Diora might be the most ambitious game I've played on the Playdate. It's all about perspective: You turn the handheld's crank to rotate your viewpoint of the bite-size 3D landscapes, which lets you peek around corners to find solutions to various puzzles. On a device with a 1-bit, black-and-white display, the miniature worlds feel miraculous, […]

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 […]

Games Done Quick, the biannual charity speedrunning event currently going on right now, not only helps organizations like the Prevent Cancer Foundation and Doctors Without Borders - it helps indie games get noticed, too. Indie game developers face an incredible uphill battle not only getting their projects funded, completed, and launched, but discovered as well. […]

Betterment, a financial app, sent a sketchy-looking notification on Friday asking users to send $10,000 to Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto wallets and promising to "triple your crypto," according to a thread on Reddit. The Betterment account says in an X thread that this was an "unauthorized message" that was sent via a "third-party system." Here's […]

Amazon could be taking another, even bigger swing at physical stores, this time with a Walmart-like supercenter. On Tuesday, the Orland Park Plan Commission in the Chicago suburb Orland Park, Illinois voted 6-1 to approve Amazon's proposal to develop 35 acres of land for a 229,000-square foot retail center, as reported by The Information. The […]

X is suing music publishers and their trade group, the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA), accusing them of attempted coercion in their ongoing battle over licensing, as reported earlier by The Hollywood Reporter. The Elon Musk-owned platform accuses music publishers of colluding with the NMPA to "coerce X into taking licenses to musical works from […]

One of the issues holding Auracast back from wider mainstream use is some companies' lack of support for the Bluetooth technology - Apple being a prime example. With iOS having 58 percent of the market share in North America and nearly 28 percent worldwide, a decision by Apple to enable native Auracast support would potentially […]

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 […]

Since X's users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple's and Google's app stores. The fact that it hasn't happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley's leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are […]

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 […]