Is it just me, or is anyone else incredibly impressed with The Verge? Their reviews are incredibly detailed, and yet they still manage to make extremely interesting, short, and informative video reviews for many products. Add to that the fact that the site, at least to me, is absolutely gorgeous, and I think I've found my new favorite gadget site.
I'm really digging it as well. The layout is pretty great. Whatever the CMS is, they're getting a ton of flexibility out of it. It feels like a more integrated media experience -- typography, video, photography, infographics, user comments, all pretty nicely wound.
I like the content and I like all of their aesthetic decisions but I’m always a bit overwhelmed by their layout. There’s just too much screaming for attention for my taste.
The site is obviously great despite that (and certainly also impressive).
Agree, although I have to add it has some terrible performance issues. The site, especially the front page, is hardly usable on slower PCs (netbooks, for example). I guess all these custom fonts are at fault here.
I must dissent on gorgeous: to me, it's a triumph of style over practicality.
It looks like a magazine page (perhaps one you'd see advertising architecture, or furniture) made flesh in the browser: the pictures are too big, the headlines are too big, the text column wanders from the left side of the page to the right, and it does all of this with highly excessive CPU consumption.
On Firefox it's particularly painful - on an i7 920, merely selecting text takes over a second - while even on Chrome, the fans start up and blare as a core hits 100% for several seconds as the page loads.
It's not down to custom fonts either, as I have those disabled in Firefox.
It all adds up to make me want to avoid the site in future, knowing I'll be assured of a laggy unpleasant experience.
100% concur here. I have an i7 w/ 8GB RAM and the site is very jerky FF7. Everytime i switch to it's tab FF hangs for at least a few seconds. The design is also very bus, way too much going on.
That said, if the content is good enough, i can deal with that. Maybe I'll just block JS for this site since i suspect that's the primary issue here.
When the top 8 people at Engadget leave to start their own site, you can bet it'll be beautiful.
according to wikipedia:
On April 3, 2011, The New York Times posted an article on their website announcing that "eight of the more prominent editorial and technology staff members at Engadget have left or are leaving AOL and are about to build a new gadget site". The group included former Engadget editor in chief Joshua Topolsky, managing editor Nilay Patel, editors Paul Miller, Joanna Stern, Chris Ziegler, and Ross Miller, product manager Justin Glow, and developer Dan Chilton.
I love the fact that the reviews seem to be fanboy (girl) and drama-free, and that the devices are evaluated fairly on their merits, regardless of their sources. The reviews are detailed enough to be useful, while more-detailed reviews like the multi-pagers at Ars and Anandtech can be overkill, for me.
Mine used to be Engadget, but the comment quality is simply awful on the website with flame wars springing up every which way.
I think some of the top-level editors of Engadget left to start The Verge. Because of this, the actual product reviews on Engadget, which I initially liked, have decreased in robustness as well.
