Technology news

Image: Mobielkopen Motorola’s Moto E6 line is all about compromises for the sake of affordability. As a budget Android handset, you’re sacrificing high-end features, build quality, and oftentimes aesthetics for something cheap and functional. But according to new renders acquired by German website Mobielkopen, the E6 line may be getting a slick visual update in the form of a proper E6 Play variant of the phone.The $149 standard E6 came out this summer as a budget Android phone on th

Image: Kik Last month, Kik announced that it would be shutting down the once-popular Kik Messenger app to focus on selling its Kin cryptocurrency, and fighting an SEC battle about the Kin cryptocurrency. But today, in a surprise, it was announced on the Kik blog that Kik Messenger will apparently live on, as it has been purchased by MediaLab, a holding company that owns companies like anonymous-messaging app Whisper and mixtape-sharing service DatPiff.
In the blog post, MediaLab committed to co

Despite early-stage virtual reality market and augmented reality market valuations softening in a transitional period, total global AR/VR startup valuations are now at $45 billion globally — include non-pure play AR/VR startups discussed below, and that amount exceeds $67 billion. More than $8 billion has been returned to investors through M&A already, with the remaining augmented and virtual reality startups carrying more than $36 billion valuations on paper. Only time will tell how m

Tilting Point announced yesterday that it has acquired Gondola, a company that aims to increase game monetization by optimizing in-game offers and video ads.
Tilting PointCEO Kevin Segalla described his company’s model as “progressive publishing” — usually, mobile game developers start working with Tilting Point because they need help with user acquisition, and then develop a deeper publishing relationship over time.
“With a select group of our development partners,

You can now subscribe to your favorite streamers from your iOS device, provided you have an iOS device and have updated the Twitch app. Truly we are living in the future.Twitch announced the news at this year’s TwitchCon in San Diego, but the feature rolled out today. It’s a little different than your usual Twitch subscribing experience, and yes, it is Apple’s fault. The reason it’s taken this long for Twitch to offer subs through its iOS app is because Apple takes a 30 p

In February, Blizzard announced a new Hearthstone e-sports program, called the Masters Tour, to pit the game’s best players against each other for a chance to win the acclaim of the internet (and potentially a lot of money). A European leg of the tour is currently happening in Bucharest, and you can catch the action over on Twitch.But there’s a catch: anybody who posts anything pro-Hong Kong seems to be earning an automatic 24-hour chat ban, as reported by Dot Esports. (On Twitch, a

Few things are more annoying than coming across an unexpected delay in traffic. Thankfully modern mapping services are generally pretty good at warning you about hindrances on the road, but someone has to report those incidents first. Now Google is making it easier to do so. The update most affects iOS users, as some traffic-reporting features were already available on Android. The iPhone crowd will now be able to report crashes, speed traps, and traffic slowdowns right from the maps navigation

As fintech investments soar to new heights, investors are looking at the bottom and top levels of the services stack to find the next billion-dollar startups.
That’s the word from seasoned investors like Andreessen Horowitz’smanaging director, Angela Strange,who has invested in a number of successful financial services technology companies. For Strange and Chris Britt,co-founder and chief executive of financial services startup Chime Bank,the best opportunities are in customer-facing

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images In two letters, a bipartisan group of lawmakers sharply criticized Apple and Blizzard over their recent actions in China.“Strong concern” over Apple’s decision
The first, addressed to Apple CEO Tim Cook, expresses “strong concern” over the company’s decision to remove an app used by Hong Kong protesters from its App Store. The app, called HKMap, tracked police presence and was used by pro-democracy activists, but was remove

Wing’s drone delivery service is now live in Virginia. The Alphabet subsidiary is now delivering snacks and health care products to residents of Christiansburg, Virginia, after receiving approval from the government and teaming up with major players like FedEx and Walgreens. Wing says it’s the first commercial drone delivery service in the US.Earlier this year, Wing became one of the first drone operators to be certified as a commercial air carrier by the Federal Aviation Administrat

It’s new tech season. New iPhones, new Pixels, new Surface devices, new Echos... and a new Banana Phone.Now, before I tell you more about the biggest tech gadget of 2019, I want to be perfectly clear that the Banana Phone isn’t a phone — it’s a Bluetooth headset that connects to your phone, and you can use it to take calls. But it looks like a banana!Image: Banana Phone
And soon, it’s getting a refresh. Earlier today, I spotted FCC filings for an updated model of th

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Google’s Pixel 4 won’t launch with support for RCS messaging on some of the biggest US networks. Verizon and T-Mobile both said on Twitter that the phone was not supported, as spotted by 9to5Google, and AT&T has yet to say whether it’ll be supported. Only Sprint has said, in an email to The Verge, that it will support RCS, which adds features like read receipts, typing indicators, and higher-quality attachments to the standard Android Mess

Photo: Eric Liebowitz / Netflix Netflix’s Living with Yourself, which launches on October 18th, is in many ways a standard sitcom. Ant-Man’s Paul Rudd stars as Miles Eliot, a man whose marriage and career arefloundering as he faces the general malaise of approaching middle age. The catch is that he attempts to get out of his familiar rut by cloning himself.
To be fair, that wasn’t actually his goal. Miles gets a tip from zero-turned-office-hero co-worker Dan (Desmin Borges of

Apple may have announced three new iPhones last month, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the company is done for the year. A report from China Economic Daily suggests Apple plans to announce a ‘Pro’ version of its ubiquitous AirPods soon. Like, before the end of October soon. The most notable rumored update to the AirPods Pro is the inclusion of noise canceling. That would be a big boon to everyone who appreciates the reliability of Apple’s buds, but wants something that

Disney’s massive 600-plus tweet thread announcing which titles would be available to stream on Disney+ in the US come launch day was mostly met with a rousing chorus of, “that’s not a real movie.”In an attempt to illuminate each title even more, Disney followed up that thread with a 3.5-hour video on YouTube listing each title that will appear on the service. It’s similar to Netflix’s monthly videos on YouTube that tell subscribers what’s being added to

Alphabet -owned drone delivery spin-out Wing is starting to service U.S. customers, after becoming the first drone delivery company to get the federal go-ahead to do so earlier this year. Wing is working with FedEx Express and Walgreenson this pilot, and their first customers are Michael and Kelly Collver, who will get a “cough and cold pack,” which includes Tylenol, cough drops, facial tissues, Emergen-C and bottled water (do people who have colds need bottled water?).
The Collvers

Harley-Davidson has restarted production and deliveries of LiveWire, its first electric motorcycle, after resolving an issue with the bike’s charging technology that was discovered last week, the company tells The Verge.The first customers of the $30,000 LiveWire, which just started shipping in September, can resume charging their motorcycles at home. (The company previously advised customers to only charge at dealerships until the issue was resolved.)Harley-Davidson has repeatedly decline

The dated tech in the United State’s nuclear computer system is getting an upgrade as the military sunsets those gigantic old-school floppy disks. It’ll be replaced with a digital solution of some kind. 60 Minutes exposed the monstrous floppy disks in 2014 when it ran a special on the nuclear mechanism — host Leslie Stahl called them “the really old kind. They were mentioned again in a report from the Government Accountability Office, which said the disks were &ldqu

Vice President Pence, President Trump, and Ivanka Trump talk to astronauts during a spacewalk | NASA Livestream Today, President Trump took a few moments out of his day to speak with NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, who are currently conducting the first all-female spacewalk in history on the outside of the International Space Station. While speaking with the pair, Trump mistakenly suggested this was the first female spacewalk ever — a point that the astronauts corrected h

Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images Instant messages from 2016 suggest that Boeing may have misled the Federal Aviation Administration about a controversial safety system of its grounded 737 Max jets, Reuters reports. The messages, between two Boeing employees, raise questions about the safety of the MCAS software that is thought to have brought down two 737 Max jets, killing a total of 346 passengers.In the messages, a Boeing pilot named Mark Forkner griped that the MCAS system was making the pl

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In a blog post published earlier this week, image-sharing site Imgur wrote that it won’t display any content from Reddit’s NSFW communities on its site.If you search for, say, r/NSFW on Imgur, you’ll hit a landing page that reads: “As of Oct 2019, Imgur will no longer display NSFW Imgur r/subsections associated with Reddit subreddits.” They also helpfully link to a couple alternatives that you can use in Imgur’s place.

Photo: A24 Robert Eggers’ new black-and-white arthouse drama The Lighthouse is the kind of film that’s just about impossible for a studio to market. It’s nominally a horror film, set in the brutal isolation of a remote, storm-wracked coastal lighthouse in the 1890s. But it’s hard to say what kind of horror film — Eggers and his brother and co-writer Max Eggers deliberately keep the details ambiguous. It centers on an older lighthouse keeper (Willem Dafoe) who takes

Image: MacGeneration Rumors have been circulating for months that Apple is readying a new, 16-inch MacBook Pro model — some reports claiming as early as this year — and we might have just gotten a first look at it, thanks to a new image hidden in the latest macOS Catalina 10.15.1 beta that was uncovered by MacGeneration.The file apparently refers to a new MacBook Pro model designated “MacBookPro16,1” (which in and of itself just indicates that it’s a new model &mda

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Google announced a new version of its two-year-old Pixel Buds headphones on Tuesday, alongside the new Pixel 4 phone. The Pixel Buds 2 are smaller and lighter, and they also ditch that fabric-colored cord that connected the original pair. They’re truly wireless earbuds now, and that makes them a better contender against Apple’s AirPods, the Samsung Galaxy Buds, and others.We won’t know exactly how they sound or how well they’ll work till

Fitness wearables aren’t that exciting to cover. It’s a crowded niche, with few factors of differentiation between the dozens of competing devices. Fortunately, the Honor Band 5 Sport edition is an exception, and has a focus that stretches far beyond step counting. By and large, fitness wearables are focused on those with an interest in exercise. If you’ll forgive the pun, the Honor Band 5 Sport takes that a step further. It emphasizes the quality of exercise, while including

I was giddy to get my review unit of Google’s brand new Pixel 4. I ripped the plastic seal around the box like a wild animal that hasn’t been fed for weeks, turned the handset on, and rushed through the setup menus so I can get to the camera app. And then it struck me like a dagger in the back: there’s no pro photography mode. I’ve been truly impressed with the Pixel series’ cameras for years, but never quite got my hands on one. So naturally, my expectations

Photo: Warner Bros. There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services, and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.
What to watch
V for Vendetta, the 2006 movie adaptation of the politically ch