Pokémon Day is always a big deal for Nintendo fans, but with this year being the franchise’s 30th anniversary, the next Pokémon Presents stream is likely to bring the heat when it begins on February 27th at 9AM ET. With Pokémon Legends: Z-A behind us and Pokémon Pokopia right around the corner, chances are high that we’re finally going to get some new information about the franchise’s next mainline game. But there’s also a chance that we’ll see more from Pokémon Champions and hear about updates for other spin-off games like Pokémon Unite, TCG Pocket, and Pokémon Sleep.
In addition to announcing the next Presents stream, Nintendo also reveal …
Read the full story at The Verge.
The Verge
Nintendo turned its biggest flop into an expensive, uncomfortable novelty
I’ve written about a lot of different video game hardware over the years, from new consoles to retro gadgets to whatever you want to call the Playdate. But I can’t remember ever being perpetually sore from testing a device; such are the joys of the Virtual Boy. Nintendo has turned its biggest flop into an accessory for the Switch, but the costs involved – to your wallet, eyes, and neck – make it a tough sell. Much like the original, this is a novelty for Nintendo sickos only.
First released in 1995, the original Virtual Boy looked like a VR headset but wasn’t actually VR or a headset. Instead, the console offered stereoscopic 3D games that …
Read the full story at The Verge.
Meta will ruin its smart glasses by being Meta
Facial recognition has been a requested feature for smart glasses, but the risks are high.
Whenever I write about Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, I already know the comments I’m going to get. Cool hardware, but hard pass on anything Meta makes; will wait for someone else to come along. It’s hard to imagine that sentiment changing anytime soon after The New York Times reported that Meta mulled launching facial recognition software “during a dynamic political environment” precisely because privacy advocates would be distracted.
Smart glasses evangelists often tell me this fear is somewhat overblown. After all, the phone in your pocket also has a camera. The government already uses facial recognition tech, and CCTV feeds are everywher …
Read the full story at The Verge.
The executive that helped build Meta’s ad machine is trying to expose it
Brian Boland spent more than a decade figuring out how to build a system that would make Meta money. On Thursday, he told a California jury it incentivized drawing more and more users, including teens, onto Facebook and Instagram – despite the risks.
Boland’s testimony came a day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in a case over whether Meta and YouTube are liable for allegedly harming a young woman’s mental health. Zuckerberg framed Meta’s mission as balancing safety with free expression, not revenue. Boland’s role was to counter this by explaining how Meta makes money, and how that shaped its platforms’ design. Boland testified …
Read the full story at The Verge.
The Pitt has a sharp take on AI
Each episode of HBO’s The Pitt features some degree of medical trauma that almost makes the hospital drama feel like a horror series. Some patients are dealing with gnarly lacerations while others are fighting off vicious blood infections that could rob them of their limbs, and the chaos of working in an emergency room often leaves The Pitt’s central characters shaken. But as alarming as many of The Pitt’s more gore-forward moments can be, what’s even more unsettling is the show’s slow-burning subplot about hospitals adopting generative artificial intelligence.
In its second season, The Pitt once again chronicles all the events that happen …
Read the full story at The Verge.
A $10K+ bounty is waiting for anyone who can unplug Ring doorbells from Amazon’s cloud
With Ring facing fierce backlash over its Search Party feature, a new program is challenging developers to move Ring doorbell footage off of Amazon’s cloud – and into users’ own devices. The Fulu Foundation, the consumer advocacy group cofounded by YouTuber Louis Rossmann, is offering an initial bounty of $10,000 to anyone who can integrate Ring doorbells with a local PC or server, while cutting off access to Amazon’s servers.
Ring users currently have to pay a subscription fee to store recordings in Amazon’s cloud. While the company has a local storage option through Ring Edge, it’s only available with the Ring Alarm Pro, and it still requ …
Read the full story at The Verge.
Mark Zuckerberg and his Ray-Ban entourage have their day in court
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg entered a downtown Los Angeles courthouse in largely the same way as all the attorneys, reporters, and advocates who’d come to watch his landmark trial testimony, but with one notable difference: he was flanked by an entourage that appeared to be wearing Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. To get to the courtroom, he walked past a crowd of parents whose children died after struggling with issues they attribute to the design of social media platforms including those that Meta makes. He would spend the next eight hours often answering questions in his signature matter-of-fact (or less charitably, monotone) cadence, denying h …
Read the full story at The Verge.
The RAM crunch could kill products and even entire companies, memory exec admits
Phison is one of the leading makers of controller chips for SSDs and other flash memory devices – and CEO Pua Khein-Seng has now become a leading voice for just how bad the RAM shortage might get.
Companies may need to cut back their product lines in the second half of 2026, and some companies will even die if they can’t get the components they need, he agreed, in a televised interview with Ningguan Chen of Taiwanese broadcaster Next TV.
While the interview’s entirely in Chinese, friends of The Verge stepped forward to confirm parts of a machine-translated summary that’s been making headlines. They also note, importantly, that it’s the int …
Read the full story at The Verge.
Dyson turned its skinny PencilVac into a lightweight wet floor cleaner
The PencilWash is designed to be lightweight and maneuverable. | Image: Dyson
Dyson has announced an alternate version of its skinny PencilVac that’s designed to clean spills and stains on hard floors instead of sucking up dirt and debris. Like the PencilVac, which Dyson called “world’s slimmest vacuum cleaner” when it was announced nine months ago, the new PencilWash squeezes a battery, motor, and other electronics into its 1.5-inch-diameter handle. But it trades a dust bin for a water reservoir located in its larger cleaning head featuring a single floor-scrubbing roller.
At 4.9 pounds without water or a low foaming cleaning solution in its tank, the PencilWash is slightly heavier than the four-pound PencilVac, but …
Read the full story at The Verge.
Meta is reportedly planning to launch a smartwatch this year
Meta is planning to launch a smartwatch with health tracking and AI features later this year, along with an updated version of its Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses, The Information reports. The smartwatch would arrive ahead of a pair of mixed reality glasses, code-named Phoenix, that Meta has reportedly delayed until 2027 amidst efforts to streamline the company’s AR and MR roadmap.
Meta previously scrapped plans for an earlier smartwatch in 2022 due to technical challenges and cost-cutting measures. If the new watch, code-named Malibu 2, comes to fruition, it would intensify competition with Apple, which is rumored to be working on a pa …
Read the full story at The Verge.