The Verge

A new Pokemon spinoff is on the way, and it looks very different than any other entry in the long-running franchise. In fact, it looks a little bit like Minecraft - and it's called Pokemon Pokopia. The game has players controlling a Ditto that has taken on the form of a human, which means that [...]

Everybody say thank you Nintendo! During its Direct livestream Hades II, the follow-up to Supergiant Game's phenomenal roguelike Hades, finally has a release date. Prepare to bring death to Chronos on Switch and PC September 25th. During the Direct, Hades II revealed a splashy new animated trailer, reminiscent of the first Hades trailer. It features [...]

There's a lot happening in the world of artificial intelligence. There is always a lot happening in the world of artificial intelligence. The money is enormous; the stakes are high; the products are, well, all over the place. Sit on your couch and read about it all long enough, and you're bound to feel some [...]

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they're going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here. About a month ago, I was [...]

You won't have to wait too long now for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. Nintendo surprised us so soon after the Kirby Air Riders direct with another direct showcase today. Clocking in at a luxurious 60 minutes, the direct covered a bunch of games (and movies) coming in the latter quarter of the year and beyond. [...]

Nintendo's oft-maligned VR headset the Virtual Boy is getting a new life on modern hardware. Nintendo announced that the platform will be coming to its collection of retro games available to Switch Online subscribers, and will be available on both the Switch and Switch 2. The twist is that in order to play these games [...]

The Ultraloq Bolt NFC smart lock is receiving a free upgrade that enables near-field communication (NFC) tap-to-unlock with compatible Android phones. The model currently supports Apple's Home Key, which lets you tap-to-unlock with an iPhone. The update makes it one of the first locks to offer the functionality across both iOS and Android, without requiring [...]

Nintendo wouldn't be Nintendo if it didn't offer surprises every now and again. During its direct showcase, the company revealed more information on the sequel to The Super Mario Bros Movie - The Super Mario Galaxy Movie including a brand new trailer. The teaser trailer was just that, a taste of what's to come. It [...]

Mastodon is officially rolling out quote posts. Starting next week, you'll see an option to quote another user by selecting the repost - or boost" - button, allowing you to add your thoughts to someone else's post. The decentralized platform initially planned not to launch quote posts over concerns that they could be used for [...]

If you missed out on the limited edition Astro Bot DualSense wireless controller for PlayStation 5 last year, we have good news: Sony is launching a new "Joyful" version of the gamepad for $84.99 on October 30th, and preorders have just begun at the PlayStation store. Last year, Sony and Team Asobi - the developer [...]

Apple has postponed preorders of the iPhone Air in mainland China, which were due to open today, with regulatory issues around eSIM almost certainly to blame. The Chinese store page for the super-slim iPhone says that release information will be updated later" (translated from Chinese). Apple had originally announced that the Air would go on [...]

Sony has announced the Xperia 10 VII, a midrange Android phone that's launching in the UK, Europe, and Asia, though not the US. It's more notable than most Sony phones because it marks the first major change to the rear design in over five years: a camera bar, just like recent Pixels, and now even [...]

Here's a hot take: gaming handhelds are better with prongs. How do I know? I hold a lot of handhelds (and gamepads) here at The Verge, but Microsoft and Asus's upcoming Xbox Ally X might take the cake for the most comfortable to hold. And that handheld has basically the exact same design as the [...]

Microsoft has avoided a fine from the European Commission after it was charged with EU antitrust violations for bundling its Teams app with Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions. The European Commission says it has accepted commitments from Microsoft to address competition concerns related to Microsoft Teams, following an anti-competitive complaint filed by Slack in [...]

Asus' ProArt P16 laptop is getting RTX 50-series GPUs and a unique new screen in its high-end configuration. Its biggest upgrades include Nvidia's top-tier RTX 5090 mobile GPU and a bright 16-inch 3840 x 2400 tandem OLED touchscreen, capable of up to 1,600 nits of brightness in HDR and 120Hz refresh with VRR. The new [...]

Starting next week, Apple's new hypertension notification feature will be coming to Watch Series 9 and later and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later with the launch of watchOS 26. That's according to an emailed statement from Apple spokesperson Zaina Khachadourian saying the feature that monitors blood pressure has been cleared by the FDA. Apple's [...]

As OpenAI attempts to restructure itself and eventually go public, a hurdle for the startup, recently valued at $500 billion, is its increasingly complicated partnership with Microsoft. On Thursday afternoon, the two companies released this joint statement about an agreement they've reached. Microsoft & OpenAI: Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding [...]

Microsoft AI launched its first in-house models last month, adding to the already complicated relationship with its OpenAI partner. Now, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says the company is making "significant investments" in the compute capacity required to Microsoft's own future frontier models. "We should have the capacity to build world class frontier models in [...]

In the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's fatal shooting, some political figures are threatening a crackdown on free speech - a cause Kirk claimed to fight for. Members of Congress, the State Department, and President Donald Trump have all attacked people who celebrated Kirk's death online or criticized him while he was alive, in [...]

Anthropic will now let its Claude AI chatbot remember" the details of previous conversations without prompting. The feature is only rolling out for Team and Enterprise users for now, allowing Claude to automatically incorporate someone's preferences, the context of the project they're working on, and their main priorities into each of its responses. Anthropic rolled [...]

Earlier today, the FBI shared two blurry photos on X of a person of interest in the shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Numerous users replied with AI-upscaled, enhanced" versions of the pictures almost immediately, turning the pixelated surveillance shots into sharp, high-resolution images. But AI tools aren't uncovering secret details in a fuzzy picture, [...]

The work of creating artificial intelligence that holds to the guardrails of human values, known in the industry as alignment, has developed into its own (somewhat ambiguous) field of study rife with policy papers and benchmarks to rank models against each other. But who aligns the alignment researchers? Enter the Center for the Alignment of [...]

A quality pair of headphones can make a huge difference in your gaming experience, and Sony's InZone Buds are among the best wireless gaming earbuds available. They're currently $143.98 ($86 off) at GameStop, dropping them to a new all-time low price. The Verge's commerce editor, Cameron Faulkner, says they deliver excellent sound quality and versatility, [...]

Amazon's Prime Video is bringing more AI to the football field with new features designed to give viewers more insight into Thursday Night Football games, as highlighted earlier by Deadline. One feature, called Pocket Health, uses AI to analyze tens of thousands of data points" across the offensive line during a play, allowing Prime Video [...]

An exciting discovery on Mars is being overshadowed by turmoil at NASA, with budget cuts threatening to destroy a scientific legacy that has been built over decades. Yesterday, the agency shared a finding, published in Nature, of potential biosignatures identified by the Mars Perseverance rover in a 3.5 billion-year-old rock. "This very well could be [...]

Baseus has announced a new dash cam that can continue capturing incidents even while your vehicle is turned off. The PrimeTrip VD1 Pro includes both a rechargeable battery and a high-efficiency solar panel it uses to record incidents when motion or impacts are detected for up to 14 days while your car is parked, without [...]

Hollow Knight: Silksong, one of the hottest games of the year with a reported five million players in its first week, didn't launch on smartphones. But that won't stop you from playing it on Android - because a new leap in Windows to Android emulation means you can easily install and run the Steam version [...]

Minutes after news that right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk had been shot at a planned campus event at Utah Valley University, the wheels of social media engagement farming and clout chasing had already begun to grind to life. Kirk, despite being in his 30s, was a mainstay on college campuses around the country, where student groups [...]

Like the rest of the Knives Out movies, Wake Up Dead Man is full of extremely fun revelations - the kind that can turn the whodunit story on its head and, as was the case for many of those attending the film's premiere in Toronto, Canada, produce audible gasps. Those shared moments of surprise are [...]

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is ordering seven AI chatbot companies to provide information about how they assess the effects of their virtual companions on kids and teens. OpenAI, Meta, its subsidiary Instagram, Snap, xAI, Google parent company Alphabet, and the maker of Character.AI all received orders to share information about how their AI companions [...]

Elektron has built a cult-like following over the years with its unique and, at times, esoteric take on electronic musical instruments. On paper, Tonverk is a seemingly over-powered sampler that continues that tradition. It's the rare piece of hardware capable of creating multisampled instruments on its own. It turns a single sample track into a [...]

Gmail is trying to make it easier to track your online orders with a new Purchases tab coming to mobile and the web. When you click on the tab, you'll only see emails related to your purchases, including order confirmations and shipping estimates. This new tab builds on Gmail's existing package-tracking features on mobile, which [...]

Over the past week, I've been using Nvidia's new RTX 5080 GeForce Now tier. Nvidia's cloud gaming service has been the best on the market for years now, and this upgrade makes it even better. I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077, Overwatch 2, and Silksong, and it's genuinely comparable to my own PC. The upgrade is [...]

If you want to buy a skin or virtual gear from the Fortnite item shop but don't have enough V-Bucks, Epic Games is going to add a way to top up" your V-Bucks balance so that you can buy just the V-Bucks you need to afford your purchase. Epic is calling this feature the Exact [...]

Are you tired of having to watch the same three or four ads over and over again? That could change soon, if Roku has its way. The smart TV and streaming device maker is working on dramatically expanding the number of advertisers vying for your attention, to the point where ads on streaming could soon [...]

Apple introduced an updated version of its MagSafe charging puck a year ago that can wirelessly charge its then new iPhone 16 lineup at faster 25W rates. However, when used with other devices, including older iPhone models, charging rates were limited to 15W and slower. A new version of Apple's MagSafe Charger is now available, [...]

Apple always makes big claims about the cameras in its new iPhones. But what does it actually mean when Apple says the iPhone 17 Pro's three rear cameras are equivalent to "eight pro lenses in your pocket" and that the iPhone Air's one rear camera is equivalent to four lenses? The super-thin iPhone Air only [...]

Within minutes of the news that right-wing youth activist Charlie Kirk had been shot on a college campus in Utah, the first accusations began to fly across MAGA social media: someone on the left must have been responsible for this. Within hours of the confirmation of his death, rage began pouring out. "Congratulations. You have [...]

Welcome to Decoder. This is Alex Heath. For my final episode as your Thursday guest host, I recently sat down with Bret Taylor, the CEO of AI startup Sierra and the chairman of OpenAI, for a live event in San Francisco, California, hosted by Alix Partners. Very few people have seen the tech industry up [...]

When Stephen King's The Long Walk was first published in 1979, dystopian young adult fiction had not yet become a wildly popular genre. With all of its gore and brutality, King's novel wasn't really meant for children. But in the book's story about disillusioned youths being made to march through wastelands as a form of [...]

Nothing shared the first full image of its next wireless earbuds today. The design of the new Ear 3 earbuds and their charging case appear very similar to the Ear 2 that debuted in 2023, but Nothing has revealed that the case is now partly made of 100 percent recycled anodized aluminum. For the first [...]

A UK-based video game reseller claims Sega was behind a police raid that seized a trove of Nintendo development kits from his home, according to a report from Time Extension. The seller, who reportedly purchased the collection from a scrapyard, accuses Sega of getting the police involved to recover the dev kits after mistakenly throwing [...]

I exclusively reported last week that Microsoft was about to shake up its Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing, and now the company has officially revealed that its sales, service, and finance Copilots are being bundled into Microsoft 365 Copilot. Microsoft currently offers business Copilot access for $30 per user per month, and if you want the [...]

Chinese tech behemoth Ant Group, which owns payment platform Alipay, has been showing off its first humanoid robot at tech conferences this month. It joins a growing wave of companies carving out space along a fresh frontier in automation by combining artificial intelligence with physical tech. Videos and news reports show Robbyant's R1 robot cooking [...]

I love me a stupid-ass action movie. Something where the plot is thin while the muscles and accents on all the henchmen are thick as hell. Think Broken Arrow or Eraser - movies that were artistically and sometimes commercially terrible but nevertheless thrilling watches that you forgot about almost immediately after leaving the theater. Borderlands [...]

Everyone's favorite CEO, Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav, thinks HBO Max is ripe for a price hike. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference (doesn't that sound like a fun time?) Zaslav argued that his company's premium output can command a premium price. The fact that this is quality - and that's [...]

Charlie Kirk, the influencer and activist who co-founded right-wing group Turning Point USA, has died at the age of 31 after being shot while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University, according to his spokesperson Andrew Kolvet, speaking to the New York Times. Deseret News had earlier reported Kirk's death, according to Utah House [...]

Horrifying videos of influencer and right-wing activist Charlie Kirk being fatally shot were widely available on social media platforms. We've reached out to some of the platforms to ask how they will be treating the videos and charged posts about the shooting. So far, we're aware of responses from Bluesky, Meta, Reddit, YouTube, and Discord [...]

OpenAI and Oracle signed a deal to purchase $300 billion in computing power over roughly five years," one of the largest cloud computing deals ever, reports the Wall Street Journal. In July, the two companies revealed their partnership to build data centers worth 4.5 gigawatts of power as part of the broader Stargate project they [...]

Amazon, like Meta, Google, Samsung, and Snap, is working on a new pair of augmented-reality (AR) glasses, according to a report from The Information. The AR glasses, codenamed Jayhawk, could reportedly come with a full-color display in one eye, along with built-in microphones, speakers, and a camera. The report comes just before Meta is expected [...]