Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 02/20 - Galaxy Fold!

Episode Date: February 20, 2019

The foldable phone is here! And some regular new Galaxies too. Other stuff... (I'm late posting today... sorry! In a rush!) Sponsors: Castro Podcast App DataDogHQ.com/ridehome joybird.com/RIDE - 25% off your first order using code RIDE Links: Samsung’s foldable phone is the Galaxy Fold, available April 26th starting at $1,980 (The Verge) Xiaomi's triple-camera Mi 9 has a fast 20W wireless charger (Engadget) Google says the built-in microphone it never told Nest users about was 'never supposed to be a secret' (Business Insider) Google Set To Unveil Netflix-Like Game Streaming Service (Fortune) Apple Plans on Combining iPhone, iPad, Mac Apps by 2021 (Bloomberg) Princeton Tech Meetup 69 w/ Brian McCullough 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 ride home for Wednesday, February 20th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the foldable phone is here.

And some regular new galaxy phones as well. Why was Google allegedly trying to sneak microphones into nest devices? And a roadmap for Project Marzapan. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Thankfully for your friendly neighborhood podcast. who has to get a show out only three hours after a major event even kicks off, Samsung opened its unpacked event today by starting with the foldable phone. It is here.

It's called the Galaxy Fold. It does what it says on the tin. You close it and it looks like a smallish, thinnish sort of smartphone. You open it up and it looks like it has a big, seamless display about the same. size of an iPad mini. But just my first impressions here from watching the video of the demo, folded up, it looks super tall and skinny. Unfolded, it is indeed a 7.3 inch display. Folded, it's a 4.6 inch display. The unfolded display gets a 1536 by 2152 resolution and folded. It's a 4.6 inch 840 by 1960 resolution.

And that folded up mode, imagine something like a traditional Hershey candy bar in terms of sort of its narrow length and width. Think of an old school sidekick if you're old enough. But here's where it gets interesting, at least in what I saw again. That folded up screen looks super bezeled. Like maybe when the phone is closed,

it's just for triage. checking notifications, messages, tweets, and stuff like that. If you want to do anything serious, you're going to want to almost yearn to open it up. Well, thankfully, there's something Samsung is calling app continuity. So if you check a quick Google map to see where you are with the phone folded up, open it up and the full map is right there waiting for you in that full tablet-style display. Stats of the device, courtesy of the verge, quote, Samsung is using 512 gigabytes of universal flash storage for fast speeds alongside a 7 nanometer processor and 12 gigabytes of RAM.

Samsung has even built two batteries for its galaxy fold, one on each side that are separated by the fold but combined in the Android operating system. Samsung has built a sturdy backbone to the device with a hinge system that has multiple interlocking gears. All of these gears are hidden at the rear of the device and allow the Galaxy Fold to transform from tablet to phone modes. Samsung is creating four different colors for the Galaxy Fold, but it's the main tablet display that's key here, end quote. More interesting Dietz. Six cameras.

Yes, the Onion headline joke has been made real. Six cameras. Three on the back. Two on the inside and one in the front. Remember, it's this whole folding. paradigm now. Samsung demoed running three apps at once on the same screen

when the device is opened up to that tablet mode. Oh, and there will be LTE and 5G versions of this out of the gate. And this is out of the gate as early as April 26. And now for some sobering

details. The price is $1980, $20 less than $2,000 depending on where you live. Well, look, I'll leave it till tomorrow to get reactions, and hopefully folks will have done some hands-on with this. Quick takeaways? Again, just from what I saw on the video, is it maybe too tall and skinny when it's in that closed mode? And how chunky is it in that closed mode? Forget thin and light. This thing looks like a chalkboard eraser a bit when closed. Something that would be super

chunky in the pocket. What does that unfolded screen really look like up close? Are both halves of the screen seamless in the sense of giving you the impression of it is one seamless screen? Anyway, because the usual galaxy lineup was also announced today, the Galaxy S-10 lineup. Let's bang through this. I don't have time to put this in any sort of meaningful, coherent order, so imagine This is just a bullet list in your mind. Samsung debuted the S-10 and S-10-plus with 6.1-inch and 6.4-inch displays, triple rear cameras, in-screen fingerprint sensors, and bigger batteries, starting from $899 and $999.99.

Samsung announced the Galaxy SE with a 5.8-inch display, two rear cameras, Snapdragon 855, 6-gabytes or 8-gabytes of, RAM and a 3,100-m-a-amp-hour battery starting at only $749. Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S-105G, arriving late in the first half of 2019, initially just on Verizon in the U.S., with a 6.7-inch Infinity O display, better 3D depth sensing, and more. And about that screen, it sports what Samsung is calling the Infinity O display. Forget the notch.

Samsung says it can laser cut only the tiny little donut holes it needs to fit the cameras in. They're right up there in the corner. If you go the Galaxy S10 Plus route, you can get one terabyte of universal flash storage. So 5G phones are coming, and one terabyte phones are officially here as well.

Your phone can now have more storage than your laptop. Samsung's S10, will wirelessly charge other devices placed on its back. What sort of devices? Samsung also announced $129 Galaxy Buds, which cost, you'll note, less than AirPods, and feature wireless charging and a small, curvy, pebble-like design. That is all for now, because I'm reading these words a mere 25 minutes

before this episode is supposed to go live. So much, much more follow-up and analysis tomorrow. note to tech companies, 2 p.m. Eastern is too late for me when it comes to product announcements. Xiaomi decided Samsung shouldn't get all of the headlines. At an event in China today, Xiaomi debuted the Me 9, which sports three rear cameras, a 6.39-inch ammo-led display, a Snapdragon 855 processor, 6 gigabytes of RAM, and 20-watt wireless charging, all for around 4.4.4.5-inch ammo-led display,

all for around $446, shipping February 26. The three rear cameras include one with a 48 megapixel main sensor, a 12-mepixel telephoto lens, and a 16-migixel ultra-wide angle lens with 117-degree view and 4-centimeter macro capability. The front side of the phone gets a 20-migel selfie camera. The display has an on-screen fingerprint reader and its, 3,300 mill-amp hour battery means you can charge this thing fully in a mere 60 minutes. But remember that 20-watt wireless charging capability as well,

that means you'd only have to wait an extra half hour to fully charge the device without plugging anything in. There's also apparently a transparent version of the phone coming that will allow you to peek inside and see the guts of the device. super quick because it's only a rumor and today is about rumors becoming reality. Forbes is saying that sources are saying that Google will reveal details about its project stream gaming streaming service during its keynote at the Game Developers Conference on March 19th. I actually haven't been keeping as close a watch on the streaming gaming wars as I have been on the streaming video wars. so we've spoken of Microsoft and Nintendo in this space, but I did not know that Google was a potential combatant in this theater. The gaming unit is expected to be a Netflix-like streaming service

building on the success of Project Stream. Games are run on cloud servers and stream directly to players, PCs, tablets, TVs, or pretty much anything with a screen. That's fairly typical with films and programs these days, but the interactive nature of games and the historically-living, qualities of most internet connections have made it impractical. Google has had a presence in the mobile gaming world, but this project will put it in competition with several key industry players, both in the console space as well as PC gaming stalwarts, such as Steam and the fast-growing

Epic Games store, end quote. This story is in danger of falling through the cracks on a day like today, and I really don't want that to happen. Let me just read the lead from this piece in business from Nick Bestone. Quote, in early February, Google announced that its home security and alarm system, Nest Secure, would be getting an update. Users could now enable its

virtual assistant technology, Google Assistant. The problem? Nest users didn't know a microphone even existed on their security device to begin with. The existence of a microphone on the Nest Guard,

which is the alarm, keypad, and motion sensor component in the Nest secure offering, was never disclosed in any of the product material for the device. On Tuesday, a Google spokesperson told Business Insider the company had made an error. Quote, the on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs. That was an error on our part, the spokesperson said, end quote. Intentional silence there. So of course, Google says that the microphone was originally included in the Nest Guard to allow for adding additional security features down the road, like, say, listening for the sound of broken glass. And Google absolutely swears up and down that, quote, the microphone has never been on and is only activated when users specifically enable the option, end quote. I really want to go on a rant here.

I want to do one of those. One does not simply walk into mortar memes with the idea that one does not simply forget to disclose a major component of a hardware product, a major component like a microphone. Wouldn't you even have to somehow disclose that for FCC reasons? That's not just an error on your part. I want to say something about contempt for users. But wait, let's just let others say it for me. Here's Matt McGee, quote, Google has officially reached Facebook level A Hattery.

I wonder what's in my Google home that they haven't told me about. And here's Jane Mansion Wong, quote, A PR tactic I started seeing from tech giants saying, Nothing's secret about it when caught red-handed. If there's nothing secret about it, why be so shady, end quote? And of course, Zenep Tufetchi, quote, I mean, who among us hasn't covertly installed undisclosed microphones in millions of homes? And finally, unusual to do a Mark German scoop Wednesday at the tail end of a show. I hope he doesn't mind bringing up the caboose for once.

Mark says Apple soon plans to let developers port their iPad apps to Macs using a new SDK that will be released as early as this June's WWDC. Quote, the aim of the multi-step initiative, code named Marzapan,

is that by 2021, developers will be able to build an app once and have it work on the

iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers, people familiar with the matter, said.

Developers will still need to submit separate versions of the app to Apple's iOS and

Mac app stores, but the new kit will mean they don't have to write the underlying

software code twice, said people familiar with the plan, end quote. Apparently, by 2020,

Apple also wants the kit expanded so that iPhone applications can also be ported to Macs, though German says Apple's engineers have found this challenging because of the screen size disparities. The goal is to, by 2020, merge iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps into one ring to rule them all what is known as a single binary. This was probably obvious and inevitable and also much dissected for a while, but now you can get a sense of the timeline that this might happen on. Hey, everybody, I've been promising to do a podcast meetup here in New York City sometime soon, and I'm still going to

do that. I just keep getting busy and getting delayed. But guess what? If you're in New Jersey, the Princeton Tech Meetup has asked me to come speak at their event this Monday night. The last link in the show notes is a link to all the details. But TLDR on Monday night, February 25th at 6.30 p.m. If you want to see me talk about my book, but also talk about a lot of the stuff we've spoken about on this podcast as well, especially if a lot of ride home mutant podcast army members show up. We can talk about whatever we want. Tickets are $5, and it goes from 6.30 p.m., as I said, till about 9 p.m. at the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, New Jersey. Very last link on the show notes will take you to the meetup page with all of the Dietz.

Hope to see you there.