Today I’m toying with

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta made AI look so stinking cute by giving it a squishy little face — and this holiday season, he wants to sell you a Muse Charm so you can carry your jolly AI helper around like a Tamagotchi.

But I won’t be buying one, because we have Muse Charm at home. It cost just $50, and I’ve decided the learning experience was worth it.

Last year’s Antigravity A1 is the best beginner drone I’ve ever tried. I put a friend who’d never flown into its virtual cockpit and didn’t worry one bit. The A1’s also nice for people who’d prefer to think about flying rather than filming, because you can reframe its 360-degree footage after.

But until today, that meant wearing the company’s FPV goggles and spending upwards of $1,599 on the complete set. Now, Antigravity is halving the price of entry to $799 in the US with a new “Follow Me” kit that replaces the original headset and motion controller with a wristwatch and ring instead.

This toolless modular lever-action wallet is the coolest I’ve stuck to my phone.

Remember when I tested the ultra-thin and convenient OhSnap Snap Grip Stand and liked it so much I bought my own? Now, OhSnap has a magnetic lever-action card wallet that can stack with that stand. It’s the coolest wallet I’ve ever stuck to my phone.

Last week, I powered on a 26-year-old copy of Pokémon Pinball, one of the best Game Boy games ever made. My save file was no more. The Charmander I’d caught for my daughter, the high scores we’d set together… gone. Before flash memory, Nintendo cartridges used tiny watch batteries to save their games, and those batteries were never meant to last this long.

But it’s not a huge deal, because I saved my family’s save file months ago. I backed it up with an Epilogue Operator, a device that connects your real Nintendo cartridges to Windows PCs, MacBooks, even a Steam Machine.

I told myself I wouldn’t buy an OhSnap accessory for my phone. Every one I’d tested was nice, but felt overpriced and slightly flawed. After I weighed in on the $40 Snap Grip 5 last year, I wound up sticking with my $25 Syncwire instead. But OhSnap’s $50 Snap Grip Stand finally got me. To have a truly useful vertical stand and grip always attached to my phone, ready at a moment’s notice? Heck yes.

I started testing the Snap Grip Stand months ago, and soon discovered that I never took it off. So I bought my own.

When I haul my 27-inch desktop monitor into the garage to film fun gadget videos… or want to play Japanese SNES games with friends… or lose the AC adapter for my old external hard disk… I can now power them with a USB battery instead.

None of them came with USB-C ports; the entire USB protocol was barely a twinkle in its creator’s eye when Nintendo shipped the Super Famicom in 1990! But a tiny programmable dongle, from a company called Werewolf, can transform old power ports to accept USB-C electricity. I’m so impressed, I just bought a second kit for a friend’s birthday.

Sharge, the company that makes delightful retro Mac-shaped chargers and see-inside batteries, is finally impressing me with a portable SSD. I couldn’t recommend the Sharge Disk, Disk Plus, or even the Disk Pro, but I’d be happy to own the new Disk Pro 2 Ultra.

This isn’t just a drive. It’s a 4K HDMI dock and a USB-C hub too. It’s a veritable USB-C Swiss Army Knife for all your main gadgets: laptop, tablet, phone, Steam Deck, even the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2.

What if you had a drone that wasn’t a buzzy, annoying fly people wanted to swat — but rather a cute dog that runs and jumps? What if it could do tricks on command and film your tricks as well? What if it could get right back up after a nasty-looking crash, dozens of times in a row?

The first time I saw Beni on Instagram, I immediately thought it was AI video slop. Surely consumer robots aren’t that smart and agile in 2026? Then I took the real robot for a spin. Truth is, Beni does need work. But my first two-hour demo was so much fun, I badly want one for myself.

When people learn I work for The Verge, they inevitably ask: “Do you get to keep the gadgets?” Now that I film Today I’m Toying With, a video series where I share the joy of tech, I get that question more than ever.

The answer is no, we don’t keep them! Our ethics policy is clear: “We don’t accept things of value from companies or from their PR firms, period.” We don’t keep them, we don’t sell them, we don’t pass them to family or friends. We try to return them, and if a company doesn’t want them back, we give them away. But now we’re going to give some of those unwanted gadgets to you.

You know Olaf. Before KPop Demon Hunters, before the Wicked movies, it was Disney’s Frozen that blasted show tunes like “Let It Go” and “Into the Unknown” into our lives. My little girls loved belting those tunes.

So when I met Olaf, the Disney Imagineering robot, I kept thinking: I can’t wait for my kids to meet him too.