Dominic Preston is The Verge’s UK-based News Editor, and puts together the newsletter The Daily. He’s a Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future food systems and public health fellow for his food writing. He’s been in journalism since 2013, after picking up two degrees in philosophy that he still hasn’t figured out what to do with. His career in journalism started out with covering movies and games before moving onto the tech beat. He was previously the deputy editor at Tech Advisor and a managing editor at Android Police, and will jump at any excuse to review an Android phone. When he’s not writing about tech he’s usually writing about food instead, on his Substack newsletter Braise. Contact him on Signal for tips: @dompreston.01
That’s the logline for Death Stranding anime Isolations, which just dropped its first short teaser. Produced by Hideo Kojima, the series releases on Disney Plus and Hulu some time in 2027. It’s separate from the live-action Death Stranding film from A24, which is set to start filming next year.
The strange-looking Signature 27 — an Android flagship poised to rival the S26 Ultra, with a Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chip and Bang & Olufsen speakers — is nearly here. Motorola says it’ll reveal the rest of the phone next week. Will we find out Graphene’s software support plans then too?
The New York Times reports that US intelligence officials believe an executive at one of Nvidia’s data center customers, Megaspeed, may be a “Chinese intelligence asset,” and has a “close relationship” with Nvidia CEO Huang. Details are sparse in the article, especially on how close that relationship was — Nvidia says she’s just one of “thousands of customer executives” Huang meets every year.
[The New York Times]
JerryRigEverything belatedly got hold of a Trump phone for a midterm special durability test, including a blunt recounting of the president’s track record so far. It features more evidence that the T1 Phone is an HTC in disguise, including a repeat of iFixit’s clever trick of swapping motherboards to prove the phones are identical inside and out.
Both newsletter platforms have helped host podcasts for a while, and now they’re getting into the money side. Last week Substack announced an early access program for dynamic sponsorship placements, with programmatic ads coming “soon.” Smaller rival Beehiiv followed up yesterday, though has both types of audio ad ready to use right now.
[Beehiiv]
It’s a time frame the company has suggested before. It says a “virtuous cycle” (well, virtuous for memory manufacturers at least) is seeing AI productivity gains lead to increased demand, maintaining pressure on supply even as SK Hynix ramps up production. It’s already signed agreements to sell more than half the RAM it’ll produce through 2028.
[SK hynix Newsroom]
Alongside laying off 1,000 employees, Netflix has fired the heads of its film and content divisions this month. We’ve already explained the company can’t fire its way out of a slump that’s now hitting its engagement metrics, but Bloomberg recounts just why co-CEO Ted Sarandos thinks otherwise, and how he got here in the first place.
Its previous patent dispute saw Ultrahuman blocked from the US market for almost a year. Now Oura alleges the Ultrahuman Ring Pro violates another two of its patents, including one only issued to Oura this week, and wants it taken off sale. For now at least, that hasn’t happened yet.
And no, you haven’t forgotten about a line of Intel-made Roombas. It requested permission to make hardware changes to the “Automatic Guided Vehicles” it’s used in semiconductor facilities for two decades. It says replacing the machines could take years, and there are no domestic alternatives. The FCC agreed, giving it permission to update its bots for the next year.
Our collective reviews of every Googlebook at launch: very good laptops hobbled by beta-level software.