Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 02/25 - Mobile World Congress Headlines

Episode Date: February 25, 2019

It’s a whole slew of headlines from Mobile World Congress: more foldable phones, dates for 5G chip sets and 5G coverage rollouts, and Microsoft unveils its HoloLens2. Plus: why Wikidata proves the bots still need us. Sponsors: Wix.com/podcast DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Links: MICROSOFT’S HOLOLENS 2: A $3,500 MIXED REALITY HEADSET FOR THE FACTORY, NOT THE LIVING ROOM (The Verge) Huawei Launches the Mate X: Folding in a New Direction (AnAndTech) I held the future in my hands, and it was foldable (TheVerge) Sprint’s 5G network launches in May (The Verge) T-Mobile delays full 600MHz 5G launch until second half of 2019 (CNET) microSD Express unlocks hyper-fast data speeds for mobile devices (Engadget) SanDisk and Micron announce the world’s first 1TB microSD card (MSPowerUser.com) The latest Android devices now let you log into apps without requiring a password (The Verge) INSIDE THE ALEXA-FRIENDLY WORLD OF WIKIDATA (Wired) Princeton Tech Meetup Details Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme ride home from Monday, February 25th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, there's a whole slew of headlines from Mobile World Congress, more foldable phones, dates for 5G chipsets, and 5G coverage rollouts, and Microsoft unveiled its HoloLens 2.

Plus, why Wikidata proves the bots still need us. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Over the weekend, Mobile World Congress kicked off in Barcelona, and yes, there was a lot of 5G talk, more foldable phones. We're going to get to all of that in a second. But before we do, Microsoft made a bunch of interesting headlines yesterday, centering around a different aspect of the term mobile. Microsoft has debuted its HoloLens 2,

what looks like a more comfortable, lighter, arm-powered, mixed reality headset, available for pre-order starting at $3,500. Deter Bone at The Verge had a pretty detailed look at this, and his initial take is interesting. This is an iterative device where everything about version one was improved with an eye towards greater adoption. And according to Deeter, mission accomplished, quote, I saw a hologram off to the side because the field of view in which they can appear is much larger than before. I bent down and didn't worry about an awkward headset shifting around because it was better balanced on my head.

I pushed a button just by pushing a button because I didn't need to learn a complicated gesture to operate the HoloLens 2. Those three things might not seem all that remarkable to you, but that's precisely the point. Microsoft needed to make the HoloLens feel much more natural if it really plans to get people to use it, and it has, end quote. But what's even more interesting to me is who, according to Dieter, Microsoft seems to be positioning this device to get adopted by. In short, the HoloLens 2 is designed more for a factory floor or a construction site, not for your living room. In fact, also announced was a line of third-party produced accessories for the HoloLens 2, including integration into a hard hat made by Trimble. The HoloLens 2 is being marketed to corporations, not consumers, for what Microsoft is calling first-line workers. Quoting again from Dieter, people in AutoShouse.

factory floors, operating rooms, and out in the field, fixing stuff. It's designed for people who work with their hands and find it difficult to integrate a computer or smartphone into their daily work. Microsoft wants to replace the grease-stained Windows 2000 computer sitting in the corner of the workroom, end quote. Among the improvements, better balance when using the device, as Dieter said.

You can plop it on your head like a baseball cap, then twist a knob, tighten the headband. The visor can flip up without forcing you to take the headset off. It's made of carbon fiber, so it's lighter. And the center of gravity for all those computers and processors and battery and whatnot has been moved back to make it feel lighter on the head. And you won't need to get as much neck strain either because the HoloLens 2 has that

field of view that's increased. In fact, it's twice as big as before. It's capable of full six degrees of tracking. Check Deiter's report for all of the interesting tidbits of the tech that makes all this possible. There's also eye tracking to drive certain interactions like scrolling through a document. And apparently the tracking of your hands has been overhauled to improve general object interaction. All this for around half the price of the original, it's just it's not designed for you or me. Alex Kippman, head of the HoloLens project, told Dieter, quote,

if you think about 7 billion people in the world, people like you and I, knowledge workers, are by far the minority, he said. The HoloLens 2 is for, quote, maybe people that are fixing our jet propulsion engine. Maybe they are the people that are in some retail space. Maybe they're the doctors that are operating on you in an operating room, end quote. Yes, not designed for you and I, not designed for consumers. And that fits with Microsoft's recent successes focusing on Enterprise. Microsoft isn't even announcing a developer kit version for the HoloLens 2 yet. But then, at the announcement of this device,

device, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney came on stage during the keynote to announce that Unreal Engine 4 would support HoloLens 2. And since Microsoft is committed to open app stores, web browsing, and open APIs, as well as drivers on the platform, Epic would be fully supporting the HoloLens 2 as well. So maybe this thing will be for all of us soon enough. Let's get to the big narratives right now in mobile, though. More foldable phones, everyone. Over the weekend, Huawei announced the Mate X. The Mate X, while named to be confusing for people like me, who are always tempted to say iPhone X anyway,

the Mate X is a photoable 5G phone, but sort of the inverse of the galaxy fold. Instead of unfolding to see the screen on the inside, the Mate X does the reverse. You unfold it to open up the screen which is wrapped around the outside of the device when folded up. So it's really only one screen. It wraps all the way around the outside. When fully opened, it's your tablet screen.

But when closed, it's your smartphone screen and you can use either side. It detects which way you're holding it so it turns on the screen that's facing you and not the one on the other side facing out. The Matex has a 6.6 inch front screen and a 6.38 inch. inch back screen when unfolded it has a combined eight inch display other differences between this and the galaxy fold the mate x has a 4,500 milanp hour battery and a folded thickness of only 11 millimeters 5.4 millimeters thick when unfolded it's super thin not as chunky looking and apparently not as chunky in the hand from some of the hands on but more on that in a second

It achieves this thinness by having a thick edge on the side to house the guts. Sort of like how, you know, recent Kindle models have done. Check the Annandtech photos in the show notes to see what I mean. Also, this is not only Huawei's first foldable phone, it's also the company's first 5G phone. All of this coming in mid-2019, but sit down for this one. It's going to run you $2,600. So remember when everyone had to retire to their fainting couches

because the $1,000 barrier for smartphones was definitively broken last year. Yeah. Late breaking edit, Vlad Savov had a hands-on with this thing. Link to the video in the show notes. And 5G headlines. Qualcomm says it will release its first chipset with an integrated 5G modem in the first half of 2020.

And Sprint says it is launching its consumer 5G net. network this May, beginning in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and Kansas City, with Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C. to follow. Sprint says its 5G network will be part of Google Fi, but the verge caveats its 5G network this way. Quote, there will be a critical difference between Sprint's 5G network and other 5G networks. Sprint isn't launching super-fast millimeter wave coverage like its competitors, since it doesn't own licenses on the wireless airwaves to support it. Instead, Sprint's 5G network will launch using the carrier's mid-band spectrum,

which is faster than LTE airwaves but doesn't travel as far. And conversely, it's slower than millimeter waves but travels further, end quote. And T-Mobile, for its part, has officially said that it won't roll out its 5G service until the second half of 2019. The reasons are similar to what I just said above. 5G is not just one component, as we've spoken about on the show before. 5G is a whole range of components. There's millimeter wave, what spectrum you're on, etc., etc.

T-Mobile needs a device that can tap into its 600 megahertz spectrum. Quoting from CNET, Verizon and AT&T initially championed millimeter wave spectrum because it can deliver super high speeds, but with limited range. Team Mobile opted for lower band spectrum that has slower peak speeds, but more coverage, end quote. Also, apparently, it requires a longer time horizon to actually begin rolling out. There were a ton of other phone releases and announcements that dribbled in over the weekend and all throughout today. This week is going to sort of be like CES.

I could go on for another two hours just reading to you phone specs. But this week is not just about the handsets. It's about mobile tech more generally. That's why it's worth noting. The SD Association has unveiled MicroSD Express, a new format for mobile with data transfer speeds of up to 885 megabits per second, low power consumption, and backwards compatibility. Why is this a big deal?

Well, not only will the lower power suck help everything. and the very, very much appreciated transfer speeds will be appreciated. Quoting from Engadgett, it also opens up features like bus metering, which lets memory cards communicate with other components without going through the CPU first. The prospect of having tiny, extremely fast 1-terabyte memory cards has tantalizing potential for other gadgets too.

It could enable a new generation of smaller cameras or even smartphones that can capture raw video, for instance. It would also be particularly handy for drones, letting them capture high-resolution video while carrying less weight, end quote. And you heard me say one-terabyte memory cards in that last statement, right? Both Sandysk and Micron have announced one-terabyte micro-SD cards. So I just want to pause here for a second and say, one terabyte of storage is possible on a micro-sd card,

a thing that I can rest on the tip of my finger. I just want to take a moment to reflect on how jaw-dropping that is. Insert old man remembering three and a half inch floppies and the first desktop computer I got that had a 100 gigabyte hard drive. Here, the new micro SD cards, at least the sandisk ones, will be available in April for $449.99. And one more bit of mobile news. Google has announced that the latest version of Google Play Services on Android 7 and up now supports the Fido2 standard, which lets users log in to services using fingerprints or a pin. The idea is to move more fully into using biometric data to log in

because biometric data is harder to steal or clone. And the standard stores data locally. So no sensitive data need be transmitted. Why is this a step forward? Quote, the important often overlooked part of this technology is actually not allowing users to use biometrics to sign in, but rather moving authentication from a shared secret model in which both you and the service you're interacting with need know some secret like your password, to an asymmetric model where you only need to prove that you know a secret,

but the remote service doesn't actually get to know the secret itself, says Christian Brand, an identity and security product manager at Google. Quote, this is better in many ways as a breach of your data on the server side doesn't actually reveal anything. that can compromise the keys you use to access the service, end quote. Finally, today I did want to end with one segment that has nothing to do with mobile. Check out the link to the story from Wired in the show notes looking at Wikidata, a sister project to Wikipedia that has increasingly found a calling, serving up bot-friendly databases to the whole universe of AI assistance out there now in the world.

Quoting from the piece, many of our densest, most reliable troves of knowledge from Wikipedia to, you know, the pages of Wired, are enclosed in an ancient technology largely opaque to machines. Pros. That's not a problem when you Google a question. Search engines don't need to read. They find the most relevant web pages using patterns of links.

But when you ask Google Assistant or one of its cistern for a celebrity's date of birth or the location of a famous battle, it has to go find the answer. Yet no machine can easily or quickly skim meanings from the Internet's tangle of predicates, compliments, sentences, and paragraphs. It requires a guide, end quote. Enter wiki data. Like Wikipedia, wikidata is maintained by an army of volunteers who got started in 2012. Just this past December, the project added its six millionth item to the database.

All data points are something called Q-coded into the database and tagged by VIII. various properties so that bots can parse the relationships between them. Quoting from the Wired piece again, The connections forged between nuggets of knowledge in wiki data allow computers to answer complex questions in fractions of a second without having to trawl through multiple web pages or databases, end quote. This project is still very early days. A quarter of the items in the database still lack references.

And as the piece concludes, it is interesting to note this, quote, that the voice-enabled avatars of the world's most sophisticated tech companies rely on a collective of unpaid enthusiasts is a reminder that AI is more limited than we are often led to believe, end quote. The bots still need us, everybody, for the time being at least. I know this is super short notice, obviously, but a quick reminder, if you downloaded this episode right when it dropped and you listen to it right away, and you're within shouting distance of Princeton, New Jersey. Why not come to that tech meetup that I told you about last week?

It's tonight at 6.30 at the Princeton Public Library. I put a link to the event in the show notes, and we will talk about my book tonight for sure, but if a bunch of tech meme ride home listeners show up, then we can hopefully also bat around a bunch of the stuff that we've spoken about recently on the podcast as well. Last I checked, 55 people have RSVP to attend, so do come and make the mutant podcast Army representation strong.

Talk to you tomorrow.