The latest tech news about the world’s best (and sometimes worst) hardware, apps, and much more. From top companies like Google and Apple to tiny startups vying for your attention, Verge Tech has the latest in what matters in technology daily.
X’s sexual deepfake machine is still running, despite Grok saying otherwise.
It’s not just a tongue-twister — the Pocket Taco is GameSir’s tiny Game Boy styled controller for your phone, not to be confused with 8BitDo’s tiny Game Boy styled controller for your phone. This one’s Bluetooth rather than USB-C, and cradles your phone’s bottom instead of hanging off the USB-C port. It also has a $35 price and a March release date.
It’s just one of two Game Boy-styled mini-controllers that cradle your phone at CES 2026. This one plugs directly into your phone with USB-C, is coming summer 2026, but doesn’t have a price yet. GameSir has a Bluetooth one for $35 that’s coming March and cradles your phone. (YouTube video version here.)
The company calls it Senso, and it’s cute! Detachable heads and charger so you can leave the probe in soil. Light, temperature, humidity, and soil moisture, plus a whole AI pitch I’m not quite buying. I’d be more tempted if it weren’t a Kickstarter and had a local smart home API. (YouTube version here.)
Before saying goodbye to CES 2026, I roamed around without a destination in mind to soak up the scene with my camera. After a week of operating at breakneck pace for long hours, it felt meditative to just capture a tiny glimpse of tech on display — including some human (and very non-human) moments.
Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge
There were a couple Steam Machine mockups at Jsaux’s CES booth, but they were just shells showing off the company’s cheesy looking stickers. The front display concept wasn’t there.
Jsaux seems thirsty to build a Steam Machine accessory ecosystem like it did with the Steam Deck, where it found success, but the real ideas will require actual hardware.
Anil Dash wrote a really fun, really deep history of Markdown, the text markup language John Gruber created that has subsequently become totally ubiquitous online. Dash also argues that the idea behind Markdown, and the forces that made it huge, hold important lessons that the current tech industry — and AI companies in particular — could really stand to learn from.
[Anil Dash]
GDU Technology’s Li Lei says she’s not sure whether it might truly hurt her company. “It’s really hard to tell because they’re changing drone policy all the time,” she tells me at CES. Also, GDU mostly sells in China. But it just recently expanded in the US, and now its just-announced flagship P300 won’t come here.
The next flagship model from Chinese startup DeepSeek “makes breakthroughs handling extremely long coding prompts,” according to The Information, and DeepSeek’s internal benchmarks put it ahead of Anthropic and OpenAI’s models in coding.
DeepSeek V4 could arrive “in the coming weeks,” around a year after DeepSeek’s previous R1 reasoning model launched on January 20th, 2025.
Smart lights that know where they’re placed in a room, wild designs for next-gen routers, and a glowing inedible donut.
Rollable laptops, twice-folding phones, and a ‘longevity station.’ This is the CES tech we come back for.
15 years ago, j5create made a cable that magically let you drag and drop between PCs and Macs. Now, it’s got a $70 USB-C astronaut dongle that wirelessly links Windows PCs with iPads here at CES. You can send files, mirror displays, and beam your mouse and keyboard. I can’t vouch for latency yet — Wi-Fi reliability at CES is kind of crap.
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.
When I wasn’t looking at huge phones at CES I managed to track down a small one: the ikko MindOne Pro. It offers a 4-inch OLED panel and a 50-megapixel camera that flips up for selfies. The MindOne Pro will ship with Android 15 as well as a proprietary OS with AI apps that you can also use as a kind of focus mode. It’s in late stages of Kickstarter funding with shipping promised for February.
The Brolan ClearX uses “sensors” (no one could tell me what sort, though) and AI to detect what material your shoes are made from and select the appropriate cleaning and drying cycle, with “micro-nano bubble technology” to help clean. Is it too late to add this to my dubious AI roundup?
After February 9th, it will discontinue support for the button that has let Microsoft 365 users send Word docs from within the app to devices like the Scribe for reading and annotation, ever since it was added in 2023.
You can still send Word documents to your Kindle, but you’ll need to use Amazon’s official Send to Kindle tool via its website instead.
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.
[Good e-Reader - The latest news on e-readers and e-paper]
This is Soramatex from Sora Materials. They wouldn’t tell me what it is, save that it uses carbon powder, which makes it sound like maybe it’s graphene aerogel — which, to be clear, already exists and can get even lighter. But it’s not every day I get to touch impossibly light lab material! (YouTube version here.)
As part of a partnership between TikTok and FIFA, select media partners can livestream “parts of” World Cup matches as well as “post more curated clips and access special content produced by FIFA for TikTok.”
External GPUs are rad but many need work — maybe they’ll take off now we’re throwing AI dollars at them? Gigabyte, Plugable, and newcomer Ugreen aren’t even calling them “eGPUs” anymore here at CES. Guess I can’t complain unless AI companies buy them all up.
AMD’s Strix Halo is a big, pricey chip with the best integrated graphics we’ve ever seen. The Asus TUF is the brand’s budget-friendly gaming line. So how “affordable” will Asus’s new TUF Gaming A14 laptop with Strix Halo be? We don’t know yet, because Asus hasn’t finalized pricing. But I look forward to testing this TUF.
