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Image: David Pierce / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 39, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get ready for gadgets this week, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been writing about Surfaces and other tablets, chatting with some internet friends about the fall of Red Lobster, reading about Magic: The Gathering and the history of emoji, watching MoviePass, MovieCrash, weeding my patio with a literal flamethrower, and for some reason, eating a lot of popcorn. Like, a lot of popcorn.
I also have for you a bunch of cool new gadgets, a new YouTube channel you’re going to love, a new-old Mario game, a clever new AI tool for Windows, lots and lots of fun new games, and a whole bunch more. Let’s do it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into this week? What should everyone be into? What is so awesome that everyone needs to know about it right this second or else? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, and tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

The Sonos Ace headphones. I’m generally very happy with my Bose QuietComfort Headphones, which are kind of beaten up but still work great. Even for $450, though, the Ace look really nice — I dig the super-minimalist vibe, almost like they’re an early prototype the company shipped. Really curious to see the reviews on these.

The new Surface Pro. If you’re one of the “why can’t my iPad do more stuff” kinds of people, the device you want might not be an iPad. It might be the new $999 Surface Pro, which Microsoft promises has great performance and battery, comes in cool colors, and has a really nifty new keyboard attachment.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Another great reboot from Nintendo, which is remarkably good at sprucing up old Mario games and getting me hooked on them all over again. Like my colleague Andrew Webster wrote, the Switch is turning into a retro Mario RPG machine, and it’s awesome.

Howtown. I love a good “no mystery too small” show, which is why I’m a religious consumer of things like Search Engine and Underunderstood. This new YouTube channel, from two excellent creators, is an insta-subscribe for me. And they have some really fun guests lined up!

Microsoft Recall. One of the cooler AI apps I’ve seen — and maybe the best argument yet for why you need an “AI PC.” Sure, an app that tracks everything you do on your computer feels slightly creepy, but that’s kind of already how your computer works. This just makes it useful.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Fury Road is one of the coolest movies ever made, if you ask me, and by all accounts, Furiosa is a worthy — if slightly slower and less, uh, bonkers — follow-up. It’s also apparently the rare prequel that adds something to the first flick; guess which two movies I’ll be watching this weekend.

Stompers. I’m currently very into silly, chill, less-intense workout apps, and this is such a funny one. You compete with your friends to walk more, and when you’re winning, your friends get, like, virtual bananas to slow you down. Delightful!

Canva. Canva launched a big redesign this week (at least, if you can find a “secret portal”), which comes with a bunch of clever AI features and some new ways for your IT department to give Canva money. I don’t use Canva much personally, but the folks I know who do tend to love it. This should be good news.

Hellblade II. This game sounds genuinely terrifying — and there’s not much I love more than a game that makes me scream out loud. The sound design appears to be particularly intense, so if you need me this weekend, I’ll be holed up in the dark scaring myself half to death.

The Daylight DC1. Half of me rolls my eyes at anyone who’s like, “Gadgets are bad. Here’s a gadget to save you from gadgets.” And it’s $729! But I love the retro-future aesthetic here, I’m hopeful the screen tech works, and I’ll be keeping an eye on this thing for sure.

Group project
Last week, I asked you to share your favorite minigames on the internet. Things you can play in a few minutes. Maybe you play once a day, maybe you play it 50 times in a row while you’re on the train to work. Did I ask for this because selfishly I’m sort of bored of Quordle and Name Drop and wanted new stuff to try? Partly! But I also suspected I’m not the only one who loves these games.
Oh boy, was I right. Thank you to everyone who responded! I got a ton of great suggestions, and I want to share as many of them as I can. First of all, here are the ones you recommended the most often:

Coffee Golf. A new five-hole golf course to play every day. (This was the most recommended game of the week, by a lot, and I can see why. I love it.)

Bandle. Guess the song, one instrument at a time.

Travle. Get from one place to another, one adjacent country at a time.

Connections. Find the four words that belong together.

Framed. Guess the movie, one screenshot at a time.

Wordle. Can’t forget the OG!

And here is a list, in no particular order but very slightly categorized, of some of the other great game recommendations I got. First up, there are the games that I’d describe as “Wordle, but not exactly:”

Worldle. Guess the country by its shape.

Summle. Put the numbers and operators in place to make math equations work.

Episode. Like Framed, but for TV shows.

CineQuote. Guess the movie, one line at a time.

Murdle. Solve a mystery with only a few clues.

Waffle. Rearrange the board until all the letters are in the right place.

Knotwords. Like sudoku meets a crossword puzzle.

Strands. A word search with a theme.

Queens / Pinpoint / Crossclimb. The three new daily games on LinkedIn, which are all pretty fun.

Housle. Guess the house price by the photo.

I heard about a bunch of Immaculate Grid games, which are a huge new category and are very fun:

Immaculate Grid. The original, I think? Guess the athlete, across lots of sports.

GeoGrid. Guess the country.

Cinematrix. Guess the movie.

And last but not least, there were the other games. Not all of them are daily, but I think they fit the “it’s a thing you can do a couple of minutes at a time,” so I’ll allow them:

Pedantle. Find words in a redacted page to figure out which Wikipedia entry it is.

Chrome’s Dino Game. Best use of a broken webpage ever.

Contexto. Try to guess the word just by guessing other words.

Football Bingo. Turns out, I don’t know soccer as well as I thought.

Untitled Game. It loads a blank webpage. You figure out what to do next.

Random battles on Pokemon Showdown.

Universal Paperclips. You make paperclips. And sell them. As many as you can. Forever.

Box Office Game. The game gives you a weekend and some numbers, you try to guess the most popular movies.

I now have about two-thirds of these games bookmarked in my browser, and I will be playing them all every day forever. I may never be productive again. Thanks again to everyone who shared their favorite games, and I hope you find something fun to play!

Screen share
David Imel is a man of many talents. He uses weird, old photography equipment to make truly gorgeous panoramic photos; he makes great videos going super duper deep into how we talk to each other online; he hosts podcasts and makes videos with the rest of the MKBHD crew.
I asked David to share his homescreen, both to see which of his cool photos he picked as a wallpaper and to snoop on whether he had any cool photography / podcasting apps I didn’t know about. Turns out, he’s pretty minimalist! Here’s David’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 15 Pro Max.
The wallpaper: A picture I took in Ohio while chasing the eclipse on a Fujifilm GFX 100S II Frankenstein attached to my Chamonix 4×5 view camera.
The apps: Photos, Settings, Viewfinder, Fujifilm Camera Remote, Telegram, Gmail, Pocket Casts, Messages, Arc, Spotify.
Gotta be honest, I generally use the swipe down to search apps gesture every time I want to use an app. I don’t know if that makes me a psycho, but I only keep a few on the homescreen. The widgets are for my bedroom lights and blinds — all running on Matter. I get very little light in my apartment, so the blinds close at 9PM and open at 7AM to help me wake up, and I toggle the lights manually.
Viewfinder Preview. This is my favorite app for shooting film. I mostly use it for my 6:17 and 6:24 120 film cameras, but it’s amazing. You can emulate any film format and field of view, and you can take digital copies to both remember which image you shot and what your settings were. It’s also a light meter and has been super accurate.
Fujifilm Camera Remote. I use this to transfer photos from my X100 (my daily camera) to my phone. The new app (Fujfilmi XApp) never works for me for some reason, but the old app still works great.
Pocket Casts. This is probably the most-used app on my phone. I’ve used this app since like 2010 for podcasts, and since I bought it once for $7 way back in the day, I got grandfathered in for a lifetime pro tier once they added a subscription model. It’s a really fantastic podcast app, but I am aware that they hide a lot of features behind a subscription now, which kinda sucks.
Arc Search. David, I think you and I are probably both the biggest Arc fans on the internet. The browser is just so delightful, and the desktop app is absolutely incredible for research; segmenting out my work life / accounts / research projects, and spaces is great. I could talk forever about how much I love the actually useful AI features they have in the desktop app like tab renaming, download / file renaming, tidy tab sorting, etc., alongside pinned tabs, the ability to share folders, and more.
I also asked David to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he shared:

Right now, I’m in the middle of getting a Hasselblad Flextight film scanner up and running. It’s the highest-quality scan you can get outside of a drum scan, but they’re so old, you have to use a super old Mac for it. My friend Willem Verbeeck made a video on it recently. A nice ex-professional photographer in California found out I’m into panoramic photography (especially my Fujifilm TX-1) and had a mask specifically made for it. It weighs 60 pounds.
I’m a big fan of Casey Newton and Kevin Roose’s Hard Fork podcast. It’s not exactly new, but I think they have a great dialogue, and considering they both cover similar things in their respective publications, the conversations are a great mix of funny, intelligent, and engaging.
I don’t watch a ton of movies, shows, or YouTube, but I’ve been going back through VSauce’s channel and watching his old videos just because I really like the style of WHY WHY WHY storytelling. Oldie, but very goodie. Also Gawx Art might be the best YouTuber on the platform right now, and this interview with him on Jack Conte’s Digital Spaghetti channel is freaking awesome.

Crowdsourced
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week.
“I loved Jenny Nicholson’s YouTube essay about the demise of the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser hotel experience. It’s long (four hours!), but she goes into every detail, from concept, to her own visit, to why it failed. Totally worth the time.” – Mike
“ReminderCal is a really awesome app that syncs iOS Reminders so they appear in iOS Calendar. I’ve set up Shortcut automations for it, and now it works like magic (even when using the app switcher!) and feels like Apple integrated it! Plus I’m absolutely loving Hit Me Hard and Soft. The whole album is Billie Eilish at her best, and I can’t get “Chihiro” out of my head!” – John
“Just saw someone mention SequoiaView, which is great, but WizTree is about 1 billion times faster. Hope it helps someone in a rush to clean up a disk…” – César
“I installed a Synology NAS in my home and set it up as a NAS (obviously) but also as a Plex server, which works really well! I can now watch my old DVDs and Blu-rays again using Plex, after importing them as MP4s, and it can also configure itself automatically to be accessible from outside my local network.” – Wenzel
“Bought a bike recently and am really enjoying viewing my Apple Watch metrics on my iPhone. Using the Peak Design case and bike mount.” – Hobie
“After a long day, my favorite way of winding down before sleeping is watching this YouTube channel, Virtual Japan, that makes videos walking around Tokyo and other cities of Japan in a beautiful 4K HDR. My favorite videos are this one from an Onsen town and this one from a rainy midnight in Kyoto. It’s one of the best ways of calming the mind and the body before sleeping.” – Guilherme
“Apparently this isn’t new, but I just heard about Hoopla this week! It’s an app that you can connect your local library card to and gain access to their library of digital content including streaming movies and TV shows! I’ve found several shows on there that are otherwise only available on a streaming service I don’t want to pay for, so it’s been a great find for me this week!” – Charles
“Probably not new, but I learned about PlayCover and have been using it to replay the GTA III / Vice City / San Andreas games on my MacBook using my Netflix subscription.” – Alex

Signing off
About this time of year, a lot of people start asking me (and everyone else I know who likes gadgets) which Bluetooth speaker to buy. It’s party and barbecue time, I guess! There are lots of good choices out there, but let me just save you a bunch of time: buy a UE Wonderboom. The whole Boom lineup is great, honestly, but this one’s plenty loud, it’s tiny, it lasts forever, it sounds great, it’s $100. You might be able to beat it on one of those things, but I’ve never found a better “awesome speaker in a tiny box” anywhere. When the weather’s good, mine goes everywhere with me. Maybe we can hang at the beach and sync ours up for some sweet stereo tunes. Hit me up.
See you next week!

Image: David Pierce / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 39, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get ready for gadgets this week, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been writing about Surfaces and other tablets, chatting with some internet friends about the fall of Red Lobster, reading about Magic: The Gathering and the history of emoji, watching MoviePass, MovieCrash, weeding my patio with a literal flamethrower, and for some reason, eating a lot of popcorn. Like, a lot of popcorn.

I also have for you a bunch of cool new gadgets, a new YouTube channel you’re going to love, a new-old Mario game, a clever new AI tool for Windows, lots and lots of fun new games, and a whole bunch more. Let’s do it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into this week? What should everyone be into? What is so awesome that everyone needs to know about it right this second or else? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, and tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

The Sonos Ace headphones. I’m generally very happy with my Bose QuietComfort Headphones, which are kind of beaten up but still work great. Even for $450, though, the Ace look really nice — I dig the super-minimalist vibe, almost like they’re an early prototype the company shipped. Really curious to see the reviews on these.

The new Surface Pro. If you’re one of the “why can’t my iPad do more stuff” kinds of people, the device you want might not be an iPad. It might be the new $999 Surface Pro, which Microsoft promises has great performance and battery, comes in cool colors, and has a really nifty new keyboard attachment.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Another great reboot from Nintendo, which is remarkably good at sprucing up old Mario games and getting me hooked on them all over again. Like my colleague Andrew Webster wrote, the Switch is turning into a retro Mario RPG machine, and it’s awesome.

Howtown. I love a good “no mystery too small” show, which is why I’m a religious consumer of things like Search Engine and Underunderstood. This new YouTube channel, from two excellent creators, is an insta-subscribe for me. And they have some really fun guests lined up!

Microsoft Recall. One of the cooler AI apps I’ve seen — and maybe the best argument yet for why you need an “AI PC.” Sure, an app that tracks everything you do on your computer feels slightly creepy, but that’s kind of already how your computer works. This just makes it useful.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Fury Road is one of the coolest movies ever made, if you ask me, and by all accounts, Furiosa is a worthy — if slightly slower and less, uh, bonkers — follow-up. It’s also apparently the rare prequel that adds something to the first flick; guess which two movies I’ll be watching this weekend.

Stompers. I’m currently very into silly, chill, less-intense workout apps, and this is such a funny one. You compete with your friends to walk more, and when you’re winning, your friends get, like, virtual bananas to slow you down. Delightful!

Canva. Canva launched a big redesign this week (at least, if you can find a “secret portal”), which comes with a bunch of clever AI features and some new ways for your IT department to give Canva money. I don’t use Canva much personally, but the folks I know who do tend to love it. This should be good news.

Hellblade II. This game sounds genuinely terrifying — and there’s not much I love more than a game that makes me scream out loud. The sound design appears to be particularly intense, so if you need me this weekend, I’ll be holed up in the dark scaring myself half to death.

The Daylight DC1. Half of me rolls my eyes at anyone who’s like, “Gadgets are bad. Here’s a gadget to save you from gadgets.” And it’s $729! But I love the retro-future aesthetic here, I’m hopeful the screen tech works, and I’ll be keeping an eye on this thing for sure.

Group project

Last week, I asked you to share your favorite minigames on the internet. Things you can play in a few minutes. Maybe you play once a day, maybe you play it 50 times in a row while you’re on the train to work. Did I ask for this because selfishly I’m sort of bored of Quordle and Name Drop and wanted new stuff to try? Partly! But I also suspected I’m not the only one who loves these games.

Oh boy, was I right. Thank you to everyone who responded! I got a ton of great suggestions, and I want to share as many of them as I can. First of all, here are the ones you recommended the most often:

Coffee Golf. A new five-hole golf course to play every day. (This was the most recommended game of the week, by a lot, and I can see why. I love it.)

Bandle. Guess the song, one instrument at a time.

Travle. Get from one place to another, one adjacent country at a time.

Connections. Find the four words that belong together.

Framed. Guess the movie, one screenshot at a time.

Wordle. Can’t forget the OG!

And here is a list, in no particular order but very slightly categorized, of some of the other great game recommendations I got. First up, there are the games that I’d describe as “Wordle, but not exactly:”

Worldle. Guess the country by its shape.

Summle. Put the numbers and operators in place to make math equations work.

Episode. Like Framed, but for TV shows.

CineQuote. Guess the movie, one line at a time.

Murdle. Solve a mystery with only a few clues.

Waffle. Rearrange the board until all the letters are in the right place.

Knotwords. Like sudoku meets a crossword puzzle.

Strands. A word search with a theme.

Queens / Pinpoint / Crossclimb. The three new daily games on LinkedIn, which are all pretty fun.

Housle. Guess the house price by the photo.

I heard about a bunch of Immaculate Grid games, which are a huge new category and are very fun:

Immaculate Grid. The original, I think? Guess the athlete, across lots of sports.

GeoGrid. Guess the country.

Cinematrix. Guess the movie.

And last but not least, there were the other games. Not all of them are daily, but I think they fit the “it’s a thing you can do a couple of minutes at a time,” so I’ll allow them:

Pedantle. Find words in a redacted page to figure out which Wikipedia entry it is.

Chrome’s Dino Game. Best use of a broken webpage ever.

Contexto. Try to guess the word just by guessing other words.

Football Bingo. Turns out, I don’t know soccer as well as I thought.

Untitled Game. It loads a blank webpage. You figure out what to do next.

Random battles on Pokemon Showdown.

Universal Paperclips. You make paperclips. And sell them. As many as you can. Forever.

Box Office Game. The game gives you a weekend and some numbers, you try to guess the most popular movies.

I now have about two-thirds of these games bookmarked in my browser, and I will be playing them all every day forever. I may never be productive again. Thanks again to everyone who shared their favorite games, and I hope you find something fun to play!

Screen share

David Imel is a man of many talents. He uses weird, old photography equipment to make truly gorgeous panoramic photos; he makes great videos going super duper deep into how we talk to each other online; he hosts podcasts and makes videos with the rest of the MKBHD crew.

I asked David to share his homescreen, both to see which of his cool photos he picked as a wallpaper and to snoop on whether he had any cool photography / podcasting apps I didn’t know about. Turns out, he’s pretty minimalist! Here’s David’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 15 Pro Max.

The wallpaper: A picture I took in Ohio while chasing the eclipse on a Fujifilm GFX 100S II Frankenstein attached to my Chamonix 4×5 view camera.

The apps: Photos, Settings, Viewfinder, Fujifilm Camera Remote, Telegram, Gmail, Pocket Casts, Messages, Arc, Spotify.

Gotta be honest, I generally use the swipe down to search apps gesture every time I want to use an app. I don’t know if that makes me a psycho, but I only keep a few on the homescreen. The widgets are for my bedroom lights and blinds — all running on Matter. I get very little light in my apartment, so the blinds close at 9PM and open at 7AM to help me wake up, and I toggle the lights manually.

Viewfinder Preview. This is my favorite app for shooting film. I mostly use it for my 6:17 and 6:24 120 film cameras, but it’s amazing. You can emulate any film format and field of view, and you can take digital copies to both remember which image you shot and what your settings were. It’s also a light meter and has been super accurate.

Fujifilm Camera Remote. I use this to transfer photos from my X100 (my daily camera) to my phone. The new app (Fujfilmi XApp) never works for me for some reason, but the old app still works great.

Pocket Casts. This is probably the most-used app on my phone. I’ve used this app since like 2010 for podcasts, and since I bought it once for $7 way back in the day, I got grandfathered in for a lifetime pro tier once they added a subscription model. It’s a really fantastic podcast app, but I am aware that they hide a lot of features behind a subscription now, which kinda sucks.

Arc Search. David, I think you and I are probably both the biggest Arc fans on the internet. The browser is just so delightful, and the desktop app is absolutely incredible for research; segmenting out my work life / accounts / research projects, and spaces is great. I could talk forever about how much I love the actually useful AI features they have in the desktop app like tab renaming, download / file renaming, tidy tab sorting, etc., alongside pinned tabs, the ability to share folders, and more.

I also asked David to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he shared:

Right now, I’m in the middle of getting a Hasselblad Flextight film scanner up and running. It’s the highest-quality scan you can get outside of a drum scan, but they’re so old, you have to use a super old Mac for it. My friend Willem Verbeeck made a video on it recently. A nice ex-professional photographer in California found out I’m into panoramic photography (especially my Fujifilm TX-1) and had a mask specifically made for it. It weighs 60 pounds.
I’m a big fan of Casey Newton and Kevin Roose’s Hard Fork podcast. It’s not exactly new, but I think they have a great dialogue, and considering they both cover similar things in their respective publications, the conversations are a great mix of funny, intelligent, and engaging.
I don’t watch a ton of movies, shows, or YouTube, but I’ve been going back through VSauce’s channel and watching his old videos just because I really like the style of WHY WHY WHY storytelling. Oldie, but very goodie. Also Gawx Art might be the best YouTuber on the platform right now, and this interview with him on Jack Conte’s Digital Spaghetti channel is freaking awesome.

Crowdsourced

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week.

“I loved Jenny Nicholson’s YouTube essay about the demise of the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser hotel experience. It’s long (four hours!), but she goes into every detail, from concept, to her own visit, to why it failed. Totally worth the time.” – Mike

“ReminderCal is a really awesome app that syncs iOS Reminders so they appear in iOS Calendar. I’ve set up Shortcut automations for it, and now it works like magic (even when using the app switcher!) and feels like Apple integrated it! Plus I’m absolutely loving Hit Me Hard and Soft. The whole album is Billie Eilish at her best, and I can’t get “Chihiro” out of my head!” – John

“Just saw someone mention SequoiaView, which is great, but WizTree is about 1 billion times faster. Hope it helps someone in a rush to clean up a disk…” – César

“I installed a Synology NAS in my home and set it up as a NAS (obviously) but also as a Plex server, which works really well! I can now watch my old DVDs and Blu-rays again using Plex, after importing them as MP4s, and it can also configure itself automatically to be accessible from outside my local network.” – Wenzel

“Bought a bike recently and am really enjoying viewing my Apple Watch metrics on my iPhone. Using the Peak Design case and bike mount.” – Hobie

“After a long day, my favorite way of winding down before sleeping is watching this YouTube channel, Virtual Japan, that makes videos walking around Tokyo and other cities of Japan in a beautiful 4K HDR. My favorite videos are this one from an Onsen town and this one from a rainy midnight in Kyoto. It’s one of the best ways of calming the mind and the body before sleeping.” – Guilherme

“Apparently this isn’t new, but I just heard about Hoopla this week! It’s an app that you can connect your local library card to and gain access to their library of digital content including streaming movies and TV shows! I’ve found several shows on there that are otherwise only available on a streaming service I don’t want to pay for, so it’s been a great find for me this week!” – Charles

“Probably not new, but I learned about PlayCover and have been using it to replay the GTA III / Vice City / San Andreas games on my MacBook using my Netflix subscription.” – Alex

Signing off

About this time of year, a lot of people start asking me (and everyone else I know who likes gadgets) which Bluetooth speaker to buy. It’s party and barbecue time, I guess! There are lots of good choices out there, but let me just save you a bunch of time: buy a UE Wonderboom. The whole Boom lineup is great, honestly, but this one’s plenty loud, it’s tiny, it lasts forever, it sounds great, it’s $100. You might be able to beat it on one of those things, but I’ve never found a better “awesome speaker in a tiny box” anywhere. When the weather’s good, mine goes everywhere with me. Maybe we can hang at the beach and sync ours up for some sweet stereo tunes. Hit me up.

See you next week!

Read More 

Bambu P1P vs. Creality K1C: an ‘easy’ 3D printer showdown. If you asked me to recommend an “easy” consumer 3D printer, I’d warn you first: despite countless innovations, you still can’t quite hit a button to reliably photocopy a 3D model. Buying a 3D printer is buying an entire hobby, one where — if you’re a lazy bum like me — many attempts will turn into worthless gobs of plastic.
But if you persisted, I’d tell you my one clear choice for lazy bums: the Bambu P1P.
What, a printer from the company that recalled its newest model and whose earlier ones once went rogue? Yep — because not only did Bambu handle those incidents with rapid apologies, investigations, transparency, and even refunds, the $599 Bambu P1P is also absolutely the easiest, most reliable 3D printer I’ve used.
It makes my stalwart old Ender 3 Pro look like a hunk of junk. It makes its closest competition, the $559 Creality K1C, feel like an inferior clone. I’ve spent months testing them side by side, and I’d personally pick the Bambu every time.
Don’t get me wrong: the K1C is the better choice for some tinkerers since its full enclosure, bed, and extra fan let you print higher temperature plastics like ABS as well as ones reinforced with glass or carbon fibers. (Bambu sells the $699 P1S for that.) And I did successfully use both the P1P and a pair of Creality K1 printers to produce dozens of objects over the past year, including pegboard mounts, figurines for my kids, and these badass unofficial Nerf blasters:

With either of these printers and a little knowledge of what’s easily 3D-printable, I can (sometimes) send an entire plate full of parts to these printers and expect them to all turn out.
But if you want fewer software and filament headaches, I would absolutely point you to Bambu. And I’d recommend you steer clear of the original Creality K1 entirely — I spent months struggling with issues that were instantly fixed when I swapped for the newer K1C model.

I took delivery of both the P1P and the original K1 last summer, and originally, I thought I’d be comparing both to the AnkerMake M5. They’re all part of a recent wave of printers promising a huge increase in speed and smarts.

One of my first prints on the Bambu P1P: the white side panels it’s worn ever since.

But the Bambu P1P and Creality K1 series stood out as the most affordable full-size, full-featured CoreXY printers that claim you can print right out of the box — with no need to bolt together a printer frame or even tighten belts. And while you can’t “just start printing the moment your K1 arrives,” as Creality puts it, both printers are mostly prebuilt, pretuned, and ready to go 20 or 30 minutes after you cut the packing tape. You remove a few safety pieces; attach their screens, power cables, and filament roll holders; connect to your home network for updates; and then press a button for automated setup.
Each will automatically level their bed so your prints literally get off on the right foot. They tune their motors with vibrations so intense, they shake the entire surface the printers are standing on. That’s intentional — because excess movement ruins prints, and printing quickly creates more movement, they teach themselves to avoid frequencies that rattle too hard. As I alluded to before, they both have CoreXY kinematics systems that provide an incredibly speedy, stable bead of plastic without needing to sling your model back and forth on a moving bed.

With a CoreXY printer, the head moves in two dimensions while the bed slowly lowers, keeping the model stable.

Bedslingers, like this Bambu A1 Mini, fling the model one direction and the print head another.

But the next step is where the Bambu P1 and Creality K1 printers begin to diverge. When it’s time to stick your fishing line of consumable plastic into a Creality printer, you have to thread the needle, pushing a sharp point of plastic into a tube and through the extruder so that the hot nozzle can melt and squirt it out one tiny bead at a time.
It’s the way many 3D printers have worked for years, but it leaves a lot of room for user error. It feels imprecise: you snip your filament at an angle to get a sharp point, then largely… shove until it feels right. Then you press a button and cross your fingers that the K1C’s motorized extruder will take it from there. Or manually shove it some more and hope the filament doesn’t break inside. Or you physically remove the filament tube, like I always did with my old Ender 3, so at least you can be sure you’re pushing straight down into the extruder without binding.

This Pikachu, made of silk PLA, came out pretty well on the K1C.

Here it is with supports removed.

It could be worse! With the original K1, the filament pathway was so jam-prone that the company wound up designing and shipping multiple replacement parts during the time I had the printer, and even then, I had some trouble. With the K1C’s completely redesigned nozzles, I’ve mostly been able to shove filament in without issue.
But Bambu sidesteps all of that: there’s no needlepoint with a Bambu printer at all! Press a few buttons, insert uncut, flat-ended filament until you feel it being pulled away from your hand, and then, in my experience, it does the rest itself. The Bambu printer also automatically cuts off the molten bit when you’re ejecting filament, producing a nice clean-cut end I can effortlessly rewind without dragging on the printer’s internal parts. And, every single print, the Bambu purges that leftover molten filament into what owners have affectionately dubbed the “poop chute.”

The tiny non-touch screen is one of the few weaknesses of the Bambu P1P. I’m getting used to it.

The upshot: it took months before I saw my Bambu P1P jam for the first time. I’ve even had good results at times pushing old, brittle filament into Bambu printers. With the K1 and even K1C, it’s far less foolproof, as Creality makes you shove it through a filament runout sensor and a tight bend in the tubing before the extruder can grab it. I’ve broken the filament a couple of times in the K1C and many times in the original K1.
And if you do have to get inside that extruder to fix or replace parts, Bambu makes it a breeze: its magnetic cover just lifts off, and $35 buys you a complete modular hotend with heatsink, fan, heating element, and thermistor all attached — just two screws and a few easy cable pulls to swap it.

Bambu’s magnetic cover pops off to reveal just two screws and two easy-pull connectors to remove the hotend.

To get inside Creality’s, you have to unscrew screws immediately underneath, and parallel to, the greased rails.

With Creality, there are five screws you have to remove at uncomfortable angles and a silicone sleeve that requires prying, and then you have to reach underneath to get at its tiny rear-facing connectors. You may even have to pull out a pair of pliers because the Creality assembly line inexplicably glues those connectors into place.
Mind you, you’re not going to be doing that every day or even every month: you generally only replace a nozzle if it wears out, gets badly jammed, or if you want to print at higher resolution for more detail or at lower resolution for more speed. For reference, I wound up replacing worn parts of my Ender 3 Pro’s hotend twice in three years after a series of messy jams.

Creality’s bed is a bit harder to clean and maintain… and whose idea was it to purge filament next to a fan intake?

The last reason I think Bambu is a better choice for beginners is the print bed surface itself: how easily parts adhere and detach and how easy it is to clean. The Creality K1 series ships with a smooth PEI build plate that’s theoretically better for high temperature materials and initially gave my parts an incredibly smooth face. But it can be a challenge to remove some parts unless you apply a coating of the included glue stick (the kind kids use to paste paper together), and it’s easy to add too little or too much. I wound up tearing a chunk out of my build plate after too thin a coating.
Also, without a “poop chute,” I always found the K1 and K1C dripping tiny unwanted beads of plastic that’d wind up embedded in the bottom of models unless I carefully cleaned the print bed before each use.

This should give you a good glimpse at the Bambu’s plate texture.

The P1P, meanwhile, ships with a textured PEI-covered stainless steel plate that’s almost never missed for me, no glue required. Generally, my parts are already loose by the time the bed cools. You can buy such a plate for Creality, too, though, and still be paying less than the P1P after you have both.
Not all of Creality’s K1C choices are worse for beginners! While its “AI camera” attaches to the printer at a slightly awkward angle, the timelapses it creates are much easier to monitor and download than the ones from Bambu’s camera. I appreciate the K1C’s simple twist-to-lock filament reel holder (Bambu uses screws), the USB port to load files (Bambu only gives you microSD), more reliable Wi-Fi, and of course, the large 4.3-inch color touchscreen. It’s so much easier to reprint a successful design or navigate a thumb drive when you can actually tap a picture of each design on a screen, instead of Up-Down-Left-Right navigating through Bambu’s small text-only interface.

Creality’s K1C comes with a USB port and anti-vibration feet.

I also like that the Creality comes with anti-vibration feet, although, out of the box, my Bambu prints had more stable lines and steady surface textures even without them. The Bambu P1P is also quieter and can completely turn off its fans when idle. I’ve often come back to the Creality K1C after a day away and found it humming loudly in my garage.
Both companies need to work on their software, but Creality’s is definitely worse. While I’m having no real major trouble with Creality’s own Creality Print desktop app for basic 3D prints in PLA and flexible TPU plastic, I had major issues printing firmer and / or transparent PETG. It’s also missing loads of features compared to rival slicer apps you’d use to prepare your models for printing. (A slicer turns a 3D shape into printable horizontal layers and spits out code that tells the printer how to form each one.)

I had a easier time making transparent green PETG appear transparent on the Bambu (left).

Another comparison between P1P (left) and K1C (right) with the silver PETG.

You can use those rival slicers, but you may need to tune them for your printer yourself — some had even refused to support the K1 until Creality fulfilled obligations to open source its code. (It seems Creality has now done so.) OrcaSlicer is a popular third-party alternative that does have its own K1 profile, and it helped me print in PETG when Creality Print wouldn’t.
Creality’s mobile app, meanwhile, is gamified to the point that I want nothing to do with it. I just want a way to start and monitor prints, not earn points for printing trendy junk! I even had to turn off app notifications after I got bombarded with point earning opportunities each day, though it seems the company’s cut back on the notifications since launch.

The failed print I’m talking about: it’s for a wireless mouse.

But while Bambu’s slicer is great and its app doesn’t have the same annoyances, I’m not entirely sure I can trust the company’s cloud. One month after the company’s very good apology for its rogue printer incident, I had a similar issue. I went out to the garage one morning to find a model I’d printed directly from its cloud half-finished, stuck to my nozzle, with a second halfway printed copy of the model on the floor.
I’ve tried to print a few other models from its new MakerWorld, a place where you can supposedly find one-click prints validated to work on Bambu’s specific printers, no slicing or tweaks necessary, but one became a huge hunk of worthless plastic because it actually wasn’t validated. I guess I could always go with a private LAN-only connection to the printer instead of using the cloud.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see from here to an even easier 3D printing future. Bambu’s new A1 series printers now have completely tool-less hotend swaps — just pop the pieces off. The company’s working on new sensors that can detect when your filament tangles while it’s still on the roll, something that occasionally trips up every 3D printer I’ve yet used. I’ve also yet to see a 3D printer company ship their printers with a dry box to keep moisture out of their filament, but Creality does sell them separately, and it’s definitely something they could do to get us closer to that push-button, get-object future!
(I’m not saying you should buy an A1: I had more jams and lower-quality results with an A1 Mini than my P1P, the filament tangle detection still doesn’t work, and many things I print are too big for its bed. I haven’t gotten to test the full-size A1 since its recall.)

The biggest way 3D printers will earn trust, though, is if companies like Creality and Bambu stop shipping them before they’re ready. I can’t believe the terrible state the original Creality K1 first shipped in, and if you lurk in the right places on Reddit and Discord, you’ll hear veterans say that the Bambu P1P shipped with early issues, too. And I’ve read plenty of testimonials from Bambu customers who, like me with the Creality K1, were expected to open up their printers to fix broken things instead of sending them in for service. It’s a good reminder that these are hobbyist devices, not consumer products, even as these companies talk about democratizing 3D printing for everyone.
No matter which printer you’re eyeing, I strongly recommend steering clear of ones that have just launched. Wait for early adopters to iron things out! But if you’re itching to get printing, I’m pretty happy with the nearly two-year-old P1P.
Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Bambu P1P vs. Creality K1C: an ‘easy’ 3D printer showdown.

If you asked me to recommend an “easy” consumer 3D printer, I’d warn you first: despite countless innovations, you still can’t quite hit a button to reliably photocopy a 3D model. Buying a 3D printer is buying an entire hobby, one where — if you’re a lazy bum like me — many attempts will turn into worthless gobs of plastic.

But if you persisted, I’d tell you my one clear choice for lazy bums: the Bambu P1P.

What, a printer from the company that recalled its newest model and whose earlier ones once went rogue? Yep — because not only did Bambu handle those incidents with rapid apologies, investigations, transparency, and even refunds, the $599 Bambu P1P is also absolutely the easiest, most reliable 3D printer I’ve used.

It makes my stalwart old Ender 3 Pro look like a hunk of junk. It makes its closest competition, the $559 Creality K1C, feel like an inferior clone. I’ve spent months testing them side by side, and I’d personally pick the Bambu every time.

Don’t get me wrong: the K1C is the better choice for some tinkerers since its full enclosure, bed, and extra fan let you print higher temperature plastics like ABS as well as ones reinforced with glass or carbon fibers. (Bambu sells the $699 P1S for that.) And I did successfully use both the P1P and a pair of Creality K1 printers to produce dozens of objects over the past year, including pegboard mounts, figurines for my kids, and these badass unofficial Nerf blasters:

With either of these printers and a little knowledge of what’s easily 3D-printable, I can (sometimes) send an entire plate full of parts to these printers and expect them to all turn out.

But if you want fewer software and filament headaches, I would absolutely point you to Bambu. And I’d recommend you steer clear of the original Creality K1 entirely — I spent months struggling with issues that were instantly fixed when I swapped for the newer K1C model.

I took delivery of both the P1P and the original K1 last summer, and originally, I thought I’d be comparing both to the AnkerMake M5. They’re all part of a recent wave of printers promising a huge increase in speed and smarts.

But the Bambu P1P and Creality K1 series stood out as the most affordable full-size, full-featured CoreXY printers that claim you can print right out of the box — with no need to bolt together a printer frame or even tighten belts. And while you can’t “just start printing the moment your K1 arrives,” as Creality puts it, both printers are mostly prebuilt, pretuned, and ready to go 20 or 30 minutes after you cut the packing tape. You remove a few safety pieces; attach their screens, power cables, and filament roll holders; connect to your home network for updates; and then press a button for automated setup.

Each will automatically level their bed so your prints literally get off on the right foot. They tune their motors with vibrations so intense, they shake the entire surface the printers are standing on. That’s intentional — because excess movement ruins prints, and printing quickly creates more movement, they teach themselves to avoid frequencies that rattle too hard. As I alluded to before, they both have CoreXY kinematics systems that provide an incredibly speedy, stable bead of plastic without needing to sling your model back and forth on a moving bed.

But the next step is where the Bambu P1 and Creality K1 printers begin to diverge. When it’s time to stick your fishing line of consumable plastic into a Creality printer, you have to thread the needle, pushing a sharp point of plastic into a tube and through the extruder so that the hot nozzle can melt and squirt it out one tiny bead at a time.

It’s the way many 3D printers have worked for years, but it leaves a lot of room for user error. It feels imprecise: you snip your filament at an angle to get a sharp point, then largely… shove until it feels right. Then you press a button and cross your fingers that the K1C’s motorized extruder will take it from there. Or manually shove it some more and hope the filament doesn’t break inside. Or you physically remove the filament tube, like I always did with my old Ender 3, so at least you can be sure you’re pushing straight down into the extruder without binding.

It could be worse! With the original K1, the filament pathway was so jam-prone that the company wound up designing and shipping multiple replacement parts during the time I had the printer, and even then, I had some trouble. With the K1C’s completely redesigned nozzles, I’ve mostly been able to shove filament in without issue.

But Bambu sidesteps all of that: there’s no needlepoint with a Bambu printer at all! Press a few buttons, insert uncut, flat-ended filament until you feel it being pulled away from your hand, and then, in my experience, it does the rest itself. The Bambu printer also automatically cuts off the molten bit when you’re ejecting filament, producing a nice clean-cut end I can effortlessly rewind without dragging on the printer’s internal parts. And, every single print, the Bambu purges that leftover molten filament into what owners have affectionately dubbed the “poop chute.”

The upshot: it took months before I saw my Bambu P1P jam for the first time. I’ve even had good results at times pushing old, brittle filament into Bambu printers. With the K1 and even K1C, it’s far less foolproof, as Creality makes you shove it through a filament runout sensor and a tight bend in the tubing before the extruder can grab it. I’ve broken the filament a couple of times in the K1C and many times in the original K1.

And if you do have to get inside that extruder to fix or replace parts, Bambu makes it a breeze: its magnetic cover just lifts off, and $35 buys you a complete modular hotend with heatsink, fan, heating element, and thermistor all attached — just two screws and a few easy cable pulls to swap it.

With Creality, there are five screws you have to remove at uncomfortable angles and a silicone sleeve that requires prying, and then you have to reach underneath to get at its tiny rear-facing connectors. You may even have to pull out a pair of pliers because the Creality assembly line inexplicably glues those connectors into place.

Mind you, you’re not going to be doing that every day or even every month: you generally only replace a nozzle if it wears out, gets badly jammed, or if you want to print at higher resolution for more detail or at lower resolution for more speed. For reference, I wound up replacing worn parts of my Ender 3 Pro’s hotend twice in three years after a series of messy jams.

Creality’s bed is a bit harder to clean and maintain… and whose idea was it to purge filament next to a fan intake?

The last reason I think Bambu is a better choice for beginners is the print bed surface itself: how easily parts adhere and detach and how easy it is to clean. The Creality K1 series ships with a smooth PEI build plate that’s theoretically better for high temperature materials and initially gave my parts an incredibly smooth face. But it can be a challenge to remove some parts unless you apply a coating of the included glue stick (the kind kids use to paste paper together), and it’s easy to add too little or too much. I wound up tearing a chunk out of my build plate after too thin a coating.

Also, without a “poop chute,” I always found the K1 and K1C dripping tiny unwanted beads of plastic that’d wind up embedded in the bottom of models unless I carefully cleaned the print bed before each use.

The P1P, meanwhile, ships with a textured PEI-covered stainless steel plate that’s almost never missed for me, no glue required. Generally, my parts are already loose by the time the bed cools. You can buy such a plate for Creality, too, though, and still be paying less than the P1P after you have both.

Not all of Creality’s K1C choices are worse for beginners! While its “AI camera” attaches to the printer at a slightly awkward angle, the timelapses it creates are much easier to monitor and download than the ones from Bambu’s camera. I appreciate the K1C’s simple twist-to-lock filament reel holder (Bambu uses screws), the USB port to load files (Bambu only gives you microSD), more reliable Wi-Fi, and of course, the large 4.3-inch color touchscreen. It’s so much easier to reprint a successful design or navigate a thumb drive when you can actually tap a picture of each design on a screen, instead of Up-Down-Left-Right navigating through Bambu’s small text-only interface.

Creality’s K1C comes with a USB port and anti-vibration feet.

I also like that the Creality comes with anti-vibration feet, although, out of the box, my Bambu prints had more stable lines and steady surface textures even without them. The Bambu P1P is also quieter and can completely turn off its fans when idle. I’ve often come back to the Creality K1C after a day away and found it humming loudly in my garage.

Both companies need to work on their software, but Creality’s is definitely worse. While I’m having no real major trouble with Creality’s own Creality Print desktop app for basic 3D prints in PLA and flexible TPU plastic, I had major issues printing firmer and / or transparent PETG. It’s also missing loads of features compared to rival slicer apps you’d use to prepare your models for printing. (A slicer turns a 3D shape into printable horizontal layers and spits out code that tells the printer how to form each one.)

I had a easier time making transparent green PETG appear transparent on the Bambu (left).

Another comparison between P1P (left) and K1C (right) with the silver PETG.

You can use those rival slicers, but you may need to tune them for your printer yourself — some had even refused to support the K1 until Creality fulfilled obligations to open source its code. (It seems Creality has now done so.) OrcaSlicer is a popular third-party alternative that does have its own K1 profile, and it helped me print in PETG when Creality Print wouldn’t.

Creality’s mobile app, meanwhile, is gamified to the point that I want nothing to do with it. I just want a way to start and monitor prints, not earn points for printing trendy junk! I even had to turn off app notifications after I got bombarded with point earning opportunities each day, though it seems the company’s cut back on the notifications since launch.

But while Bambu’s slicer is great and its app doesn’t have the same annoyances, I’m not entirely sure I can trust the company’s cloud. One month after the company’s very good apology for its rogue printer incident, I had a similar issue. I went out to the garage one morning to find a model I’d printed directly from its cloud half-finished, stuck to my nozzle, with a second halfway printed copy of the model on the floor.

I’ve tried to print a few other models from its new MakerWorld, a place where you can supposedly find one-click prints validated to work on Bambu’s specific printers, no slicing or tweaks necessary, but one became a huge hunk of worthless plastic because it actually wasn’t validated. I guess I could always go with a private LAN-only connection to the printer instead of using the cloud.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see from here to an even easier 3D printing future. Bambu’s new A1 series printers now have completely tool-less hotend swaps — just pop the pieces off. The company’s working on new sensors that can detect when your filament tangles while it’s still on the roll, something that occasionally trips up every 3D printer I’ve yet used. I’ve also yet to see a 3D printer company ship their printers with a dry box to keep moisture out of their filament, but Creality does sell them separately, and it’s definitely something they could do to get us closer to that push-button, get-object future!

(I’m not saying you should buy an A1: I had more jams and lower-quality results with an A1 Mini than my P1P, the filament tangle detection still doesn’t work, and many things I print are too big for its bed. I haven’t gotten to test the full-size A1 since its recall.)

The biggest way 3D printers will earn trust, though, is if companies like Creality and Bambu stop shipping them before they’re ready. I can’t believe the terrible state the original Creality K1 first shipped in, and if you lurk in the right places on Reddit and Discord, you’ll hear veterans say that the Bambu P1P shipped with early issues, too. And I’ve read plenty of testimonials from Bambu customers who, like me with the Creality K1, were expected to open up their printers to fix broken things instead of sending them in for service. It’s a good reminder that these are hobbyist devices, not consumer products, even as these companies talk about democratizing 3D printing for everyone.

No matter which printer you’re eyeing, I strongly recommend steering clear of ones that have just launched. Wait for early adopters to iron things out! But if you’re itching to get printing, I’m pretty happy with the nearly two-year-old P1P.

Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge

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Ventje’s eVentje.

The eVentje custom buildout is a worthy all-electric successor to the iconic VW Camper in Europe. Volkswagen’s ID Buzz now has a custom camper build-out that’s just as clever and charming as the electric microbus. It’s called eVentje, and it’s now available for general sale in Europe.
Designed and sold by Ventje, a small but rapidly growing company based in the Netherlands, the eVentje conversion is as good as it gets until VW finally releases a California edition of the ID Buzz — which is still a few years away at least. That long delay since European sales began in 2022 has made room for a burgeoning aftermarket for ID Buzz camper products, including the excellent and relatively inexpensive Ququq camping box I previously reviewed.
I first tested a Ventje camper built on top of a VW Transporter T5 cargo van in 2022, before living and working from an ID Buzz for a few weeks in 2023. In 2024, I finally got to test the union of the two for a weekend. And let me tell you, this is definitely a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The ID Buzz has always been a showstopper when driving past onlookers — now, the show continues when the doors open to reveal that wonderfully adaptive Ventje interior.

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The overall design of the Ventje camper still relies on more than 100 magnets to keep all those wooden surfaces aligned and locked in place. There’s still a kitchen accessible from inside and out, a pop-top tent, and a multipurpose interior that converts from a lounge to a bed to a luxurious outside furniture set in minutes. Only now, things have been refined throughout with one big addition: a folding table and hidden stools to create an outside bar. Swoon.
The kitchen has seen several improvements that provide more adaptable prep surfaces — always a challenge in a small space — and smarter use of storage. Ventje also moved to not one but two induction cooktops thanks to the inclusion of a 2200W inverter and 2160Wh leisure battery that charges from the VW’s driving battery, a 350-watt solar panel, and a mini shore-power outlet located on the lower backside of the van.

There’s even a bar.

Ventje also makes it easier to keep all your own gear powered with eight USB sockets (4x USB-A, 4x USB-C), a 12V car jack, 3x wireless charging surfaces, and 3x 230V AC sockets for anyone looking to take advantage of their company’s hybrid office policy. There are also more lighting options including dimmable LED light strips and a closable sunroof in the pop-top tent.
VW’s poorly designed software still frustrates the otherwise exceptional driving experience, which remains rattle-free even with all of Ventje’s customizations. One would expect VW to eventually enable a camping mode on the ID Buzz, a feature already found on its existing California series campers. That would make heating and cooling the ID Buzz more intuitive when parked and allow owners to more easily disable the interior motion alarm when locking all the doors at night.
The eVentje can sleep four but is currently highway legal for only two people. It’s built around the regular-wheelbase ID Buzz, not the long-wheelbase model coming to Europe and the US (finally!) later this year. Nevertheless, my wife and I didn’t want for more space, even with the dog coming along on the trip.

The eVentje, like the ID Buzz, isn’t cheap, and soon, in Europe, it will have to compete with VW’s new PHEV “T7” California camper going on sale in June for what’s probably about the same price. But that model lacks the retrofuturistic appeal of the all-electric ID Buzz, and its interior is arguably less flexible — and definitely less fun — than Ventje’s warm custom design.
The modified eVentje ID Buzz starts at €95,000 (about $103,000) in Europe. An order placed today will ship in nine months to customers in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Ventje says that it’s also planning to expand to the UK and US in time.
Importantly, Ventje is doing what VW hasn’t since first teasing the ID Buzz all the way back in 2017: deliver a worthy all-electric successor to the iconic Type 2 camper.
Photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

Ventje’s eVentje.

The eVentje custom buildout is a worthy all-electric successor to the iconic VW Camper in Europe.

Volkswagen’s ID Buzz now has a custom camper build-out that’s just as clever and charming as the electric microbus. It’s called eVentje, and it’s now available for general sale in Europe.

Designed and sold by Ventje, a small but rapidly growing company based in the Netherlands, the eVentje conversion is as good as it gets until VW finally releases a California edition of the ID Buzz — which is still a few years away at least. That long delay since European sales began in 2022 has made room for a burgeoning aftermarket for ID Buzz camper products, including the excellent and relatively inexpensive Ququq camping box I previously reviewed.

I first tested a Ventje camper built on top of a VW Transporter T5 cargo van in 2022, before living and working from an ID Buzz for a few weeks in 2023. In 2024, I finally got to test the union of the two for a weekend. And let me tell you, this is definitely a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The ID Buzz has always been a showstopper when driving past onlookers — now, the show continues when the doors open to reveal that wonderfully adaptive Ventje interior.

The overall design of the Ventje camper still relies on more than 100 magnets to keep all those wooden surfaces aligned and locked in place. There’s still a kitchen accessible from inside and out, a pop-top tent, and a multipurpose interior that converts from a lounge to a bed to a luxurious outside furniture set in minutes. Only now, things have been refined throughout with one big addition: a folding table and hidden stools to create an outside bar. Swoon.

The kitchen has seen several improvements that provide more adaptable prep surfaces — always a challenge in a small space — and smarter use of storage. Ventje also moved to not one but two induction cooktops thanks to the inclusion of a 2200W inverter and 2160Wh leisure battery that charges from the VW’s driving battery, a 350-watt solar panel, and a mini shore-power outlet located on the lower backside of the van.

Ventje also makes it easier to keep all your own gear powered with eight USB sockets (4x USB-A, 4x USB-C), a 12V car jack, 3x wireless charging surfaces, and 3x 230V AC sockets for anyone looking to take advantage of their company’s hybrid office policy. There are also more lighting options including dimmable LED light strips and a closable sunroof in the pop-top tent.

VW’s poorly designed software still frustrates the otherwise exceptional driving experience, which remains rattle-free even with all of Ventje’s customizations. One would expect VW to eventually enable a camping mode on the ID Buzz, a feature already found on its existing California series campers. That would make heating and cooling the ID Buzz more intuitive when parked and allow owners to more easily disable the interior motion alarm when locking all the doors at night.

The eVentje can sleep four but is currently highway legal for only two people. It’s built around the regular-wheelbase ID Buzz, not the long-wheelbase model coming to Europe and the US (finally!) later this year. Nevertheless, my wife and I didn’t want for more space, even with the dog coming along on the trip.

The eVentje, like the ID Buzz, isn’t cheap, and soon, in Europe, it will have to compete with VW’s new PHEV “T7” California camper going on sale in June for what’s probably about the same price. But that model lacks the retrofuturistic appeal of the all-electric ID Buzz, and its interior is arguably less flexible — and definitely less fun — than Ventje’s warm custom design.

The modified eVentje ID Buzz starts at €95,000 (about $103,000) in Europe. An order placed today will ship in nine months to customers in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Ventje says that it’s also planning to expand to the UK and US in time.

Importantly, Ventje is doing what VW hasn’t since first teasing the ID Buzz all the way back in 2017: deliver a worthy all-electric successor to the iconic Type 2 camper.

Photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

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Tap the waveform icon, circled above, to search with sound. | Screenshots: YouTube Music

The Android YouTube Music app is rolling out a feature that’s part Shazam and part your friend when you say, “hey what’s that song that goes…” right before you hum out a bar. The feature lets you hum, whistle, sing, or play a recording of a song to figure out what it is.
If you have the new feature, you’ll see a new waveform icon next to the microphone icon that appears when you tap the search button in the upper right corner of the app. Tap this, and the app will start listening. It’s not too shabby, either! When I tested, it was able to identify actual recordings with what seemed like uncanny speed, making it a great replacement for Shazam.
As far as listening to me hum, it accurately picked out most of the songs I sang, whistled, and hummed at my phone, but there were some funny misses:

Screenshot: YouTube Music
To be fair, some Tom Waits songs make for good Halloween music.

This is not Tom Waits’ “Fumblin’ With the Blues.” Even a little bit.

Screenshot: YouTube Music

This song has a great string arrangement, though.

This was supposed to be “Dead,” by They Might Be Giants.

Screenshot: YouTube Music
Eh, I’ll take it.

I was whistling “Bat Out of Hell” by Meat Loaf here. At least Finnish hair metal throwback band Reckless Love is at least in the ballpark, kind of?
I can’t fault it too much for the misses. I was throwing songs at it that I’d guess most people wouldn’t pick out from a few seconds of humming. Overall, it works quickly, perhaps faster than the same feature that Google Assistant has had for years. Humming to search has reportedly been spotted in YouTube Music for iOS in recent months, too, though it doesn’t appear to have gone out widely there, yet.

Tap the waveform icon, circled above, to search with sound. | Screenshots: YouTube Music

The Android YouTube Music app is rolling out a feature that’s part Shazam and part your friend when you say, “hey what’s that song that goes…” right before you hum out a bar. The feature lets you hum, whistle, sing, or play a recording of a song to figure out what it is.

If you have the new feature, you’ll see a new waveform icon next to the microphone icon that appears when you tap the search button in the upper right corner of the app. Tap this, and the app will start listening. It’s not too shabby, either! When I tested, it was able to identify actual recordings with what seemed like uncanny speed, making it a great replacement for Shazam.

As far as listening to me hum, it accurately picked out most of the songs I sang, whistled, and hummed at my phone, but there were some funny misses:

Screenshot: YouTube Music
To be fair, some Tom Waits songs make for good Halloween music.

This is not Tom Waits’ “Fumblin’ With the Blues.” Even a little bit.

Screenshot: YouTube Music

This song has a great string arrangement, though.

This was supposed to be “Dead,” by They Might Be Giants.

Screenshot: YouTube Music
Eh, I’ll take it.

I was whistling “Bat Out of Hell” by Meat Loaf here. At least Finnish hair metal throwback band Reckless Love is at least in the ballpark, kind of?

I can’t fault it too much for the misses. I was throwing songs at it that I’d guess most people wouldn’t pick out from a few seconds of humming. Overall, it works quickly, perhaps faster than the same feature that Google Assistant has had for years. Humming to search has reportedly been spotted in YouTube Music for iOS in recent months, too, though it doesn’t appear to have gone out widely there, yet.

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Image: Bungie

A jury found on Friday that Phoenix Digital, which owns the cheat mod site AimJunkies, is guilty of violating Bungie copyrights when it created cheats for Destiny 2, reported Stephen Totilo, who has written about Bungie’s cheating lawsuits for Axios. The landmark decision may be the first time a jury has agreed that a cheat creator violated a gaming company’s copyrights.
Yesterday’s jury decision awarded Bungie (PDF) a tidy sum of $63,210. Bungie counsel James Barker said in a statement emailed to The Verge that the company is “committed to our players and will continue to protect them against cheats, including taking this and future cases all the way to trial.”
In 2021, Bungie sued AimJunkies and four defendants (here’s a PDF of the complaint), alleging, among other things, that they hacked Destiny 2 to copy the code used to make cheats. Some of Bungie’s complaints — like that AimJunkies violated a DMCA provision forbidding circumvention of copyright protection tech — went to arbitration and saw Bungie winning $4 million. AimJunkies appealed after the judge confirmed that award. That appeal is still in process, as Polygon wrote this week.

Phoenix Digital founder David Schaefer tells me his group will fight this, moving to dismiss the verdict and, if that fails, appeal.The dispute here is whether Bungie truly proved a copyright violation occurred.— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo) May 25, 2024

Phoenix Digital founder David Schaefer will move to dismiss the jury’s verdict and appeal it if necessary, according to Totilo. However that shakes out, the verdict is significant, given that cheating lawsuits tend to conclude in other ways, like settlements. (For example, a judge shut down a Grand Theft Auto cheat distributor in 2018 following a Take-Two Interactive lawsuit, or when Bungie settled another cheating lawsuit in 2022 for $13.5 million.)
The win may only mean pocket change for Bungie, and it won’t likely put an end to online cheating, but it does put a jury on record about the legality of creating such cheats. That makes this more significant than the pocket-change-for-Bungie $63,000 award lets on.

Image: Bungie

A jury found on Friday that Phoenix Digital, which owns the cheat mod site AimJunkies, is guilty of violating Bungie copyrights when it created cheats for Destiny 2, reported Stephen Totilo, who has written about Bungie’s cheating lawsuits for Axios. The landmark decision may be the first time a jury has agreed that a cheat creator violated a gaming company’s copyrights.

Yesterday’s jury decision awarded Bungie (PDF) a tidy sum of $63,210. Bungie counsel James Barker said in a statement emailed to The Verge that the company is “committed to our players and will continue to protect them against cheats, including taking this and future cases all the way to trial.”

In 2021, Bungie sued AimJunkies and four defendants (here’s a PDF of the complaint), alleging, among other things, that they hacked Destiny 2 to copy the code used to make cheats. Some of Bungie’s complaints — like that AimJunkies violated a DMCA provision forbidding circumvention of copyright protection tech — went to arbitration and saw Bungie winning $4 million. AimJunkies appealed after the judge confirmed that award. That appeal is still in process, as Polygon wrote this week.

Phoenix Digital founder David Schaefer will move to dismiss the jury’s verdict and appeal it if necessary, according to Totilo. However that shakes out, the verdict is significant, given that cheating lawsuits tend to conclude in other ways, like settlements. (For example, a judge shut down a Grand Theft Auto cheat distributor in 2018 following a Take-Two Interactive lawsuit, or when Bungie settled another cheating lawsuit in 2022 for $13.5 million.)

The win may only mean pocket change for Bungie, and it won’t likely put an end to online cheating, but it does put a jury on record about the legality of creating such cheats. That makes this more significant than the pocket-change-for-Bungie $63,000 award lets on.

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Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

We’ve curated a collection of great gifts that should appease any dad, from tabletop games and tools to some of our favorite tech. It’s true that spending time with dear old dad on Father’s Day is probably the best gift you can give him, but I bet he wouldn’t say no to a Garmin or a fancy-schmancy set of tools come Sunday, June 16th. After all, who can resist the allure of the perfect kit?

If you’re stumped on what to give your dad (or any paternal figure) next month, we’ve assembled a medley of tried-and-true gift ideas, each of which comes with a big stamp of approval from a Verge staffer. Our father-friendly recs span the entire spectrum of tech, from plush noise-canceling headphones and ultra-portable wall chargers to an Android-based ebook reader that’s as small as your smartphone. We even have a few analog picks and suggestions for the dad who refuses to grow up because, let’s be honest, Lego sets have only gotten better over the last decade.
Feel free to use the filters below to jump between price points. And if you find yourself still seeking the perfect gift for your dad, husband, partner, grandpa, etc., be sure to peruse our full slate of gift guides.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

We’ve curated a collection of great gifts that should appease any dad, from tabletop games and tools to some of our favorite tech.

It’s true that spending time with dear old dad on Father’s Day is probably the best gift you can give him, but I bet he wouldn’t say no to a Garmin or a fancy-schmancy set of tools come Sunday, June 16th. After all, who can resist the allure of the perfect kit?

If you’re stumped on what to give your dad (or any paternal figure) next month, we’ve assembled a medley of tried-and-true gift ideas, each of which comes with a big stamp of approval from a Verge staffer. Our father-friendly recs span the entire spectrum of tech, from plush noise-canceling headphones and ultra-portable wall chargers to an Android-based ebook reader that’s as small as your smartphone. We even have a few analog picks and suggestions for the dad who refuses to grow up because, let’s be honest, Lego sets have only gotten better over the last decade.

Feel free to use the filters below to jump between price points. And if you find yourself still seeking the perfect gift for your dad, husband, partner, grandpa, etc., be sure to peruse our full slate of gift guides.

Read More 

Your ICQ number is finally shuffling off to the great beyond. Russian company VK, which has been the service’s steward since 2010, published a message Friday that simply reads, “ICQ will stop working from June 26th,” and implores users to switch to its other chat solutions.
ICQ was among the crop of early instant messenger services, like AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger, that allowed for real-time chats. It differed from others by assigning users a number they would use to connect to one another, as opposed to aliases or email addresses. It also had uncommon features like SMS messaging and the ability to message people who were offline.
And of course, those of us of a certain age probably remember the “Uh oh!” alert that would play when you received a message.

Screenshot: The Internet Archive
ICQ, apparently in its final form on iOS.

ICQ was started in 1996 by Israeli company Mirabilis, which AOL bought in 1998. ICQ grew to 100 million registered users at one point, at least according to a 2001 release from Time Warner, which had bought AOL a year earlier in a famously doomed merger. AOL sold the service to Digital Sky Technologies, the firm that owned VK, then known as Mail.ru, in 2010.
The modern version of ICQ appeared to have worked and functioned like other messenger apps, such as WhatsApp or Telegram. Or so I gathered from a March 2023 Internet Archive snapshot of its iOS App Store listing, as the app apparently is gone from both Apple’s digital shop and Google’s Play Store (and seemingly has been for months). It seems that ICQ has already been done for some time — perhaps VK is just making it official.

Your ICQ number is finally shuffling off to the great beyond. Russian company VK, which has been the service’s steward since 2010, published a message Friday that simply reads, “ICQ will stop working from June 26th,” and implores users to switch to its other chat solutions.

ICQ was among the crop of early instant messenger services, like AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger, that allowed for real-time chats. It differed from others by assigning users a number they would use to connect to one another, as opposed to aliases or email addresses. It also had uncommon features like SMS messaging and the ability to message people who were offline.

And of course, those of us of a certain age probably remember the “Uh oh!” alert that would play when you received a message.

Screenshot: The Internet Archive
ICQ, apparently in its final form on iOS.

ICQ was started in 1996 by Israeli company Mirabilis, which AOL bought in 1998. ICQ grew to 100 million registered users at one point, at least according to a 2001 release from Time Warner, which had bought AOL a year earlier in a famously doomed merger. AOL sold the service to Digital Sky Technologies, the firm that owned VK, then known as Mail.ru, in 2010.

The modern version of ICQ appeared to have worked and functioned like other messenger apps, such as WhatsApp or Telegram. Or so I gathered from a March 2023 Internet Archive snapshot of its iOS App Store listing, as the app apparently is gone from both Apple’s digital shop and Google’s Play Store (and seemingly has been for months). It seems that ICQ has already been done for some time — perhaps VK is just making it official.

Read More 

Image: Big Mode / Shared Memory

About midway through Animal Well, I felt I had been lied to. I read all the glowing reviews of the game and heard the breathless praise heaped upon it on social media. But my expectations did not match my reality… until I beat the game. Now, I’m well on my way to 100 percent completion for a game I was seriously considering abandoning.
Spoilers for Animal Well are below.
Though I loved Animal Well’s novel take on traditional movement abilities — the tools it provides possess multiple clever uses — platforming itself often felt demoralizing. Initially, Animal Well’s platforming felt like it had difficulty spikes that were both too great and too frequent. I could often see where I had to go and how to get there (and I often looked up video guides to confirm I was doing it right with the right tools) but actually executing was more laborious than fun and engaging.
Though I loved Animal Well’s novel take on traditional movement abilities, platforming itself often felt demoralizing
I’ve always felt that the difficulty of a task in a platformer should be commensurate with its importance: the hardest moments should be reserved for secrets and optional goals, while everything involved in completing the game should be more attainable. That way, I am still in control of my experience and, critically, still having an experience. If reaching a secret is harder than I’d like, then I can opt out to continue on to beat the game one completion percentage point lower. But if simply getting from point A to point B is too dang hard, opting out means opting out of the game entirely. Animal Well’s platforming convinced me I’d run into an obstacle so frustratingly difficult that I’d quit and never come back.

Image: Big Mode / Shared Memory
On a lark, I decided to see what would happen if I pressed a big red skull button in a room full of crows, and yup, they pecked me to death.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Somehow, I persisted long enough to collect all four animal flames to complete the game’s first “ending,” figuring I’d stop there. But then, right before the final encounter, I found a room littered with skulls containing an upgrade to the bubble wand item. Remember this, it’ll be important in a moment.
The bubble wand creates little bubble platforms you can jump on, but you can only blow one at a time. The upgraded bubble wand allows you to blow multiple bubbles that, with the right technique, let you bypass a lot of the game’s obstacles.

Remember the skulls? I figured out that all the skulls in that room, piled high enough for me to reach the wand, represented the number of times I died. With that realization came the shock that even though I wasn’t initially vibing with the game, it was always vibing with me. The bubble wand upgrade is unreachable unless you’ve accumulated enough skulls to build a platform up to it. The only way I got what finally made this game click for me was because of all the frustration it put me through in the first place.
When I figured that out, I started laughing maniacally, tears in my eyes, thinking, “Oh, you cheeky bastards!” I immediately went right back to the start of the game to go egg hunting, something I already decided I wasn’t going to do. But I was locked in now. I understood. I’m stuck in the (animal) well now, and I’m never coming out.

Image: Big Mode / Shared Memory

About midway through Animal Well, I felt I had been lied to. I read all the glowing reviews of the game and heard the breathless praise heaped upon it on social media. But my expectations did not match my reality… until I beat the game. Now, I’m well on my way to 100 percent completion for a game I was seriously considering abandoning.

Spoilers for Animal Well are below.

Though I loved Animal Well’s novel take on traditional movement abilities — the tools it provides possess multiple clever uses — platforming itself often felt demoralizing. Initially, Animal Well’s platforming felt like it had difficulty spikes that were both too great and too frequent. I could often see where I had to go and how to get there (and I often looked up video guides to confirm I was doing it right with the right tools) but actually executing was more laborious than fun and engaging.

I’ve always felt that the difficulty of a task in a platformer should be commensurate with its importance: the hardest moments should be reserved for secrets and optional goals, while everything involved in completing the game should be more attainable. That way, I am still in control of my experience and, critically, still having an experience. If reaching a secret is harder than I’d like, then I can opt out to continue on to beat the game one completion percentage point lower. But if simply getting from point A to point B is too dang hard, opting out means opting out of the game entirely. Animal Well’s platforming convinced me I’d run into an obstacle so frustratingly difficult that I’d quit and never come back.

Image: Big Mode / Shared Memory
On a lark, I decided to see what would happen if I pressed a big red skull button in a room full of crows, and yup, they pecked me to death.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Somehow, I persisted long enough to collect all four animal flames to complete the game’s first “ending,” figuring I’d stop there. But then, right before the final encounter, I found a room littered with skulls containing an upgrade to the bubble wand item. Remember this, it’ll be important in a moment.

The bubble wand creates little bubble platforms you can jump on, but you can only blow one at a time. The upgraded bubble wand allows you to blow multiple bubbles that, with the right technique, let you bypass a lot of the game’s obstacles.

Remember the skulls? I figured out that all the skulls in that room, piled high enough for me to reach the wand, represented the number of times I died. With that realization came the shock that even though I wasn’t initially vibing with the game, it was always vibing with me. The bubble wand upgrade is unreachable unless you’ve accumulated enough skulls to build a platform up to it. The only way I got what finally made this game click for me was because of all the frustration it put me through in the first place.

When I figured that out, I started laughing maniacally, tears in my eyes, thinking, “Oh, you cheeky bastards!” I immediately went right back to the start of the game to go egg hunting, something I already decided I wasn’t going to do. But I was locked in now. I understood. I’m stuck in the (animal) well now, and I’m never coming out.

Read More 

A mini power plant that turns a standard power outlet into a solar power inlet. Portable solar generators are so useful that you increasingly see them at the beach, campground, job site, or anywhere without access to grid power. But they’re also an expensive luxury if shoved into storage as soon as you return home.
EcoFlow’s $200-ish PowerStream box can help maximize the year-round usefulness of the company’s own solar generators. It’s pitched as a plug-in “balcony solar system” that anyone can install, even if you’re renting an apartment.
These DIY systems from EcoFlow, Anker, and others became very popular around Europe over the last few years as energy costs soared amid steadily decreasing solar and battery prices. They can lower your energy bills and ensure a modicum of home backup in the event of a power outage.
Plug-in systems are built around a microinverter that feeds solar energy back into the home via a standard wall jack. The solar panels can be leaned up against a terrace wall, placed in a garden, or hung off a balcony railing. Any solar excess not used immediately by the home can be diverted into the solar generator’s big-ass battery for use later.

Image: EcoFlow

Balcony-mounted solar panels feed the sun’s energy through the PowerStream microinverter and back into a battery and / or the home over a regular AC outlet. A special flat cable allows the window to close. GIF: EcoFlow

I’ve been testing an EcoFlow PowerStream setup in my own home, where I’ve installed $1,500 worth of EcoFlow’s portable solar panels on my roof, with the cables snaking through a window to the PowerStream box connected to a $2,599 EcoFlow Delta Pro. I also have six EcoFlow smart plugs attached to things like the washing machine, coffee machine, and home theater projector that tell the PowerStream to send more or less power.
It’s surprisingly simple to set up and get running, but not without some initial trepidation about safety, which I delve into below. I also made a mistake that killed the first PowerStream EcoFlow sent me. But importantly, I learned a lot about my family’s energy consumption habits and how much power 800W of haphazardly installed solar panels can produce under a weak northern sun.
So, it’s a shame that EcoFlow’s PowerStream is a Europe-only solution for now.

How does it save me money?
The PowerStream has three proprietary ports: one that connects to your MC4 solar panels; one that connects to your battery; and one AC output that plugs into a standard wall socket. The battery is entirely optional if you just want to feed every watt of solar power produced back into your home.
To understand how the PowerStream works, let’s look at a real example using screen recordings taken from the excellent EcoFlow app. Note how the direction of power delivery changes from GIF to GIF as EcoFlow’s smart plugs steadily increase demand.

The home is demanding less power than my solar panels are producing, so the excess solar energy is diverted to the battery for use later.

In the first GIF above, I’m generating 397W of solar power, but my home is only demanding 290W — 250W for the “base load” and 40W for EcoFlow’s smart plugs (both of which I’ll describe in detail later). Since that load could be covered by solar power alone, the PowerStream didn’t need to request any power from the grid. It immediately sends the excess 107W of solar to charge the connected Delta Pro battery instead.

Turning on the home theater projector increases demand beyond what the solar panels can provide, so the PowerStream taps into the battery to make up the balance.

But after I turn on my home theater projector, the “smart plug” load jumps to 239W, and my solar panels can no longer cover the 489W now demanded by my home. So PowerStream diverts an extra 92W from the battery to cover the new total. Power grid demand is still 0W since the incoming solar power and battery power can cover the total demand of the home.

Turning on the Nespresso coffee machine exceeds the 800W capacity of the PowerStream, so the grid is called upon to provide the rest.

Finally, I turn on my Nespresso coffee machine, which activates the grid. The PowerStream has a maximum output of 800W (805W in this example), so it pulls an extra 845W from my grid provider to cover the 1,650W (1.4K plus 250W) my home is now demanding.
Pretty clever, right?
And while batteries do degrade if you cycle them every day like this, the LFP chemistry used by modern solar generators like the Delta Pro should maintain 80 percent of its charging capacity after 3,500 cycles — that’s almost 10 years. And it should still be good for 50 percent capacity after 6,000 cycles.
By the end of my example day, the PowerStream had produced a total of 3.03kWh, saving me a grand total of… 90 euro cents at my current energy rates. That might not sound like a lot, but at that rate, it will easily pay off the PowerStream after about a year of usage — faster in some climates and slower in others. Notably, it would have paid itself off in just months last year, when I was paying over three times as much per kWh due to global events.

Solar power from the PowerStream on April 29th. Note production peaking between 11AM and 3PM.

Power from my grid provider, also on April 29th, 2024. My paid energy usage is mostly zero from 11AM to 3PM, and overall usage is well below 2023.

Importantly, I have gained a degree of energy independence in this uncertain world — and making regular use of an expensive solar generator that was otherwise just waiting for the next road trip or natural disaster.
Great, but is feeding that much electricity into a standard wall socket actually safe?
A power outlet becomes a power inlet
It might seem odd and even unsafe to feed electricity into something called a power outlet, but AC wall jacks are, in fact, bidirectional under the right conditions.
The PowerStream is a mini power plant that automatically synchronizes with the grid to ensure seamless integration with the devices plugged into your home circuitry. Power flows from high to low voltages, which is why the grid voltage is slightly higher (by millivolts) than the devices plugged into your home. The PowerStream similarly alters its voltage to regulate the flow of power to your devices.

EcoFlow’s smart plug works with the PowerStream to control the flow of power.

EcoFlow’s PowerStream is not a burden on 16A home circuits in Europe because it’s limited to a maximum of 800W (or 600W in Germany, currently) and requires less than 3.5A. Still, if the circuit is overloaded for any reason, the breaker will shut it off as usual, and the PowerStream will stop working.
And when there’s a power outage, the PowerStream will turn off automatically to ensure there’s no electricity in the wires in order to protect line workers from shock. The PowerStream will only turn back on when the grid power returns.
(This also means that the PowerStream, unlike a Tesla Powerwall or EcoFlow’s own Delta Pro Ultra home backup system, can’t power your home on battery alone. There’s no automatic home failover to battery. To power devices in an extended blackout, I’d have to disconnect the giant Delta Pro from the PowerSteam and carry it downstairs to the fridge to keep it running.)
And despite how it looks in the app, the PowerStream isn’t actually sending power directly to the devices attached to those EcoFlow smart plugs. The PowerStream uses the smart plugs as signals to pump more or less juice into the stream of power entering the home, from which every device can drink.
EcoFlow says the PowerStream has obtained grid certification in over 10 countries, covering 70 percent of Europe. You might still have to register it with your local energy provider, however — so do check your local requirements. And the PowerStream isn’t available in the US at all due to restrictions that prohibit plug-in grid solutions.
Installation
The hardest part in setting up the PowerStream is doing the math to ensure your solar panels are wired up properly in series or parallel, especially when maxing out the system like I did. My bad math caused me to smoke the first PowerStream review unit by overvolting it (where, by “smoke,” I mean it just stopped working forever). Eventually, I figured out the right wiring configuration to keep everything under the 55V / 13A limit of the PowerStream’s solar inputs.

800W of portable solar panels takes up a ton of space.

My setup is meant to be temporary because I still want to take the portable EcoFlow solar panels and Delta Pro on the road — but those panels need to be securely mounted. This can be done using EcoFlow’s own mounts (or your own, like I did) because a strong wind could easily send those lightweight panels flying. Of course, there’s nothing preventing you from connecting a PowerStream to rigid panels from any company you choose.
EcoFlow also sells its PowerStream with a new waterproof battery for a super tidy outdoor installation. Everything, including the PowerStream, is IP54 rated, and the 2kWh battery is even heated to ensure proper operation in temperatures down to -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit). The kit runs completely silently, as does the PowerStream in my own comparatively crude installation.
With all the hardware installed, you then need to decide whether to prioritize power delivery from the PowerStream to your home circuitry or to battery storage. I currently default to home but would switch that to battery if a storm were in the forecast to ensure I had backup power. While you can schedule these modes to change throughout the day, you can only do it based on time, which is a shame. Ideally, it would automatically prioritize the battery if a big storm were in the forecast, as many home backup systems do.
Still, scheduling a change in priority modes can be very useful if you’re on a variable energy contract. That way, you can charge the battery during off-peak hours and then use that relatively cheap stored energy to power the home when electricity prices are highest.

The real trick to optimizing the PowerStream is to first determine your home’s idle baseline power usage — how many watts your home continuously pulls before turning on things like the dishwasher or coffee maker. Mine’s about 300W, according to the display on the smart energy meter in my utility closet. Ideally, EcoFlow’s PowerStream would get real-time readings from my smart meter, but that’s not currently possible.
So, I set what EcoFlow calls the base load to 250W in its app to ensure a 50W cushion. That way, I can avoid feeding energy back into the grid. Doing so has potential financial repercussions depending on your provider and where you live. As the sun returns here in the Netherlands, power companies are struggling to cope with oversupply under the current solar incentive scheme, resulting in charges levied against panel owners for energy returned to the grid.
EcoFlow smart plugs help direct traffic
Some PowerStream installations will benefit from a handful of Matter-enabled EcoFlow smart plugs installed on high-consumption devices like the TV, washer, dryer, dishwasher, refrigerator, and boiler to properly balance the load. They tell the PowerStream that those devices are demanding even more power than the base load, so it needs to ramp things up. Each smart plug costs €36 (about $39).
In the first screen recording below, you can see the PowerStream delivering 482W into the home. It determines this number by starting with the 250W I set as my base load and adding 232W to cover all the devices connected to the smart plugs. And since only 355W was coming in via solar at the time, it pulls an additional 127W from the connected Delta Pro battery for the home. In the second recording, the excess solar power is immediately diverted to the battery now that the projector is turned off.

The PowerStream, with help from EcoFlow’s smart plugs, senses that my home needs more power than solar is producing, so it taps the battery for an additional 126W.

The PowerStream senses a surplus of energy being produced by the solar panels, so it diverts the excess 74W to charge the battery.

And while the app shows the power grid delivering 0W into the home, this is pure fantasy since I don’t have smart plugs on every single device attached to my home. (And remember, my true baseline is closer to 300W.)
More power-heavy homes can just skip the smart plugs entirely. My maxed-out system with 800W of solar input can only generate a maximum of 4kWh per day, usually much less. That’s not enough to cover my daily base load of 6kWh (250W x 24 hours). So I should just feed enough solar power into the home to cover my base load during the day and send any excess to the EcoFlow battery for use when the sun goes down.
I have to say, I’m incredibly impressed by the PowerStream, especially now that it’s priced at just €150, almost half off the €279 it cost at launch last year. Not only does it help existing owners of EcoFlow’s solar generators maximize the value for their money but it also makes the idea of owning a solar generator more tempting knowing you can use it year-round, at home or off the grid.
It also makes the owner acutely aware of their energy habits. I’ve been obsessing over the EcoFlow app’s data like a new runner who just bought their first Garmin watch. For me, it’s been an interesting and relatively frugal first step toward energy independence. I now have real data and experience to help make a very complex decision about installing my own fixed panel system.
Photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

A mini power plant that turns a standard power outlet into a solar power inlet.

Portable solar generators are so useful that you increasingly see them at the beach, campground, job site, or anywhere without access to grid power. But they’re also an expensive luxury if shoved into storage as soon as you return home.

EcoFlow’s $200-ish PowerStream box can help maximize the year-round usefulness of the company’s own solar generators. It’s pitched as a plug-in “balcony solar system” that anyone can install, even if you’re renting an apartment.

These DIY systems from EcoFlow, Anker, and others became very popular around Europe over the last few years as energy costs soared amid steadily decreasing solar and battery prices. They can lower your energy bills and ensure a modicum of home backup in the event of a power outage.

Plug-in systems are built around a microinverter that feeds solar energy back into the home via a standard wall jack. The solar panels can be leaned up against a terrace wall, placed in a garden, or hung off a balcony railing. Any solar excess not used immediately by the home can be diverted into the solar generator’s big-ass battery for use later.

Image: EcoFlow

Balcony-mounted solar panels feed the sun’s energy through the PowerStream microinverter and back into a battery and / or the home over a regular AC outlet. A special flat cable allows the window to close. GIF: EcoFlow

I’ve been testing an EcoFlow PowerStream setup in my own home, where I’ve installed $1,500 worth of EcoFlow’s portable solar panels on my roof, with the cables snaking through a window to the PowerStream box connected to a $2,599 EcoFlow Delta Pro. I also have six EcoFlow smart plugs attached to things like the washing machine, coffee machine, and home theater projector that tell the PowerStream to send more or less power.

It’s surprisingly simple to set up and get running, but not without some initial trepidation about safety, which I delve into below. I also made a mistake that killed the first PowerStream EcoFlow sent me. But importantly, I learned a lot about my family’s energy consumption habits and how much power 800W of haphazardly installed solar panels can produce under a weak northern sun.

So, it’s a shame that EcoFlow’s PowerStream is a Europe-only solution for now.

How does it save me money?

The PowerStream has three proprietary ports: one that connects to your MC4 solar panels; one that connects to your battery; and one AC output that plugs into a standard wall socket. The battery is entirely optional if you just want to feed every watt of solar power produced back into your home.

To understand how the PowerStream works, let’s look at a real example using screen recordings taken from the excellent EcoFlow app. Note how the direction of power delivery changes from GIF to GIF as EcoFlow’s smart plugs steadily increase demand.

The home is demanding less power than my solar panels are producing, so the excess solar energy is diverted to the battery for use later.

In the first GIF above, I’m generating 397W of solar power, but my home is only demanding 290W — 250W for the “base load” and 40W for EcoFlow’s smart plugs (both of which I’ll describe in detail later). Since that load could be covered by solar power alone, the PowerStream didn’t need to request any power from the grid. It immediately sends the excess 107W of solar to charge the connected Delta Pro battery instead.

Turning on the home theater projector increases demand beyond what the solar panels can provide, so the PowerStream taps into the battery to make up the balance.

But after I turn on my home theater projector, the “smart plug” load jumps to 239W, and my solar panels can no longer cover the 489W now demanded by my home. So PowerStream diverts an extra 92W from the battery to cover the new total. Power grid demand is still 0W since the incoming solar power and battery power can cover the total demand of the home.

Turning on the Nespresso coffee machine exceeds the 800W capacity of the PowerStream, so the grid is called upon to provide the rest.

Finally, I turn on my Nespresso coffee machine, which activates the grid. The PowerStream has a maximum output of 800W (805W in this example), so it pulls an extra 845W from my grid provider to cover the 1,650W (1.4K plus 250W) my home is now demanding.

Pretty clever, right?

And while batteries do degrade if you cycle them every day like this, the LFP chemistry used by modern solar generators like the Delta Pro should maintain 80 percent of its charging capacity after 3,500 cycles — that’s almost 10 years. And it should still be good for 50 percent capacity after 6,000 cycles.

By the end of my example day, the PowerStream had produced a total of 3.03kWh, saving me a grand total of… 90 euro cents at my current energy rates. That might not sound like a lot, but at that rate, it will easily pay off the PowerStream after about a year of usage — faster in some climates and slower in others. Notably, it would have paid itself off in just months last year, when I was paying over three times as much per kWh due to global events.

Importantly, I have gained a degree of energy independence in this uncertain world — and making regular use of an expensive solar generator that was otherwise just waiting for the next road trip or natural disaster.

Great, but is feeding that much electricity into a standard wall socket actually safe?

A power outlet becomes a power inlet

It might seem odd and even unsafe to feed electricity into something called a power outlet, but AC wall jacks are, in fact, bidirectional under the right conditions.

The PowerStream is a mini power plant that automatically synchronizes with the grid to ensure seamless integration with the devices plugged into your home circuitry. Power flows from high to low voltages, which is why the grid voltage is slightly higher (by millivolts) than the devices plugged into your home. The PowerStream similarly alters its voltage to regulate the flow of power to your devices.

EcoFlow’s smart plug works with the PowerStream to control the flow of power.

EcoFlow’s PowerStream is not a burden on 16A home circuits in Europe because it’s limited to a maximum of 800W (or 600W in Germany, currently) and requires less than 3.5A. Still, if the circuit is overloaded for any reason, the breaker will shut it off as usual, and the PowerStream will stop working.

And when there’s a power outage, the PowerStream will turn off automatically to ensure there’s no electricity in the wires in order to protect line workers from shock. The PowerStream will only turn back on when the grid power returns.

(This also means that the PowerStream, unlike a Tesla Powerwall or EcoFlow’s own Delta Pro Ultra home backup system, can’t power your home on battery alone. There’s no automatic home failover to battery. To power devices in an extended blackout, I’d have to disconnect the giant Delta Pro from the PowerSteam and carry it downstairs to the fridge to keep it running.)

And despite how it looks in the app, the PowerStream isn’t actually sending power directly to the devices attached to those EcoFlow smart plugs. The PowerStream uses the smart plugs as signals to pump more or less juice into the stream of power entering the home, from which every device can drink.

EcoFlow says the PowerStream has obtained grid certification in over 10 countries, covering 70 percent of Europe. You might still have to register it with your local energy provider, however — so do check your local requirements. And the PowerStream isn’t available in the US at all due to restrictions that prohibit plug-in grid solutions.

Installation

The hardest part in setting up the PowerStream is doing the math to ensure your solar panels are wired up properly in series or parallel, especially when maxing out the system like I did. My bad math caused me to smoke the first PowerStream review unit by overvolting it (where, by “smoke,” I mean it just stopped working forever). Eventually, I figured out the right wiring configuration to keep everything under the 55V / 13A limit of the PowerStream’s solar inputs.

800W of portable solar panels takes up a ton of space.

My setup is meant to be temporary because I still want to take the portable EcoFlow solar panels and Delta Pro on the road — but those panels need to be securely mounted. This can be done using EcoFlow’s own mounts (or your own, like I did) because a strong wind could easily send those lightweight panels flying. Of course, there’s nothing preventing you from connecting a PowerStream to rigid panels from any company you choose.

EcoFlow also sells its PowerStream with a new waterproof battery for a super tidy outdoor installation. Everything, including the PowerStream, is IP54 rated, and the 2kWh battery is even heated to ensure proper operation in temperatures down to -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit). The kit runs completely silently, as does the PowerStream in my own comparatively crude installation.

With all the hardware installed, you then need to decide whether to prioritize power delivery from the PowerStream to your home circuitry or to battery storage. I currently default to home but would switch that to battery if a storm were in the forecast to ensure I had backup power. While you can schedule these modes to change throughout the day, you can only do it based on time, which is a shame. Ideally, it would automatically prioritize the battery if a big storm were in the forecast, as many home backup systems do.

Still, scheduling a change in priority modes can be very useful if you’re on a variable energy contract. That way, you can charge the battery during off-peak hours and then use that relatively cheap stored energy to power the home when electricity prices are highest.

The real trick to optimizing the PowerStream is to first determine your home’s idle baseline power usage — how many watts your home continuously pulls before turning on things like the dishwasher or coffee maker. Mine’s about 300W, according to the display on the smart energy meter in my utility closet. Ideally, EcoFlow’s PowerStream would get real-time readings from my smart meter, but that’s not currently possible.

So, I set what EcoFlow calls the base load to 250W in its app to ensure a 50W cushion. That way, I can avoid feeding energy back into the grid. Doing so has potential financial repercussions depending on your provider and where you live. As the sun returns here in the Netherlands, power companies are struggling to cope with oversupply under the current solar incentive scheme, resulting in charges levied against panel owners for energy returned to the grid.

EcoFlow smart plugs help direct traffic

Some PowerStream installations will benefit from a handful of Matter-enabled EcoFlow smart plugs installed on high-consumption devices like the TV, washer, dryer, dishwasher, refrigerator, and boiler to properly balance the load. They tell the PowerStream that those devices are demanding even more power than the base load, so it needs to ramp things up. Each smart plug costs €36 (about $39).

In the first screen recording below, you can see the PowerStream delivering 482W into the home. It determines this number by starting with the 250W I set as my base load and adding 232W to cover all the devices connected to the smart plugs. And since only 355W was coming in via solar at the time, it pulls an additional 127W from the connected Delta Pro battery for the home. In the second recording, the excess solar power is immediately diverted to the battery now that the projector is turned off.

And while the app shows the power grid delivering 0W into the home, this is pure fantasy since I don’t have smart plugs on every single device attached to my home. (And remember, my true baseline is closer to 300W.)

More power-heavy homes can just skip the smart plugs entirely. My maxed-out system with 800W of solar input can only generate a maximum of 4kWh per day, usually much less. That’s not enough to cover my daily base load of 6kWh (250W x 24 hours). So I should just feed enough solar power into the home to cover my base load during the day and send any excess to the EcoFlow battery for use when the sun goes down.

I have to say, I’m incredibly impressed by the PowerStream, especially now that it’s priced at just €150, almost half off the €279 it cost at launch last year. Not only does it help existing owners of EcoFlow’s solar generators maximize the value for their money but it also makes the idea of owning a solar generator more tempting knowing you can use it year-round, at home or off the grid.

It also makes the owner acutely aware of their energy habits. I’ve been obsessing over the EcoFlow app’s data like a new runner who just bought their first Garmin watch. For me, it’s been an interesting and relatively frugal first step toward energy independence. I now have real data and experience to help make a very complex decision about installing my own fixed panel system.

Photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

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Photo illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Philip Pacheco, Bloomberg, Getty Images

Despite Epic Games’ surprise win at trial, I was skeptical that Judge James Donato would seriously consider forcing Google to let the Epic Games Store live inside its own Google Play Store, and give it access to every app inside Google Play. Those were two of the biggest demands that Epic revealed in April.
But Judge Donato is indeed considering them. He’s ordered Google to calculate the costs of complying with those demands by June 24th, one month from today:
Google will file by June 24, 2024, a proffer stating in detail the tech work required and economic costs, if any, to provide “Catalog Access” and “Library Porting” to competing app stores for a period of up to 6 years. See MDL Dkt. No. 952 at 7. The proffer may also address tech work and economic costs for the distribution of third-party app stores through the Google Play Store.
MDL Dkt. No. 952 is Epic’s 16-page list of asks, and 7 is the page that would force Google to give other app stores access to the entire Google Play catalog of apps, should Epic get its way. Take a peek:

Page 8 of epic-google-proposed-permanent-injunction

Contributed to DocumentCloud by The Verge (Vox.com) • View document or read text

Just below “Catalog Access and Library Porting” is the other huge ask Judge Donato seems to be considering: that Google would carry other third-party app stores within its Google Play store for six years.

According to the order, Epic will get a chance to question Google’s experts and engineers about the accuracy of their estimates, and file a rebuttal, before a final hearing on August 14th. In an evidentiary hearing yesterday, Judge Donato seemed extremely skeptical of Google’s arguments against Epic’s proposed remedies, but also suggested that some of Epic’s asks were “open-ended and too vague.”
If you’re curious about Epic’s other asks, I break them all down for you in this story. Following its win, Epic has indeed been working on a version of its game store for Android.

Photo illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Philip Pacheco, Bloomberg, Getty Images

Despite Epic Games’ surprise win at trial, I was skeptical that Judge James Donato would seriously consider forcing Google to let the Epic Games Store live inside its own Google Play Store, and give it access to every app inside Google Play. Those were two of the biggest demands that Epic revealed in April.

But Judge Donato is indeed considering them. He’s ordered Google to calculate the costs of complying with those demands by June 24th, one month from today:

Google will file by June 24, 2024, a proffer stating in detail the tech work required and economic costs, if any, to provide “Catalog Access” and “Library Porting” to competing app stores for a period of up to 6 years. See MDL Dkt. No. 952 at 7. The proffer may also address tech work and economic costs for the distribution of third-party app stores through the Google Play Store.

MDL Dkt. No. 952 is Epic’s 16-page list of asks, and 7 is the page that would force Google to give other app stores access to the entire Google Play catalog of apps, should Epic get its way. Take a peek:

Just below “Catalog Access and Library Porting” is the other huge ask Judge Donato seems to be considering: that Google would carry other third-party app stores within its Google Play store for six years.

According to the order, Epic will get a chance to question Google’s experts and engineers about the accuracy of their estimates, and file a rebuttal, before a final hearing on August 14th. In an evidentiary hearing yesterday, Judge Donato seemed extremely skeptical of Google’s arguments against Epic’s proposed remedies, but also suggested that some of Epic’s asks were “open-ended and too vague.”

If you’re curious about Epic’s other asks, I break them all down for you in this story. Following its win, Epic has indeed been working on a version of its game store for Android.

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