Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 07/09 – The New Nothing Phone Costs Practically Nothing

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

The new nothing phone costs almost nothing. I’m not punning. Sam Altman has founded yet another AI startup. Is the hype around AI PCs underdelivering? And two other back the future stories about updating Notepad in Windows, and abandoning floppy disks in Japan. Sponsors: Dragon Ball Legends Links: Nothing’s CMF Devices Prove Yet Again Cheap Doesn't Have to Mean Boring (Wired) Amazon announces new $79 Echo Spot alarm clock (CNBC) OpenAI and Arianna Huffington are working together on an ‘AI health coach’ (The Verge) Spotify is going to let you leave comments on podcast episodes (The Verge) Qualcomm, Microsoft Lean on AI Hype to Spur PC Market Revival (Bloomberg) After 41 years Microsoft quietly adds spellchecking and autocorrect to Windows Notepad (Tom Hardware) Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks (Reuters) 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 TechMeme right home for Tuesday, July 9th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. The new nothing phone costs almost nothing. I'm not punning there. Sam Altman has founded yet another AI startup is the hype around AI PCs

under delivering and two other Back to the Future stories about updating notepad in windows and abandoning floppy disks in Japan. Here's what you've missed today in the world of tech. A couple of new gadgets to tell you about. Nothing has unveiled the $199,9,000, CMF Phone 1, with swappable parts, a 6.67-inch Amel-ed screen, a Media Tech system on a chip, and nothing OS, plus the $69 CMF Watch Pro 2 and $59 CMF Buds Pro 2. So, cheap stuff, and also, again, swappable. Also, those are affordable prices for the watch and the earbuds, but I'm going to focus on the phone, quoting Wired. Budget gadgets are used. usually stuck with drab designs and lackluster specs, a Challenge Nothing's sub-brand CMF has decided

to take on. The relatively new offshoot from Nothing focuses on the extreme low end of the market and has, until now, sold a smartwatch, wireless earbuds, and chargers. Today marks its first smartphone, the CMF Phone 1, becoming available in the US through a beta program. It's accompanied by unique accessories plus the new Buds Pro 2 and Watch Pro 2. What's most remarkable about these devices is the price. I have tested cheap and flagship smartphones for nearly a decade, and after setting up the CMF phone one, I was pretty surprised to hear it costs just $19. It looks, feels, and performs nearly twice the price. The Watch Pro 2 and equally well-built smartwatch will set you back just $69, and the Buzz Pro 2 are $59. Better yet, they're not just cheap devices. There's plenty of

character in their designs that make you want to use them. See the four black screws on the back of the phone's case, well, use the screwdriver tip to remove them, and you can essentially remove the back of the phone and switch it up with other back covers, $35 each. These come in a few colors like blue, orange, and light green. Okay, so once you have your fun swapping the black back cover, I swap mine to the delightfully bright orange, now it's time to shift attention to that circular module on the bottom right. This is what CMF calls the accessory point. By default, this circle does nothing. unscrew it off and it opens up a small world of accessories that you can screw in with your fingers, no screwdriver needed. This includes a lanyard, $25 bucks, a kickstand, $25, and a wallet case,

$35 bucks. Interestingly, the wallet case has two parts. The first layer is just a very slim plastic sheet that attaches to the case via the screw on the accessory point. In the middle is a magnetic ring, allowing you to magnetically stick the wallet to the back of the phone very much like Apple's MagSafe system. Remove the wallet, and the phone one can attached to anything else that's magnetic. I tested it on a magsafe charger and it magnetically stuck to it perfectly, but because there's no wireless charging support, it's not as functional. CMF says it has no plans to announce other accessories at the moment, but I love that a $199 phone has these first-party options. They're smartly designed and simple. As for the smartphone

itself, the specs are quite remarkable for the price, though I have to note that the U.S. is starved for good-budget Android phones, which are much more commonplace in the rest of the world. The CMF phone one has a 6.7-inch Ameled display, 2400 by 1080 pixel resolution with an adaptive 120 hertz screen refresh rate, beating out the $200 Samsung Galaxy A15 already. It's powered by a Media Tech Dimensity 7300 processor with 8 gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage. I haven't been able to use the phone much, but it's impressively snappy. There's 5G support and dual-sim capability, or you can add a micro SD card to expand. storage to up to 2 terabytes. Rounding things out is a 5,000-m-a-amp-hour battery cell with 33-watt fast-charging support and an under-display optical fingerprint sensor. There's a 50-mapixel main

camera on the back, along with a sensor to capture depth for portrait mode, and over on the front is a 16-mapixel selfie shooter. Oh, and the CMF is employing Nothing OS for the software. It's still Android 14, but with a jazzed-up interface from nothing and other small tweaks. CMF is promising two Android OS updates to the device with three years of security updates. It's all excellent stuff for a $199 handset in the U.S. However, keep in mind that while the CMF phone one is available globally, it's only available in the U.S. through a beta program. You'll have to sign up for it, and once approved, you'll be able to purchase it.

It's the same approach parent company Nothing has with its budget device, the nothing phone 2A. As for U.S. carrier support, 4G will work on AT&T, but there's no 5G support. It'll fare better on T-Mobile, though not all 5G bands are supported. Verizon support is lackluster, and CMF does not recommend using it on that network, end quote.

Again, you're going to want to read the rest of the piece, because again, the earbuds are only $59, and the watch is a shocking $69. Noisse. For just $10 more, you can get Amazon's updated $79. Echospot alarm clock with a revamped design and improved audio. quality, the first update to the device since its 2017 launch. Quoting CNBC. The company added a display where users can check the time, weather, or see what song is playing.

Amazon also put a better speaker in the front of the device. It said it delivers clearer vocals and deeper bass. The previous version, which Amazon priced at $129, also featured a semicircle design, but it had a full-size display and a camera. Amazon said members of its $139 per year Prime program can purchase the new Echo Spot, for $44.99 through July 17th when it is running its prime day mega sale, end quote. Sam Altman and Ariana Huffington have announced Thrive AI Health, a new startup backed by OpenAI and Thrive Global to build a, quote, hyper-personalized AI health coach, quoting the verge.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Huffington stated that the bot will be trained on, quote, the best peer-reviewed science alongside the personal biometric lab and other medical data you've chosen to share with it. The company tapped DeCarlos Love, a former Google executive who previously worked on Fitbit and other wearables to be CEO. Thrive AI Health also established research partnerships with several academic institutions and medical centers like Stanford Medicine, the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University, and the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine. The Alice L. Walton Foundation is also a strategic investor in Thrive AI Health. AI-powered health coaches have become a popular fad.

Fitbit is working on an AI chatbot coach and Whoop added a chat GPT powered coach to give users more insight into their health metrics. In San Francisco, health data obsession is a staple. You won't go far without seeing someone wearing an aura ring or bragging about their sleep data from their eight sleep mattress. Thrive AI Health's goal is to provide powerful insights to those who otherwise wouldn't have access, like a single mother looking for a quick meal idea for her gluten-free child or an immunocompromise person in need of instant advice in between doctors' appointments. Personally,

I'd use it to ask about every unusual headache rather than relying on webb-endd's often alarming diagnoses. But one doesn't have to think hard to come up with reasons to be cautious. Sharing your health data with anyone other than a primary care doctor could result in a leak of that information. Then there's the potential for the bot to provide dangerous or even fatal misinformation, as well as the risk that quality care could be reduced to quick and flawed responses without human oversight. The bot is still in its early stages adopting an atomic habits approach. Its goal is to gently encourage small changes in five key areas of your life, sleep, nutrition, fitness, stress management, and social connection. By making minor adjustments such as suggesting

a 10-minute walk after picking up your child from school, Thrive AI Health aims to positively impact people with chronic conditions like heart disease. It doesn't claim to be ready to provide real diagnoses like a doctor would, but instead aims to guide users into a healthier lifestyle. end quote. If you listen to this show on Spotify, you can now leave comments for me. Not sure I'll be checking the comments, but it looks like you can do it if you want. Quoting the verge. Spotify is launching the ability to leave comments on podcasts. The company already lets Spotify podcasters offer polls and Q&As, so this new feature could give creators new ways to interact with their audiences. Comments will be private by default, similar to Q&A responses, so creators will have to approve each comment

they want to appear. Creators can choose to have comments available for their whole show or just for specific episodes, and if they don't want to allow comments at all, they can opt out of the feature. Creators can manage comments on the Spotify for podcasters web app starting Tuesday and as part of a revamped Spotify for podcasters mobile app that is being introduced in a phased rollout over the next few days, according to Maya Prohovnik, Spotify's VP of podcast product. Comments for podcast listeners will also become available as part of a phase rollout beginning Tuesday in most Spotify markets. Prohavnik says, end quote. From the pouring cold water on AI hype file, which has been in quite a bit of material lately,

according to IDC, only around 3% of PCs shipped in 2024 will meet Microsoft's AI PC processing power threshold. A source says some big app makers rebuffed a push for on-device AI. Quoting Bloomberg, So far, analysts and reviewers also are taking a skeptical tone towards the new laptop's artificial intelligence abilities. Usefulness is limited because few software makers beyond Microsoft are building features to utilize the new chips in the machines optimized for AI tasks, said Eric Compton, a financial analyst focused on the PC industry at Morningstar. Application makers like Adobe, Salesforce, and Sentinel One rebuffed one of the largest PC makers when it asked them to tweak software so AI tools could be used directly on the new computers in time for the launch. according to a person familiar with the discussions. All of those companies deliver AI features through

the cloud. Sentinel One is looking at optimizing its products for AI PCs in future development, but it will likely take years for these devices to reach a, quote, sufficient proportion of deployed machines, Gregor Stewart, the company's vice president of AI said in a statement. Clara Shee, who leads Salesforce's AI efforts, said the company is developing on-device language models, the technology that underpins many types of generative AI, but didn't provide any expected timeline for release. Some smaller software makers optimize their apps for on-device AI. That includes Blackmagic design, which makes video editing software that competes with Adobe's Premiere and Algorithms music mixing tool DJ. For now, available AI features are largely gimmicks, said a Best Buy company employee shortly after launch in June, who asked not to be identified for fear of professional repercussions.

Machines known as copilot plus PCs are limited to features like a tool that makes it appear you are looking at the camera during a video meeting when in reality, your eyes are focused elsewhere. Generative AI models can be used to produce images on the device, but still require internet connection for content moderation. The stakes are high for many of the companies involved. Qualcomm, the provider of the new chips, says it's ready to challenge Intel's dominance in the machines. PC makers like Dell and HP hope the machines will fuel consumer excitement for personal computers again. Even if features are currently limited, AI PCs have the potential to fuel a wave of new higher price purchases. Many consumers, businesses, and schools bought laptops in the early months of the pandemic, but haven't yet upgraded.

New AI capabilities will help steer buyers toward higher-end options. Michael Dell, founder and chief executive officer of the namesake company, said in a May interview, quote, Do you want to buy a PC that is not capable of doing those AI things that you'll want to do in the future? I don't think so, end quote. Let's end today with a couple from the getting with the Times file? First, Microsoft has quietly added spell-checking and autocorrect to Notepad in Windows 11, after testing the features back in March. Quoting Tom's hardware. Windows Notepad first appeared back in 1983 and seemed like an app frozen in time for many years with barely any discernible differences across generations of the OS, but we have seen

some sizable advances made in recent times. Probably some of the biggest changes to Notepad in years have been delivered under the auspices of Windows 10 and 11. Windows 10 delivered a handful of long-needed updates to the Humble Notepad Plain Text Editor app in July of 2018. After several years of neglect, notepad received wrap-around, find, replace, text zooming, and line numbers with word wrap enabled, plus some performance boost with large files. Windows 11 launched in late 2021, and it also brought some noticeable notepad enhancements. Among the best new features were probably the dark mode compliance auto save slash session restore and a useful new tabbed interface for handling multiple files. Now we have an integrated spell checker. It feels like the ambassador is really

spoiling us. As we mentioned in the intro, the new spell check feature has arrived without fanfare, but it is obvious that you have it when you misspell a word or two or use some unknown techy terms. Users of the latest notepad on Windows 11 will instantly see characteristic red wiggly lines start to appear under their questionable vocab. You will see it if you have been auto-updated as spell checking is enabled by default. While we welcome enhancements to Windows essential apps like Notepad plaintext editor, feature creep is something that experienced Windows users will be hoping can be strictly limited. There is definitely more danger of this phenomenon now as WordPad has been read its last rights and has been absent and fresh Windows 11 from Build 26-020 insider previews,

canary channels, and onwards. WordPad got the chop. after 28 years of service as a light word processor. Microsoft callously suggested folks should either use Notepad or Word for their text processing needs. Interestingly, Microsoft had always classed spell checking as a premium feature out of the reach of the bundled Wordpad, so getting this feature in Notepad could be viewed as a welcome surprise, end quote. And finally, finally, Japan's long national nightmare is over, quoting Reuters.

Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of the use of the time. of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday, reaching a long-awaited milestone in a campaign to modernize its bureaucracy. By the middle of last month, the digital agency had scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling. We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28th, digital minister Tarokono, who has been vocal about wiping out fax machines and other analog technologies and government told Reuters and a statement on Wednesday, the digital agency was set up during COVID-19 when a scramble to roll out nationwide testing and vaccination revealed that the

government still relied on paper filing and outdated technology. A charismatic figure with two and a half million followers on X, Kono formerly headed the defense and foreign ministries as well as the COVID vaccine deployment, taking up his current role in August 22 after a failed bid to become prime minister. Japan's digitization effort has run into numerous snags, however, a contact tracing app flopped during the pandemic and adoption of the government's My Number Digital Identification Card has been slower than it hoped amid repeated data mishaps, end quote. This hotel that we're staying at in Milwaukee is right across the street from the convention

center where the Republican National Convention will be held next week. I am literally looking out the window at the roof of the venue as I talk to you right now. Longtime listeners will remember last year when all the way over in Ireland, President Biden stayed at our hotel and we ran into him almost quite literally, the motorcade anyway. We will be leaving tomorrow, so there's no worry of us running into the Trump motorcade, but somehow the McCullough family is on this streak of close encounters with politics on every vacation we take. Talk to you tomorrow.