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 Ternus, watching F1 and Roofman and half the Mission: Impossible series on plane rides, starting and then immediately failing a daily journaling habit, getting super into the Debt Heads podcast, learning fun facts about mail processing, buying a bunch of old gadgets on eBay to fill up my video call background, and barely escaping the CES flu. So far.
I also have for you a bunch of the best stuff out of this year’s CES! Our whole team does an incredible job of covering all the news, and you should be sure and check out our awards for the show’s best stuff. For our purposes here, I tried to just grab a bunch of the best and most interesting stuff that actually feels real. (I’m linking here largely to our coverage instead of normal product pages, because in many cases, there aren’t any yet.) Real in the sense that (a) it will actually ship and work and (b) it might actually be worth your money. A hard task the week of CES!
Oh, and before I forget, tiny housekeeping thing: this newsletter will now be live on our website the same time it hits your inbox. Since it’s all for subscribers, no good reason to wait a day anymore! Read it in email, read it on the site, read it in RSS — it’ll be there every Saturday morning starting now. Let me know if you run into any issues! Now let’s get into it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / listening to / bedazzling / still setting up from the holidays this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)
- The Clicks Power Keyboard. The Communicator is maybe my favorite gadget of this year’s CES, but the Power Keyboard is much more finished and probably more practical. You can attach it to your phone, but it also works as a Bluetooth keyboard for your iPad, smart TV, and whatever else. One of these will end up living on my coffee table for sure.
- The Lego Smart Brick. Undeniably the story of CES this year, at least according to our comments and website traffic! I actually love how simple an idea this is: it’s not some full-on NEW SMART LEGO SYSTEM, it’s just a way to make your favorite sets come even more alive. I do have some reservations about having to charge a Lego, though.
- The Ikea Kallsup. Ikea is on such a heater of great smart home devices right now. I absolutely love the idea of dotting these little speaker cubes all over the house, chaining them all together into an extremely colorful audio system. Ten bucks apiece is a huge win, too.
- The Lenovo Legion Go 2. The latest in Lenovo’s line of handheld consoles, this one is already a win because it runs SteamOS and not Windows. It’s seriously expensive, and I suspect we’ll see a lot of new competition before this hits shelves in June, but this one checks a lot of the right handheld boxes.
- The Pila Energy home battery. Every time the power flickers — which seems to be happening more and more — I get a little closer to buying a backup battery. These are, against all odds, not hideous to look at! Which is maybe why they’re also kind of expensive. But I suspect I’ll be willing to make that trade.
- The Corsair Galleon 100 SD. Having used a Stream Deck for years now, I think the keyboard is actually where the Stream Deck belongs. This is a beast of a mechanical keyboard, too. I’m normally looking for something quieter and lower-profile, but I look at this, and I think I would be unstoppable.
- The Shokz OpenFit Pro. Shokz’s stuff continues to be my go-to recommendation for people who need open-ear, out-in-the-world headphones. These new buds, which appear to actually somehow also offer solid noise reduction, might just replace the OpenRun Pro 2 headband I’ve been wearing for years.
- The Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold. My theory of foldable phones is that we haven’t yet figured out what “slightly bigger than your phone” actually accomplishes. But “way bigger than your phone?” We know what that can do. And this phone folds out to be way bigger. I can’t stop myself from wanting one.
- The Amazon Ember Artline TV. There are so many things I hate about the Frame TV I bought on Black Friday. SO MANY THINGS. But I am a total convert to the art TV concept, and it’s awesome to see lots of other companies — including Amazon, which is not historically interested in bold new ideas about televisions — jump on board. Maybe this all means my next art TV won’t be so freaking slow.
- The Govee Sky Ceiling Light. I’m writing to you from my dark, effectively windowless basement, staring at the pictures of this faux skylight and thinking that yes, in fact, this might make my days more bearable. Or maybe I should go outside more. Who knows.
At some point in the very near future, I’m going to spend too many thousands of dollars on an e-bike. This will be almost entirely Andy Hawkins’ fault. In addition to being The Verge’s transportation editor, he’s also our foremost proponent of ditching your car and going full-on cargo bike. Yes, if you ask, he will lead your bike bus.
I asked Andy to share his homescreen this week, since there’s always so much interesting future-of-transit stuff happening at CES. (Side note: I test-drove an Infinite Machine Olto while in Vegas, it was fabulous.) Andy didn’t go to Vegas this year, presumably because he couldn’t bike that far, but he did agree to share with us.
Here’s Andy’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 16. I was content to run my iPhone 11 into the ground, but my mother insisted I join her family plan, so we all got upgrades last year. It’s a bit skinnier than my iPhone 11, which is fine but took some getting used to. A week after I got it, my kid touched the screen with a sparkler, and now it has a weird permanent burn in the lower left hand corner, kind of like the Eye of Sauron. So that’s cool.
The wallpaper: Typically a photo of my kids. I recently selected the option in settings for a new wallpaper photo every hour, and I’ve been delighting in the old baby pics and occasional random sunset or cityscape photo.
The apps: Camera, YouTube, Weather, Bluesky, Google Maps, Slack, Photos, TikTok, Phone, Instagram, The Verge, Spotify, Gmail, Messages, Chrome, Telegram.
The top half of my homescreen is devoted to folders for things like streaming music and TV, news, navigation, social media, banking, etc. The bottom half is for my most-used apps: Instagram, Spotify, Google Maps, Photos, Camera, and, of course, The Verge. Those can change sometimes. For example, I’ll move Instagram and TikTok out (or delete them entirely), if I’m in the mind to reduce my doomscrolling. The dock is reserved for nonnegotiables: Gmail, iMessage, Telegram, and Chrome. My wife is the opposite. Her phone is just a chaos of random apps spread across multiple screens. Couldn’t be me.
I also asked Andy to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
- I’ve been really enjoying Letterboxd lately. It’s not the most well-designed app, but as an aspiring insufferable film snob, it scratches the itch I have right now for escape and distraction. Sometimes you just want to open an app and not immediately see the worst thing you’ve ever seen or some pathetic AI slop. Sometimes you just want to read hilarious one-sentence reviews of Marty Supreme.
- Relatedly, I’ve been watching a lot of pre-code movies, like Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels and all the old gangster movies like Scarface and Little Caesar. The acting is a little goofy, but the dialogue and practical effects (Real planes! Real bullets!) can’t be beat.
- Geese’s Getting Killed album. I’m a 46-year-old white guy. This shit is like crack to me.
- I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but nothing beats riding bikes, especially with kids. My son just got his first geared bike and it’s been a game changer. We ride the bike bus every Friday, even in the winter, and it’s a real mood lifter. The world is dark and scary and sometimes it feels like nothing good will ever happen again. But then you’re riding down a hill with your kid and he’s yelling “Wee!” and suddenly it’s not so bad.
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email [email protected] or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.
“Slow Gods, by Claire North. It’s a banger!” — Eliot
“Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries was the sassy, perfect romp I needed this holiday season. (I haven’t yet watched the TV show.) I’m currently pairing that with Margaret Atwood’s memoir (a little highbrow balance) and the ultimate cozy setup: espresso from my Profitec 600 machine that’s kept warm by the real MVP, an Ember Mug 2.” — Lauren
“I’m relistening to old Retronauts pods. The more Bob Mackey in my life, the better.” — Brad
“An app I started using because Instagram has decided that authentic content was meaningless has been Retro. I got a free year of the premium subscription and am basically just using it as a personal photo journal rather than a social network.” — Ryan
“This glorious video, ‘Durrr ChatGPT.’ It’s mind-boggling when I see people use it for practically everything these days. This video perfectly captures my mood and I keep going back to it. It is made with pure rage and you can feel it.” — Yagya
“Just got myself a Pixel Buds 2a after realising that I don’t, in fact, need some expensive Ultra or Pro earbuds. Love these things and how light they are. They just work! (And have no settings I need to dig deep for!) Bonus points for acting as a temporary Find My tracker. All this at $99.” — Anshuman
“This deep dive into why the ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV rollout and deployment has been such a fiasco is fascinating and slightly infuriating!” — Eric
“I recommend the Espro portable coffee maker. I travel to Italy for work regularly and the country has a coffee volume problem for Americans. No, that one-ounce espresso isn’t going to wake me up. I tried an Aeropress previously but it has a lot more pieces and cleanup. The Espro gives me a decent volume with easy cleaning and storage.” — Sean
“I’ve been meaning to recommend Mr. Owen Cutts on TikTok. He does something called Old Music Friday, and it’s awesome! He plays classic soul, R&B songs, and goes through what makes them great. But that’s not the best part — he gets so into the music he dances….. it’s just gotta be seen to enjoy.” — Brian
“I recently started using ChatGPT to play a solo RPG. (Solo RPGs are games where you receive random events by rolling dice/drawing cards and then journaling what happens.) Rather than writing a few simple sentences of what happened, I have ChatGPT take my plot points and write a paragraph. Then, I use ElevenLabs to narrate the scene to me. It is honestly really fun.” — Albert
One of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to scroll less and game more. I’m not trying to not waste time on my phone, I just want to waste that time in a way that makes me feel good and not bad. So that means lots of limits on social apps, and total free rein on the NYT Games app, Puzzmo, Balatro, and the rest of the places I can pour hours and hours of free time.
This shift has, somewhat unexpectedly, made me absolutely love Apple Arcade. For $6.99 a month, I get a bunch of exclusive games and, more importantly, a lot of games without ads or in-app purchase shenanigans. As a result, I’m playing more games — and trying more new ones — than ever. I’ve even started playing Asphalt 8 again, which is much more fun when it’s not begging you for money all the time. Now I just have to remember how to stop crashing so much.
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