I didn’t have “phone toaster” on my CES bingo card, but here we are. Swippitt is a unique solution to the problem of keeping your phone battery charged up, and it promises a life where you basically never have to plug your phone into a charger again. But it’ll cost you.

To be clear, there isn’t an actual toaster involved. Swippitt — which rhymes with “whip it,” and I’m sorry you have that song stuck in your head now — includes a system of interchangeable batteries that fit into specially designed phone cases. You use your phone like normal, and the extra battery charges your phone through a power connector integrated into the case — much like plenty of other battery cases on the market.

But instead of having to recharge the external battery, you swap it out. To change the battery out for a new one, you insert your phone, case and all, into the Swippitt Hub, which is the toaster-looking bit. Inside the hub, a fully charged battery is swapped into your case, the old one is retained to recharge, and your phone is ready to go with a fresh external battery. The whole thing happens within seconds. The demo unit I saw was pretty noisy about it all, but I’m told final production models will have much better sound dampening.

Each external battery provides an extra 3,500mAh, which is roughly 50 to 90 percent extra charge, depending on the size of your phone’s battery. That power is available immediately to begin charging your phone, or if you’re topping off a battery that’s not super low, it can sit in reserve until needed. An accompanying app lets you set lots of different parameters — things like limiting the charging of your phone’s battery to 80 percent to extend its lifespan, dictating certain times of day to charge your phone, that kind of thing.

Because it uses a mechanical process to swap external batteries, Swippitt works with any phone as long as there’s a case designed for it. That way, a single hub can serve a whole household of people with different phone models. At launch, it will offer cases for the iPhone 14, 15, and 16 series, and the company plans to expand with Samsung Galaxy S series cases by the end of 2025. The company’s CEO and founder Padraic Connolly tells me that they’ve designed it with some wiggle room to keep the hub and batteries all compatible even if phones (groan) continue getting bigger in the coming years.

This all clicked for me when I realized that Swippitt isn’t just selling a silly charging gadget — it’s selling a life where you never have to plug your phone into a charger again. Who wouldn’t want that? But this vision of an untethered future comes at a price: $450 for the hub, which contains five batteries, and a phone case with a battery included is $120. The company is running some introductory promos, including 30 percent off your entire purchase if you order in January, as well as another $100 off as a kind of CES special. Swippitt expects the system to start shipping in June 2025.

Still, you could buy a whole bunch of nice MagSafe chargers for that kind of money. But what Swippitt offers is a tidier solution, one you don’t really have to think about. For some people, that kind of convenience might be worth the price. The rest of us will probably have to keep our phone chargers for now.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Afeela is starting to become a little bit more than just a feeling. The electric vehicle, which is a joint venture between Sony and Honda, is finally available for preorder. And it only took five years to get here.

At its press conference at CES today, Sony Honda Mobility announced pricing and preorder details for the Afeela 1. The vehicle will come in two trims: the $89,900 Afeela 1 Origin and the $102,900 Afeela 1 Signature. Both prices include a complimentary three-year subscription to a variety of in-car features, including the company’s Level 2+ driver assist and an AI-powered personal assistant.

Preorders start today, and interested buyers who live in California — and apparently only California — can plunk down a refundable $200 deposit to get in line to buy one. It’s unclear if and when the Afeela will be available to the other 49 states.

We’re also getting some new specs, including up to 300 miles of EPA-estimated range, and built-in support for Tesla’s Supercharger network. The only paint option appears to be “Core Black.” The pricier Signature trim will start deliveries in 2026, while customers will have to wait until 2027 for the less expensive Origin.

Screenshot: Sony Honda Mobility

The latest version of the prototype, which Sony Honda Mobility CEO Yasuhide Mizuno described as “near final,” still looks like a mashup of a Tesla with the Lucid Air, with short overhangs and a long wheelbase.

It boasts screens across the width of the dashboard, 40 sensors and cameras for semi-autonomous driving assistance, all-wheel drive, and hints at augmented reality integration and “virtual worlds” embedded into the driving experience. As a result, Sony’s first foray into the automotive sector is designed to compete with some of the top players in the luxury EV space.

Mizuno demonstrated one of the more advanced features when he summoned the vehicle onstage by speaking the voice command “Come on out, Afeela” into his phone. (He also said it was a “tech demo for this showcase,” so it’s a little unclear whether voice commands will become a production feature.)

A lot has changed since Sony first rolled out its Vision concept in 2020: demand for EVs in the US spiked, then flatlined, and now has basically stabilized; the Biden administration rolled out generous incentives for EV buyers, but they’ll likely get eliminated by the incoming Trump administration; and China has emerged as the world’s dominant EV producer. That last fact has recently spurred Honda to initiate a merger with Nissan in the hopes of better competing with Chinese companies on EVs.

And now the Afeela, with its sleek sedan looks and plethora of interior touchscreens, is moving steadily closer to becoming a real car that you can really buy.

The preorder details aren’t all we’re getting from Sony Honda Mobility this week. Tomorrow, the company will hold another press conference to outline the customer experience of shopping for and owning an Afeela.

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

So what can Apple do now? A non-apology and the promise of a warning label isn’t enough. The company should either give all apps the option of opting out of AI summaries, or offer an opt-out to the developers of specific classes of apps (like news apps). Next, it should probably build separate pathways for notifications of related content (a bunch of emails or chat messages in a thread) versus unrelated content (BBC headlines, podcast episode descriptions) and change how the unrelated content is summarized. Perhaps a little further down the road, news notifications should be summarized based on the full text of the news article, rather than generating a secondhand machine summary of a story already summarized by a human headline writer.

In all the years Snell and I have been doing what we do, I don’t think we’ve ever come so close to writing the exact same take at the same time. The only subtle differences are that (a) I side with Apple in not giving developers the option to opt out of notification summaries, and (b) that I’m a bit more of the mind that Apple can address this by somehow making it more clear which notifications are AI-generated summaries. Like, perhaps instead of their “↪︎” glyph, they could use the 🤪 emoji.

Zoe Kleinman / BBC:
After complaints from the BBC, Apple plans an Apple Intelligence update “in the coming weeks” that “will further clarify” when it is summarizing notifications  —  Apple has said it will update, rather than pause, a new artificial intelligence (AI) …

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