This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
Nothing couldn’t wait to show off the Phone 4A
23 Feb 2026, 1:01 pm by Jess Weatherbed
After teasing the upcoming launch of its midrange Phone 4A last week, Nothing has now revealed what the rear of the device looks like. An official render of the Phone 4A shared on X shows off the brand’s familiar transparent-industrial stylings, alongside a new “Glyph Bar” lighting feature located to the right of the triple camera island.
This Glyph Bar features nine individually controllable mini-LEDs that appear as a line of seven square lights – six white, and one red – replacing the three LED light strips that surround the camera on Nothing’s 3A devices. Nothing says that the Glyph Bar is 40 percent brighter than the previous A-series’ …
Uber launches robotaxi support project to aid AV partners
23 Feb 2026, 1:00 pm by Andrew J. Hawkins
Uber is moving aggressively into robotaxis, striking deals with new partners and promising big investments to support future fleets – basically everything it can do except design and build the vehicles itself. (It tried that once, unsuccessfully.) Now, the ridehail giant is launching a new initiative to support its third-party robotaxi partners called Uber Autonomous Solutions.
Basically, Uber is taking many of the things it does for its drivers and couriers – vehicle financing, fleet management tools, regulatory assistance – and making them available for its third-party AV partners, companies like Wayve, WeRide, Nuro, Waabi, and others. I …
How many AIs does it take to read a PDF?
23 Feb 2026, 11:00 am by Josh Dzieza
Last November, the House Oversight Committee had just released 20,000 pages of documents from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, and Luke Igel and some friends were clicking around, trying to follow the threads of conversation through garbled email threads and a PDF viewer that was, frankly, “gross.” In the coming months, the Department of Justice would release its own batches of files, more than three million of them – again, all PDFs.
This was a problem. While the Department of Justice had run optical character recognition over the text, it was not very good, Igel said, rendering the files more or less unsearchable.
“There was no interface …
Taara Beam provides 25Gbps connectivity over invisible beams of light
23 Feb 2026, 11:00 am by Thomas Ricker
Light-based internet provider Taara, which spun out of Alphabet’s “moonshot” incubator last year, just launched Taara Beam to provide 25Gbps connectivity within cities over invisible beams of light – line of sight permitting.
Unlike last year’s Taara Lightbridge, which connects communities separated by water and mountains at distances up to 20km (over 12 miles), the shoebox-sized Beam can be mounted to street poles and roof tops for city-wide connectivity at distances up to 10km. The 8kg (less than 20 pounds) device typically consumes about 90W.
Taara’s big advantage is speed. It rivals fiber in terms of throughput and can also be deploye …
End of today’s The Verge roundup.
