Smartphones are great. They’re also… a lot. The idea of a more balanced device, one that gives you all of the most important and useful features of a smartphone but keeps you out of the infinite-doomscrolling loops, has been an enticing one for a long time. Nailing that balance, though, turns out to be almost impossible.
On this episode of The Vergecast, we try and get it right. The Verge’s Allison Johnson joins the show to talk about the new Light Phone III, and then we run through a list of a few dozen things your phone can do and we wonder if your perfect, sane, functional phone should be able to do them. Some things are easy, some are surprisingly difficult. We’re still not sure what to do with Snapchat.
After that, The Verge’s Andy Hawkins catches us up on all things Tesla Takedown. After this weekend’s coordinated set of protests, we talk through what the protestors want, why they’re pointing their anger at Tesla in particular, and how we’ll know if it’s working. Andy also walks us through the tariff chaos coming for the auto industry, and tells us a little about the surprisingly cool new Nissan Leaf.
Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11, or email vergecast@theverge.com!) about whether anyone is working on an in-home camera that can tell you where you left the scissors. It’s a tricky problem to solve, but there are a lot of folks working on it. (Maybe not specifically for scissors, though.)
If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started:
- Light Phone III review: everything in moderation
- There’s no perfect minimalist phone — yet
- One year with the Light Phone 2
- We went to 10 anti-Tesla protests — and a couple counter protests, too
- ‘Tesla Takedown’ protesters planning ‘biggest day of action’
- How Elon Musk turned the Tesla brand so toxic
- The Nissan Leaf lives on as a compact SUV with a Tesla charge port
- Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house
- Project Astra is the future of AI at Google
- Alexa Plus arrives with promise but plenty of questions