Best remote ever? Best remote ever. When TiVo first debuted, it felt like magic: You could pause live TV! You could rewind it! The concept immediately became a phenomenon — even though TiVo it...
Flappy Bird was a mean game. It was extremely simple and yet punishingly difficult; if you could get 10 points, that meant you were pretty good! For a few weeks, the game became an absolute global ...
In the mid-1980s, Nintendo pretty much ruled the video game industry. And somehow, a few toymakers and inventors convinced Nintendo that the controller of the future was… this big, clunky thing you...
AOL Instant Messenger was, for years, one of the very best things on the internet. Before iMessage and WhatsApp, before Twitter and Facebook, AIM was simply how people talked to each other online. ...
The iPhone 4 was one of the best iPhones ever — and definitely the most dramatic iPhone ever. It was lost in a bar in California, sold to Gizmodo, and published for the world to see months before i...
Google didn't invent the concept of smart glasses, but it was one of the first companies to actually put them on people's faces. It was a revolution, and also a problem: Google made face computers ...
Vine was the original short-form video platform, and pioneered so many of the ideas we now take for granted in reels and TikToks. It was a cultural engine whose executives clashed with the creators...
You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a handbag. But plenty of people used LimeWire and other file sharing services to share music, movies and more. If Napster was the beginning of the pirac...
In 2014, the tech world was abuzz with the prospect of a phone made by Amazon. When the Fire Phone arrived, it was chock full of ideas — a "dynamic perspective" feature that created 3D illusions, a...
In 2006, Microsoft came for the iPod's throne with an innovative MP3 player called the Zune. It had a bunch of features the iPod didn't: WiFi, music sharing, a bigger screen, a beautiful UI, even a...
Millions of basements have fake plastic guitars in them thanks to the 2005 smash hit Guitar Hero. Chris Grant and Ash Parrish join David Pierce to rock out with a game created over a matter of mont...
1982's coolest gadget was the Sony Watchman portable TV. Decades before everyone was glued to YouTube on their smartphones, the Watchman popularized the concept of video on the go. In the early day...
If you're a paid subscriber to The Verge, there's great news: You can now listen to Decoder, Version History, and The Vergecast completely ad-free. Just head to your Account Settings page to opt-i...
Back when text messages cost 10 cents each, BlackBerry came up with a better way: BlackBerry Messenger, commonly known as BBM. It was the first new idea about messaging in a long time, and it was a...
In 2015, self-balancing scooters (which quickly became known as hoverboards) exploded in popularity, and then began literally exploding. Andrew Hawkins and Sean O’Kane join David Pierce to explore ...
Your favorite people from The Verge and beyond are here to explain and debate the legacy of tech's biggest, weirdest and worst ideas. We'll talk about everything from BlackBerry to Vine, from Fire ...
