Crossbody Strap, but make it pink.

If you check out tomorrow’s Vergecast, you’ll get to hear The Verge’s Jess Weatherbed convince me that gadget straps are a clever phone accessory — and have a lot to say about the future, too. Apple’s version is expensive, but clever, and now comes in “Soft Pink” and “Bright Guava.” I think I’m still buying black, though.

Here’s a cool peek at the iPhone Air’s camera.

There is a lot of new Apple tech in the super-thin iPhone Air — Apple’s talking about the work it had to do on everything from the modem to the chip to make the phone this small. Check out the images below for an x-ray of the camera array, which is seriously crammed in there. Apparently it’s a “plateau,” not a camera bump.

Watches Watches Watches.

New Watch Series 11, new Watch SE 3, new Watch Ultra 3. I’m due for an upgrade, and am thinking the Series 11 is probably the one for me? That 42 hours of Ultra battery does sound good, though. Check out the stories and the bentos, tell me which does it for you!

The rundown on the new AirPods Pro 3.

They look good! We’ll have to see how that “world’s best ANC” claim holds up, though. Check out Tom’s story for more, and here’s the bento box with all the details:

New emojis just dropped.

(Emoji? Emojis? Plurals, how do they work.) The Unicode Consortium just released the latest version of its standard, with 164 new emojis and “several thousand additional non-emoji characters.” As we saw in the preview in July, there’s a lot of good stuff in here. But now comes the fun part: seeing how different platforms interpret, and occasionally totally ruin, the new characters. They better not screw up Fight Cloud.

Typing indicators in group chats!

There’s a bunch of good new stuff in group messaging for Apple Messages — polls, better notification management for unknown senders, and more — but the best quality-of-life thing here is definitely typing indicators for group chats. This is going to make chaotic family messaging so much less chaotic.

Project Starline is now Google Beam.

Google’s futuristic conference-calling experiment has been threatening to become commercially available for a while, and Sundar Pichai just said it’s coming this year through devices from HP. And to be fair, “Google Beam” is a less fun but much more Google-y name than Starline.

CES stands for Consumer Electronics Silverware.

Once there was the Hapifork. Now there’s the Electric Salt Spoon, from a company called Kirin Electronics, which uses “mild electrical currents” to make low-sodium meals taste a little more salty. (The spoon launched in Japan earlier this year.)

I did not taste the spoon among the crowd at CES Unveiled, because, gross, but the science is legit! We did a whole Vergecast segment about it! There’s so much interesting potential here.

It’s almost almost almost CES time.

We’re in line at CES Unveiled, which is the first official event of the week. There will be gadgets. Many of them will be absurd. But that’s what we’re here for.

Keep it locked, friends. It’s bloggin’ time.

TIL what an “asterism” is.

A few folks working on decentralized social stuff just proposed a new symbol for all things fediverse: the asterism, represented here by three asterisks in a triangle. Looks like this: ⁂

I dig it! But I might like one of the Hacker News comments even better: “that’s the sarcasterisk and should replace /s in modern communication.”