Hey, look at that — it’s 9PM ET, and our iPhone 16E review just dropped. I figured it’d be a good time to pop into your inbox and flag it before you crawl into bed, eat dinner on the West Coast, or whatever you’re about to do. Oh, and we should talk about Amazon’s Alexa Plus, too.
But first, the $599 iPhone 16E. Allison Johnson has been testing it for the past several days and thinks maybe the E stands for “eh, it’s fine?” It has plenty of good stuff, like a (slightly different) A18 chip from the iPhone 16, support for Apple Intelligence, and a new Apple C1 modem that apparently helps improve battery life over the Qualcomm chips in other iPhones.
Still, it doesn’t have Apple’s Dynamic Island, which shows updates on sports scores and whatnot on the top of the screen. It also doesn’t support MagSafe, though it does work with regular Qi wireless chargers. Allison suggests it’s probably good enough for most people, but buyers should consider the $699 iPhone 15 if they care about all that other stuff more than Apple Intelligence.
Speaking of AI, Amazon had a bunch to talk about today. It announced Alexa Plus, which can do a lot more than regular Alexa. In demos during the company’s keynote, Alexa Plus sounded much less robotic and could understand complex sentences, book an Uber ride, order food, or schedule a repair for your oven. This is Amazon’s use-case for “AI agents” that, in this case, crawl the internet and do things for you.
It’s all neat but with a huge caveat: Amazon didn’t let us try Alexa Plus. The demos were all controlled by company reps, so who knows how good it really is? It’ll cost $19.99 a month but will be free for Amazon Prime customers when it launches for early access late next month.
There are a lot of other good reads on The Verge this week.
The Steam Deck is dominating handheld PC gaming, according to data my colleague Sean Hollister has from IDC. And Ash Parrish wrote up a stellar preview of South of Midnight, a new action-adventure platformer that Ash praised for its authenticity. It’s full of interviews, and you need to read it, so I’ll tease it with this: “It was hard playing a preview of South of Midnight because, 20 minutes in, I just started bawling.”
