The CMF Phone 1 is a cheap Android phone with good looks

Hi friends! Welcome to installer #45, your guide to the best and Border-most important thing in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, sorry, I love productivity apps, and you can also read all the back issues on installer home page.)

I’m back from a few days off, feeling rested, sunburned and ready to fight. Thank you to everyone who sent birthday wishes! This week I’ve been reading Made for love and stories about AI Players It is AI Musicians It is Ferrari electric vehiclesattending Inflection pointreplacing my weather app with Lazy time, furious with Ira Glass for listening to podcasts at 2x speedand pouring out all my feelings to the Point 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 new AI pod to check out. Lots happening in mid-July! Let’s dig.

(As always, the best part installer are your ideas and tips. What are you doing now? What should everyone read/watch/play/eat/download/store for the winter? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone who might like installertell them to sign up here.)

• The CMF 1 phone. A beautiful, long-lasting Android phone for $200? With an OLED screen and interchangeable backplates and a bunch of really cool accessories, one of them is a stand? 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 much the same and even more expensive. But I’m most excited about the Galaxy Ring, which seems to have nailed smart ring hardware – and even has some interesting ideas about gesture control.
• “The Dignation Meeting Part 1.” If you’re a technology lover of a certain age, there’s a good chance you grew up watching Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht drink and joke about technology while sitting on the couch. Seeing the guys get back together was a delightful blast from the past. AND there is a part twoalso!
• Delta 1.6. Delta game emulation is on iPad! I’m actually not sure how much I’ll use this, considering how much of my retro games are on an iPhone with a Backbone controller. But this update, with a bigger screen and support for multiple games at once, looks pretty good.
• Amazon’s new Echo Spot. For me, this is the exact balance for an Alexa speaker. It’s small, costs $45 (for now), has a touchscreen but no camera, and is the right size for a nightstand. I keep promising to leave my phone out of the room and maybe this will replace it.
• Sunny. A woman loses her husband but gets a robot from her technology company to help her. Strangeness ensues. Such a great 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 comes out 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 very good hack! And I like that it basically hides which network people are using; they’re just people, on a timeline.
• Pestle. I love a good recipe app. I mostly use Crouton and Mela, but Pestle’s new ability import recipes from Instagram Reels it’s incredible. Just enter the link, give it a name and it will 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 helped work on was this crazy thing where a writer decided to completely disappear and see if the internet could find him. The story was incredible, and the writer was Evan Ratliff, who has since been one of my favorite journalists. He was co-founder The Atavist Magazine and I did a great job there, I created the fantastic Person podcast, and until recently, was one of the co-hosts of Long form, the journalism podcast I always dreamed I would one day be invited to. Unfortunately.

Now Evan has launched a new podcast called shell game, in which he uses an AI clone of his voice to cause all sorts of chaos in his own life. The first episode is incredible, and I’m very excited about what comes next. I asked Evan to share his home screen with us to see if he had any podcasting tricks I could steal from him and to see how his life became AI.

Here’s Evan’s home screen, plus some information about the apps he uses and why:

The telephone: iPhone 13 Mini.

The wallpaper: The person I 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 the planet. (Usually 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 home screen rules are: no social media, no news. I’m a news junkie, but I at least want it out of sight for a bit. And no Twitter app on the phone, ever. As for some applications:

• Children [group]: One 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 in the sky or Maritime Traffic at sea to see where ships and planes come from and go. My father studies logistics and instilled in me a curiosity about how things get from one place to another.
• CloudBeats: Essential for listening to podcast drafts while running and walking; with shell game In production, sometimes I’m on it for hours a day.
• Libby: Any New Yorker who doesn’t have one is missing out. You can get e-books and audiobooks from the library and listen to them right here!
• Instapaper: Does anyone else still use Instapaper out there? I don’t even know who owns this thing anymore. But that’s still how I read the long things I saved.

I also asked Evan to share some things he enjoys now. Here’s what he shared:

• Moss. I made a moss garden this year and I enjoy all things moss. Sites on how to maintain it and its incredible properties, moss gurus (e.g. Mossina Annie). Moss!
• The new Charley Crockett album. Just a genius composer and singer, with an incredible story. Hear perfectly while walking on the moss (which you should).
• Currently revisiting The Braindead Megaphonecollection of essays by George Saunders, parts of which seem very shell game-relevant to me.
• My sister-in-law, who is 50 times more culturally aware than me, showed us a British comic game show, Foreman. The perfect decompression after a day working alongside your AI doppelganger.

Here’s what installer community is this week. I want to know what you’re doing now too! 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 answers to this post on Threads.

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

“I just binged all six episodes on Netflix Supacell. It is like Heroes but darker, 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 new show in a genre that’s basically monopolized by Marvel.” -William

“Currently reading The singularity is closer by Ray Kurzweil. We are lucky to see human evolution in real time.” – Mateus

“Best ball drafts in 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 in an hour or less and then compete against strangers. It’s like trying to win a March Madness bracket, but you draft a fantasy football lineup. – Noah

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

“As a new father, Dungeons and Dads resonates with me in a special way. This Podcast (Self-Described Non-BDSM) Puts a Hilarious Twist D&D, following four parents navigating a fantastical kingdom to rescue their lost children. It made me laugh more than ever and made me cry more than once. I’ve already watched the first season three times (more than 180 hours of listening) and I’m re-listening to the second season now.” – Brand

“I just bought a BooxGo 10.3 E Ink Tablet and I really like it. Very thin, well designed, no front light and great for writing when needed. It’s more of a competitor to the Remarkable 2 (i.e. a note-taking device), but I’m liking it for reading articles via Omnivore.” -Patrick

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

“Apple PenLite: the iPad before the iPad.” I’ve been watching Colin Holter’s channel for a few years now and I love his work, but this video is really something different for him. He interviewed several former Apple employees and I thought it was very well done. I was very young at the time, so I don’t remember any news on this topic, but it was really 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 is a painting”It’s the best YouTube series of all time. If you haven’t watched it yet, watch them all. (If you only watch one, watch this one in Edgar Wright. Or this one about David Fincher. Or this one the sound of Marvel films. Just watch them all!) So when the channel released its first video in seven years – a small trailer for a new limited series and short film – I immediately started refreshing the page every 10 minutes and rewatching everything on the channel. It’s like going to film school at warp speed, and I can’t recommend it enough. Chairs, guys! Chairs!