A supercheap Android phone with looks to spare

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 45, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, sorry I love productivity apps so much, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

I’m back from a few days off, feeling rested and sunburned and ready to rumble. Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes! This week, I’ve been reading Made for Love and stories about AI gamers and AI musicians and Ferrari EVs, watching Turning Point, replacing my weather app with Lazy Weather, raging at Ira Glass for listening to podcasts at 2x speed, and spilling all my feelings to the Dot AI bot.

I also have for you a new phone, a new smart ring, a new / old podcast reunion, a sci-fi show everyone seems to love, a nice update to a great recipe app, and a wild new AI pod to check out. A lot going on for the middle of July! Let’s dig in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be reading / watching / playing / eating / downloading / storing for winter? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

• The CMF Phone 1. A nice-looking, long-lasting Android phone for $200? With an OLED screen and interchangeable backplates and a bunch of really cool accessories, one of which is a kickstand? Yes. Please. In orange, of course.
• The Samsung Galaxy Ring. I’m still a fan of Samsung’s Fold and Flip phones, even though the new models are very same-y and even more expensive. But I’m most excited about the Galaxy Ring, which seems to have pretty much nailed the smart ring hardware — and even has some interesting ideas about gesture control.
• “The Diggnation Reunion Part 1.” If you’re a tech lover of a certain age, there’s a strong chance you grew up watching Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht drink and make jokes about tech while sitting on a couch. Watching the guys get back together was a delightful blast from the past. And there’s a part two, too!
• Delta 1.6. Delta’s game emulation is on the iPad! I’m actually not sure how much I’ll use this given how much of my retro gaming is on an iPhone with a Backbone controller. But this update, with a bigger screen and support for multiple games at once, does sound pretty great.
• Amazon’s new Echo Spot. To me, this is the exact right balance of things for an Alexa speaker. It’s small, it’s $45 (for now), it has a touchscreen but no camera, and it’s the right size for a nightstand. I keep promising to leave my phone out of my bedroom, and maybe this’ll replace it.
• Sunny. A woman loses her husband but gets a robot from his tech company to help her through it. Strangeness ensues. Such a good premise! And by all accounts, this show continues Apple TV Plus’ run of great sci-fi stuff. I’ll definitely catch up before episode 3 drops on Wednesday.
• Openvibe. Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and Nostr, all in one timeline in one app. This is basically a clever hack, not the interconnected social universe of my dreams, but it’s a pretty good hack! And I like that it basically hides which network people are using; it’s just people, in a timeline.
• Pestle. I love a good recipe app. I mostly use Crouton and Mela, but Pestle’s new ability to import recipes from Instagram Reels is pretty awesome. Just drop in the link, give it a name, and it’ll turn a video into a bunch of ingredients and steps.

A million years ago, I was an intern at Wired, and one of the stories I got to help work on was this wild thing where a writer had decided to completely disappear and see if the internet could find him. The story turned out awesome, and the writer was Evan Ratliff, who has been one of my favorite journalists ever since. He cofounded The Atavist Magazine and did a ton of great work there, created the terrific Persona podcast, and until recently, was one of the cohosts of Longform, the journalism podcast I always dreamed I might one day get invited on. Alas.

Now Evan has a new podcast out, called Shell Game, in which he uses an AI clone of his voice to cause all kinds of chaos in his own life. The first episode is awesome, and I’m very excited for what’s next. I asked Evan to share his homescreen with us to see if he had any podcasting tricks I might steal from him and to see how AI-ified his life had become.

Here’s Evan’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 13 Mini. 

The wallpaper: The one I’ve sent here is my cat Henry, an 18-year-old icon who was once a mini-celebrity on Vine and is the sweetest creature on earth. (Normally it’s my kids, but I don’t allow photos of them on the open internet.)

The apps: Google Maps, Photos, Apple Notes, Slack, Settings, Clock, Phone, WhatsApp, Signal, Freedom, Google Translate, CloudBeats, Scrivener, Instapaper, Spotify, TuneIn, Libby, Gmail, Google Calendar, Messages, Brave.

My homescreen rules are no social media, no news. I’m a certified news junkie, but I at least want it a little out of view. And no Twitter app on the phone, ever. As for some apps:

• Kids [group]: A thing they don’t tell you about parenting in the 2020s is how many school, camp, and bus apps you are forced to acquire and check.
• Ships / planes: The only AR apps I’ve ever used. I feel like a wizard just pointing Flightradar24 at the sky or MarineTraffic at the sea to see where ships and planes are coming from and going to. My father studies logistics and instilled in me a curiosity about how things get from place to place. 
• CloudBeats: Essential for listening to podcast drafts while running and walking around; with Shell Game in production, I’m on this thing for hours a day sometimes. 
• Libby: Any New Yorker who doesn’t have it is missing out. You can grab ebooks and audiobooks from the library and listen to them right here! 
• Instapaper: Anyone else still using Instapaper out there? I don’t even know who owns this thing anymore. But it’s still how I read longform stuff I’ve saved. 

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

• Moss. Made a moss garden this year and I’m into all things moss-related. Websites on how to maintain it and its incredible properties, moss gurus (e.g., Mossin’ Annie). Moss! 
• The new Charley Crockett album. Just a genius songwriter and singer, with an incredible story. Perfect listen while walking on your moss (which you must).
• Currently revisiting The Braindead Megaphone, George Saunders’ essay collection, parts of which feel very Shell Game-relevant to me. 
• My sister-in-law, who is 50x more culturally aware than I, turned us on to this British comic game show, Taskmaster. The perfect decompression after a day working alongside your AI doppelganger.

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. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads.

“I just wanted to share an app that (and it is a shock for me) no one knows about. It’s called Slick Inbox. The idea is very simple: it allows you to create your own inbox only for newsletters. I hate reading newsletters in my personal Gmail box, and this is a very convenient solution to my problem.” – Denis

“I just binged all six episodes of Netflix’s Supacell. It’s like Heroes but grimier, set in South London, with an almost entirely Black cast and made by Rapman. It’s one of the best things I’ve seen this year and such a fresh show in a genre that is basically monopolized by Marvel.” – Guilherme

“Currently reading The Singularity is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil. We are lucky to see human evolution in real time.” – Matthew

“Best Ball drafts on Underdog Fantasy. What was once a niche version of fantasy football is now an (absurdly?) popular sports betting format where players draft an entire team within an hour or less and then compete against strangers. It’s kind of like trying to win a March Madness bracket but you draft a fantasy football roster.” – Noah

“Using the VR Exercise Tracker app created by the VR Health Institute. They use science-backed measurement of VR activity to help you measure your VR workouts. Connects with Apple Watch and other Bluetooth fitness devices.” – Dan

“As a new dad, Dungeons & Daddies resonates with me in a special way. This (self-described non-BDSM) podcast puts a hilarious twist on D&D, following four dads navigating a fantastical realm to rescue their lost sons. It’s made me laugh harder than I have in a long time and made me cry more than once. I’ve binged the first season three times already (that’s more than 180 hours of listening) and am relistening to the second season now.” – Mark

“Just bought a Boox Go 10.3 E Ink tablet and am really enjoying it. Very slim, nicely designed, no front light, and fairly great to write on when needed. It’s meant more as a competitor to the Remarkable 2 (i.e., a note-taking device), but I’m enjoying it for reading articles via Omnivore.” – Patrick

“I’ve recently started reading a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport on the merits of dedicating time to focus on a task with minimal distractions. My attention span, along with many others in recent years, has been obliterated, hence me picking up this book to try and rectify my ability to focus deeply.” – Dave

“Apple PenLite: The iPad Before the iPad.” I have been watching Colin Holter’s channel for a few years now and really love his stuff, but this video is really something different for him. He interviewed several former Apple employees, and I thought it was really well done. I was really young during the time period this is about, so I don’t remember any news about this stuff, but it was so interesting to get this kind of perspective from the engineers and product managers working at Apple at the time.” – Ian

I sincerely believe that “Every Frame a Painting” is the best YouTube series of all time. If you haven’t watched them, watch all of them. (If you only watch one, watch this one on Edgar Wright. Or this one on David Fincher. Or this one on the sound of Marvel movies. Just watch them all!) So when the channel dropped its first video in seven years — a short trailer for a new limited series and short film — I immediately started refreshing the page every 10 minutes and rewatching every single thing on the channel all over again. It’s like going to film school at warp speed, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Chairs, y’all! Chairs!

See you next week!