A souped-up smart button for Apple’s HomeKit smart home
The Galaxy Buds 2 and their wireless charging case have a very compact design. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
We’re just a couple days removed from Samsung’s Unpacked event, where it announced two new foldable phones, two new smartwatches, and one new premium set of earbuds — the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro. While there are some trade-in deals if you preorder those buds before their release on August 26th, there’s a better deal happening on the similarly named base model.
Right now, you can get the excellent value that is the Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 for just $99.99 ($50 off) at Best Buy and Amazon. That matches their lowest price, and unlike some previous occasions, these are USA models that come with a full warranty. They’re also available in nearly all colors, including Best Buy’s exclusive darker phantom black.
The Galaxy Buds 2 Pro are sure to offer...
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Every Wednesday and Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where our editors make sense of the week’s most important technology news. On Fridays, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, editor-at-large David Pierce, and managing editor Alex Cranz discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.
On today’s show, Nilay, David, and Alex are joined by Verge senior news editor Richard Lawler to discuss the foldable phones announced at Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event this week: the Z Fold 4 and the Z Flip 4. Samsung basically owns the foldable category in the US, and the devices are getting better with each generation. But do people actually hold on to them? The crew shares their...
A Nissan Leaf being fed from a pole-mounted EV charger in Melrose, MA | Image: Only In Boston
Electric utility poles do a lot for us: they power our homes, take nails for our yard sale and lost cat signs, and shine light for our streets at night. But arguably their greatest contribution yet is helping EV owners juice up their cars. We’re talking about pole-mounted EV chargers, an awesome and apparently feasible public charging solution found in a few places like Melrose, Massachusetts, which recently installed several with the help of the local utility, National Grid.
The utility company worked with the city of Melrose to install the elevated chargers around town, helping EV owners who otherwise don’t have access to a garage or private parking space with dedicated charging. And according to the company, these charging stations...
All the ports and all the power
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
After a high-profile incident in which subpoenaed Facebook messages led to felony charges for a 17-year-old girl and her mother in a Nebraska abortion case, Meta said Thursday that it would expand testing of end-to-end encryption in Messenger ahead of a planned global rollout.
This week, the company will automatically begin to add end-to-end encryption in Messenger chats for more people. In the coming weeks, it will also increase the number of people who can begin using end-to-end encryption on direct messages in Instagram.
Meanwhile, the company has begun to test a feature called “secure storage” that will allow users to restore their chat history when they install Messenger on a new device. Backups can be locked by a PIN, and the...
The Xiaomi Mix Fold 2 displayed in a gold finish. | Image: Xiaomi
The Xiaomi Mix Fold 2 has launched in China just days after Samsung announced its next generation of foldable handsets, with Xiaomi looking to gain an advantage over its competition with a slimmer design, bigger displays, and a more affordable price.
The Mix Fold 2 has several improvements over the original Mi Mix Fold released last year that go beyond dropping the Mi branding. The Fold 2 is powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 SoC flagship chipset, with 12GB of RAM and several storage options ranging from 256GB to 1TB. It also features an improved hinge and comes in either gold or black.
Image: Xiaomi
Just in case you wanted to know if the Xiaomi Mix Fold 2 looks good in black.
As a foldable,...
Haeun Jang / The Verge
Ship of Harkinian is a labor of love years in the making
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images
Content warning: I am about to do a close read while violating the principles of New Criticism.
I woke up annoying this morning, so we are going to do a close read of this internet artifact: a semi-viral tweet showing Elon Musk discussing Twitter bots in what appears to be a blurred-out conference room of some kind. There is an audience, though — you get to hear them laugh.
"Anyone who uses Twitter is well aware that the comment threads are filled with scam, spam, & lot of fake accounts. It seems beyond reasonable for Twitter to claim that the number of real unique humans is above 95%. Does anyone have that experience?" — @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/XivtjhEBu3
— Pranay Pathole (@PPathole) August 6, 2022
Here is a lightly edited...
Photo by Carlos Suriel
Wanting neither a ticking time bomb of a hoverboard nor the hassle of paying for a grimy rental scooter, I worked my ass off at a minimum wage job during the summer of 2017 to afford my first electric skateboard: a Boosted Dual+ V2. Almost every weekend after I forked over my $1,500, I’d take my board out to my local boba cafe. I’d do a couple of laps around my Northern California neighborhood on the way back home, my milk tea in one hand and my remote in the other.
As a high school student on an uphill battle to get into one of California’s top universities, electric skateboarding became my go-to form of escapism. It allowed me to take a break from the books — and gave me an excuse to go outside. It offered the effortless freedom of a...