What’s on your desk, Dominic Preston?

Not all of The Verge’s staff live in the US. For example, news editor Dominic Preston is based in London and is, as he says, “responsible for keeping our news coverage ticking over in UK mornings before the US team comes online.” He also curates our new Verge Daily newsletter and covers Android phones, especially all the models that don’t launch in the US. 

And outside of work? “I’m a bit of a food obsessive,” he says, “and run a newsletter called Braise where I review London restaurants and cookbooks, and occasionally try my own hand at recipe writing. That means I spend most of my free time cooking, eating, or thinking about food, and so also a decent amount of time in the gym trying to make up for that.” 

Where is your workspace located?

This is an office that I share with my partner in our flat in London. It used to be a second bedroom, but now we’ve kitted it out with two desks and a sofa bed for the occasional times we actually have guests to stay. My partner is a PhD student, so her working hours are a bit unpredictable, and split between here and school — which means that 90 percent of the time I’ve got the office to myself.

Could you tell us about your desk(s)?

We both have standing desks. Mine is an Autonomous SmartDesk 2 that’s electronic and automatic, hers an old pneumatic model by Bakker Elkhuizen that they don’t make anymore, which annoys her because it requires a bit of effort to shift up and down. They’re both decorated with self-healing cutting mats, which are still occasionally used for arts and crafts (or as the backdrop for my product photos) but mostly double as giant mouse mats.

You have both a chair and a walking station. What are they, and how well do they work for you?

The chair is a secondhand Herman Miller. It actually used to be my partner’s, while I sat in a big Duelhawk Jet Black PU gaming chair (also no longer available), until we each realized we preferred the other’s seat and swapped. I’m old enough, and sore enough, to be willing to invest a little in the chair I’ll be using every day anyway.

The walking pad is a pretty cheap one from Mobvoi. I actually bought it immediately after reading a piece by my colleague Victoria Song on a different Mobvoi model, and following her advice I’ve made no attempt to touch its smart features or track my workouts; so far it’s served me well. I just use it as slow as it goes, and try to spend as much of every morning walking on it as possible — on a good day I’ll rack up two or three hours of steady walking time; on a bad day I’ll keep putting it off until the coffee hits and never quite get going. Either way, I let myself sit down for the afternoon, which is more likely to be concentrated writing time — I find it hard to do anything too creative or complicated while walking at the same time.

(I know, I know, my cable management isn’t great. I tend to be very tidy, but cables are one of the few things I absolutely don’t have the patience to organize. Sadly, having a standing desk really lays bare those sins, so I may have to force myself to get better about it.)

Here’s the long one: tell us about the various tech devices you’re using. 

My current setup is slightly awkwardly trapped between my work and personal computers, though I have some plans in the works to improve it.

My work machine is an M2 MacBook Air, which lives propped up on a Ugreen laptop stand. It’s connected to the monitor on the right, a cheap 24-inch QHD Philips model that I bought in 2020. 

The confusing part of my setup is that second monitor, an embarrassingly old Acer one. That’s because I’ve also got a desktop PC that I use outside of work, and that connects to both monitors. At the end of the work day I can flip the MacBook shut, and my personal setup is good to go. It’s all unnecessarily cluttered, though, especially since the MacBook can’t support both external monitors at once, so this year’s big upgrade will probably be a 32-inch 4K monitor to replace the pair of them. I’ll happily take any recommendations from the comments!

My keyboard is the Logitech MX Keys S, which I love. I’m as much of a sucker for a good mechanical board as the next guy, but I love low-profile, full-size keyboards, and good mechanical options in that space are few and far between. I used to use a Hexgears Venture, but I ran it into the ground eventually, and this has served me well since.

The mouse is also Logitech, though it isn’t my usual one. I picked up this MX Anywhere 3S a while back to use when I’m traveling to trade shows and product launches, and usually have the larger MX Master 3S on my desk. Sadly the left button on that has given up the ghost, and I’m holding off on replacing it in the hopes that the long-rumored MX Master 4 is about to launch.

Continuing the Logitech theme (I’m just now realizing quite how much of my desk setup was built by them), I have an old Z337 2.1 speaker system that just barely fits on the desk right now (another reason I need to switch to a single monitor), and a Brio 500 webcam that I mostly like for how easy it is to flip the built-in privacy shutter.

Everything connects up through an Anker Prime USB hub that’s almost certainly more powerful than I need it to be, but has lots of front-facing USB ports for charging my array of phones, helped by a Xiaomi 50W wireless charging stand, which made more sense when I was using a Xiaomi 14 Ultra as my main phone, but is slightly wasted now — other phones don’t hit that max charging speed.

I tend to have a rotating cast of phones floating around my desk, though this is relatively tidy for me — on messy days I can have up to five or six handsets taking up space. Beyond the Vivo X200 Ultra I used to take these photos, you can see the Fairphone 6 and Huawei Pura X, the two phones I’ve most recently been testing for reviews. 

Tell us about your camera collection.

I decided I wanted to try out film photography back in 2019, because I was spending a lot more time writing about cameras as part of my phone reviews and using cameras as part of my job. I figured film would be a good way to make myself learn more about the core principles. 

I picked up this Canon EF on eBay. It’s a ’70s SLR with a metal body, which means it’s heavy but is built like a tank — I suspect it will outlast me. It came with a Canon 50mm lens, and I’ve gradually picked up a few cheap options to go with it: a 28mm wide-angle, a 35-70mm for when I want flexibility, and a 70-210mm telephoto I bought specifically for a safari in Kenya a couple years back. I always tell myself I’ll buy better-quality lenses when I’m a good enough photographer to get the most out of them, but I’ll probably just have to bite the bullet eventually.

The microphone living alongside them all is the Rode NT-USB, which I use for podcasts and videos, though I’d like to get a boom arm for it so I can store it around the desk.

You’ve got a lot of toys and games on those shelves! How long have you been collecting them?

This is a really motley assortment of things I’ve collected over the years — some bought, some gifted, some acquired from an old office clearout. There’s more dotted around the rest of my apartment, though my girlfriend is on an (understandable) mission to concentrate it all in the office.

Do you have any favorites?

I’m an absolute Alien obsessive, and I actually have two full-size facehuggers, one plushie and one vinyl, which I adore. There’s also a (sadly not full-size) power loader from Aliens, which I can’t get enough of. Elsewhere in the apartment I have a few original ’90s Street Sharks and Small Soldiers action figures, which are still waiting for the right shelf to display them on.

The board game collection is small but steadily growing. I’ve been playing a lot of Gloomhaven over the last year or so, though Betrayal at House on the Hill is probably the game that gets broken out most often. I’ve also got a healthy collection of D&D 5e and Alien RPG sourcebooks — I can strongly recommend the latter, and that’s not just the fanboy in me speaking!

Okay, tell us about that beautiful cat.

That’s Noodle, one of our two cats (the other is Loaf, and yes, of course they have an Instagram account).

She’s actually a recent addition to my desk. We’ve had the cats for a couple of years, but in the last few months Noodle has decided she really wants to hang out with me while I work, and will happily lie down on my keyboard to do so. We set her up with a little blanket bed instead, which she now sleeps in about half the day, though she still isn’t above a keyboard nap when the mood strikes. The biggest surprise to me is that she doesn’t seem to mind the standing desk going up or down while she’s on it, which I expected would cause a bit of panic.

Photographs by Dominic Preston / The Verge