The Verge

Meta is adding a new feature to let you add a bunch of extra text to Threads posts - no screenshots of text blocks required. Starting today, Meta is rolling out a tool that lets you attach up to 10,000 characters of text to Threads posts, giving you a way to build upon the 500-character [...]

Darth Vader's lightsaber is about to become someone's prized possession. It's up for auction alongside a bunch of other iconic movie props, as spotted earlier by The New York Times. The auction is hosted by the memorabilia company Propstore, and it estimates that Vader's lightsaber will fetch anywhere from $1 million to $3 million. Darth [...]

The new Horizon 20 lineup of 4K Google TV projectors from Xgimi targets gamers who want to play day and night on the biggest screen possible. In addition to promising an incredibly bright image from the flagship model, Xgimi is at IFA 2025 saying the entire lineup supports low-latency gaming with an input lag of [...]

It's no secret that Microsoft has been struggling to sell its Copilot AI assistant to businesses. The steep pricing has put many businesses off paying extra for Microsoft's AI services, especially when OpenAI's ChatGPT has been gaining traction in the all-important enterprise market. Microsoft is now getting ready to tempt more businesses into paying for [...]

Dyson is launching a new air purifier that's designed to look - but thankfully, not sound - like a jet engine. The Dyson HushJet Purifier Compact is launching in the US on September 30th for $349.99, featuring a new nozzle design that's shaped to help the device blast jets of air at high speed, similar [...]

Google is adding Veo 3 software capabilities to its video generation feature for Google Photos. US-based users can turn static images into four-second videos by clicking either the "Subtle movements" or, for the more adventurous, the "I'm feeling lucky" options under the Create tab in Google Photos. According to Google spokesperson Michael Marconi, you can [...]

This year, football season kicks off with a twist: Following tonight's season opener, YouTube will stream the NFL's first Friday game of the season - a face-off between the Los Angeles Chargers and the Kansas City Chiefs broadcast live from Sao Paulo, Brazil - for free to a global audience this Friday. It's the first [...]

A federal jury in California has ordered Google to pay $425 million for violating user privacy by collecting the data of millions of people even after they disabled tracking, as reported earlier by Reuters. The decision stems from a class action lawsuit filed in July 2020, which accused Google of unlawfully accessing app activity data [...]

AI could bring the smart home closer to the Star Trek dream: a central "computer" that runs your home. At IFA this week, SwitchBot - best known for its button-pushing robots - is debuting a product that lays the groundwork for at least part of that vision. The new SwitchBot AI Hub combines local AI [...]

Bluetti's at IFA 2025 with the world's first portable power station built around a sodium-ion battery, and a second, slim unit designed to mount next to the fridge to keep it running during a blackout. The Pioneer Na (get it? Na = sodium) is covered in AC and USB jacks and delivers up to 1,500W [...]

Ecovacs' latest mopping robovac may not need to take charging breaks while cleaning your home. The company says its new Deebot X11 Omnicyclone uses GaN-enabled fast charging to power up every time it returns to its base station for mop rinses, allowing it to keep cleaning without stopping to charge. The X11 Omnicyclone robovac comes [...]

We've covered OpenAI on Decoder in several ways this summer, from how it's navigating the AI talent wars to how people are starting to feel attached to ChatGPT. Next week, we're airing a recent conversation I had with Bret Taylor, the chairman of OpenAI's board. But today, I want to zoom in on the battle [...]

Govee has some colorful new ideas for how a light strip can decorate your home. Its latest, the Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism, puts three lights in every bulb along the strip, with a prism lens above them that's designed to create three distinct or blended beams of light. The strip supports full color, and Govee [...]

Govee has launched a new TV backlight kit for folks who like to add immersive lighting that syncs with whatever is playing on the display. The Govee TV Backlight 3 Pro features an industry-first HDR triple-camera wide-area color matching system," according to Govee, which is designed to capture the colors on your TV screen with [...]

If your plan to combat the post-summer blues is binge-watching TV shows, movies, and sports, Paramount Plus is offering a great deal. New and returning subscribers can save 50 percent on an annual subscription to its Paramount Plus Essential and Paramount Plus Premium plans until September 18th. The deal knocks the annual price of an [...]

TCL has been making its E Ink-inspired Nxtpaper phones for years, but it's taken the company until now to realize that parents are a likely demographic for it. That's finally been remedied with the Nxtpaper 5G Junior, a kids phone launching in Europe with a focus on eye health and screentime, which arrives alongside the [...]

Baseus has announced a new accessory that can wirelessly charge a Qi2-compatible smartphone directly on an outlet, making it useful as a hands-free wall mount. It's reminiscent of a similar wireless charger that Zens released last year, but Baseus' new EnerGeek GT01 has additional functionality, including a 10,000mAh battery that can be separated from the [...]

Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO of enterprise software giant Atlassian, was one of the first users of the Arc browser. Over the last several years, he has been a prolific bug reporter and feature requester. Now he'll own the thing: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company, the New York-based startup that makes both Arc and the [...]

Luxury appliance manufacturer Miele is entering the outdoor cooking market with its new exterior kitchen range, which provides customizable modules and smart grilling capabilities. The Dreams" modular outdoor kitchen introduced at IFA today includes Fire Pro IQ," which is a smart gas grill feature that automatically regulates temperatures and follows the grilling steps in whatever [...]

After years of unofficial copies of Microsoft's 6502 BASIC floating around on the internet, the software giant has released the code under an open-source license. 6502 BASIC was one of Microsoft's first pieces of software, adapted in 1976 by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and early employee Ric Weiland to run on the 6502 CPU that [...]

Huawei has announced the Mate XTs, its second-generation trifold phone, which is available to order now in China. It's only a minor upgrade on the first edition, but comes with new colors, stylus support, and a slightly lower price tag. The biggest addition is the ability to use a stylus on the folding screen, though [...]

Roborock is launching an updated Qrevo Curv robot vacuum that offers an impressive 25,000 Pa of suction power - topping the 18,500 Pa available with last year's model. That's not all that's new with the Qrevo Curv 2 Pro, either, as the newly announced robovac comes with a dual-spinning mop system that automatically detaches before [...]

Roborock, a company best known for its robovacs, is entering a new product category: robot lawnmowers. During the IFA 2025 tech conference, Roborock took the wraps off a trio of robot lawnmowers, with its premium RockMow Z1 featuring an all-wheel drive system to handle steep slopes of up to 80 percent, or around 38.66 degrees. [...]

If you've been eagerly awaiting Samsung's long-teased trifold phone or Project Moohan XR headset, the company's IFA launches may feel a little prosaic: an affordable spinoff of its flagship phone line, and a pair of Android tablets. The Galaxy S25 FE and Tab S11 series may not be Samsung's most exciting launches of the year, [...]

I've never been quite sure what to call the category Samsung's Galaxy FE belongs to. Upper midrange? Midrange plus? Low flagship? Whatever we're calling it, Samsung is bringing the concept back again this year in the Galaxy S25 FE, which continues to stand for Fan Edition. It's still $650 like the S24 FE before it [...]

Aeotec announced its Smart Home Hub 2 at the IFA tech show this week, marking the end of an era. The hub, produced in partnership with Samsung, is the fourth generation to support the SmartThings home automation platform, and the first without a Z-Wave radio. The Smart Home Hub 2 has twice the performance of [...]

Anker took its portable and incredibly bright Nebula X1 projectorand jammed it into a 30 x 17 x 13.5-inch box with a 160W subwoofer to create the Soundcore Nebula X1 Pro. The resulting Google TV party projector - announced at IFA 2025 - weighs 72.4 pounds, so Anker also gave it a retractable handle and [...]

Just one week after EcoFlow launched the fastest 99Wh power bank yet, Anker is firing back at IFA 2025 with a souped-up portable battery of its own. Anker's Prime Power Bank (26k, 300W) supports 250W of input, or up to 300W of output to charge multiple devices simultaneously, making it a decent runner-up. It arrives [...]

Anker is the latest company to announce an AI-powered voice recorder designed to transcribe, summarize, and highlight important moments from a conversation or meeting. Its functionality is similar to what's offered by devices like the Bee or Plaud NotePin, but the Soundcore Work manages to further shrink the hardware down to an even smaller coin-sized [...]

Eufy, Anker's smart home brand, has announced a new outdoor security solution with a stationary 4K wide-angle camera that can spot intruders and then trigger a pair of 2K cameras to pan, tilt, and zoom in to get a closer look at their faces, even when they're up to 164 feet away. Priced at $299, [...]

Who needs legs? Eufy, Anker's smart home brand, believes it has solved the problem of how a single robot vacuum can clean multiple floors in your home. Its new MarsWalker robot is equipped with four arms to carry a vacuum between levels, so you don't have to lug it up the stairs yourself or buy [...]

Aqara's at IFA in Berlin where it just announced a slew of new smart home products, highlighted by a new wired doorbell camera, a video recording hub for Aqara cameras, and the company's first battery-powered camera for outdoor use. The new Doorbell Camera G400 is only available for wired installations, and works with Apple's HomeKit [...]

Belkin is launching four new affordable earbuds, including a wired option that provides active noise cancellation (ANC) for users who don't want to worry about battery life. The SoundForm USB-C Wired Earbuds with ANC will be available sometime in October for $34.99, according to Belkin's press release, and come in white or black. They feature [...]

Belkin has announced new charging accessories at the IFA tech show in Berlin, Germany, including a wireless charging puck that doubles as a kickstand for your devices. The UltraCharge Magnetic Charger features a collapsible ring-shaped stand on the back that can either be used to prop up your phone, allowing you to stream hands-free content [...]

Aukey has announced a new modular charging solution called the MagFusion Ark. It combines a base station featuring up to three Qi2.2 charging pads with spherical power banks that each have their own Qi2.2-compatible pads. The spheres support passthrough charging and can wirelessly charge another device while they're on the base station, but they can [...]

Robot vacuums that can both mop and sweep your floors have improved significantly in recent years. While they are still not as effective as good ol' manual labor, if you run them regularly, they will help keep your floors cleaner with much less effort on your part. The difference is that newer combo" robot vacuum [...]

Apple is working on an AI-powered search feature for Siri - but it might need Google's help to make it happen, according to a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. As noted by Gurman, Google is currently in the lead to help Apple revamp its voice assistant, which could involve using a custom Gemini model running [...]

I have a dead cockroach in my ceiling, and I only noticed it thanks to a Switch 2 screen protector that, ironically, is supposed to tame reflections. The protector in question is a pre-production sample of the Jsaux Obsidian AR screen protector, which is coming in October for $21.99. The company claims it's better than [...]

Switzerland launched an open-source model called Apertus on Monday as an alternative to proprietary models like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, reports SWI as spotted by Engadget. The model's source code, training data, model weights, and detailed development process are available on the AI model platform HuggingFace. Apertus, which is Latin for open," was designed [...]

IO Interactive, developers of the much-beloved Hitman series, showed off its latest title, 007 First Light during a special September State of Play. In it, instead of a bald Agent 47, you play a youthful and immaculately coiffed James Bond - and that's pretty much the biggest distinction between the two games. Watch the thirty [...]

Anker's Laptop Power Bank came to the rescue of my laptop and smartphone during a recent power outage. They were on the verge of dying, but its pair of built-in USB-C cables powered up my devices so I could keep working remotely. Since then, I carry it with me wherever I go, and it's bailed [...]

This month's Google Pixel drop includes a broader rollout of the company's splashy UI revamp. Starting today, Google will bring its Material 3 Expressive design language to Pixel 6 devices and newer, in addition to the Pixel Tablet. Google first revealed the youthful new design language in May before launching it with its Android 16-equipped [...]

Pixel phones will now be able to stream audio to multiple headphones at once thanks to expanded Bluetooth LE Audio and Auracast support. If you have a Pixel 8 or newer, you'll now be able to pair two headphones at a time. That means you can make your friend listen to the new Nourished by [...]

It's been a tumultuous summer for Scale AI: Meta took a multibillion-dollar stake in the company, Mark Zuckerberg hired Scale CEO Alexandr Wang and other top staff, and Scale laid off 14 percent of its workforce. Now the latest development is a lawsuit over corporate espionage in the AI industry. The AI data labeling company, [...]

If you ever doubted the console wars" were over, here's a new piece of data to consider: Helldivers 2, formerly console exclusive to Sony's PS5, is currently the best-selling title on Xbox. In fact, it's the first and third best-selling game, if you count its more premium edition, and it's currently the ninth-most played game [...]

Pornhub has settled with the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Utah over claims it inflicted grave harm on children." As part of the proposed settlement, Pornhub and its parent company, Aylo, must pay $5 million to Utah and address the FTC's allegations, which included: Pornhub must also implement policies to combat CSAM and [...]

Mophie has announced a new wireless charger for Apple's AirPods Max called the Max Headphones Charging Stand. The AirPods Max don't support wireless charging, so Mophie's new stand relies on a small dongle that stays connected to the headphones' USB-C port at all times. When docked in the stand, the dongle magnetically aligns and connects [...]

Roblox is going to start showing ESRB ratings alongside experiences to help users in the US better understand if an experience is appropriate for a user of a certain age. The new ratings will appear thanks to Roblox's new partnership with the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC), which was announced today. As part of the [...]

Streameast, one of the largest sports piracy platforms in the world, has been shut down according to the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), an antipiracy group that counts NBC Universal, Netflix, and Disney among its members. ACE announced in a statement that it worked alongside Egyptian authorities to shut down the notorious" platform, and [...]

After years of requests from users, Instagram will finally have a dedicated app for iPad. Beginning Wednesday, September 3rd, users will be able to download the new app built specifically for Apple's tablet. But it will be slightly different than the mobile app users are accustomed to. Most significantly, the iPad app will open directly [...]