Welcome back to Inbox, hope you had a nice weekend, particularly if you were cheering for a certain European football team. Given Argentina’s late-game heroics throughout the World Cup, I’m surprised there were no last-minute goals to tie things up, but I’ll admit that Spain was the better team throughout the match.
Still, if you’re in North America, I think this recent headline from The Onion is spot on: Nation Wakes Up From Strange Dream Where They Were Watching Soccer. For the rest of the world, the countdown to World Cup 2030 starts…now.
Google has had a very busy year so far. By my count, the company has announced 40 distinct software or platform products since January, and they just keep on coming. As someone who follows the company’s chaotic product adventures with alacrity, I knew that only a small number had actually been widely released, but it wasn’t until seeing a comment in this article about Google’s new Noto 3D emoji that I thought to put a number to the madness.
Google often announces products months before they become widely available, particularly outside North America. But in the Gemini era, that reality has been compounded by Google’s own tiered AI lineup.
In fact, of the 40 products that Google has announced this year, only 13 of them have rolled out widely, and many of them are still limited to US users. Big-ticket features like Gmail’s AI Inbox, announced at CES back in January, are still only available to Google AI subscribers in the US.
Things really get backlogged when you jump ahead to the Android Show and Google I/O. In the two months since Google’s developer showcase, we’ve heard little about the company’s new Googlebook laptops or Universal Cart, the AI-powered shopping experience built on top of UCP (which itself has been suspiciously quiet since April), and we’re no closer to knowing when Adobe Premiere will premiere on Android.
Google’s homegrown Home Speaker was released a few weeks ago, but Gemini’s impending expansion to third-party speakers is still missing in action. Similarly, Google announced Gemini 3.5 Pro alongside its cheaper and more lightweight 3.5 Flash counterpart in May, but according to reporting from Bloomberg, it’s been delayed because internal benchmarking isn’t hitting expectations.
Not everything Google’s announced in 2026 has been a no-show, though: users are loving AirDrop support on more Android phones, and Spark, the agentic workhorse built into Gemini, has rolled out to AI Ultra users in the US, with an expansion to the cheaper Pro tier “soon.” And Android 17 was released a few weeks ago to some acclaim, complete with support for multitasking Bubbles, Screen Reactions, and Ask Photos support in more countries.
In the past, Google’s “trollouts” were confined to certain devices or countries. Now, high-demand (and high-compute) AI features are being restricted to expensive Gemini Ultra plans, too, fragmenting the company’s product lineup further. Everything it has announced will eventually be released, and there’s plenty of time for Google to hit its many, many “coming later this summer” milestones, but for many Google users hoping for AI’s promises to bear fruit, the wait continues.
For most of the country the weather is still too hot to think about holiday gift buying, but Best Buy’s Black Friday in July sale reminds us that it’s never too early to pretend you’re actually saving money.
While you’ll have to wait until November to get the really good deals, there are a few that stood out to me. I will espouse the virtues of spending good money on a Dyson vacuum because they last forever, and the V15 Detect at $500 matches its lowest-ever price from a couple of years ago. I’ve had mine going on two years now, and it’s in perfect condition despite getting hours of use every week. And if that’s too rich for your blood, my other stick vacuum, Shark’s Pet, is down to $180, just $10 off its all-time low.
I’m a huge LG OLED guy, and this is the lowest price you’ll likely see for a 55-inch model released in 2026. The B6E is a slightly cut-down version of the B6, lacking two AI upscaling features of its more expensive counterpart, but they share the same panel and underlying processor, and you can’t go wrong at this $800 price point. Unfortunately the 65-inch model isn’t nearly as discounted at $1400, but you’ll find a lot of decent TV sales if you look hard enough.
Finally, under no circumstances should you buy this almost three-year-old Moto G Play for $100, but the Motorola Razr Ultra (2025) at $700 is a pretty fantastic deal on one of my favorite devices of last year.
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As of this writing, the Avengers: Doomsday trailer has accrued over 30 million views in just under 14 hours, but for good reason: this thing is packed to the gills with nearly every living (and some not-so-living) Marvel superhero of the last decade.
Narrated in an appropriately dramatic fashion by the son of Odin himself, we see glimpses of the X-men, including Channing Tatum as Gambit; the Fantastic Four; Ant-Man; Shang-Chi; the new Black Panther, as well as Namor; and many others.
With AMC reporting its highest-ever quarterly revenue in Q2 (PDF) on a surge of people returning to movie theaters, Avengers: Doomsday may actually be the movie that gets people rooting for Marvel’s return. We’ll know in five short months.
Speaking of movies, I’ve always been a fan of Neill Blomkamp’s audacity, if not the actual movies he creates. District 9 is a solid film wrapped inside a tremendous VFX demo reel, and there were many things to admire about Elysium and Chappie.
Now the erstwhile film director has debuted a 13-minute short called “Nightborne” made with no cameras at all. Generated entirely using Bytedance’s popular Seedance 2.0 generative AI tool, Blomkamp claims the short film used “the faces and voices of 32 real people,” and that it is a precursor to a “full feature in this format.”
While clearly technically impressive, there is a discomfiting uncanniness evident throughout the entire runtime that’s difficult to ignore. It’s also so, so badly written.
It’s not surprising that we’re seeing mainstream directors like Blomkamp, along with even bigger names like Darren Aronofsky and Gareth Edwards, embracing the technology at a time when it’s increasingly difficult to get big-budget films made.
But will anyone ever make an AI film worth watching? That’s what I want to know.
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Daniel is a writer, editor, podcaster and analyst covering the big stories, small milestones, and amazing people behind tech’s biggest moments. He was previously editor-in-chief of MobileSyrup, Android Central, and Android Police, and has been a content director of tech publications since 2010.
