Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 07/26 – Samsung Unpacked Event

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

All the headlines from the big Galaxy Unpacked event today. This was the foldable event, but there were interesting watch announces too. Quick earnings roundup. Threads gets a follower tab. And the group that wants to battle Apple and Google in maps dominance has released their first product. Sponsors: Crashplan.com code techmeme Mindbloom.com/techmeme and promocode techmeme Links: The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 gets a big little screen upgrade (The Verge) Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 hands-on: Is Samsung squandering its head start? (Engadget) The Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 series is all about the bezels (The Verge) Meta’s Threads app is rolling out a Following feed (TechCrunch) OpenAI Quietly Shuts Down Its AI Detection Tool (Decrypt) Meta, Microsoft and Amazon team up on maps project to crack Apple-Google duopoly (CNBC) 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 right home for Wednesday, July 26, 2023. I'm Brian McCalla today. All the headlines from Big Galaxy Unpacked event this morning. This was the foldable event, but there were interesting watch announces as well. Quick earnings roundup, Threads gets a follower tab, and the group that wants to battle Apple and Google and Maps dominance has released their first product. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. At the big Galaxy Unpacked event in South Korea this morning, Samsung unveiled a bunch of stuff, beginning with the Galaxy Z-Flip-5, offering a larger 3.4-inch cover screen up from a 1.9-inch cover screen on the Z-flip 4. A new hinge, 256 gigabytes of storage, for the same $999 starting point.

Quoting the Verge. That puts it toe-to-to-to with Motorola's new Razor Plus, also 999 with 256 gigabytes of storage. But given Samsung's experience making foldable phones and some of the hardware upgrades included in this year's Z-Flipp, the Razor Plus is in a tough spot. The Z-Flipp 5's inner screen is unchanged. It's a 6.7-inch 1080-P OLED panel with a refresh rate up to 120 hertz. The outer screen is a 720p OLED with a standard 60 hertz refresh rate. Samsung is rebranding the screen as the flex display, and it covers most of the phone's front panel excluding the two large camera cutouts. That's a different approach than Motorola took with the Razor Plus. Its front screen flows around the

cameras and thus measure slightly bigger at 3.6 inches. The new teardrop-style hinge on the Z-Flip and fold solves one of the series's persistent problems. Rather than leaving a gap near the hinge when folded, the two sides of the phone now close flat. Samsung also says the new hinge is more durable and that its double-rail design can better handle an impact from a drop. The Flip 5 is rated IPX-8, like its predecessor, and is protected against full water immersion up to 1.5 meters for up to 30 minutes. The Razor Plus claims some dust resistance with an IP 52 rating but is merely splash resistant. Samsung doesn't claim any official level of dust resistance, but does include some measures designed to minimize the risk of dust intrusion. In either case, dust is very bad news for a folding

phone, so it's best to be careful with a folding phone around sand or dust, IP rating or not. Like the Razor Plus, the Z-flip 5 populates its cover screen with small screen-friendly widgets, but also lets you run full apps if you want. Samsung supports running full apps too, but puts this feature in its good lock app, so you'll have to go looking for it if that's something you want. But you don't have to be that adventurous to take advantage of the new cover screen. It offers a full-size keyboard so you can respond to text,

whereas you could only send a few pre-written responses on the Flip 4. Other specs remain unchanged. There's a 3,700-m-a-hour battery, 25-watt wired and 15-watt wireless charging, and 8 gigabytes of RAM. There's still a 12-magixel 1.8 main rear camera with optical image stabilization, with improved lens coatings this year to reduce flare, plus a 12-magixel ultra-wide and 10-mapsal selfie camera on the inner display. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Z-flip 5 spells serious trouble for the Motorola Razor Plus. In addition to the lower water-resistance rating, the Razor Plus has a Snapdragon chip set that's a generation behind the 8 Gen 2 in the Z-Flipped.

Z-Flip 5. Motorola has a lot of nostalgic charm with its razor branding, but Samsung has a lot more reps under its belt going into its fifth generation of folding phones. Motorola might just need to make a move on price if it wants to entice prospective flip phone buyers, end quote. That was the flip, but also announced, was the Galaxy Z Fold 5, offering the same 7.6 inch and 6.2 displays, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, 50 megapixel rear camera, a new hinge, and new colors, for $1,199. This is the flagship foldable, quoting Sam Rutherford adding gadget. The Galaxy Z Fold 5 is centered around what Samsung is calling a flex hinge, which is said to have a more streamlined design while still boasting IPX8 water resistance. And thanks to that new hinge,

Samsung has managed to get rid of the gap between the screen halves, while also decreasing its overall thickness to 13.5 millimeters. That's a nice move toward everyday usability, though it's thicker than pixel fold, which is only 12.1 millimeters. On the inside, you get a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platform for Galaxy for increased performance along with 12 gigabytes of RAM and up to 1 terabyte of storage. However, the Z-Folds battery is staying pat at 4,400m-amp hours, so Samsung is really relying on power efficiency gains to deliver longer run times. As for its cameras, we're looking at essentially the same general setup as on the Z-Fold 4 highlighted, by a 50-machixel main camera, 12-migixel ultra-wide, and a 10-mapixel telephoto with a 3X optical zoom.

Though, Samsung says it's added some new processing tricks. The screens are also essentially the same. You still get a skinny baton-like shape with a 6.2-inch OLED cover screen, along with that big 7.6-inch main display on the inside, both of which sport 120 hertz refresh rates. That main screen's peak brightness is now the same as what you get on an S-23 Ultra at 1750 nits, which is rather impressive for a flexible display. That said, it still has a crease, which may be an issue for some. Those who can ignore the divot, though, will find a few new gestures to make multitasking on that expansive screen just a bit easier. Finally, while there's still no room for it inside the device itself, Samsung has created a new S-Pen for the Galaxy Z-Fold 5 that's around 40% thinner than before

and works with a revamped and more compact phone case, so there's somewhere to stash it when it's not being used. My issue with the Z-Fold 5 is that while a lot of the changes are nice in a vacuum, for a company that has had such a head start in the foldable phone space, it seems like Samsung isn't pushing that advantage as hard as it should. On the pixel fold, which is Google's first foldable phone, by the way, we got an interesting new design. that's even thinner than the Z-Fold 5, while having a similarly sized screen plus a longer 5x optical zoom, not to mention Google's superior photo processing. And other big foldables from China, like the ApoFind and 2, are doing a better job at eliminating the crease.

But perhaps more importantly, the Z-Fold 5 still costs $1,800, which is ludicrously expensive. That's kind of disappointing because after five generations, you like to see Samsung leverage its size to scale down the price of foldables. And for something like the Z-Flip series, Samsung actually has done a decent job of that. The original Z-flip costs just shy of $1,500 at launch, but Samsung has brought that price down to $1,000. Meanwhile, the first Z-fold started at just under $2,000 and has only come down by $200 over five generations, end quote. Also announced tablets, the $800-plus Galaxy Tab S-9, $1,000-plus S-9 plus, and $1,200-plus S-9 Ultra, offering a similar design to the previous generation new CPUs, though, and new OLED displays. Those are shipping August 11th.

And finally, the $300-plus Galaxy Watch 6 and $400-Watch 6 Classic, powered by WareOS 4, reviving the classics rotating bezel, which is what most people were talking about. Quoting the verge, if you're new to Samsung smartwatches, here's the bezel breakdown. Until 2019, all Samsung watches had rotating bezels. Starting with the Galaxy Watch Active 2, Samsung tended to stick touch bezels on its entry-level smart watches, e.g. the Galaxy watch Active 2 and Galaxy Watch 4, and reserved the rotating bezel for its premium or flagship models, e.g. the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic, etc. At least that was. the case until last year. Instead of a Watch 5 classic, we got the more rugged Watch 5 Pro,

Sands rotating bezel. I get why the rotating bezel isn't quite as durable for outdoorsy activities, but it was still a major bummer. I got my hands on the Galaxy Watch 6 and Watch 6 classic last week in New York City, and playing with the classic again reminded me why the physical rotating bezel being back is so great in the first place. While I liked the touch bezel on the Galaxy Watch Active 2 made the watch sleeker. I've found over the years that it's not quite as useful. Scrolling speed on touch bezels can be finicky, and generally you have to swipe your finger around the entire border. Not so with the rotating bezel. You can be much more precise when navigating through screens and widgets, and you don't have to move your hand much when you're

scrolling a bunch. Plus, like a physical button, it's immune to sweaty fingers and gloves. The mechanical click is also much more satisfying than the touch bezel's haptics. In a press briefing, I asked Samsung what drove the decision to bring back the rotating bezel with the Watch 6 Classic. Turns out it was due to popular demand. That said, the classics return doesn't necessarily mean the pro is going away. It's still part of the lineup, but it's just not getting an update this year. Samsung demurred when I asked whether it plans to update it down the line. The rotating bezel isn't the only bezel-related update. The border around the OLED display of both the Watch 6 and Classic is also slimmer. It's 30% thinner on the regular Galaxy Watch 6 compared to its predecessor and

15% then are on the classic. The result is a 20% overall increase in screen real estate for both watches. Aside from that, Samsung isn't reinventing the wheel here. The regular watch six still comes in 40mm and 44 millimeter sizes, while the classic is only slightly larger at 43 and 47 millimeters respectively. Material-wise, the watch six comes in an aluminum case while the classic is stainless steel. Both have sapphire crystal displays, end quote. Quick earnings hit. Alphabet yesterday. reported revenue was up 7% net income went to $18.37 billion from $16 billion year-on-year. Cloud revenue was $8.03 billion up from $6.28 billion. But I'm willing to bet that the reason Google stock was up over 6% overnight was because Google ad revenue was up 3% after two previous

consecutive quarters of falling ad sales. Microsoft reported Q4 net income up 20% year over year, revenue up 8% office commercial up 12% Dynamics 365 up 26% year on year and LinkedIn revenue was up 5% year on year. In case you missed it and are still using it, threads added an option for a chronological feed of posts from people that you as a user follows. Coding TechCrunch, you'll be able to either hide or show the for you and following feeds by tapping on the threads icon at the top of the app's screen. In addition, the update includes new categories to sort your activity feed, allowing you to filter by follows, quotes, and reposts, and a new follow button on your followers list to easily follow other accounts back. Instagram tells TechCrunch. Plus, users with private accounts can now approve follow requests in one go with a new approve all option. Soon, users will also gain the ability to see posts they've liked in their settings, we're told. In a post on his Instagram channel, Mark Zuckerberg said the company is adding translation features as well.

Threads started rolling out an option for a chronological feed of only people you're following and added translations to more to come, he wrote. Users will need to be on the latest version of the Threads app to get these new features. However, because this is a gradual rollout, you might not see the new feed or the other options immediately. The company said that translations are automatic based on the language they are written in and the user's language settings, end quote. Not sure if this means anything, but I did want to note that Open AI has shut down its AI. classifier for indicating AI written text, citing the low rate of accuracy of that tool. They say they will research more effective provenance techniques, but what does it mean that they took away the tool that helps you determine if something was written by ChatGPT,

quoting Decrypt. In January, artificial intelligence powerhouse open AI announced a tool that would save the world or at least preserve the sanity of professors and teachers by detecting whether a piece of content had been created using generative AI tools like its own chat GPT. Half a year later, that tool is dead because it couldn't do what it was designed to do. The explanation was not in a new announcement, but added in a note added to the blog post that first announced the tool. The link to OpenAI's classifier is no longer available. OpenAI announced the launch of its AI classifier claiming it could distinguish between text written by a human and AI. Even then, however, OpenAI called the classifier not fully

reliable, adding that the evaluations on a challenge set of English texts correctly identified 26% of AI-written text as likely AI-written, while incorrectly labeling the human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time. OpenAI said limitations of the AI classifier include being unreliable on text with fewer than a thousand characters, incorrectly labeling text written by humans as written by AI, and classifiers based on neural networks performing poorly outside of their training data, end quote. Finally today, the Overture Maps Foundation, a consortium formed by META, Microsoft, AWS, and TomTom has released its first dataset with 59 million points of interest, data that was donated by

meta and Microsoft, quoting CNBC. The consortium is releasing this data to enable companies to build their own maps without having to rely on Google or Apple. The Overture Maps Foundation, which was established late last year, captured 59 million points of interest, such as restaurants, landmarks, streets, and regional borders. The data has been cleaned and formatted so it can be used for free as the base layer for a new map application. Overture is aiming to establish a baseline for maps so that companies can use it to build and operate their own maps. For many companies, Google's and Apple's maps aren't ideal because they don't provide access to the underlying data. Instead, those companies allow app makers to use their maps as a service and, in many cases,

charged each time the underlying map is accessed. For example, app makers pay per thousand Google Maps lookups through an API. Apple allows access to Apple Maps for free for native app developers, but web app developers need to pay. That works for a lot of people, but not for others, a spokesperson for the consortium said. Overture is only offering the underlying map data, leaving it up to companies to build their own software on top of it. Digital maps are important for nearly all mobile apps. Emerging technologies such as augmented reality and self-driving cars also require high-quality mapping software to work. Using Overture's data, companies, can integrate their proprietary information, such as exact pickup locations for a delivery app to

customize their offerings. Overture isn't the first organization to strive to create map data that can be used freely or cheaply. OpenStreetMap, founded in 2004, creates maps using crowdsource data. Meta uses that data in its maps, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.