LEGO’s official phoenix, the 597-piece Fawkes from the Harry Potter line, does one trick. You turn a crank at the back and the wings flap up and down, forever, in the same arc, like a very committed but slightly limited stage performer. It’s a lovely little set and it looks great on a shelf, but the bird has exactly one thing it can do, and it will do that one thing until the end of time or until you stop turning the handle, whichever comes first.
Swas has taken a different approach on LEGO Ideas. His Blazing Phoenix doesn’t animate, it poses, which turns out to be the better idea for a creature this dramatic. Photograph it upright and it’s regal. Sweep the wings forward and drop the head and it’s about to ruin someone’s afternoon.
Designer: Swas
The wings are where the engineering flexes hardest. Each one runs off a Technic spine with visible pin and axle connections at the root and mid-span, and that hidden skeleton is what lets the whole assembly hold a pose instead of flopping. Four or five overlapping feather ranks are shingled per wing, small scalloped coverts near the shoulder giving way to long individually mounted primaries at the tips that actually fan and separate rather than sitting as one flat slab. Bright yellow stripes run along the length of each feather like flame traveling outward from the body, which is a genuinely smart color call and does more storytelling than the shape alone ever could.
The tail gets the same individual-feather treatment, a long fan of striped blades that either gathers low behind the perch or spreads wide depending on the pose you land on. Every feather looks independently mounted, so the tail reads as one more articulating surface rather than a fixed decorative wedge bolted on as an afterthought.
The head is where the personality lives, and also where my favorite detail is hiding. The beak transitions from bright orange into yellow with a nicely hooked profile, and above the eye Swas has used a small red feathered wing piece as a stand-in eyebrow. That’s the kind of part repurpose that separates builders who are just following a shape from builders who understand how a face actually reads.
Down at the perch, the legs are jointed at hip, knee, and ankle, bending the correct backward-bird way, ending in curved nougat talons that genuinely wrap around the rail instead of resting near it. Swas says the claws grasp, and looking at the renders, that’s not a marketing line, the grip looks load-bearing.
Swas has said the phoenix stuck with him since his teenage years, when the fantasy novels he was reading collided with the mythological stories his grandmother used to tell, and the message that every end is a new beginning is one he still carries around. That’s a nice thing to build a thousand-plus bricks around.
The Blazing Phoenix just crossed 1,000 supporters and is now working toward the 5,000 mark, with 591 days left on the clock. If a poseable, fully articulated phoenix sounds better to you than one that only knows a single flap, head over to LEGO Ideas and give it your vote.
Some brewing setups look like they belong in a kitchen. Purestone looks like it escaped from an architect’s desk. With its faceted black ceramic body, square tasting cups, and upside-down pyramid filter, the whole set feels closer to a tiny Brutalist sculpture than a teapot and pour-over kit. The proportions are tight, stackable, and clearly considered. That visual sharpness is what grabs you first, especially in a category full of soft curves, glass cones, and familiar café gear.
Then it starts showing off. The same compact set handles gongfu tea and pour-over coffee through a single reusable alumina mineral filter, eliminating paper entirely. Gongfu brewing means steeping leaves directly in the pot and straining through the filter, a practice rooted in Chinese tea culture that prioritizes short steeps and full leaf expression. That means fewer throwaway parts, more of the drink’s natural aromatic oils, and a ritual that feels tidier and more intentional. If your countertop has ever looked like a coffee shop and a tea house got into an argument, this thing clearly came to restore peace.
The angular geometry is a stark difference from anything you’d otherwise find at .your local barista Purestone’s brutalist trapezoid pitcher body trades rounded contours for deliberately sharp edges that create natural grip points and double as thermal insulation from the heat inside. The square tasting cups, compact at 50ml, are built to stack cleanly. The drip tray, cast from the same raw mineral clay as the pitcher, uses a slanted three-dimensional wave contour tested repeatedly to lock the brewer snugly in place. It is a set designed from the geometry outward, not decorated after the fact.
Shaped like an inverted pyramid and sintered into a microporous structure, the alumina ore filter intercepts coffee grounds and tea particles while water flows through mineral-rich ceramic. Purestone claims this softens the water and reduces bitterness, an approach aligned with ceramic filtration science that Japanese makers like Kyuemon pioneered back in 1986. The non-porous outer layer handles physical sediment blocking; the inner microporous alumina does the mineral work. It is fully reusable, resets with a rinse, and preserves the aromatic oils that paper filters tend to quietly absorb. No paper waste, no metallic aftertaste from mesh screens.
Black Lubao ceramic clay goes into every piece, fired at 1,000 degrees in a kiln that vitrifies the material and bonds the matte frosted glaze to the surface. The process delivers stain resistance, thermal shock resilience, and a fingerprint-proof charcoal finish. The glaze is applied by hand before firing. Every component is then molded separately and hand-polished by artisans, with each bevel manually smoothed to remove what industrial casting leaves behind. The result is geometric in intent but warm in feel, and that contrast is what makes it work as a table object rather than just a shelf piece.
The pitcher’s handle is raised and widened into a three-dimensional form that creates an air gap between your hand and the hot ceramic body, keeping it cool without any insulating sleeve. The spout is hand-shaped into what Purestone calls an eagle beak cavity, which builds steady internal pressure and lets you dial the pour from a heavy stream to a fine trickle. Most ceramic spouts scatter and drip on the return. This one is designed to cut off cleanly. The tray completes the ergonomic picture, with a wave-contoured groove that holds the brewer steady and catches any drips that land off-target.
Zero electronic components, zero plastic parts, and zero rubber seals mean nothing in this set degrades or needs replacing after a couple of years. The reusable alumina filter eliminates the running cost of paper filters altogether. The primary materials are natural clay and mineral-based aluminum oxide, with no chemical coatings, no plastics, and no heavy metals anywhere in the mix. The custom EVA carry case in the Ultimate Package serves as permanent storage rather than packaging you toss on unboxing. It travels, stacks, and cleans with water.
Purestone is available now, with the standard set (brewer pot, two tasting cups, drip tray, and alumina ore filter) at a discounted $69. The Ultimate Package adds wooden pallets, the EVA carry case, and a 2-in-1 tea strainer and coffee spoon, priced at a discounted $129. No warranty period is specified in the available product details, but the all-ceramic, all-mineral construction makes longevity a materials argument rather than a mechanical one. Objects built from sintered clay fired at 1,000 degrees tend to outlast any guarantee. Global shipping begins November 2026.
Every camera product ever made has one thing in common: it needs you to operate it. A gimbal needs a hand to hold it. A drone needs a pilot with eyes on a controller. An action cam mounts somewhere on your body, which means it films from your body, not at it. Even the smartest AI tracking stand on the market still requires you to set it up, point it at where you’ll roughly be, and go do something interesting within its field of view. All of this adds up to a life spent maneuvering cameras instead of being in front of them, and the shots that matter most, the ones where you’re actually doing the thing, are consistently the ones you’re missing from.
Beni, from Palo Alto startup Mondo Robotics, is the robot that plays camera crew. It rides on four wheels, films in 4K HDR with 3-axis stabilization, hits 17.9 mph, and clears 10-inch obstacles mid-chase, getting itself back upright after a fall without any help from you. The team includes engineers from DJI and Tesla’s Optimus program, which explains how a 3.86-pound consumer robot ends up with hardware like that. It also has color-changing expressive eyes, a swappable hat, a name, and a personality that comes through in little nods and head shakes. That design language places Beni in a tradition Sony’s Aibo started in 1999, building robots people actually want to be around. The engineering is serious, the warmth is deliberate, and the combination puts Beni in territory most robotics products actively avoid.
The choice to give a camera robot a face, a name, and a wardrobe is a design statement, not a marketing gimmick. Beni’s eyes change color and express emotions, it nods and shakes its head, and the whole body is customizable through swappable hats, ear attachments, and protection plates, in whatever combination suits you. The character design sits somewhere between a cartoon character and a precision instrument, which sounds like a contradiction and somehow isn’t. Mondo Robotics understood that emotional connection determines how often a device actually leaves the house. A robot you find charming is one you take outside. One that reads like a spec sheet stays in the drawer.
Beni measures 8.5 by 7.1 by 7.1 inches and weighs 3.86 pounds, light enough to throw in a bag. It hits 17.9 mph (28.8 kph) to keep pace with skateboarders and runners, clears up to 10-inch obstacles to handle curbs and stairs, dodges obstacles with onboard sensing, and self-rights when it tips over. The self-recovery system sounds like a footnote until you actually send Beni across gravel and watch it eat dirt, bounce back up, and continue tracking without a second of interruption. A creator who ran it through grass, gravel, trails, and concrete stairs for a full week reported footage that never stopped rolling. That kind of reliability is what separates a robot from a gadget.
The camera shoots 4K with HDR coloring that handles extreme lighting without manual adjustment. HybridFlow Stabilization combines four-axis mechanical and electronic stabilization, which keeps footage smooth even when Beni is clattering across rough terrain at full speed. Storage is 32GB internally with a microSD slot for expansion. Everything core, tracking, filming, obstacle avoidance, runs entirely on-device, and your footage stays on the robot’s local storage. The only cloud connection Beni ever makes is for the optional AI auto-editing feature, and only when you explicitly give permission. For a camera product in 2026, that’s a privacy setup worth paying attention to.
Tail tracking, side tracking, front tracking, and circle tracking give Beni four distinct cinematic modes, each producing footage that most solo filmers never actually get to see. Tail mode keeps Beni behind you at pace, a proper chase-cam shot without anyone chasing. Side mode locks it right beside you, framing you against the rushing landscape the way a Hollywood tracking rig would. Front mode has Beni reversing ahead while filming your face, which turns out to be unusually good for capturing effort and expression mid-activity. Circle mode sends it into a continuous 360-degree orbit for sweeping hero shots. The magnetic Motion Tracker, worn on your wrist or clipped to your bag, keeps Beni locked on even when you briefly move out of frame, and doubles as a manual controller for directing movement without touching your phone.
Beni’s auto-editing feature builds highlights from your raw footage using AI models that Mondo Robotics has customized, so you’re not manually scrubbing through hours of clips for ten good seconds. The company is clear that this is the only opt-in cloud feature; every other function runs locally. Pilot Mode sits at the other end of the control spectrum, letting you drive Beni manually from your phone for footage from its low-slung ground-level perspective. The vantage point is genuinely unlike anything a handheld camera can produce, just by virtue of where the lens sits relative to the ground.
Battery life runs 1.5 hours per charge, with a swappable design that stretches to 4.5 hours across three batteries. The Standard Combo, including Beni, Motion Tracker, hat, chest protection plate, and one battery, is available at $549 (discounted from the $799 retail price). The Explore Combo adds three batteries, a charging hub, and off-road wheels for $699. Individual add-ons, including extra batteries at $59, off-road wheel pairs at $9, ears and hats packs at $9, and protection plates at $9, are available separately. Every unit comes with a 12-month limited warranty from the date of activation, and global customer support is available at mondorobotics.com. Shipping covers the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand, with customs fees included on a flat $10 shipping fee.
Remember where you were on December 12, 2021? If you’re an F1 fan, chances are you do, because that was the day Max Verstappen snatched his first world title away from Lewis Hamilton on the literal final lap, in the literal final corner, off the back of a safety car restart that stewards are probably still debating in group chats somewhere. I was rooting for Hamilton that day, and honestly, watching it unfold live still ranks as one of the most gutting sports moments I’ve sat through. Verstappen fans got a legend born in real time. The rest of us got years of “what if” conversations that still spark up whenever Abu Dhabi comes up.
F1 Authentics just gave fans a way to own a literal piece of that chaos. The official F1 memorabilia arm, run by Memento Exclusives, has dropped a new Mystery Box collection where every single box guarantees a genuine piece of bodywork from the RB16B, the Honda powered Red Bull that carried Verstappen to that maiden championship. Only 1,000 boxes exist worldwide, with 500 going up for grabs online, priced around £1,000 GBP ($1,348 USD) a pop, which also happens to be the minimum guaranteed value of everything packed inside.
That RB16B earned every bit of the spotlight it’s getting now. It was an evolution of the 2020 car, finally sharp enough to go toe to toe with a dominant Mercedes squad, and it carried Verstappen through nine wins across one of the most contentious title fights modern F1 has produced. Hamilton led early, Verstappen clawed the lead back mid-season, and the two arrived at Abu Dhabi dead level on points. We all know how that ended. Owning a fragment of that car means owning a piece of the exact machine that decided, for better or worse depending who you asked, one of the sport’s most argued about championships.
Photo by Batchelor/XPB Images
Somewhere in that run of a thousand boxes sits the real chaos generator, a redeemable ticket for an official F1 replica front wing and nose, pulled from cars across Aston Martin, Cadillac, Racing Bulls, Red Bull, Williams, or Alpine, and valued north of twenty grand. It’s a genuinely wild pull rate, turning what could have been a straightforward memorabilia drop into something closer to a scratch card for grown adults with disposable income and a soft spot for motorsport history.
Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images
F1 Authentics has been building toward drops like this all year, following an earlier sold out box tied to Lando Norris’s championship car and a March release that hid an £89,000 racing simulator inside one of just 150 units. F1 memorabilia is getting gamified, and this RB16B drop might be the most emotionally loaded chapter yet, especially if you were the one yelling at your TV that night in Abu Dhabi.
Feeling like you’ve heard this before? You sort of have. Last year Apple quietly shipped a Mac Studio with mismatched M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips, and buyers barely blinked, since Studio shoppers expect spec weirdness. Now the same move looks headed for the Mac mini, the one Mac people buy precisely because it is simple, affordable, and predictable. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is testing units that pair a new M6 chip with a carried over M5 Pro.
That is an odd combination to put inside Apple’s most straightforward computer. The Mac mini has never asked buyers to think twice about chip lineage, and now it may become the clearest example yet of how messy Apple’s silicon strategy has gotten.
The mismatch traces back to a decision Apple made months earlier, and it has nothing to do with the Mac mini specifically. Apple canceled the M6 Pro and M6 Max outright, choosing to fast track the AI focused M7 lineup instead of building a Pro tier that would have been outdated within months of shipping. That leaves a gap in the middle of the chip family, and the Mac mini’s step up configuration is the one stuck filling it with last year’s silicon. I get the engineering logic. I still think it is a rough position to put a customer in.
Here is the part that will annoy anyone who buys on spec sheets alone. An M5 Pro comfortably beats a base M6 on the multi core and graphics work that Pro tier buyers actually care about, so the generation label is closer to marketing noise than a real downgrade. Performance wise, the pricier mini still wins. But nobody wants to spend more money and watch the box on the shelf next to it wear a newer number. Apple has spent a decade training customers to read chip generations as a shorthand for how current a machine is, and this configuration quietly breaks that shorthand.
There is a supply chain story sitting underneath all of this too, and it is worth naming. The global memory shortage that pushed MacBook Pro prices up by three hundred dollars in June is the same pressure shaping this roadmap. Apple already pulled higher RAM configurations from some Mac mini and Mac Studio models earlier this year, and Gurman’s own reporting notes the mismatched mini’s exact chip and memory setup still depends on how memory supply plays out. None of this is locked in yet. Testing configurations shift constantly, and Apple has not committed to a release window.
What makes this genuinely interesting from a design standpoint is the mini’s shell. That aluminum box has not changed since the M4 redesign in 2024, and it may end up carrying three chip generations without a single exterior update. Apple has effectively split the Mac mini’s identity in two, treating the outside as a fixed platform and the inside as a variable it can rearrange however the roadmap demands. That is a different kind of product thinking than the tidy, synchronized launches Apple built its reputation on.
Whether that flexibility reads as smart engineering or a confusing shopping experience will depend entirely on how Apple prices and markets the two configurations when they actually arrive. For now, anyone holding out for a clean M5 Mac mini should probably let that expectation go. The machine that shows up later this year might carry a name nobody predicted, wrapped in a body nobody will notice changed at all.
The Pixel 11 lineup arrived this week with a genuinely great redesign. The camera bar is 40 percent thinner, the glass runs edge to edge, and for the first time in a while a Pixel actually looks like it evolved instead of just got a new coat of paint. And then there’s HiLight, the one piece of new hardware Google actually wants you to talk about. A small LED cluster tucked into the corner of that same camera bar, ready to glow when Gemini is thinking or when someone you love is calling.
It is, in essence, Google finally admitting it missed the old Nexus notification LED and bringing it back. Five colors, a glow for Gemini, a glow for your favorite caller, and that’s the whole feature list on day one. Nothing to complain about here, except that Nothing exists. The London phone brand has spent years turning its own version of this idea into an actual playground, mini-games, custom widgets, an SDK anyone can build on. Google clearly has the engineering muscle to do something just as ambitious with HiLight down the line. It just chose not to, at least not yet.
Designer: Google
Before we get into that though, credit where it’s due. Hold a Pixel 11 next to a Pixel 10 and the difference is immediate, not the kind that only shows up in marketing photos. The bar sits almost flush now, and Google’s claim that it’s basically bumpless with a case on actually checks out in person. Under that glass, Tensor G6 lands on a 2nm node, Google’s first, promising 25 percent faster browsing, 15 percent quicker app launches, and on-device AI running up to 3.5 times faster while using less power. The Pixel 11 gets a new 48MP main sensor with 56 percent more light sensitivity and a telephoto stretching to 30x Super Zoom. This is a very complete phone before you even get to the Pro models.
The Pro and Pro XL push further with a 50MP main sensor, a redesigned 48MP telephoto, Portrait Mode at 5x, and 120x Pro Zoom, sitting under a 3,600-nit display that Google claims is twice as scratch resistant as last year’s. Titan M3 adds quantum-safe boot security on top. The Pixel 11 Pro Fold deserves its own mention here too. It shed almost 10 percent of its weight and a millimeter of thickness, down to 10.1mm closed, while Google claims triple the durability thanks to a redesigned gearless hinge. The crease is genuinely harder to spot than last year’s, and the whole thing folds flat enough to stop feeling like a novelty. If you told me a year ago Google would have the most convincing foldable in its own lineup, I would not have believed you.
Now, the part everyone will bring up regardless of how the rest of this goes: RAM. The Pro and Pro XL start at 12GB in their base 256GB configs, down from 16GB last year, and Google is blaming this on a supplier RAM shortage hitting the entire industry. Memory manufacturers have been shifting production capacity toward AI server chips, and consumer RAM and NAND prices have spiked hard enough this year that people are half-jokingly calling it RAMageddon. It is a real problem, and Google is far from the only phone maker feeling it. Storage doubling to 256GB as a base softens the blow a little, but a $100 price bump alongside a RAM cut is still a hard sell. Fair enough on the supply chain excuse. Less fair asking Pro buyers to pay more for less unless they climb a storage tier.
Back to HiLight, because it deserves the real estate. That LED cluster sits right where the temperature sensor used to live on older Pixels, which is a strange trade to make for something this limited. Google’s official pitch is that HiLight keeps you informed without the distraction of staring at a screen, which is a very polished way of saying there weren’t enough ideas to fill the space. Glowing when Gemini talks and flashing a color for favorite callers is a fine start, not an entire feature. Compare that to what’s happening across the pond. Nothing’s Glyph Matrix on the Phone (3) packs 489 individually lit LEDs into what functions as a tiny secondary screen, complete with an open SDK that lets anyone build their own widgets and games. People made a working ball maze. A tilt-controlled Magic 8 Ball. A contact dialer you can use without touching the main display. None of it is essential, but all of it is fun, and fun counts for something when you’re asking someone to pay a premium for a light.
Google clearly has the horsepower for something bigger here. Tensor G6 alone proves the company isn’t short on engineering muscle, and the camera bar redesign shows the industrial design team knows exactly what it’s doing right now. HiLight feels like the output of a team that had a great idea, then stopped one meeting short of making it good. I want to see where this goes in a year or two, because the foundation Google just built, the hardware, the placement, even the name, is genuinely solid. It just needs an actual reason to exist beyond telling you Gemini is thinking.
The Pixel Tag comes in exactly one color, a grey green called Fog, wrapped around stainless steel with a G logo stamped right on the front. It’s the same script Apple wrote with the AirTag and Samsung copied with the SmartTag2. A tracker spends its entire life clipped to your keys or your dog’s collar or tucked into a backpack pocket, which makes it one of the most personal objects you own. Google, of all companies, knows how to make hardware feel less like hardware. It just didn’t bother here.
Somebody at DJI figured out that a $60 microphone could come with snap-on decals, because apparently even a tiny accessory deserves a little personality. Motorola figured out something similar with the Moto Tag, which actually ships in sage green and a soft blue instead of the usual black or white default. So it’s not like nobody in tech has thought about this. It’s just that almost nobody applies it to trackers, and now Google has joined the long list of companies that had the chance and passed.
The excuse I keep hearing, and I use that word deliberately, is durability. Metal survives drops, fabric doesn’t, case closed. Except my phone survives daily abuse inside a woven case, and so does yours, and so does every rugged Kevlar sleeve sold by the millions for devices far more fragile than a coin sized tracker. Nobody worries their phone case is going to disintegrate because it has some texture on it. A tracker being too delicate for color or grip is not a real constraint. It’s a decision that got dressed up as one.
Underneath that decision is genuinely solid engineering, for what it’s worth. The Pixel Tag measures 1.8 by 1.1 inches and just 5.4mm thick, which makes it noticeably slimmer than the AirTag’s 8mm body. It runs on a replaceable CR2032 battery rated for about a year, carries an IP67 rating for dust and water, and pairs instantly over Fast Pair with any Android 9 device or newer. The headline feature is Ultra Wideband combined with Bluetooth Channel Sounding, which gives you a literal on-screen arrow and distance reading instead of a vague “getting warmer” signal, though that trick needs Android 16 and Bluetooth 6.0 to actually work. It taps into Find Hub, Google’s network of over a billion Android phones, so a lost item can get spotted even when it is nowhere near your own devices. You can share access with up to ten people, ring it from a Pixel Watch, or ask Gemini through your Pixel Buds to ring it for you. All of that ships November 11 for $29, or $99 for a four pack.
Google already knows how to wrap good engineering in an object people actually want to look at, because it solved the exact same brief years ago with its speakers. The Nest Mini gets a soft, woven top because Google understood people don’t want to display a hunk of bare plastic on their kitchen counter. The Nest Audio does the same thing, fabric front, rounded edges, an object designed to belong in a room rather than announce itself as a gadget in one. That instinct exists inside the same company that just shipped a keychain accessory in one shade of grey with a logo dead center, like it needed to remind you it’s tech.
A tracker’s entire job is to sit quietly on the stuff you actually care about. It should feel like something you chose, not something you tolerated because the tech underneath happened to be good. Find Hub integration, UWB precision finding, a battery that lasts a year, all of that is genuinely solid work. But solid engineering wrapped in a logo stamped on steel isn’t a finished product. It’s half of one, and Google, weirdly, is the company with the least excuse for stopping there.
Somewhere in your house right now, there is a perfectly good iPad/Android Pad doing absolutely nothing. Maybe it is the one you replaced two years ago when the new model came out, or the one your kid borrowed and never gave back, now sitting on a nightstand charging for no reason. It has a great screen, solid processing power, and more capability than most factory-installed car infotainment systems from the last decade. The problem was never the tablet. The problem was always that nobody made a convincing way to put it in a car and have it behave like an actual car display, CarPlay and all. HERMIX NANO is a credit-card-thin wireless bridge device that finally does exactly that.
Roughly the shape and size of an iPod Classic, the HERMIX NANO is a compact wireless hub that sits in your car, pairs to your phone, and turns your mounted tablet or phone into a fully functional smart car infotainment display. It supports wireless CarPlay for iPhone and wireless Android Auto for Android, designed for vehicles without a built-in display, or for drivers tired of slow and outdated factory systems. Plug in the included 1080p backup camera and the tablet automatically switches to a reverse view the moment you shift into reverse, no manual tapping required. Who knew that a $74 device could transform your existing car and tablet into a new car experience that you’d otherwise pay tens of thousands of dollars for.
Mounting an old tablet PC to your dashboard and opening Google Maps already works, technically. But a tablet stuck in a car still behaves like an iPad or Android Pad, which means you are dealing with a regular tablet interface, regular apps, regular notifications, and a screen layout that was never designed around driving. HERMIX NANO changes the operating system experience entirely by turning that tablet into a proper CarPlay or Android Auto display, with the simplified app grid, large touch targets, voice-first controls, and glanceable navigation layout people already know from newer cars. That shift is the whole point. Instead of juggling a tablet UI meant for the couch, you get a driving interface built around quick inputs, cleaner menus, easier media control, and maps that make sense when your eyes need to get back on the road in about half a second.
Setup involves installing the device, connecting the power, and downloading the HERMIX NANO app, and the whole process requires no tools, no rewiring, and no dashboard modification of any kind. You power on the HERMIX NANO, find it in the app, connect via Bluetooth, pair your phone, and you are done. After that first pairing, the connection happens automatically every time you get in the car. iPhone users get wireless CarPlay with Siri, navigation, music, calls, and every app Apple has approved for CarPlay, while Android users get wireless Android Auto with Google Assistant, Google Maps, Waze, Spotify, and the rest. Whether you are on Android or iOS, the Hermix Nano app is available free on Google Play and the App Store, and unlocks all features immediately.
The HERMIX NANO also packs a 1080p HD backup camera that mounts to the rear of your car – the moment you shift into reverse, HERMIX NANO automatically wakes the camera up, with no manual operation needed, instantly turning the tablet into an HD large-screen rearview mirror that gives a clear view of every blind spot (again, something your existing iPad or Android Pad wouldn’t do). A backup camera that routes to a full tablet screen is a meaningfully better experience than one squeezed onto the three-inch display of a typical aftermarket head unit. Shift back out of reverse and the infotainment interface returns immediately, with no settings menu and no manual switching. The result is a clearer view of blind spots and greater confidence when parking. For anyone navigating tight urban lots daily, this alone is a compelling reason to pay attention.
On the tablet version of the HERMIX NANO app, a dedicated split-screen feature unlocks a more flexible display experience, with multiple customizable modes including HUD Mode. HUD mode gives a simplified navigation view for distraction-free driving, Mini Map mode delivers a real-time compact navigation display, and Family Album mode showcases selected photos and videos for a personalized in-car screen experience. The HERMIX NANO features five customizable physical buttons on the device body, allowing you to personalize controls based on your driving habits. Easily access frequently used functions such as volume adjustment, track switching, phone calls, and map launch. A long press of the “OK” button allows manual rear camera activation, providing safer and more convenient control while driving.That last one is genuinely useful if you want to check what is behind you while parallel parking without actually putting the car in reverse. The display also auto-rotates based on how the device is mounted, whether portrait or landscape, adapting instantly with no manual setup required.
For global compatibility, the system supports left-hand drive and right-hand drive modes, letting users switch the UI layout according to their vehicle setup for optimal visibility and comfort. The HERMIX NANO interface automatically switches between Light and Dark Mode according to surrounding brightness, providing optimal visibility and a comfortable viewing experience during both daytime and nighttime driving.Firmware updates push wirelessly through the app, meaning the device can improve over time without any physical servicing. By combining automotive-grade hardware, seamless wireless connectivity, and deeply integrated software, HERMIX built a compact smart hub that transforms devices people already own into a complete in-car smart experience. The obvious audience is anyone driving a vehicle more than five years old, but it is equally relevant for drivers whose factory systems simply never matched the software quality of modern CarPlay and Android Auto.
The HERMIX NANO is priced at $99 retail, with early pricing at $74 for a single kit that includes the device, a 1080p HD rearview camera, a USB-Type C cable, a Type C-to-C cable, and a user manual. A two-pack runs $138 and a three-pack $178 at early pricing, and a tablet car holder add-on is available separately for $9. Shipping is estimated to begin in October 2026, covering the US, Canada, the EU, the UK, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and most other major markets. The Hermix Nano app is already live and free on both the App Store and Google Play.
Sony has a pattern with these limited edition consoles now. Announce a big first party or Marvel game, dress up a PS5 to match, sell it alongside a matching controller. Ghost of Yotei got the black and gold treatment last time around, and it was fine, if a little safe. Wolverine is where that formula gets an upgrade.
This time Sony gave us two console designs instead of one. Battle Yellow is unapologetic, claw gouges and a screaming Wolverine face on a bright yellow panel. Adamantium is the plot twist, the same claw motif but stripped down to brushed metal that looks closer to a premium appliance than a video game tie in. Two designs, two totally different personalities, and somehow neither one feels like the compromise pick.
Battle Yellow is the flagship of the two, sold as a full PS5 Digital Edition bundle for $649.99 with a matching DualSense controller and a code for the game. The artwork comes from Jock, the Scottish comic artist who worked on Wolverine’s key art, and you can actually tell. The claw slashes and the inked portrait have that loose, hand drawn energy comics get right and games usually flatten out. It is a rare case of licensed hardware art that does not look like clip art stapled onto a console.
Adamantium skips the yellow entirely and goes for brushed silver, but only as a console cover for PS5 Pro owners plus a standalone controller, no full bundle here. That is honestly the smarter buy for anyone who wants the Wolverine tie in without turning their entertainment center into a comic shop display. Same claw details, completely different mood. It reads expensive in a way the yellow version was never trying to.Adamantium skips the yellow entirely and goes for brushed silver, but only as a console cover for PS5 Pro owners plus a standalone controller, no full bundle here. That is honestly the smarter buy for anyone who wants the Wolverine tie in without turning their entertainment center into a comic shop display. Same claw details, completely different mood. It reads expensive in a way the yellow version was never trying to.
Here is where it gets less fun. This entire lineup drops during Sony’s second PS5 price hike in under a year, with the standard console now sitting a hundred dollars above where it started. So a $649.99 bundle for a digital only console, no disc drive option at all, lands at a moment when PS5 pricing is already a sore subject for a lot of players. The comments under every Wolverine reveal video prove that. People are annoyed about the missing disc drive way more than they are annoyed about yellow paint.
I get why Sony leans into these drops even now, maybe especially now. A great design distracts from a rough price conversation better than any spec sheet does, and Jock’s artwork is genuinely good enough to pull that off. But good design and good timing are not the same thing, and this lineup is proof you can nail one without fully nailing the other.
Sony has a pattern with these limited edition consoles now. Announce a big first party or Marvel game, dress up a PS5 to match, sell it alongside a matching controller. Ghost of Yotei got the black and gold treatment last time around, and it was fine, if a little safe. Wolverine is where that formula gets an upgrade.
This time Sony gave us two console designs instead of one. Battle Yellow is unapologetic, claw gouges and a screaming Wolverine face on a bright yellow panel. Adamantium is the plot twist, the same claw motif but stripped down to brushed metal that looks closer to a premium appliance than a video game tie in. Two designs, two totally different personalities, and somehow neither one feels like the compromise pick.
Battle Yellow is the flagship of the two, sold as a full PS5 Digital Edition bundle for $649.99 with a matching DualSense controller and a code for the game. The artwork comes from Jock, the Scottish comic artist who worked on Wolverine’s key art, and you can actually tell. The claw slashes and the inked portrait have that loose, hand drawn energy comics get right and games usually flatten out. It is a rare case of licensed hardware art that does not look like clip art stapled onto a console.
Adamantium skips the yellow entirely and goes for brushed silver, but only as a console cover for PS5 Pro owners plus a standalone controller, no full bundle here. That is honestly the smarter buy for anyone who wants the Wolverine tie in without turning their entertainment center into a comic shop display. Same claw details, completely different mood. It reads expensive in a way the yellow version was never trying to.Adamantium skips the yellow entirely and goes for brushed silver, but only as a console cover for PS5 Pro owners plus a standalone controller, no full bundle here. That is honestly the smarter buy for anyone who wants the Wolverine tie in without turning their entertainment center into a comic shop display. Same claw details, completely different mood. It reads expensive in a way the yellow version was never trying to.
Here is where it gets less fun. This entire lineup drops during Sony’s second PS5 price hike in under a year, with the standard console now sitting a hundred dollars above where it started. So a $649.99 bundle for a digital only console, no disc drive option at all, lands at a moment when PS5 pricing is already a sore subject for a lot of players. The comments under every Wolverine reveal video prove that. People are annoyed about the missing disc drive way more than they are annoyed about yellow paint.
I get why Sony leans into these drops even now, maybe especially now. A great design distracts from a rough price conversation better than any spec sheet does, and Jock’s artwork is genuinely good enough to pull that off. But good design and good timing are not the same thing, and this lineup is proof you can nail one without fully nailing the other.
