Google recently announced new features, including forcing app icons to match your themes, new notification summaries (that don’t suck), and more. Here’s a video they released going over four new significant changes:

What?! This is insanely cool. As reported by The Verge, Google Pixel 10 users cannot send and receive files with Apple devices over AirDrop. Yes, you read that right. How long will this last? Who knows! But this is a pretty awesome move by Google to help make Apple’s walled garden feel a little less tall. Here’s the full blog post from Google about how they did it.

Each of these new sticks can plug directly into your Home Assistant Controller, like the excellent Home Assistant Green we reviewed. These new sticks are up to four times more powerful than the previous generation and built with the latest standards in mind. Click the product links to see their current price. And you can learn more about Home Assistant and these new devices here.

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Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 (Z-Wave)

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Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 (Zigbee and Thread)

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An absolutely killer headline from The Verge,  Google is just the latest company that seems to be running into issues combining LLM models with more rules-based systems, like the ones that powered smart assistants previously and were reliable when you asked them to turn on the lights. Whether or not any of these new assistants can do this reliably remains to be seen. We’ll continue to monitor the rollout of these new assistants that incorporate LLMs into the smart home space and have several videos planned around the smart home for early 2026, including one around smart appliances!

Similar to how you can integrate devices from Home Assistant into Apple Home, as we discussed in our Home Assistant Green video, Homey’s new Bridge app enables you to transfer devices from one platform to another, using Homey as the intermediary. It works with Google Home, Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, and Home Assistant. Read the full announcement here. Homey has been making quite a few updates to their app and functionality of the Homey Pro, but if you want a general breakdown of the device, check out our review of the Homey Pro (2023):

As reported by Engadget, new and generally affordable smart bulbs, sensors, and remote controls have begun to hit the market from the Swedish furniture maker, some of which won’t be available in the US until 2026. As we pointed out in our 2025 smart home guide (below), since the new switches are Matter-compatible, they’ll work with other manufacturers’ devices, not just IKEA’s.

Apple has reportedly delayed the next-generation iPhone Air and is considering making changes to its form factor, as reported by The Verge. Based on our experience with the phone so far, here’s what might be going on:

As reported by The Verge, after an embarrassing moment for the company when users were unable to control the temperature of their beds due to an AWS outage, the company finally rolled out a solution for local control of the bed via Bluetooth. But it’s not enough – users should be able to control things like alarms locally as well, and not have to pay for a subscription to do it, as we pointed out in our review of the Pod 4:

The Verge is taking us back to the best tech gadgets of the past in a new podcast called Version History. The Blackberry episode was also an excellent look back at the BBM phenomenon that Apple and Facebook eventually crushed with the iPhone and WhatsApp/iMessage. Highly recommend giving it a listen/watch.