The Android 2025 upgrade cycle has begun, thanks to Samsung and Google

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 68, your guide to the best and most beautiful things in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I hope you’re staying warm and sane, and you can also read all the old issues on the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Kieran Culkin and insomnia and eBay. for good starter stuff, finally watching The Wild Robot, thinking a lot about my shopping habits while watching The Mega-Brands That Built America, adding as many cables as Baseus can pull to my travels. kit, playing an amazing browser-based rendition of the Atari game Pitfall!, testing out the new Spark calendar for Android, and trying to copy Babish’s delicious-looking breakfast sandwich. I also have for you the biggest new phone in the Android world, the GPU every gamer wants, impossible tests for AI tools, smart Google alternatives, and more. It’s been a bit of a quiet week for new stuff, to be honest, as it’s the post-CES doldrums and political chaos. But we still have great things to talk about! Let’s do it. (As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What have you been watching / reading / cooking / downloading / building with Legos / strapping on your wrist this week? What are your other must-haves? Tell me everything: installer@ theverge.com And if you know someone else who might like Installer, tell them to subscribe here.) The DropThe Samsung Galaxy S25. The S25 Edge is undoubtedly Samsung’s most interesting phone of the year, and the Ultra is probably one of the best, but honestly the whole lineup is a little boring this time? However, I’m very happy that Samsung is delivering a top-of-the-line, reasonably-sized, full-featured smartphone for $800. This is the Android phone I suspect most people will end up with this year. Star Trek: Part 31. Review for the new Paramount Plus movie, uh, all over the place. People still have strong feelings about Star Trek, who knew?! But I love Michelle Yeoh, and I’m frankly glad to have a reason to dive back into the universe for the first time in a while. Also: another two-hour movie and one less ten-hour limited series, please.Humanity’s Last Test. A fun and exciting – and also very difficult – test that many researchers consider to be the final frontier for AI. (All current models fail spectacularly.) I’ve learned a ton just by poking around the question. Confusion Assistant. Frankly, I’ve never found Perplexity’s search results very good, but this company is really good at creating fun products. This new Android app is a step toward more AI that does the job — a bit like OpenAI’s new Operator feature but without the $200 a month price tag. Android 16 public beta. Not much in the way of new stuff this year, but the Live Activities style lock screen notifications are great. And if you have a foldable phone, you’ll love resizable apps. Curious about the night mode camera upgrade as well. The Night Agent season 2. I dug the first season of this show, which (like most Netflix shows) was probably one or two episodes too long but still really fun. Sounds like the second season is just as fun and fast-moving. Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090. $ 2,000 is a steep price for a GPU, but Nvidia’s latest animal seems to be clearly the best thing in 4K games. (It’s not technically shipping until next week, but if you want one of these, I think you should get in early.) “Why streaming will destroy the typical sports fan.” This is an economic study of sports rights and a cultural history of how sports became so important on television. The Jenga tower cable bundle metaphor is so good I’m furious I never thought of it.Wani Rerank. Brave is one of the better non-Google search engines, and this is a great idea in terms of features: you can go up and down the domains you want to see in your results. A little tweaking also goes a long way. Screen share Every now and then, Mike McCue and I jump on Google Meet and rant at each other about the future. Mike is the CEO of Flipboard, a tech executive all the way back to the days of Netscape, and both a realist and a total bleeding-heart optimist of what technology can do. Recently, what we’ve been talking about the most is Surf, Flipboard’s new feed-reader app. I surf, or something like that, it’s winter. (There is also a new Reeder and Project Tapestry, which have the same idea – but Surf is the most ambitious I have seen yet.) It is social, but not controlled by one company; it’s personal, but only in the way you choose. It’s all very early days, but every time X changes or TikTok disappears, it becomes clear that we need something completely different. Oh, and I have good news: if you register Surf with the code “Installer,” you can skip the waitlist line and try out the app. Right now you need a Mastodon account to sign in (which is easy enough to sign in), but Mike says Bluesky support is coming soon. I asked Mike to share his homescreen, plus give us a glimpse into some of the feeds he likes the most right now. Here’s the home screen, plus some info about which apps are in use and why: Phone: iPhone 16 Pro Max. Wallpaper: I alternate between Apple Earth and family photos. It’s easy and fun to change your wallpaper on iOS. Earth wallpapers are dynamic throughout the day. I love how it reminds me that I’m just a speck in space and time. Applications: Apple Maps, Gaia GPS, Windy, Sky Guide, Spotify, Google Calendar, Safari, Leica Fotos, Apple Photos, Pixelfed, Flipboard, Utas, Gading (Mastodon client), Bluesky, Surf Beta. If there’s one takeaway here, it’s that I’m a social web nerd, and I’m hopelessly addicted to news and social media. My saving grace is that I can come out fairly. I recently switched to Apple Maps (I present while driving), and I use Gaia for trails when I’m hiking or mountain biking. Windy is the best weather app out there (I bought a premium subscription for sailing). That said, I think MyRadar is the best at answering the question, “Is it going to rain? And for how long?” I use Sky Guide a surprising amount. It’s more fun to find and track planets and space stations. The bottom right quadrant is the one I use most often. Of those, Apple Notes is the one I do most of it. It’s where I do all my thinking, planning, and writing for work and life. I know there are more powerful alternatives, but Notes is really simple and just works. For social media, I use a mix of Mastodon (via Ivory). Bluesky, and Thread, three of the main app on the web. I also love the new ActivityPub app. I stopped posting on Instagram last year. It’s good to start sharing photos too Here’s what’s going on in the Surf right now: NBAThreads by David Rushing: Real-time commentary from fans on Threads and Bluesky during the game. Lots of great videos and podcasts between games.FilmFeed by David Imel: Great photos from a handpicked list of film photographers. Like Instagram for movie fans.Guardians of the Fediverse by Tim Chambers: My feed for connecting with people who build on the social web.SkyTok: Trending videos on Bluesky and videos tagged #SkyTok. Also available live on Bluesky as a custom feed. Here’s what the Installer community did this week. I want to know what you are doing now too! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 ​​​​— with recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For better recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Thread and this post on Bluesky. design in general. Super interesting stuff.” — Teo “UFO 50! An incredible compilation of 50 new retro-style indie games, built around a fictional gaming company in the 80s. That’s all I’ve played and I’ve only played about 15 games so far. — Jelly“Watch Uncontested, the new 3 on 3 women’s basketball league, on TNT / TruTV / Max! It’s great to watch the best basketball players play with more space and a different format than traditional basketball. – Renata “I got my Miyoo A30 this week, installed Spruce (custom hardware), and now I’m playing Pokémon Yellow Legacy because I need some nostalgic food to get through everything that’s going on right now.” — Beeks“Just finished Kevin Can F**k himself on Netflix. I think it’s a few years old, but the person is very good. I love the storytelling device used wherever Kevin is, it’s filmed as an All In the Family style sitcom, and other times it’s filmed like a dark comedy. — JK“It’s been a long time since Graze building feed for BlueSky! They really do a great job for the community, and make custom feeds fast, fun and available to anyone, techie or not. — Kerha “I Love Hue Too. It’s been out for a while, but it’s beautiful, addictive and a great way to distract from the crumbling world around me. — Brad“The Silo season finale last week was amazing and I’ve also started Wool (the first in a book series) and it’s been a fun read. It’s crazy how much faster this book is moving – it’s only like 40 percent through that story [REDACTED] happen!!” – Andy”I’ve been playing a lot of Dragonsweeper, which is like Minesweeper crossed with a dungeon crawler. It’s hard at first, but it hurts. — Sophie”This old school Weather Channel playlist my brother sent me has been the soundtrack for the past few days. Just sit back and nostalgic try it look for basic cable predictions. – MikeSigning offAt CES a few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend on the show floor when he casually mentioned the thing Douglas Adams wrote about the internet. Hitchhiker’s Guide?” Yeah, no, get it. What is the internet? Turns out, in 1999, Adams wrote an essay titled “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet,” and wow, 26 years later it’s a way to think about the world we live in. live today. Here’s just one quote: “Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as computer scientist Bran Ferren defines it, is ‘something that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there are times when we have not been able to figure out how many legs the chair should have, how high it should be, and they often ‘crash’ when we try to use it. Before long, computers will be as trivial and numerous as chairs (and a few decades after that, like sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will be ignorant of these things. near everyday now. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And maybe we should be entertained.

Source link