ROMhacking.net, a longtime stalwart of the online classic gaming world mostly turned the lights off on Saturday. Nightcrawler, who created and runs ROMhacking, announced that the site, which has hosted community-made alterations for classic games, has stopped taking submissions and will only post news going forward.

ROM hacks like those the site hosted can be as minor as replacing the original Mario sprite with his Super Mario Bros. 3 incarnation, or as thorough as Mario Builder 64, essentially a game in its own right lets you create your own levels for Super Mario 64, a la Super Mario Maker — a Nintendo series that arguably owes a lot to the ROM hacker community.

Hobbyist contributors to the site regularly submitted tweaks for game ROM files that included bug fixes, additions, and even translations of games that were never released in certain languages, like English or Spanish. You can also find things like the reverse-engineered source code for the original NES Metroid game. Writing about the shutdown yesterday, Polygon pointed to its past stories about translations of Sailor Moon and Samurai Showdown games. ArsTechnica called out a mod that lets the SNES Star Fox run at 60 frames per second.

Nightcrawler said the site’s collection can be found on The Internet Archive (where, incredibly, all 20 years’ worth of hacks and other files are mostly concentrated in a single 11.7GB zip file.) He added that the forum will stay up and downloadables will remain available for now; otherwise, the site is in read-only mode.

Nightcrawler blamed the wind-down of the site on “24/7 use, endless queues, and an endless inbox,” as well as “legal burdens.” He also accused members of a group who’d offered to take over administering the site of doxxing him and of plotting to remove him from the site. One member of the group disputed his accusations in a series of posts on X.

EcoFlow’s new Power Hat must be the dorkiest piece of headgear I’ve ever heard of — and I think I love it? It’s a wide-brimmed floppy-ish sun hat full of solar cells that you can charge your phone with. EcoFlow says it can charge a 4,000mAh smartphone to capacity “in as fast as 3–4 hours.” Sounds ideal for casually scrolling feeds at a campsite or surviving in a sun-blasted, Mad Maxian desert wasteland.

According to EcoFlow’s specs, the $129 Power Hat’s solar cells are made from a thin, flexible material called passivated emitter and rear contact (PERC) monocrystalline silicon. It offers roughly 12-watt charging via the USB-A and USB-C connectors on the underside of the brim. The whole thing weighs 370 grams.

Image: EcoFlow

Oh, and the Power Hat is IP65 rated, meaning it’s dust-proof and can withstand water jets from any direction (although I question whether that holds true if you’re pointing a super soaker at the USB ports). Here’s a promotional video, complete with an inoffensive, vaguely Kings of Leon-sounding soundtrack, which is perfect floppy hat music if my past music festival experience is any indication:

The hat comes in two size ranges. The smaller one is adjustable between 56–58cm (22–22.8 inches) while the larger size is 59–61cm (23.2–24 inches). The Power Hat will be available in preorder until August 31st and EcoFlow says it expects to start shipping them out in mid-September.

Judi Dench, Keegan-Michael Key, and Awkwafina are among multiple “actors and influencers” whose voices could become part of Meta’s AI offering, Bloomberg reported on Friday. The company is apparently working to wrap up deals quickly so it can develop and show off the new voices at its Meta Connect conference in September.

Specifically, at least one tool will be “a digital assistant product called MetaAI,” according to multiple unnamed sources in a New York Times report. Meta is negotiating with all of the top talent agencies in Hollywood to secure the voices, the Times writes. And it may pay the actors who sign on “millions of dollars.” Meta doled out similarly fat stacks to the celebrities represented by the recently-discontinued Meta AI chatbots from last year’s Connect.

The contracts would reportedly be temporary, and actors could choose whether to re-up as the term ends. And the voices would be found across Meta’s social media stable, seemingly anywhere Meta AI exists today. That includes on Facebook and Instagram, as well as on Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, the outlet writes. Meta did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Does this all sound familiar? Waze has used celebrity voice directions for years, and once upon a time, you could pay for the privilege of asking Samuel L. Jackson to roast you. Meta itself recently discontinued a celebrity AI chatbot feature that it introduced at last year’s Connect.

But every single one of those implementations smacks of novelty, and for me at least, they get old very quickly. Generative AI, though, has proven undeniably better for mimicking an actual human voice, as in OpenAI’s GPT-4o demo of a chatbot that sounded startlingly similar to Scarlett Johansson (which she wasn’t exactly happy about). Hearing Awkwafina’s distinctive rasp will feel a lot less like a cheap trick if the famous person version of Meta AI can do everything the regular one can (though we won’t know if that’s how it’ll work if and until Meta announces the featured voices).

And I don’t own a pair of Meta Ray-Bans, but I’d be tempted if it means I can have AI Dame Judy Dench tell me about, I don’t know, the bridge I’m looking at. I like that she would be paid a negotiated fee for it, and plus, when it lies to me about that bridge, I can just pretend the voice is actually supposed to be M, Dench’s James Bond spy chief, trying to throw me off the trail.

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest is a pitchy mess about who gets a pass.

Trap’s premise sounded tailor-made to play into M. Night Shyamalan’s twisty strengths and maybe even say something about the modern era of superstars turning their concerts into cinematic events. But for all of its promise, the thriller almost immediately runs out of steam. Shyamalan’s latest is a convoluted misfire whose handful of interesting ideas isn’t nearly enough to keep it from feeling like a notable low point in the director’s filmography.

In its first act, Trap introduces mild-mannered father Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett) and his daughter Riley (​​Ariel Donoghue) as the pair make their way downtown to see superstar Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) perform in concert. Though Cooper himself doesn’t quite get the singer’s appeal, she’s everything to his daughter. And with Riley dealing with some friend drama at school, Cooper’s all too happy to take her mind off things with a few hours of live music.

Almost everyone who meets the Adamses sees them as just another father-daughter duo hyped up to see the show. Cooper has a secret, though — he’s a serial killer who has his next victim trapped in a dungeon. You can feel the influence of series killer dramas like You and Dexter in the way Trap juxtaposes moments of familial banality with shots of Cooper sneaking furtive, twitchy glances at his phone to watch a livestream of the man he plans to murder next. But the Shyamalan twist of it all comes early on as Trap establishes how the Lady Raven concert is actually an elaborate ploy to smoke Cooper out.

Trap takes inspiration from Operation Flagship, the 1985 sting operation in which US marshals and DC police lured wanted criminals to the Washington Convention Center with the promise of free football tickets. Shyamalan riffs on that real history to imagine how a Taylor Swift-like concert filled with thousands of screaming teens could be weaponized against a monster. But as Trap works through that thought exercise, the movie is quickly boxed in by its core conceit.

Part of the problem is how Trap stretches credulity even for a Shyamalan movie as Cooper uses his constant “trips to the merch table” to learn more about how the police plan to catch him. The cops are pulling men out of the audience, and they aren’t letting people leave without being interviewed. But none of those dangers ever feel especially pressing for Cooper because of how effortlessly he’s able to skirt by them thanks to the plot armor Shyamalan piles onto him out of necessity.

You’re meant to read the strangeness of Cooper’s behavior as a part of his sociopathy, repeatedly slipping away from his daughter on the concert floor. Cooper has to slip away in order for the movie to really move. Otherwise, things would come to an end rather abruptly. But Trap becomes harder and harder to take seriously as Cooper’s situation pushes him to take a series of increasingly absurd — but not exactly exciting — chances on ploys to evade capture.

There’s an absurdity to the way Cooper is able to navigate Trap’s game of cat and mouse that almost feels like Shyamalan is trying to say something about what kind of people are seen as threats to society. As Cooper, Hartnett’s utterly devoid of charisma, and there’s an awkwardness to his interactions with Riley that doesn’t entirely feel intentional. But he’s a handsome white guy, and that seems to be enough to keep people from clocking his overt weirdness.

If fewer of Cooper’s tricks to escape — which serve as the film’s set pieces — came by way of convenient happenstance, Trap might work a bit better as a straight thriller about a predator becoming prey. But the movie goes to such absurd lengths to keep its story going that it definitely feels like Shyamalan ran out of solid ideas early on.

Everything about Trap, from its story to the way it also works as a vehicle for his daughter’s career as a musician, makes it feel like exactly the kind of project you might expect from Shyamalan, who has often self-financed his films since 2015. The director himself cameos as Lady Raven’s uncle and becomes part of the story in a way that connects him to Cooper’s search for an exit. But Shyamalan’s presence in the film is somewhat distracting and has a way of drawing attention to how many of Trap’s characters speak to the camera with a cloyingness the director tends to be very fond of.

Conceptually, this is one of Shyamalan’s most intriguing films, but its foundation is so limiting that it winds up feeling like the director set a trap for himself. It’s a testament to his ability to come up with novel ideas — but that alone isn’t always enough to make for a good time at the movies.

Nvidia has reportedly told Microsoft and at least one other cloud provider that its “Blackwell” B200 AI chips will take at least three months longer to produce than was planned, according to The Information. The delay is the result of a design flaw discovered “unusually late in the production process,” according to two unnamed sources, including a Microsoft employee, cited by the outlet.

B200 chips are the follow-up to the supremely popular and hard-to-get H100 chips that power vast swaths of the artificial intelligence cloud landscape (and helped make Nvidia one of the most valuable companies in the world). Nvidia expects production of the chip “to ramp in 2H,” according to a statement that Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo shared with The Verge. “Beyond that, we don’t comment on rumors.”

Nvidia is now reportedly working through a fresh set of test runs with chip producer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and won’t ship large numbers of Blackwell chips until the first quarter. The Information writes that Microsoft, Google, and Meta, have ordered “tens of billions of dollars” worth of the chips.

The report comes just months after Nvidia said that “Blackwell-based products will be available from partners” starting in 2024. The new chips are supposed to kick off a new yearly cadence of AI chips from the company as several other tech firms, such as AMD, work to spin up their own AI chip competitors.

It’s not the most fun, but reliability goes a long way.

Look, fun is fun and all, but sometimes boring is better.

A flip phone dripping with nostalgia that comes in bold colors and lets you run apps all willy-nilly on the cover screen? With inviting wallpapers and playful UI touches? That’s fun. It’s also not the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6. But while I thoroughly enjoyed using the Motorola Razr Plus — the fun flip phone — reliability wins out in the end.

Samsung’s newest clamshell-style foldable is a light update on last year’s model. It costs $1,099, which is a hundred dollars more than last year but also just what flagship phones cost these days. The inner and outer screens get a little brighter in direct sunlight, there’s a slightly bigger battery, and there’s an upgraded main camera, plus the latest Qualcomm chipset, naturally.

That paragraph could describe any number of new Android phones this year. And in the case of the Z Flip 6, that’s actually a good indication of how far Samsung’s flip phone has come. Last year’s update from a small cover screen to the current 3.4-inch OLED took the Flip series from “eh, it’s kinda cool” to “okay this is something.” It’s a far cry from Samsung’s earliest attempts.

But the Z Flip 6 hasn’t totally reached parity with slab phones; it’s certainly not the most fun flip phone. Sure, it’s the best Samsung flip phone — I just wish it would borrow a few ideas from some of the competition.

If I’d never picked up the Motorola Razr Plus, I’d think the Z Flip 6’s outer screen was pretty darn good. But the Razr’s bigger, higher-res screen wraps all the way around the punchouts for the lenses and flash. It makes the Flip 6’s cover screen, which keeps well away from that whole area, look stodgy and cramped by comparison.

And not to get too caught up about wallpapers, but Samsung’s best idea about new wallpapers for the outer screen is… a donut that bounces around when your phone moves? There’s so much more fun stuff you could do with this! Moto’s wallpapers are colorful and inviting, there’s an adorable turntable that spins when you’re playing audio, and I swear one of the background options is blurple. The Z Flip 6 comes with a proper always-on display this time around, but it lacks the sense of fun that I’d expect from a flip phone. Motorola has a mode that turns the whole phone into a retro flip phone, for Pete’s sake. Let’s live a little.

The Flip 6’s cover screen is a little more customizable than last year’s, which limited you to swiping through a bunch of full-screen widgets. Now, it’s more like a traditional home screen. You can still opt for a full-screen widget or add multiple smaller widgets to the same panel. The result feels much more streamlined; I don’t have to dedicate a whole panel to a timer; I can just add it as a smaller widget on a screen with weather info and my calendar.

And as much as I loved the playfulness of Motorola’s cover screen treatment, Samsung’s widgets are more reliable. Specifically, the Spotify panel on the Razr Plus cover screen often needs to refresh before it’ll actually work. The Spotify controls on the Z Flip 6 work flawlessly. Fun only goes so far.

Still, Motorola’s method for approving apps to run on the cover screen is much better than Samsung’s. Out of the box, Samsung will only allow you to run a handful of full apps on the small screen. To add any others, you need to go through a convoluted process: downloading Good Lock and another module from the Galaxy Store and then adding a launcher as a cover screen widget. Motorola doesn’t require any of that futzing about.

This is worth complaining about because I still think that being able to run a full app on the outer screen is one of the best things about a folding phone. Is it an ideal experience opening Strava on a tiny square? No! But I can tap, like, two things to start recording a bike ride without having to come face-to-face with everything else on my phone. It’s glorious.

Typing out messages on the small screen’s keyboard is still a little ridiculous, but it’s another feature I appreciate about a flip phone even if it is an objectively worse user experience. It’s perfect for when I’m in the middle of something and want to send a short response to a text. As an alternative to tapping on those tiny keys, Samsung uses AI to suggest some responses based on previous messages in your thread. Like a lot of generative AI, the responses seem almost normal but are never quite right.

This is the part of the review where I’d normally tell you about a lot of other stuff, like performance and display quality, but you know what? It’s all fine. It’s 2024, and it’s hard to buy a bad phone at the flagship level. The inner screen? Fine. The crease is still there, but you don’t really see it when you’re looking at the phone straight-on, and it never bothered me much. Processing speed? Connectivity? Mouthfeel? Kidding about that last one. But they’re all fine.

Even battery life is fine, which is an achievement compared to the flip phones of just a few years ago. The Z Flip 6 will manage a full day of heavy use, but you’ll be cruising down to the single digits by bedtime. There are lots of other $1,000 phones with better battery life, starting with Samsung’s own Galaxy S24 Plus. If top-notch battery life is a priority, then a flip phone may not be for you.

Getting sand in your crease will really ruin your day — and the same goes for a folding phone. The Flip 6 comes with an IP48 rating, meaning it’s fully water resistant but lord help you if that hinge sucks up a grain of sand. That “4” looks a lot better than the Razr Plus’ nonexistent dust rating, but it just means the phone is protected against foreign objects bigger than 1mm. That said, I’ve been pretty rough with my Z Flip 6 review unit over the past week. It’s survived being thrown into the bottom of some dusty bags, but I can’t say how well it would stand up to years of that kind of abuse.

Flip phone cameras are still catching up to slab phones, too. This year, Samsung has addressed that by upgrading the Z Flip 6 to a 50-megapixel main camera sensor. Image quality looks about as good as any flagship phone, though there’s no telephoto lens if you want to get closer to your subject — just digital zoom and a secondary ultrawide camera. Motorola went the opposite direction with the Razr Plus, trading its ultrawide for a 2x tele lens. That’s a nice move in theory if you like shooting portraits more than sweeping landscapes, but Motorola’s overall image processing isn’t as good as Samsung’s. Samsung phones really do take the best portrait photos, and the Z Flip 6 is no exception.

Samsung is working hard to sell the idea that flip phones work just as well as any other phone, and didn’t you see those Olympians taking pictures with one? Don’t you want that, too? But while there are things I love about the Z Flip 6, it’s still not a phone I would recommend to just anyone. Day-to-day durability is fine, but how it holds up against dust in the long run is still unclear. There’s a 12-month warranty on the Z Flip 6 when you buy it from Samsung in the US, but that doesn’t cover damage caused by dust exposure.

The Galaxy Z Flip 6 makes sense if you really want the benefits of the cover screen — less so if you just find the novelty appealing. You can easily find better battery life and cameras from a garden-variety slab phone. The Moto Razr Plus is more fun. But if you are sold on the idea of the flip phone, Samsung’s slow and steady approach is your best bet.

I find that outer screen incredibly useful, and while Samsung’s take on the UI lacks a little imagination, it works consistently, unlike Moto’s. Likewise, Samsung’s track record for software support is excellent: flagship phones get timely updates, and the Z Flip 6 will keep getting OS upgrades for seven years. Motorola makes a charming flip phone, but it comes with just four years of software support, and new OS updates can be slow to arrive.

Software updates, reliability, and camera processing: not the most fun stuff. But in this case, boring might just be better.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Following GameStop’s sudden announcement that it would be shutting down Game Informer after 33 years — which includes GameStop making all of the work on Game Informer’s website disappear and reportedly laying off the entire staff — people across the video game industry are sharing their tributes to the gaming magazine.

“As someone who grew up poring over each issue, it was such a thrill and an honor to see our games grace Game Informer,” said Neil Druckmann, head of creative at The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog and an executive producer on the hit HBO show. “Sad that such a staple of our industry is now gone. Good luck to everyone involved. Your work will be missed.”

“Thank you for what you have brought to the video game industry,” said the official Konami account on X. “We will never stop fondly reminiscing about waiting for that next issue to arrive in the mail. Your legacy and impact will forever remain.” The accounts for Discord, Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin’s Creed, Metacritic and X Gaming saluted Game Informer, too.

Many are reminiscing about Game Informer’s excellent covers, which often had beautiful, custom art. Kit Ellis, who worked at Nintendo for more than 13 years in marketing and PR, highlighted how the Game Informer team pushed Nintendo to make amazing art for this The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild cover:

“I remember how excited we were to get this cover ahead of The Witcher 3 launch,” said Michał Nowakowski, the joint CEO of CD Project Red. “Game Informer was there in the very early days of the industry and it is hard to imagine this will be no more.”

Radek Grabowski, CD Projekt Red’s global PR director, also highlighted great covers for Borderlands and Fortnite. “This is video game preservation, which deserves recognition,” Grabowski said.

Current and former staffers are expressing their sadness, too.

• “I’m heartbroken — it was my dream job — but my bills don’t care,” said former lead video producer Alex Van Aden.
• Former editor Wesley LeBlanc posted about now being out of a job while coming home from a work trip.
• “We were about 70% done with the next issue and it was going to have a GREAT cover,” said former magazine content director Kyle Hilliard.
• “All of our features on Game Informer... just... gone,” said Liana Ruppert, a former staffer who left in 2021. “Some of my favorite work I ever did was over there and that’s just me – heart is breaking for the folks that have been there so much longer, poured so much of themselves into it just for it to be taken away with ZERO notice. How is this ok?”
• “As someone who was there at issue one and spent most of their life fighting and scratching and clawing for GI, it breaks my heart to see it end,” said Andy McNamara, a former editor-in-chief who was at the publication for 29 years.
• “Heartbroken and angry,” Andrew Reiner, another former editor-in-chief, said in a post. “Most of my adult life was spent at Game Informer. All day, I’ve been remembering amazing moments I had with the team — some of the most talented and kindhearted people I’ve ever met and was lucky enough to work with. End of an era, but GI forever!” (Shuhei Yoshida, who once led Sony’s worldwide game studios and now heads up its indie initiatives, replied: “Unbelievable! Thank you for all the years of amazing coverage and friendship. GI lives in our memory forever.”)

Some are scrutinizing the shutdown message itself, which was not written by Game Informer staff, according to Kotaku’s Ethan Gach. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier observed that ChatGPT was able to write a pretty similar message to the one that was actually posted.

GameStop didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Below, we’ve embedded a video interview from 2016 with former Game Informer lead editors McNamara and Reiner about the origins of the magazine.

A selfie drone that makes the case for ditching GPS, obstacle avoidance, and controllers.

I’ve played around with a few DJI drones over the years but always found them to be too cumbersome to master and use spontaneously. The $349 HoverAir X1 from Zero Zero Robotics is different. This so-called “selfie drone” is so easy to use that it’s already an indispensable tool for my work and play, right out of the box.

For example, the HoverAir X1 is responsible for this review photo, this 360-degree GIF, and this overhead shot, as well as all of the follow, orbit, and zoom in / out shots used in this ID Buzz e-camper review. Each shot was made with just a touch of a button on the top of the X1 — no controller required — including all the drone footage used in this e-bikepacking video.

The best drone is the one you have with you and the ultra-lightweight HoverAir X1 can easily fit inside a pocket to be taken everywhere. It launches so quickly that I can impulsively grab a more interesting drone shot instead of just defaulting to my iPhone. It returns automatically to land in your hand.

The HoverAir X1 is not without limitations, and I did manage to break one review unit after falling on it. But I have to admit I love this little guy precisely because of its shortcomings, not in spite of them.

The HoverAir X1’s flying weight is about half that of DJI’s sub-250g Mini drones, so it, too, is exempt from registration and licensing requirements in most countries. It folds up into a 5 x 3.4 x 1.2-inch (127 x 86 x 31mm) package that’s so small and lightweight that I could comfortably carry it in a thigh pocket on long bike rides or trail runs.

The primary user interface for the X1 is two buttons on the drone itself. One turns the unit on, and the other cycles through five presets that lock the camera onto the user as the drone completes a predetermined flight path, shooting video or taking photos along the way:

• Hover — floats in fixed space and tracks your movement
• Follow — flies behind or in front of you at different heights and distances
• Orbit — makes a wide circle overhead around a fixed center spot
• Zoom out — flies away and up and then back in
• Bird’s eye — for top-down shots directly over a fixed spot

There’s also a sixth mode that lets you assign a lightly customized flight pattern. The hover and follow modes can record videos or take photos for several minutes at a time, while the other flight modes begin and end at the point of launch and last for about 30 seconds.

The HoverAir app lets you tweak each of its automatic flight modes, including the altitude, distance, swapping between photo or video captures, portrait or landscape, and image quality. After some early experimentation to see what I liked, I rarely had to adjust these again.

In a metric I like to call “time to drone,” I can pull the X1 out of a pocket, unfold it, turn it on, select a predefined flight path, and set it aloft from an outstretched palm in less than 20 seconds. No DJI drone can come anywhere close.

That’s not to say that the HoverAir can compete with DJI’s consumer drones on features or capabilities. The X1’s diminutive size means compromises were made, starting with a max video resolution of 2.7K/30fps.

Shots also start looking a little shaky in light winds around 10 knots (5.1m/s), and the X1 can’t even fly once winds exceed a moderate 15 knots (7.7m/s). It’s also relatively slow. The X1 can track me fine on a trail run, but it’ll start losing its object lock when I’m road biking at a not-very-fast pace of just 12mph (20km/h). Even when it can keep up, it’ll lose me when the elevation changes rapidly on a steep climb or descent.

Otherwise, the X1’s computer vision tracking is very good — it’s the main reason you’d buy this drone. But when it does lose track of me for whatever reason, it’ll just stop, hover in place, and then eventually land, even over water or a busy street. There is no return-to-home feature to ensure a safe landing and recovery. It can, however, be configured to play a sound to help find it.

The X1 also lacks any obstacle avoidance. Instead, the drone’s four rotors are encased in a flexible plastic cage to protect the device from collisions. In most flight modes, the lack of avoidance tech isn’t really a problem so long as you give the immediate area a quick survey. It becomes an issue when the drone is in follow-me mode through narrow tree-lined trails, for example, or when walking around a sharp corner inside my home. Usually, it’ll just stop and hover in place if it runs into something, meaning I’ll have to double back to re-engage the tracking lock on my person or to collect it. But if it hits something when going faster — like chasing me on a bike — it’ll crash. My review X1 has already survived a few dozen crashes that sent it plummeting to the ground. It’s fine, other than a few scuff marks.

I did destroy another X1 when my full weight landed on it while testing some new clipless bike pedals (don’t judge!). The X1 is not indestructible, but it’s surprisingly robust for such a lightweight drone.

The HoverAir X1 also lacks any kind of advanced GPS positioning. Instead, it opts for a VIO (Visual Inertial Odometry) system to estimate its position in 3D space, indoors or out, so that its preset flight modes can return the drone to its original starting point. It worked very well in my testing, often living up to the HoverAir’s claim of “centimeter-level precision,” even when flying orbits around me with a 20-foot (six-meter) radius.

The drone also responds to a variety of hand gestures when the user is standing still. For example, you can send the X1 left or right with a wave of an arm or tell it to land with your arms crossed overhead. You can also just grab the drone out of the air and flip it upside down to turn those protected rotors off.

The HoverAir X1 does offer a manual Wi-Fi-connected flight mode whereby your phone becomes the controller. It’s fun, but I found it unresponsive at times, making it difficult to control flight with any real precision. I consider it a bonus feature you might want to use in a pinch.

The X1 is limited to 32GB of built-in storage without any option for microSD expansion. I’m currently using just 8.8GB to store the 113 videos and 60 images I’ve shot at max resolution over the last few months of testing. The footage transfers quickly to a phone over a direct Wi-Fi connection using the HoverAir app or over USB-C to a laptop. That USB-C connection will also charge the X1’s battery in about 55 minutes.

On paper, the X1 is dumb and unremarkable. But the HoverAir is so good at doing what many people actually need from a drone that its shortcomings rarely matter at all.

DJI is still the king of sweeping panoramas, but the HoverAir X1 makes a strong case for being the drone you choose to capture yourself doing things — indoors and out — especially for social media.

I do wish it was more capable so I could trust it to capture action over water when kitesurfing on windy days, keep up with me when road cycling at pace, or maintain its object lock when I’m bombing down a steep hill on a mountain bike. A 4K/60fps shooting mode would also be nice so long as none of these wishes increase the price too much.

Still, the X1 does 90 percent of what I want a drone to do without adding GPS, obstacle avoidance sensors, and a physical controller that’ll just make everything more expensive, more complicated, more cumbersome to carry, and slower to launch. Maybe DJI’s rumored Neo will fill in that last 10 percent because it certainly looks like a response to the HoverAir hype.

The HoverAir X1 lists for $429, but it’s nearly always on sale somewhere, often at or below $350. But I’d recommend opting for the $400-ish bundle that adds a dual-battery quick charger and two extra batteries that each only last about 10 to 12 minutes before needing a 35-minute recharge. Like the X1 itself, they’re so small and lightweight that you can easily bring them along to help document your next activity.

All photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

The CrowdStrike global IT outage that downed some 8.5 million Windows PCs, halting flights and affecting hospitals, banks and more, is now apparently also a scapegoat for the terrible conditions at the set of a reality game show competition put on by mega-popular YouTuber MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, with $5 million on the line.

The New York Times is reporting that after 2,000 contestants arrived at Allegiant Stadium this July, they were barely fed and didn’t receive their prescription medication or clean underwear on time — despite providing it to the organizers themselves. (The 1,000 contestants who make it through can return for the Beast Games Amazon show, but this segment is for Donaldson’s YouTube channel.)

The Times’ story is filled with anecdotes from over a dozen contestants who say they were mistreated by organizers, like this:

One contestant said she had initially been denied the food she required to take her medication and had been told by staff members that she didn’t actually need to eat. After asking repeatedly, she was given half a banana.

But MrBeast isn’t apologizing, at least not yet. In fact, he’s not even quoted in the Times. Instead, the NYT received a text message from a spokesperson for MrBeast that blamed external factors, including CrowdStrike, instead of any poor planning on its part:

“In a text message, a spokesperson for MrBeast said the shoot “was unfortunately complicated by the CrowdStrike incident, extreme weather and other unexpected logistical and communications issues.” The spokesperson said MrBeast had started a formal review and had “taken steps to ensure that we learn from this experience.”

This is just the latest such event that lured fans to a location without enough logistical support, of course — I immediately flashed back to accusations around Netflix’s Squid Game: The Challenge, and of course there’s Fyre Festival.

It’s also not the first time in recent days that MrBeast has let an anonymous spokeperson handle bad press: he had one apologize for his younger self to the Associated Press earlier this week.

Ford’s new Android-powered infotainment system is finally coming to a Ford-branded vehicle. The automaker’s so-called Digital Experience, which debuted with the 2024 Lincoln Nautilus earlier this year, will power the new 2025 Ford Explorer SUV, the company announced today.

The 2025 Ford Explorer includes many of the Digital Experience’s main features, including built-in Google Maps, Google Play Store, Google Assistant, wireless CarPlay and Android Auto, and digital HVAC controls. It doesn't have the extravagant 48-inch panoramic screen setup that the Lincoln Nautilus has, but from the looks of it, the main 13.2-inch touchscreen has the same interface. And the Explorer’s 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster can project maps for the first time.

Speaking of HVAC, it looks like the new Explorer lacks physical climate control buttons. That tracks with Ford’s newly redesigned Maverick truck, which also moved its HVAC controls to the touchscreen. The Maverick, however, still runs on Ford’s older QNX-powered Sync 4 software.

The Explorer’s much more subdued screen size, as compared to the Lincoln Nautilus, shows how the system is adaptable to different interiors and use cases. And as we previously reported, Ford is not planning to phase out its internal Sync operating system, which runs on similarly sized screens across many of Ford’s vehicles.

Ford is also planning to include its Android-based system in its electric vehicles like the F-150 Lightning and Mustang Mach-E, both of which have a much larger, vertically oriented screen — and will need a Digital Experience that looks different than the one we see today.