Welcome to the Vergecast, flagship podcast of phones that are also laptops and tablets and maybe kind of smartwatches.

I'm Richard Fend, David Pierce, and I just got a new game for the Nintendo Switch, and this is a surprisingly big deal to me.

So I'm sure I've talked about this before, but my like true sweet spot era of gaming

growing up was the Nintendo 64, which means I logged, you know, a million hours on GoldenE. I played

a lot of Mario Party. I played a lot of Mario Golf. But the Nintendo 64 game for me was Mario tennis. It was the game I played against all of my friends, all of the time. We would have these epic five set, like three hour long matches. It was the best game ever to sort of sit next to somebody and have a conversation while you also were playing a video game because there's a lot happening, but you don't have to fully focus. I loved it very much. But anyway, this new game, Mario Tennis Fever, just came out for the Switch 2, so I immediately got it.

And I have to say, so far, it's like, it's good. It's kind of a lot. These games have gotten

much more complicated and gimmicky and just kind of wacky over time. They're all trying to bring more stuff

into it. And that's frankly not for me. I liked when it was just tennis. But this is still tennis

on the switch and I will play it presumably for decades. I'm very excited about that. Anyway,

I'm going to put this away because I'm just going to get distracted otherwise. Today in the show, we're going to do two things. First, we're going to talk to Alison Johnson about an experiment she's been doing, about whether she can actually use a folding phone as a computer. This is a thing people have been talking about forever. It's sort of the dream of big phones is that they can adapt to be other things. Allison has given it a real try. She's bought some gear. She's used the thing, and she's going to tell us how it went. Then Jacob Feldman, our friend from Sportico, is going to come on and catch us up on the state of sports streaming. We have some YouTube TV news. The Super Bowl just happened. The Olympics is going on right now. And it seems like a good moment is to just catch up on what it means to be a sports fan in 2026.

Plus, we have a hotline question about foldable phones, which happens to be right up my alley at this moment. I'm very excited to talk about it.

All of that is coming up in just a sec. But first, I'm going to go win this tournament

because I play with Lefty Luigi and I am unstoppable in Mario Tennis. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right

back.

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