The 2025 Android upgrade cycle has begun

  News, Rassegna Stampa
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Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 68, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you’re staying warm and sane, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I’ve been reading about Kieran Culkin and insomnia and the eBay for fancy startup stuff, finally watching The Wild Robot, thinking a lot about my shopping habits while watching The Mega-Brands That Built America, adding a bunch of Baseus retractable cables to my travel 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’s going to want, an impossible test for AI tools, a clever Google alternative, and much more. It’s been a somewhat quiet week for new stuff, honestly, since it’s both post-CES doldrums and utter political chaos. But we’ve still got great stuff to talk about! Let’s do it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / cooking / downloading / building with Legos / strapping to your wrists this week? What should everyone else be into as much as you are? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

  • The Samsung Galaxy S25. The S25 Edge is definitely Samsung’s most interesting phone this year, and the Ultra is probably the best one, but honestly the whole lineup is a little boring this time? Still, I really do appreciate that Samsung’s shipping a high-end, reasonably sized, full-featured flagship smartphone for $800. This is the Android phone I suspect most people will end up with this year.
  • Star Trek: Section 31. The reviews for this new Paramount Plus movie are, uh, all over the place. People still have strong feelings about Star Trek, who knew?! But I love Michelle Yeoh, and I am frankly excited to have an excuse to dive back into that universe for the first time in a while. Also: more two-hour movies and fewer ten-hour limited series, please.
  • Humanity’s Last Exam. An incredibly fun and thought-provoking — and also mind-bendingly hard — test that a bunch of researchers think represents something like the final frontier for AI. (All the models currently fail spectacularly.) I’ve learned a ton just poking around the questions. 
  • Perplexity Assistant. Frankly, I’ve never found Perplexity’s actual search results all that good, but this company is really good at building products that are fun to use. This new Android app is a step toward more task-doing AI — a bit like OpenAI’s new Operator feature but without the $200 monthly price.
  • Android 16 public beta. Not much in the way of ground-breaking new stuff this year, but the Live Activities-style lockscreen notifications are cool. And if you have a foldable phone, you’ll like the forced app resizing. Curious about the night mode camera upgrades, too. 
  • The Night Agent season 2. I dug the first season of this show, which (like a lot of Netflix shows) was probably an episode or two too long but still really fun. Sounds like the second season is just as fun and fast-moving.
  • The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090. $2,000 is a steep price for a GPU, but Nvidia’s latest beast seems to be clearly the best thing in 4K gaming. (It’s not technically shipping until next week, but if you want one of these I have a feeling you’ll need to get in early.)
  • Why streaming will destroy the typical sports fan.” This is both an economic study of sports rights and a cultural history of how sports came to matter so much on television in the first place. The Jenga tower cable bundle metaphor is so good I’m furious I never thought of it.
  • Brave Rerank. Brave is one of the better non-Google search engines, and this is such a no-brainer good idea of a feature: you get to up- and down-rank which domains you want to see in your results. A little tweaking goes a long way, too.

Every once in a while, 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 Netscape days, and both a realist and a total bleeding-heart optimist about what technology can be. Recently, what we’ve mostly talked about is Surf, Flipboard’s new feed-reader app.