The 2025 Android Upgrade Cycle Has Begun

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Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 68, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world.

This week, I’ve been reading about Kieran Culkin and insomnia and the eBay for fancy startup stuff, finally watching The Wild Robot, thinking a lot about my shopping habits while watching The Mega-Brands That Built America, adding a bunch of Baseus retractable cables to my travel kit, playing an amazing browser-based rendition of the Atari game Pitfall!, testing out the new Spark calendar for Android, and trying to copy Babish’s delicious-looking breakfast sandwich.

The Drop

• The Samsung Galaxy S25. The S25 Edge is definitely Samsung’s most interesting phone this year, and the Ultra is probably the best one, but honestly the whole lineup is a little boring this time? Still, I really do appreciate that Samsung’s shipping a high-end, reasonably sized, full-featured flagship smartphone for $800. This is the Android phone I suspect most people will end up with this year.
• Star Trek: Section 31. The reviews for this new Paramount Plus movie are, uh, all over the place. People still have strong feelings about Star Trek, who knew?! But I love Michelle Yeoh, and I am frankly excited to have an excuse to dive back into that universe for the first time in a while. Also: more two-hour movies and fewer ten-hour limited series, please.
• Humanity’s Last Exam. An incredibly fun and thought-provoking — and also mind-bendingly hard — test that a bunch of researchers think represents something like the final frontier for AI. (All the models currently fail spectacularly.) I’ve learned a ton just poking around the questions.
• Perplexity Assistant. Frankly, I’ve never found Perplexity’s actual search results all that good, but this company is really good at building products that are fun to use. This new Android app is a step toward more task-doing AI — a bit like OpenAI’s new Operator feature but without the $200 monthly price.
• Android 16 public beta. Not much in the way of ground-breaking new stuff this year, but the Live Activities-style lockscreen notifications are cool. And if you have a foldable phone, yo…

Community Spotlights

• "Been spending a bunch of time on Graze building feeds for BlueSky! They’re really doing some great work for the community, and have made setting up custom feeds super quick, fun, and available to pretty much anyone, techie or not." — Kerha
• "I Love Hue Too. It’s been out a while, but it’s beautiful, addictive, and a wonderful way to distract from the crumbling world around me." — Brad
• "Last week’s Silo season finale was incredible and I’ve also started Wool (the first in the book series) and it is a really fun read. Crazy how much faster the book is paced – it’s only like 40 percent through the story that [REDACTED] happens!!" — Andy
• "I’ve been playing a whole lot of Dragonsweeper, which is like Minesweeper crossed with a dungeon crawler. It’s tricky at first, but it’s sick." — Sophie
• "This playlist of old school Weather Channel songs my brother sent me has been my soundtrack for the last few days. Just sit back and let the nostalgia of trying to get a forecast over basic cable wash over you." — Mike

Signing off

At CES a few weeks ago, I was chatting with a new friend on the show floor when he casually referenced "that thing Douglas Adams wrote about the internet." I stared stupidly back at him. "You know, the Hitchhiker’s Guide guy?" Yeah, no, got that. What internet thing?

Turns out, in 1999, Adams wrote an essay titled "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet," and wow does it hold up 26 years later as a way to think about the world we live in now. Here’s just one quote:

"Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things."

I think about this essay damn near every day now. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And maybe we should be comforted by that.

FAQs

Q: What is the best phone for this year?
A: The Samsung Galaxy S25 is a great option.

Q: What’s the latest on Star Trek: Section 31?
A: The reviews are all over the place, but I’m excited to dive back into the Star Trek universe.

Q: What’s the new AI test that’s been making waves?
A: Humanity’s Last Exam is an incredibly fun and thought-provoking test that represents the final frontier for AI.

Q: What’s the new Android app from Perplexity?
A: Perplexity Assistant is a step toward more task-doing AI, but it’s not available on iOS.