Illustration: The Verge A judge has ruled that X, the platform previously known as Twitter, must pay $1.1 million in legal fees associated with the investigations of the platform that unfolded during Elon Musk’s buyout of the platform last year, according to a report from Bloomberg.As noted by Bloomberg, Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick ruled in favor of former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, former lead policy officer Vijaya Gadde, and other executives, as Twitter “violated its duties to cover legal expenses generated by their work for the company.” Elon Musk fired Agrawal and other high-level leaders once he took over the company and after Twitter sued Musk for attempting to back out of his agreement for the $44 billion acquisition.In... Continue reading…

Emoji reactions are coming to a Gmail inbox near you. | Image: Gmail It’s finally here — the tool that could turn your email inbox into a nightmare or a pure delight, depending on your POV. Google is adding the ability to react to an email with an emoji.First rumored last month, Google has now confirmed it is bringing emoji reactions to its Gmail service. The feature will roll out gradually, starting with Android users and coming to web and iOS users over the next few months. Image: Google An animation of how emoji reactions will work. Happily, you’ll be able to “unsend” just as you can with a regular email (for those times when you accidentally hit the thumbs-down emoji.) When you have access, you’ll see a at the bottom of a message. Click on that to choose your emoji from... Continue reading…

This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.Ariel and Amrita coming to you with another joint issue today. It’s a jam-packed Tuesday, with Spotify debuting its biggest audiobook development yet, an exclusive interview with the writer of the Audible Original Six Sermons, and Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries laying off a third of its staff.Spotify gets serious about audiobooksAt a company event this afternoon, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced that Spotify subscribers in the UK, Australia, and, in the winter, the US will be able to stream 15 hours of premium audiobooks each month. It’s a big leap from Spotify’s initial a la carte audiobook model and has the potential to... Continue reading…

Everybody do the pinchy pinch. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Double tap, which lets Apple Watch users tap their thumb and index finger together twice to contextually control the watch, is one of the coolest features of the latest Apple Watch models. It wasn’t included at launch, but 9to5Mac reports that it’s available now in the watchOS 10.1 developer beta. The public beta and general release are almost certainly not far behind, but if you have an Apple Watch Series 9 or Ultra 2 and you’re feeling mildly adventurous, you can try it out today — it’s easy to sign up for the developer betas these days. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Double tap does have some customizability, though mainly for the widget stack and music controls. The contextual pinchy pinch lets... Continue reading…

When it comes to smartphone operating systems, Android dominates in global market share. However, several features of Google's OS can be accessed only through paths and methods that are hidden away from the average user. These have generally been done with the help of some command line Android Debug Bridge (ADB) commands, a tool that Google offers for developers to debug various parts of their applications or the system, but which we can use for all kinds of neat, hidden tricks. A prerequisite to these tricks is installing ADB on your computer. So, in this guide, we will show you how to install ADB on Windows, macOS, and Linux in quick and easy-to-follow steps.

Image: Meta Meta’s text-based chat feature for Horizon Worlds will be available for all users beginning this week, Meta said in a blog post on Tuesday. The text chat, which Meta dubs “world chat,” offers a way to communicate with other people inside a Horizon Worlds experience without using your voice. Meta first launched world chat in a limited way in June.The world chat feature is accessible from the options you can pick from when you lift your left wrist while in VR; it’s a little world icon inside a speech box. And to make text chat a bit easier, Meta says it offers quick replies so that you don’t have to take the time to manually spell out messages, which can be a big pain in VR.Unfortunately, I don’t have access to world chat myself just... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Verizon has announced an exclusive combo offering Netflix Premium and NFL Plus Premium for $25 per month. Netflix Premium costs $19.99 / month right now (though it could go up soon!), and NFL Plus Premium is $16.99 / month. That sounds like a pretty good deal for Verizon customers if they’re ready for some football and they need their own Netflix account. NFL Plus Premium includes live access to regional and primetime NFL football games across devices and includes the NFL Network, plus NFL RedZone. It does not include NFL Sunday Ticket, which costs a cool $449 per year and gives you all the Sunday games regardless of region. Verizon’s promo page states that existing Netflix customers can transfer their subscriptions over to Verizon and... Continue reading…

Image: Laura Normand / The Verge Forget Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company — Elon Musk is now the owner of Twitter. Continue reading…

Look! A purple phone that’s actually purple. | Image: Samsung Samsung’s FE series is back after a year off, this time with a pair of Galaxy Buds in the mix. The Galaxy S23 FE has the specs we’d expect of a “value flagship” smartphone and a price that makes more sense: $599, rather than the $699 Samsung charged for the S21 FE. The Galaxy Tab S9 FE comes with robust water and dust resistance and a much friendlier $449 price tag than the pricey standard S9, which starts at $799 — but you’ll have to settle for an LCD panel rather than OLED. And the Galaxy Buds FE offer active noise cancellation for $99.Samsung’s Galaxy S21 FE was the most recent phone in the FE series, and it didn’t make a lot of sense priced so closely to the standard S21. The company seems to have recognized the problem with this... Continue reading…

Image: Instacart Instacart is expanding its payment options next year to include Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and other supplement health benefits for grocery deliveries. The move comes after the company began accepting food stamps as payment earlier this year. The program, which will be administered through Alignment Health, will allow anyone who receives health insurance through Medicare Advantage, Medicaid and other eligible programs to use their plan-sponsored funds to purchase “eligible groceries, wellness essentials, and over-the-counter medications for delivery via Instacart,” the company said.The goal is to improve access to nutritious food and over-the-counter medicines for seniors, many whom experience food insecurity as a result of... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge At Zoomtopia 2023 today, Zoom announced Zoom Docs, a collaboration-focused “modular workspace” that integrates the company’s Zoom AI Companion for generating new content or populating a doc from other sources — you know the drill by now. Along with the Mail and Calendar offerings launched during last year’s event, Zoom Docs is another step toward a full office suite alternative to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, which both have started to integrate AI-powered tools of their own, dubbed Duet AI and Copilot, respectively. The company says it will be widely available in 2024.Like other AI helper software, users can ask Zoom AI Companion to do things like summarize meetings, chats, and information from inside Zoom Docs or generate... Continue reading…

A banana bed, as created by DALL-E 3. | Image: OpenAI The image generator inside the AI-powered Bing Chat is getting a big upgrade today: Microsoft announced that OpenAI’s latest DALL-E 3 model is now available to all Bing Chat and Bing Image Creator users. It has been rolling out over the last week or so, first to Bing Enterprise users and then to Bing Image Creator, but now it’s open to everyone.Bing is getting DALL-E 3 access even before OpenAI’s own ChatGPT does — that’s scheduled to happen this month, but only for paying users. Microsoft is likely to be the most popular image generating tool for a while.DALL-E 3 is, of course, the third version of OpenAI’s image generating model. The company says it understands prompts far better than before and can create images that are both more... Continue reading…