bigger, bulkier device to get. It is thin. It is luxurious. Also: it is two thousand dollars.
It's so nice. It's two thousand dollars. Somewhere in betwe …
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