The Vergecast - 327: Pixel 3 review, the new Palm phone, and Google antitrust violations

Episode Date: October 19, 2018

Pixel 3 review, Google antitrust violations, and the new Palm phone Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Have you ever sent out a company tweet with a controversial hashtag? That's not smart. But you know what is smart? Hiring is a ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter's powerful technology finds people the right experience for your job and actively invites them to apply so you get qualified candidates fast. That's why ZipRecruiter is rated number one by employers in the United States based on a trust pilot rating of hiring with over 1,000 reviews.

Now, Virgcast, let's mention try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com.com slash verge. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash Verge. ZipRecruiter, smartest way to hire. This episode of The Vergecast brought to you by Erickson. Have you ever wished that you could stream high-quality HD videos on a crowded train or sit courtside to watch Big Game Live from your couch? Or share life experiences via video on social media from concerts and cool places all in real time? Well, Erickson is about to change the game in cellular networking with high-speed, low-latency 5-G.

Find out what the future looks like at E-R-C-S-S-S-S-O-N.com slash 5-G. That's Erickson, E-S-S-S-S-O-N dot com slash 5G. Hello and welcome to The Verge-S-S-S-S-S-E. for the week of whatever week this is. We've never gotten that right either. Anyway, this is the flagship podcast of Vurge.com. We're back up to two podcasts. Because Why'd You Push That Button?

Season 3 is out. Ashley and Caitlin, the tough topics of modern life on the internet. Why'd You Push That Button is back. I love that show. I'm so happy it's back. I'm so happy that I can say that we have, once again, a fleet of audio programming for you. So stop listening to this.

Pull over in your car. Stop listening to this. Go find why you push that button. Listen to that. Their first episode of season three is, why do you delete your tweets? It's a spicy one. They get into it.

It's really good. You should go listen to it, subscribe. But we're here. I'm Nelai, your friend. Paul is here. Hello. Dieter Bone is here. Greetings, Mobile Accomplishers.

Yes. Dieter got a bomb scoop. That's what happened. Pre-Central Zone, Deeter Bone is here. How are you, buddy? Deeter, you actually. had two big stories this week.

There's like a lot going on in the mobile phones. Three, Neely. It was three. Thank you very much. It was a third one. Intel story. That one up today. That one's not so big. Yeah, but it's there. I haven't read that one.

Okay. I'd say it's medium-sized, not, you know, necessarily large, like a laptop, but not small like a phone. Just kind of a nice medium-sized story. And there were like two sides to it that you could like fold up together. That's true. That's true. All right.

Anyway, well, maybe. we'll get into later. I would say there are a few huge stories. It's basically going to be a mobile phone-oriented show today. The Pixel 3 review, which Dieter did. Google changed the way that Android is licensed in Europe, which is a huge deal that we're going to talk about. And then I thought this was going to be really silly, but the audience interest in this

blew me away, which is that Palm has released a little baby phone to go with your big phone. And there's like photos of Steph Curry wearing it around his neck like a necklace. And people love it. They are freaking out over it. So we got to talk about the palm phone. And then there's an Apple event on the 30th, and that got announced today. So there's just a lot going on.

And Dieter went to Intel. Just to remind you. All right, let's start with the pixel. We have been talking about this phone for so long, and now you have it. You reviewed it. There was a wave of coverage between the event and sort of reviews coming out. But I think your review is actually the review. So what do you think?

I think that it is a stupendous phone. Shout out to people that remember what I called the last pixel stupendous, or the first pixel stupendous. Palm. God damn. Google. Google took all the things that people were unhappy about with the pixel two, and then it fixed them.

Yeah? That's like, that's, yeah, that honestly is the big takeaway for me. It changed the way the camera works a little bit. It fixed the screens. It made the bezel smaller, which, you know, you end up with a notch, which I'm sure we can talk about quite a bit. But the smaller Pixel 2, for example, it just looked crappy, right? It looked like a cheap phone.

It just did. It had big fat bezels, and it was just kind of meh. And now the smaller Pixel 3, it feels like it, you know, might deserve to cost. What is it, 750 bucks or something? It actually, like, is a phone that looks like it deserves to cost that much money. And, yeah, I don't know. Like, we can really get into, like, anything you want. But the big takeaway is they took.

the stuff that was like not great about the pixel two and they fixed it and then they also introduced a notch. Okay. So something that really stood out to me with this, now that you actually used it for a while was performance and this is, you know, I think we all agree that this is not as fast under the hood as the iPhone and it doesn't have as much RAM as certain phones out there. So I was really curious about if this felt good and how confident are you that it will stay fast? So it feels. So it feels, feels very good. My confidence in it's staying fast is not as high as I would have guessed six months ago, I guess, because the pixel two started to be a little bit draggy. But it does, it does feel quite fast. Now, it is not anywhere near as powerful under the hood as an iPhone 10S.

But I guess, like, I don't know what Android would do with that much power, honestly. There's stuff they could do that they're not able to do, I suppose, in terms of, like, gaming and VR. But it's more than fast enough for me. It feels definitely. faster than even like an S-9. An S-9 is plenty fast. Don't get me wrong. But like this feels a little bit smoother. It just feels more optimized just at the like

a really base software layer. About the RAM, shut up. I don't care that it only has four years of RAM. I just don't. Everyone that's like, it only has four years of RAM. Shut up. Just shut up. It's it's faster RAM. It's LPDDR4X or something and so it's lower power and faster

or whatever. Not a problem. Like I haven't had stuff force clothes on me. I'm sure that if you wanted to, you could do it. But I think that's a nothing burger of a drama, nothing burger of a gate. There is a gate that other people have said as a nothing burger that I think is an actual problem with this phone, which is it scratches really easily. And anybody who says otherwise is fooling themselves. Peter and Dan came up to me during the review period and said, hey, put this phone in your pocket. And I put my phone, which is the white one, into my pocket with my keys, just like shook my pocket with my hand, like very lightly. And

Then I pulled it out and it was scratched in a way that does not come out. Like immediately without question scratched, which I keep my phones in cases now. I've just become a case person. So it kind of doesn't bother me. But it scratches instantly. Yeah. So you can mark it up really easily. So if you like lightly drag a key across it, you'll see a mark that is like, oh my God, terrifying.

But it'll wipe off. But anything harder than that or any more pressure than that. Like the matte glass on the back, they did this mat finish. It totally does scratch. In fact, I kind of think the glossy part of that also is a little bit scratch prone. So I have for a wedding ring a tungsten carbide ring, which is the hardest metal that you can get it on a wedding ring when you buy it for $8 from Amazon. There's probably harder medals. But it's an $8 Amazon wedding ring, which is great because when I lose it, I can just buy another one and nobody will know.

and I just like super lightly pulled it across the back of both the glossy part and the matte finish and that scratched it. Now, that's not fair because tungsten carbide is definitely harder than Gorilla Glass 5. However, I did the same thing on the back of an iPhone 10S and it did not do a thing. Same pressure, same, you know, whatever. So yeah, sorry, like get a case. Yeah, I mean, it comes down to the mat being a thing. Yeah, well, so here's a funny thing. I ended up choosing the pixel 3 instead of the pixel 3, Excel, not.

because of the notch, but because I knew I'd want to definitely put a case on this phone. And I would rather have a case on a small phone than a case on a big phone. Yeah, that's interesting because I only have the little one and I desperately want to switch and try the big one for a while now. The alternate way to do this is you just scratch, you take it out of the box, you take your keys, you put a nice big scratch in the back, and then you never have to stress about it. Yeah, it's already scratched. I'm done. Like the paint is chipping off of my iPhone 7. Like, I'm going to have a phone for a while.

I've never successfully resold a phone. So I'm just going to live with it. If you are a phone reselling company like to buy ads in the Vergecast, this would be where I would mention some of you, but I will not at this time. They exist, though. That's not how that would work at all.

But think about it. Anyway, Paul, you asked about the scratching. No, I asked about performance, and Dieter somehow segue that into scratching. Well, there's just not that much to say about it. It performs really well. So, Paul, you asked about performance.

My read on it in staying fast. My read on it is iPhones have so much headroom that you never actually use their performance until the way end of the life cycle. So right now, in this moment on this day, I don't think the 10 and the 10S have a noticeable performance difference outside of some 10S neural engine stuff, right, that they're doing with the camera, for example. Right. AR stuff is faster because of the neural engine.

But that stuff to me seems pretty marginal. Opening web pages and read an email and looking at Instagram is exactly the same. No, no, no, no. That's the thing, though. That's the problem with the world as it exists currently is that opening web pages is the hardest thing that your phone has to do constantly. It's constantly cycling hundreds of megabytes of JavaScript in and out of memory. and just in time compiling JavaScript for ads that track you all over the internet. And it's really frustrating.

I'm sorry. But you need as much performance as you can. The A12 has a lightning fast JavaScript engine. It's way faster than even like a MacBook Pro now. It's crazy. So that is improved. But I just think over the saying Apple has a lead in performance versus a Snapchat and right now is like they will feel qualitatively the same to you.

but three years from now, your iPhone will hold up. And you know your Android phone is kind of operating its limit the day you buy it. Right. And I think that's really the thing. Yeah. I could argue that an iPhone can feel faster at like some operations. But I think that a much bigger impact on your experience of the software is going to be the tuning of the software, how they choose to open up animations. Can the thing actually open up apps relatively quickly?

and I think that you'll get much more out of that on how they tune and optimize the software, Android versus iOS, than you will out of more clock speed. Yeah. Dieter, I'm going to ask you about the display minus the notch. Yeah.

So the pixel 2 display, can we just all agree, now that the pixel 3 is out, can we just all agree the pixel 2 display was not good? The pixel 2 XL display was not good. Nope, not good. They didn't want to admit it.

Nope. And they said we were overblowing it. They hit very hard that it was color accurate, it. And the very first thing I did was I set down a pixel 3xl next to a pixel 2xel, set them both to the natural color profile, and just looked at them. And you know what? One of them was brown and muddy and grainy, and one of them was sharp and clear and vibrant. Yeah. Is that enough? Like, I would have used the pixel 2 this whole time much more happily because I didn't like looking at the screen, which is a really important thing on a phone. Yeah, no, I used a pixel 2 all year. And I don't

know, you get used to it, man. Yeah. Who are you going to believe? Your lion eyes? It's a spec sheet. So they fixed the display. So the screens, the two, the 3xel is made by Samsung, but apparently the pixel 3, according to I-fix it, is made by LG on both of their teardowns, which is fascinating

to me because they, to my lion eyes, look very, very similar. I don't see a massive disparity between them. And when I talk to Google for the review, because, I mean, I'll just tell you, if you go to the home screen, have the big white home button, and then you immediately go to a gray screen, which was the thing that caused the burn-in scare last year, you can see the after image of the home button. Now, it goes away, and they've done a bunch of stuff in software to, like, mitigate against burn-in. So, for example, like, Google's almost hit 50-50 parity for whether the nav bar on the bottom will be black or white,

depending on what Google app you use. I think they're at, like, 48-52 technically right now. So that helps mitigate burn-in, but I do not expect there to be a burn-in drama or controversy here. One of the things that they've done is I think they're paying much more attention to yields. And they're much more likely to take the good stuff off the line than they are to take the garbage cast-offs that I think they got for the Pixel 2XL. Yeah. Okay. Now we have to talk about the notch.

It's huge. I haven't seen you. You were here for the event. You went back to San Francisco sometime. And then you published a review and I read it. And you're like, you just get used to it. And I was like, what happened to him? Yeah, yeah.

Walk us through the timeline. Do you, are you not used to the notch on the iPhone 10? I'm used to it. I will say one. It is very much smaller. So I look at the notch in the same way that I look at like a silly word or just a normal word. Like you'll just be looking at a word like, I don't know, blue. And then you're staring at it.

And then all of a sudden it doesn't even look like a word anymore. It just looks like some weird squiggly lines. And like it ceases to like have that immediate like, oh, you don't see the word. You just see the idea color blue, but then you're actually looking at the actual letters on the page and like it looks strange. If you look at the notch, it looks doofy as hell. It just looks dumb. If you just look at the screen, the notch eventually does the thing that the word blue does when you don't like look at it as a thing on a page. It just becomes like the idea of the word blue.

It just becomes a screen. But how long? How long? Is that a 30-minute process? Yeah. So Paul wants the timeline. I'm telling you that I disagree with your philosophical trickery,

my friend. I will say that I saw on Reddit that there is a term for that thing that happens when you think about a word too much. Willful blindness? No. Fanboy delusion.

Can I give you guys a little piece of inside baseball? I chose to call this notch Duffy instead of goofy. I think Duffy is a funnier sounding word. It's a combination. It's like, it comes from nowhere, right? But in my head, it's like goofy, but also it's dumb. So, it's doofy.

So TechMeme decided to link to the story. Thank you very much, TechMeme. But they rewrote, they always rewrite their headlines. And so they rewrote doofy to goofy. They said the notch looked goofy. And so I, like, I messaged them on Twitter. I was like, no, the word is doofy. Do they change it?

And they changed it. Beautiful. All right. So what is the time on answer Paul's question? Like half an hour. But the thing is, there's an option in developer settings to hide the notch. But what they need to do is make an option. is make an option that's better for hiding the notch,

where it will just put status icons up there, but leave it black, and then still give you an extended screen. Instead, it just pushes everything down and just completely eliminates the notch. Wait, really? You want a middle, yeah, well, that's a developer setting. So it's not an actual official setting

that they've released to hide the notch. It's a thing that you do if you want to test Android phones to see if your Apple work with various sizes of notches. So people have been saying, like, there's a developer setting to fix it. And it's like, that's not what it's for. The developer setting is there to test phones against various notch sizes and you're repurposing it. Google has said they're going to release a setting to do something with the notch.

And if and when they do, I'm hoping they'll have a more elegant solution to what to do with that space if you want to hide the notch. But philosophically, it's the color. It's the word blue. And if you just refuse to acknowledge its composition, then it just fades into a conceptual reality for you that you can live with. Look, if you're in your car, I want you to pull over. And I want you to look at the clock on your dashboard. And don't just look at, don't just read the time. Look at the actual numbers.

Look at the two or whatever time it is right now. And just it's a weird, just glyph and it kind of looks funny, right? Now you're good. You're driving. Drive again. You're allowed to drive again. And in five minutes, you're going to check the time. You're going to look at the clock.

You're not going to see what the clock looks like. You're just going to see the time. That's how the screen works. Again, I think that you're making it. It's an elegant conflation. Metaphor. Yeah. It's also a complete bullshit because the notch looks stupid.

Right, because the glyph, the two, which looks silly when you consider it qua itself, actually provides utility, whereas the notch just looks, as you have already said, doofy. Well, okay, so this is where did Google justify the notch? You get a louder speaker. The speakers sound great. and you get a wide angle selfie. And here I will suggest that Nelai is being a hypocrite because he is super hype for the wide angle selfie.

Yeah, but I have a smaller friend that has no notch. I got all the things you got, and I got none of that going on. But it is true. We should just go to the cameras because we're never going to convince anyone that this thing is good or bad. You either like it or you don't, or you can't. I don't think anybody likes it.

I think you either accept it or you don't. You know who doesn't accept? This is kind of a tangent, but you know who doesn't accept their notch? Apple. I'm so sick of that commercial with that stupid planet on it that hides the notch. That is basically lies. Yeah. Everyone does it, though.

Everyone does like a dark background to like kind of get away with it. Anyway, cameras. So agree. Deeter and I literally the comment in the Google Doc when I was editing the review was, we're going to have this fight about the wide angle camera. Well, and then by the time I read the comment, I had already changed my mind. I had written something.

I had written something and I was like, you know, it's fine. It's wide angle. I don't care that much. And then like as I like was sitting out and using it just a little bit more, I was like, oh, wait, no, this is great. To me, I think Google's entire framing of Google at this event was we're here to help you. We've identified some problems you have. And then we've like built some solutions for those problems, right?

And everything they did with the phone kind of fits into that frame extremely well. So there is call screening, which we can talk about, but you get a lot of robocalls. Now Google robot will answer your phone for you. That's great. The wide-angle selfie one to me is an even more brilliant kind of approach because people take a lot of selfies. And we know that the demand to take selfies from slightly farther away is so great that you can just buy it. You can literally buy a stick to make your camera go farther away from you. Yes.

Right? So if you're just looking at that, there's enough market demand here that selfie sticks exist. Then of course you're going to put another lens on the front and let people zoom out. And when you demo that to people, when I've showed people the phone, that's the thing they're most excited about. The call screening thing, which is arguably much more intense and impressive and cool is just kind of like, oh, whatever, I just hang up on people anyway. This is like, oh, I want that. That's a thing I want on my phone. What Snowblinded me to it, I think, was I've seen, and this like gets into the story of everything else I've added to the camera, but we've seen so many Android phone makers release, come out with the new phone and be like, look at all the crap the camera can do. And it's all stupid. Yeah. And some of those people, some of those Android manufacturers have made wide-angle selfie lenses and given them stupid names. And so I was sort of terrified testing this phone that it was going to, it was going to, it was going to, feel Samsung-y. Now, I don't think that's the case at all, and I don't think that's the case with

the wide-angle selfie camera either, but I also don't want to, like, give Google credit for being a masterful genius and coming up with, you know, nobody's thought to do this before. Yeah, lots of people have it. They just, like, they did a meh job of it. Like, Google did a pretty good job of it, although the wide-angle selfie camera is not quite as good quality as a main selfie camera, in my opinion. No, I think you're absolutely right. It's clearly a worse camera. And neither one of them is particularly brilliant to begin with. But it's super useful. And I think people will pick useful over quality in everything in technology 10 out of 10 times.

The MP3 story. Yeah, exactly. To that point, because I've seen a lot of this on Twitter, like, oh, everybody's so excited about this phone, but all the other phones already had this feature. Like, I think this is important. This is why it's interesting to me that Google's making a phone. Now they've done it three times. that it's an integrated experience. It's an all-in-one experience.

This is what I've always liked about Apple is that they have thought about your whole experience into end. And when they add a feature, they're going to integrate it with the whole experience. It's going to feel native and natural. And it's not going to feel like a tact-on gimmick. Yeah, there's an element to that where it's still Android. You know what I mean?

Where they can't. And I don't mean that. I don't mean, that sounds way more pejorative than I meant. Wait, I mean it to. Yeah, please. So, like, Apple controls the entire experience with an iron fist. So they're like, we're going to change how email works on the iPhone. And they just, like, change it at the OS level.

And then sometimes you're like, I'm going to send an email and you're dumped into Apple's email experience. Right. Like, there's no way out of it. Apple's like, here's how sharing works now. And that share sheet is just, it's full of, you know what I mean? Like, you know what? My big pet peeve on Apple right now is on iOS. every time I click a YouTube link, it opens the in-app browser,

then I click the Safari icon. It loads Safari. And then I have to scroll, pull down to get that open in YouTube, like, little banner. So it's a lot of work to open YouTube on iOS. I have different problems. So that's like a really good example, right? How Apple handles deep linking in its system is oftentimes it doesn't work. And sometimes you get these weird redirect loops.

Yeah. My favorite was when I go back to open Safari. And the last thing I'd open was a YouTube link, and all of a sudden YouTube opens that I don't know why. Love that. Yeah, it just dumps you over. So that's like a good example of Apple is like tightly in control of this experience. And sometimes it works really well and sometimes it's crazy.

With Android, I don't, Google philosophically does not want to be in control of that experience in that way. Right. So they can build features and they integrate them into the system, but they don't push them into everything the way that Apple does. So I agree, like again, I didn't mean that to sound. negative. It's still just Android. There's more Google stuff there to fill in the gaps of Android as opposed to, say, a Samsung phone where you're like, I'd like to send an email and you get a picture of four email clients, Verizon's email client, and then like some like weird Samsung

experience that you didn't want. Like that doesn't happen because Google's cleaned that up. But the ability for that to happen is still there, which I think is good. Well, yeah, that's why I'm very seriously planning on buying the pixel 3. I want some of this flexibility. I have lacked flexibility for so long. I want flexibility. But at the same time, I want a manufacturer to think through the experience into end, at least have one user flow in mind.

And if I want to go off the reservation, I can. But at least they've thought through one full use case. Yeah. Yeah. So we should talk about the back camera, which is the, I mean, it's the thing. So here's a thing that is going to make Nilai talk for 20 minutes straight. The most surprising thing to me about testing the rear camera on the Pixel 3

was how much I disliked the back camera on the iPhone 10S. I was just like, oh, wow. Like the Pixel 3 is an iterative update and quality over the Pixel 2 for sure. It's better for me in low light for some reason, especially with like handshake. I don't know if they've done anything in particular to resolve that. They've warmed up the colors a little bit. which we could have debates over. There are some cases where I think the pixel two

looks a little bit nicer just because it's like more dramatic in some way or more photographic as a thing James Barham on our team keeps saying. And I think he's right. But it looks probably nice for on a phone to be a little bit warmer. And in general, like there's a bunch of features that we can talk about how we can get into all of them. But like in terms of raw quality,

it's like it's a step up, it's nice. And they change these texts a little bit. But mostly what I was doing was like for the first time doing a head-to-head between the iPhone 10S and the Pixel 3 because I didn't do that with the 10S and the Pixel 2 because I wasn't involved in that review. So I didn't like see with my own eyes like man the the 10s is just like it's just try hard. It is a try hard camera. It's trying way too hard. It does a lot.

It occurred to me playing with the Pixel 3. It's really only like the second generation of these computational photography cameras, right? Yeah, they didn't. I mean the Pixel 1 camera was good, but it wasn't anything like the pixel one camera was good, but it wasn't anything like the pixel 2 in terms of quality. And it's Apple's first crack at it, really. They did HDR before. But this sort of like, honestly, the way these cameras work now is more like a video camera than a still camera.

Oh, interesting. If you want my, like, deeply philosophical read on this, these cameras are no longer capturing a moment in time, right? Like, you think about an SLR, you push the button, it goes, and like, however long that shutter is open is the moment in time you've captured and thus it shall be. these cameras are taking basically videos right they're frame by frame they're adjusting the setting of that capture but they're capturing four frames into a buffer and then they're constructing a photo they're basically video cameras like someone's going to tell me I'm wrong and I'm probably on a specific level the only little twist there is video is kind of like a series of still images right okay so go with me on this is where I was going but video doesn't record a series of still images anymore but video doesn't record a series of still images anymore but more. It now like records the changes in the images. Right. And it does all kinds of interlacing and the iPhone will do interframes at different exposures when you record in 24. So cameras have become video cameras and video cameras have become the other thing. The only reason I bring this up is the idea that you're going to take

basically a series of frames, a video, and then collapse that into an image that's supposed to represent a moment in time is brand new. Like it didn't really exist before. for, especially not in real-time, like, HDR existed. Even with HDR, you were taking a long exposure and a short exposure, and you were merging back highlights into your short exposure, right? Here, or the other way around, here, it's just, it's just doing something else. It's so new. What does a, what does a raw image mean in this world?

Like, there was the whole long blog post from Halide, and then there's, like, the computational raw that you can get out of the pixel three. It's like, what does it even mean for it to be a raw? raw image because it's still combining a bunch of images together. Right. So there's not a thing as a raw data on the pixel. So they have a thing called computational raw. It will spit out a DNG file, which is Adobe's raw format.

It is everything through the HDR chain except the compression to JPEC. Yeah. So it takes the raw thing and puts it through the HDR chain and then it just doesn't deliver you a JPEG. I think it doesn't do as much coloring as the JPEG, at least the example I saw. But I haven't been experimenting that much. Right at that JPEG compression stage, it does the final, like, it sets a bunch of levels.

Oh, sure, yeah. Yeah, okay, compresses JPEG and throws everything else out. So it doesn't do that last tweak to say, okay, here's how the JPEG should look. We're going to throw away all the other dynamic range. So you can, you get a DNG that's like the HDR merge from the pixel, and then you can do that stuff on your own. You can do that with apples.

When you shoot raw with halide on a 10 or a 10S or whatever, you get that too. Anyway, my point of all this is I'm really picky, and I'm very harsh in the 10S camera. I know. But, like, there's a part of me that's forgiving because literally no one else has ever tried to do this before. And these cameras are, like, fundamentally magic. Like, when you, like, really think about how small these sensors are and what Google can do with, like, their Zoom function to measure handshake and get extra resolution, it is crazy town. So, like, there's a part of me that wants to be more forgiving.

And then there's a part of me that looks at a 10S comparison photo with the pixel 3 and says, the hell are you doing? Just like, let me stop doing this. And I, you know, eventually the 10R will come out and we'll get another crack at it and we'll do it all over again with the pixel 3. I will say that in many of the comparison photos of the pixel 2 and the pixel 3, I prefer the pixel 2. Yeah. For no reasons other than aesthetics.

I think the pixel 2 just, those photos are crunchier and more contrasty and more dramatic in a way that I really. By the way, Dieter was like, Neil was going to talk for 20 minutes, and I've just been rambling. I do wonder what's going to happen when the software updates come to the pixel 2, if they're going to adjust the pixel 2's, like, color temperature and overall stuff to be closer to what the pixel 3 does. That's like a super interesting, because they're adding a bunch of camera features back to the pixel 2. Yeah, and I can't remember the list of what is and isn't getting added back. I'm sorry, I should know, but I don't remember. There's like half of them are.

The big one is the night site, which no one has yet, right? The long exposure nighttime stuff. Anyway, look, I don't quite get what Apple's doing. They're very confident in what they're doing. But I just find that camera to be noisy, basically. And then their noise reduction makes everything look like a mosaic of colors. Google is pretty good at preserving detail. But the pixel three, we haven't actually said this yet.

The pixel three looks more iPhone-y than the pixel two, right? So it brings out more shadow detail. It's a little warmer. It's a little less contrasty. They're getting towards a more pleasing image as opposed to the very dramatic sort of art shots of the pixel two. I would like an option. Maybe there is an option.

I just don't know. Some of these sample photos from the pixel two in the pixel three look a little more HDR than I'm necessarily comfortable with. And so they look very pleasing immediately, but on examination, it's like, everything is just so perfectly exposed.

And that's just not photography. It kind of almost matches how it feels to see where when you're looking with your eyes, everything seems to be correctly exposed because you adjust so quickly. But photography typically has... Yeah, you can turn off the HDR, but I don't know how much you lose

in terms of the other stuff when you turn off the auto-h-DR. I think it becomes much more like a standard dumb camera when you do that. When you turn off HDR on the 10S, it produces basically garbage. Like, it's not great. Even though the sensor's bigger...

I just want to turn it down 50%. That question you're asking, like, does this look like photography or does it look like your eyes? another deeply philosophical question about cameras on this episode of the Vergecast the camera makers will tell you they're going for eyes they are going for what your eye

sees that's what we want to capture and I don't know if that's everyone's expectation I don't know if that is good it just depends on the mood like the zoom aspect that was something that for me that's like these are things I can see in the world that I want to be able to zoom in on them better and so that's really exciting

And so I don't, in every case, wants something that looks like a photograph. But every once in a while, it's nice. Yeah. I mean, that's the whole depth of field aspect, right? It's just to look like a photograph. It's not how it feels to see. Yeah, your eyes don't produce, like, beautiful boca. But people really like it, and we're spending a lot of time trying to recreate it in these cameras.

Okay, Dieter, wrap up the pixel three. What's your big takeaway? This is the phone to get? If you don't want an iPhone, then I think, yes. I think this is the best Android phone and like running away. Now there's, you know, other stuff coming out. There's a new mate phone that Vlad's going to review, and it's got eight. No, it's not eight.

It's, I think it's got three cameras on the back, and there's other things going to beat it on specs. The one big knock on it besides the scratching is the price. You can get pretty much everything on this phone minus the camera quality for like 500 bucks, right? Or maybe even less if you get something a little bit used. So if you are not here for the camera and you're not that, you don't care that much about like really nice integrated software stuff, you can get the same specs as this phone minus the great camera for way, way less, which is cool, you know. But if, you know, price is no object and you want an Android phone, this is bar none, the phone I'd recommend to people. And would there be any reservations if you're not on Verizon or you don't want to join Project Fi? No.

Just buying it unlocked? Like, there's no reason to worry about that, right? Insofar as, like, it's a hassle to get it repaired if something happens because you've got to find, like, your local U. Break Eye Fix shop or something, which is the thing I've done. Like, that sucks. But if you're not worried about getting it fixed if you crack the screen or something, the unlocked phones, they've got wide band support. I had no problem with the pixel two throwing multiple different kinds of SIM cards in it and having it worked just fine on multiple carriers. I love that phone manufacturers have figured this out with LTE because when LTE first rolled out, out this was not a guarantee

that they would be able to design antennas for every band of LTE and now it seems to not have the problem which is a delight. All right, we've got to take a break. We're going to listen to an ad from Erickson who's sponsoring the show. Then Liz is going to do this week in Elon and then I'm going to tell you all about antitrust policy

and Android in Europe. It's going to be riveting. We'll be back. And now, the 5G meditation minute. Welcome. Just relax your body. Breathe. Repeat your mantra and feel the calm wash over you.

5G is here. 5G is here. And it's going to change the way we live. This next generation of wireless technology will revolutionize how we send and receive data. And Erickson is one of the companies building the infrastructure we'll need. Push away the bad reception and overcrowded networks. 5G uses multiple antenna to boost capacity. So in large crowds of people, like at a packed concert,

you can still connect and share selfies instantly. Embrace the cloud. With minuscule latency and edge computing, 5G makes even remote files behave as if they're, were on your device, and you will have so much more to be thankful for. Augmented reality, 8K streaming, AI-assisted services, smart cities, and the ever-growing internet of things. Your future is empowered by 5G.

Lie back. Be present. Focus on real connections. Erickson is bringing 5G to life. Breathe in and breathe out. Repeat your mantra and feel the calm wash over you. 5G is here. Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags and everybody else,

welcome to this week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lepado, deputy editor at The Verge. This week, we will be talking about tequila. So, Tesla Kila started as part of an April Fool's Day joke. You might remember this is a series of posts that Elon Musk made. on Twitter, with himself propped up next to a Model 3, saying he'd been found, quote, surrounded by Tesla Kila bottles. Anyway, he filed a patent for Tesla Kila.

He says it's coming soon, which actually makes it a lot like the other merchandising efforts Musk has made this year via, well, this year and last year, via the Boring Company, right? So the boring company sold hats, then it sold flamethrowers, and it raised a bunch of money. So merch is pretty actually normal for high-end automakers. You'll notice that BMW sells hats, thermoses, luggagees, and For some reason, $61 golf balls. Porsche actually created its own subsidiary for merch and sells everything from quilted jackets to Porsche design-branded phones.

Ferrari sells hats, driving gloves, $42 keychains, and $55 earbuds. But if the Ferrari keychain seems expensive to you, definitely check out the Maserati keychain, which retails at $163. So, like, the reason why this happens is you don't have to be able to afford afford a BMW, a Ferrari, a Maserati, or a Porsche to be able to buy the merch. And you don't need to be able to afford a Tesla to buy the Tesla Kila. You can participate in the lifestyle.

So Tesla does have its own accessory shop where you can buy mostly men's and women's apparel, though not as of right now short shorts. But there's like toy versions of the Model S, infant onesies, some mugs. So there seems to be an interested market for musk-related collectibles through. throughout his companies, not just at the boring company, but also at Tesla. I do think it's a little weird, after all these years of campaigning against drunk driving for a car company to sell alcohol, but it just looks like bad optics. It's not actually illegal or anything.

And Elon Musk isn't actually opening himself up to any liability lawsuits unless, you know, he's personally serving the tequila and then encouraging people to drive their Tesla's home afterwards, which I don't think he's going to do. I hope he's not going to do. So, you know, it's like a little weird, but it's a little weird, but it's, It's Tesla. Weird it comes with the territory. So let's talk a little bit about tequila. So for those of you who don't know, it's a type of mescal made exclusively from blue agave in Mexico.

And mostly it's people who drink it are in the U.S. And it's been really, really popular lately. It's been, you know, sales have more than doubled since 2002. And celebrities are super into it. In fact, they have their own tequila brands. So you've got... This is just going to be a funny list. I'm really sorry.

You have Sammy Hagar. You have George Clooney. You have Justin Timberlake. you have P-Diddy, and even ACDC has a tequila. Okay, so celebrity tequila is definitely a thing. But, you know, the thing that interests me about Musk's tequila is that it fits with another pattern in his businesses, which is that he likes to really do the hard thing.

And tequila is, not only is it a fairly saturated market with a lot of celebrity products in it, it's actually pretty hard to make. There's a long period of time that it takes agave to mature, and then on top of that, tequila has to be aged. Whereas if you were to pick something like vodka, you can make that out of literally anything, even agave if you wanted. And you don't have to age it. It works right away.

So this sort of fits with Elon's general interest in doing it the hard thing. And there are like a couple of like, you know, things that are a little weird, right, about tequila generally, right? So, you know, there's the trade war, not just for China, where Tesla recently purchased ground for a new gigafactory. I guess Donald Trump's hostile rhetoric towards Mexico has a number of. of tequila producers trying to see if they can expand outside the U.S. market. Again, like a lot of Musk's projects, this is tough. It's not impossible. And as branding tie-ins go, I think it's probably better than golf balls.

Because one of the things that happens with merch is you start to see how companies, like, view the people who use their products, right? So there are people who golf. They're usually older, maybe not as hip, whereas basically anybody who's over the age of 21 drinks tequila. So I think that actually Tesla Kila is a pretty good idea, and I am personally looking forward to tasting it. And that's this week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lepado.

Thank you very much. All right. We're back. Big thing happened this week. Huge. To change Android forever in Europe. That's my setup. You guys appropriately wowed.

So the European Commission find Google 5 billion euro and said, you have to bring. break apart how Android is licensed. You can no longer tie Android to the Play Store to Chrome and search. So previously, if you want to make an Android phone, you sign up for the Android OpenSvors License, that's great, you get Android, and you just do stuff with Android. But if you want to make stuff with the Play Store, you had to promise Google that you would not make any devices that ran a forked version of Android. So the forked version of Android, I'm just going to keep referring to here, is Amazon's Fire

OS. because it's the most famous one I can think of. It just is. There's lots and lots of other ones. So, like, Samsung has Tyson. The reason Tyson isn't a fork of Android is because it gets Samsung around this deal with Google. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a special exception where you can do whatever you need to do in China. Because there's no Play Store in China.

So that's not an exception. It's just like reality. So they won't knock you for releasing a forked version of Android in China because you got it. Yeah, people have no choice. But I'll come to China momentarily. So Google says if you want to use the Play Store and Chrome and search, you cannot make wireless. You can't use any forged versions of Android.

So that's one big restriction Google had. The second restriction was if you want the Play Store, which is the place where all of the apps are and Play Services, which is where all the updates and APIs live, then you have to have Chrome as your browser and Google Search and we'll pay you some money to put them on the home screen. European Commission says to Google, these are illegal ties. This is the antitrust violation. You are illegally tying your products together.

So you have to let people make forked versions of Android. You have to let Samsung make a FIREOS phone in Europe in addition to their Google Android phones. And you cannot demand the inclusion of Chrome and search if people want the Play Store. You have to separate these. Can I just say that I know you're trying to like very deliberately and carefully explain the situation here in terms that we can actually discuss it and like I commend you for it. Thank you, friend. But the fact that you just put the idea in my head that someday Samsung, the software quality

expert, will release a fire OS phone. 100% has me shook. Just shook. The word I used to describe that product, that hypothetical product in our post yesterday, was Wackadoo. If Samsung wants to release a Wackadoo fire phone, they will. And I know that they will. By the way, the hierarchy and ridiculousness, like,

Wackadoo is definitely an order of magnitude crazier than doofy, just to be clear. Yeah, it's Wackadoo. That's where they are. Okay. So Google says, all right, we have to comply with this thing. Here's what we're going to do. They announced their plan. I'm going to say this very directly to all of the people at Google who I know are listening to this.

The blog post that was drafted, I believe, for Hiroshi, announcing how they're dealing with Android in Europe, is one of the most confusing and bad blog posts ever written. So you read it and you have no idea what's going on. Do you think that that was intentional? I have no idea. But we figured it out. We figured it out. It took us, me and Jake, the better part of the day making phone calls, we figured it all out. Here is what is happening with Google and Android in Europe.

You can now license, you can just take Android open source and go and do whatever you're going to do. You can take Android open source and you can get the Play Store in what's called Google Mobile Services, which is their collection of apps. so that's Maps, Gmail, YouTube, calendar, all that sort of thing. You have to pay for that, right? Because the way Google makes money is Chrome in search.

So now you can get an Android phone. You're in Europe. Your Samsung, you want to sell a phone in the UK. Well, not, the UK is a bad example because of Brexit. You want to sell a phone in Italy. You can build an Android phone that has the Play Store in YouTube

and maps and calendar and never put Chrome in search on there. Because Chrome and Search were how Google made money, now they're going to charge you a license fee for the Google Mobile Services. So just think in your mind, separate out the Play Store, Gmail, YouTube, calendar, whatever else.

That's called Google Mobile Services. That's GMS. And then there's Chrome in the search app. Then once you get the GMS license, you can further, if you want, get a Chrome in search license. Does that also cost money? That is free.

And if you are wanting to do some business of Google, you can go back to Google and say, hey, Google, we will put Chrome and search on the home screen like we used to if you pay us. And Google will happily pay you. I wonder if they'll pay you a similar amount of money to which you just had to pay to get Google mobile services. I am almost 100% certain that that is the case. When we talked to some folks yesterday, I would describe the response to that as kind deflection. So just to be clear again, the way Google works now, European device manufacturers always have to pay to get the Play Store on their phones. We don't know how much. I would love to find out if you know, please tell me. So you got to pay a license fee to get Play Store, Gmail, YouTube,

calendar, all that stuff. You can then take Chrome in Search for free once you've licensed GMS. Can you get Chrome in search without the Play Store? You cannot get Chrome in search without the Play Store for obvious reasons, namely, I think Chrome is deeply tied to the play services universe. Yes. Right. That was a quiz. You passed.

I nailed it. And you can get Google to pay you for placement of Chrome and search on your phone, which suggests you might be able to get all the way back to zero, which further suggests that the European Union accomplished nothing, but that's where I want Paul to jump in. Just to make this more complicated, I want an edge case here. Yeah. Chrome and Google search are free. Yeah.

But if you use Chrome and Google search. search if you set it as a default or in some scenario, Google will pay you. Is there a scenario where you just have Chrome and Google search, but you haven't checked all the right boxes so you don't get paid? The only box that you would not check in that scenario is did I ask Google for money, right? If you're a device vendor and you're giving up, if you're giving up spots on your default home screen for free, like you're just, you deserve to go out of business, right? Jimmy at LG is in big trouble because he always forgets to cash the checks.

It's like Jimmy did it again. Jimmy, did you call Google? Come on, man. What are you doing? Lucky and Gold Star mad at you. This makes a lot of sense. I really like the idea of Google selling a product. So I would say the responses to this broke down into three main categories.

raise of things. One, this is stupid. The European Union is stupid because Google has just constructed a licensing scheme at which nothing will change. And there's some validity to that, although I disagree in some important ways. Two, this is good because now Google is actually selling a product, right? This is a revenue stream like that. So they're incentivized to make that a good product and not have me data collection. I'm a little bit of a little. I'm a little shakier on that one. And then sort of the third one was, is this just going to result in higher prices for consumers, right? If you have to pay $2 per device or potentially way more, but if you're Samsung, you got to pay some licensing fee per device, are you going to say, well,

I got to pay this licensing fee so the Galaxy S-10 is going to be $2 more now? All of that is unclear. I would say the first one, which is, this is stupid. We just ended up back at zero. The reason that one, to me, doesn't hit home is the opportunity for Samsung to go make FireOS phones didn't exist before. So there's an opportunity now for the biggest phone vendors in the world to take Android and do different things with it, which is, I think, really good. Well, and actually, I just want to point out that that opportunity is important because Android is 85% of the worldwide market. It's how, like, it's like you get a huge app compatibility bonus. And so you remember, like, I don't know,

sailfish, you'd be like, like, Migo, all the stuff that like at the tail end of the smartphone wars, when Blackberry and Palm and Windows phone were finally dying, nobody will ever be able to make another operating system again because the first thing that we'll do on Theverge.com is say, where's Instagram and they'll go, uh, do, zip, but da, yeah. And then we'll say, well, you're going to fail, and then they will. But if you're able to fork Android and still have some access to Android apps, You'll have to open your own store and blah, blah, blah, blah. Then that is potentially the very first competition

that Android has had in the worldwide market in, I don't know how long. This was Jake Cashnakas wrote a really good article to that effect on our site. Anyway, sorry. Again, clarify and edge case. So now you can make your fire phone, Wackadoo. And then you can make your like, I don't know, like Duck, Go phone with F droid on it as your app store. But you could also still make a Google blessed phone, right? You can do all of those simultaneously now.

Okay, two weeks ago, before this came out, Samsung was not able to make any Android-based phones in Europe that were not Google phones. They didn't have the full GMS license, didn't have the Play Store, didn't have Chrome in search. Well, it could have, but it chose not to because then it would not be able to also sell Google phones. So Amazon did this, and it failed. So the Samsung Galaxy Wacadoo, they could have done it at any point, but it was too big a risk because they would not have been able to sell Google phones.

Right, because their money is the S-9. So if you want to make money selling an Android phone, you needed the Play Store because you need the apps. You maybe didn't want Chrome and maybe you didn't want search. For example, say you are Microsoft and you would prefer to release a phone with Edge and Bing, but you know, based on your own history with attracting app developers to your mobile platform. that that's a pretty hard road. So now this is, I think, the most interesting middle case in Europe. Microsoft could make a surface phone that has the Play Store, but does not have Chrome in search, right?

That has Edge and Bing preloaded. And Microsoft has enough money to pay the fee for each device, which is hilarious because Microsoft be licensing an operating system effectively. Just go with it. This is great. Very exciting. But Microsoft could make a Surface phone that has the App Store and the various Google apps on it, but then their own browser and their own search engine preloaded onto Android.

That is not possible in America, right? If you want to get access to the Play Store, Google demands that you have Chrome. That's just how that contract works here. So in Europe, they've broken it apart. So I think there's some argument that, yeah, the vast majority of Android phone manufacturers are going to take the money, right? and it's going to look exactly the same as it did before. But you've got some big, powerful players who can now provide real competition. So I will say there are so many exciting things.

I totally could see a Microsoft Android phone very quickly. By the way, Paul, you just got excited about EU regulatory behavior. I just want to put a pin in that for the Vergecast audience. I have carrying my own pen. I am carrying my own pen for that. This is clearly a case of a government agency just picking winners and losers. Think of who wins here. All the people who are in many ways, not in all ways, because they do rely on Google for Android,

but in many ways competitors. And so the EU has said... They got to go win. They have the opportunity to win. They have the opportunity to compete. Yeah. Yeah. But they did it before.

That's not picking winners and losers. You don't win because you don't... You don't lose because you suddenly have competition, right? Like they just got this. They're just allowed to get to the starting line. No, it's kind of like, you know, the score is 90 to 30 and the game is over. And the referee named EU walks out of the court and blows his whistle and he says, I invented more quarters.

Now you've got a chance. Well, so the, okay, just to map that hypothetical to reality. Yeah. Time does not end in reality. The European government did not invent more time for, like, the game isn't over. The game never ends. And that is maybe the most depressing thing I've ever said on this show. Right.

So like the idea that you were going to, for all time, like Google win because of what appears to be an unfair contract. The big philosophical distinction. All these parties entered that contract willingly in the first place. originally. Right? They complained to the regulator. They complained to the state about the fact these contracts were unfair and were foreclosing competition.

And who else are you going to complain to? Complaining to a ref during a game is different than starting a game with certain rules. Paul, I love you with this metaphor is so broken. There's no, right, it's just more time. It's more competition. So the EU's antitrust policy is very different than the United States' antitrust. policy in that it is dedicated to the idea that there should be competition in the market. Right?

It's not the consumer welfare standard that we have in the United States. Actually, the FTC just held a hearing earlier this week to talk about that standard. Ben Thompson, who's sort of friend of the verge, writes for techery. It's a great newsletter and blog that you can go read. You should read it. He spoke at that hearing. And his takeaway was the United States is overly wedded to the consumer welfare standard that says prices have to go up for consumers for the government to regulate because everything is free now.

Right. So that's like the United States where like in this moment of philosophical change or just at least debate about that. In Europe, the idea is there should be competition, right? And they're very aggressive with that. And I think here what they've created is the opportunity for competition because they think that more than dictating prices or dictating behavior will result in better consumer outcomes. I think that's like fair, especially when you're here and you're saying, well, Samsung can't even make a FIREOS phone. But Google has been. monopolized Samsung. Did you guys ever read that story with the chicken and she's making a meal and she asks all the other farm animals if they'll help her make the meal and they're like, no, I'm busy doing other things on the farm. And then she finishes the meal and everybody wants to eat the meal. And the chicken's like, well, you didn't help anybody help me make the meal. I feel very strongly that you've gone from a baseball game to a farm. No, it was a basketball game originally, to be clear. Now it's a farm. Wait, where does, like, Wilbur the pig fit into this?

Is that just a retail animal farm? No, it's, there's a chicken and she's making food. I don't know. But the idea, it's just the idea, Google made this. Nobody forced Google to make this thing. It is an extremely valuable, important thing in our world. And so now that they've succeeded, now that they're, important now that they have a dominant market share, yes, dominant, now they're under attack and they have to change everything up.

Sure. I think that's an absolute one way to look at it. I think the other way to look at it, which is the way that our government looked at Microsoft and Internet Explorer, was it is anti-competitive to take your powerful thing and use it to prop up your less powerful thing, right? It is anti-competitive to use your dominance in one sector of the economy to, crush competitors in another one through contract contractual arrangements. So Microsoft makes Windows. It's great. We can bundle, Explorer onto it. By the way, Windows, PC manufacturers,

if you want a reasonable license rate for Windows, you have to pre-install Internet Explorer and not put Netscape on your computer. Right? Yeah, they made Windows. That's what they did. They were really successful at that. Should they be able to leverage that success and success in other fields? And look at them now. They're like, they're going to, third rate, fourth rate tech giant. They're almost a joke. I don't think, wow. That's the spiciest Microsoft take we've had on the show in a long time.

You can follow Paul on Twitter. No, but I'm saying the government picked a loser. You just got excited about a surface phone. Yeah, because it's going to be hilarious. It's going to have the best outlook integration of anything. It's got Excel spreadsheets all over the place, a little like, I don't know. The government picked a winner in a, picked a loser. In that case, the loser was Microsoft.

I don't agree that that's how winners and losers are defined. I don't think saying there's going to be competition. I'll come back to basketball, right? The Golden State Warriors win a lot, right? They won last year. Should they just be the winner or should they have to play another season to try to win again? Paul, do you believe in the draft system? Not really.

Wait, for the military or for basketball? For sports teams. I want a sport, well, at least one sport to have a pure free market and no salary caps. Oh my God. No drafting. I'm just going to, can I just button this whole conversation up by saying right before we started the Vergecast, Paul and I were talking about Bitcoin and the combination of Bitcoin and a pure free market sport is like perfectly aligned.

Bitcoin basketball with Paul Miller. All I know is I want to buy a Samsung Wackadoo now. Thanks a lot. Yeah. Please. Well, you'll have to go to Europe for that. I am less sympathetic to giant corporations and whether or not they should be allowed to win forever. I am more sympathetic to when people pay money for things, do they have a range of options?

Can they pick the best one? Can the market decide a winner as opposed to entrenched dominance, right, without the necessity of major disruptive platform form factor shifts? So Microsoft, if mobile had not happened, I assure you that Microsoft's dominance would have happened continued unchecked for some time. If the iPhone didn't happen, if we didn't shift this, if they weren't late to that, if Steve Ballmer hadn't been the CEO at that time, like, there's a lot of ways they could have won that fight, right? And they could have just kept winning. They didn't. So that's great. But there's not another one of those coming for phones.

So I would rather that people have more options, whether those options are insane guys. Galaxy wackadoos or surface phones or whatever. And not for nothing. This is the one time, Paul, where I think you and I get literal international state level experiments to look at, right? Because the United States is not changing. So whatever happens in the U.S. market, whatever happens in the European market, we're going to divert.

A little A B test. A little A B test. With Britain in the middle, just super confused. All right. We should move right on. We really just did 30 minutes on Android licensing. I told you it was going to be exciting. There was a basketball game.

There's a farm. So many things happen. All right, Paul. Yeah. Every week. You hit us with this segment. It's been consistent. Same name, same idea.

Always. What you got. It's called Plam This. And I'm stealing Dieter's Thunder because we're about to talk about the Plam phone. But in the meantime, Before you think about that, think about this, the world's thinnest phone. Docomo is releasing a kiosyro phone called the card phone, K-Y-hyphen, O-1L.

Wow. See, now I think the government should pick a winner and a loser here. It always goes. It's got a 2.8-inch e-ink screen. This is actually what's most exciting to me. At some point, I don't need my phone to be any thinner. But I do want an E-E-E-E-Inc phone. I'm always excited to see someone mess around with the E-ink phone.

This is an E-E-E-L-E-E-T-E-E-T-E-E-T-E-E-T-E-E-E-T-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-RGE-GGG. Oh, my God. But it's a lot of fun. It looks like it's Japanese-only. It's about $300. But there's a video on the site. You can check it out. I think we should go to look for it.

It's got, it makes, it makes beeps every time they do anything. Every time they touch the phone, it beeps. It's really interesting. You know, there's nothing I miss more than that sort of like mid-90s to mid-2000s. The beep happens just like a half breath after you do something on a device. Like, you know, like that's slow. Yeah. The little, that little like feedback latency that just made you feel like you were really using something. Like, I'm really punching these buttons right. By the way, Dieter, I want you to talk about the bomb phone, but we didn't. mention this about the pixel.

Pixel has great haptics. Yeah, the haptics are really good. Some of the best I've ever used an Android phone. Well, that's damning with faint praise. No, they're really good. I think LG had really good ones, and I think there's LG screen. Maybe a little LG haptic situation in there. They're really good.

Anyway, Palm Fun. Yep. This is your time, man. I got to rant about cameras. I got to rant about EU regulatory behavior. If you haven't seen the news, there's a little company in San Francisco, funded by Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors and others, decided they wanted to make a little phone, just an eddy-bitty, tiny little phone.

And so they went out in the world and they said, hey, we want to make this any-bitty, tiny little phone. Oh, hey, it looks like an iPhone, whatever. And they needed to get it made. So they went over to China and they said, hey, which you guys want to make our 80-bitty-tiny little phone. And TCL said, hey, we're down to do pretty much anything for anyone ever. we'll do it

and these guys who are like former Samsung guys are like cool oh by the way we don't know we're going to call this thing and TCL was like

you know we promised the world that we were going to do something with this palm brand and that was a lie we have no idea what to do with this palm brand

do you want it and they were like sure that sounds great we're going to call this thing the Palm co-pilot and then Stefan Curry said no just call it

it's like taking the the of a face book. And they're like, cool, Stefan Fond. That's great. We totally agree. Isn't it? Wait, hold on, Dieter. Isn't it Stefan Curry? Yes. But the story is funnier if I mispronounce it every time I say his name. And I have a different pronunciation every time. It is. Okay. Just keep going with it. So then these two guys now own the Palm brand, they licensed it from TCL. We're like, all right, now we've got to get released this thing. What are we going to do? I know. Let's make it carrier exclusive.

And then they went around and they went it to all the different phone carriers. And they said, hey, you want this phone? We don't want anybody to buy it. We only want them to buy it if they have another phone, and it's going to be their time-well-spent phone. It's going to be the tiny little phone they take when they don't want to use a big phone. And all the carriers went, nah.

And then Verizon went, you know, we destroyed Palm twice. Not once, but twice we ruined that company. We ruined them when we didn't take the pre in the first place, and we ruined them again when we told them we were going to take the pre-plus and make it our iPhone killer. But instead, we were just using that to, play Google and then we put all our money into

the Motorola droid. So, you know what? We owe you one. We owe Palm one. And the guy's like, you know, we're not really Palm, right? And Verizon's like, shut up. We're releasing your phone. Please put all our software on it. And the guy said, uh, and Verizon said, yes, everyone wants Verizon Message Plus for texting. And the guy said,

okay. That's a lot. Wait, and then someone's like, oh, shoot, we forgot to put a logo on the phone. How do we How do we spell palm? I can't remember. Where did the Elgo? And so they wrote plan.

That's true. And then they got Steph Curry to be their creative director. Yes, he's their creative director. Which is amazing. Harry McCracken, who's a great tech writer, wrote a big profile in Fastcoe, where he got to hang out with Steph Curry while he designed armbands. And he said, I'm really involved. This is a real thing.

It's not just a joke. All of this sounds ridiculous, I will say. And I want Dieter to describe the, the, the, the, the, the, of turning on Verizon Message Plus because that is also a delight. It's all ridiculous, but people are super into it. That's it. That's the one. There it is.

I think we were all super surprised at the response to this story. Ezra Klein tweeted like, this is what happens when you look at smartphones as an addiction. Like this is the product that's, which is, that's a lot to say about the plan phone. It is the most interesting sort of, hey, this. This is a thing I didn't know I want it, but now I want it because it solves a problem. Reaction to what is essentially just a very small Android phone. Yeah. It's still an Android phone.

You can put all the things on it. You can totally not time well spent your time with this phone if you want to. It's just, it's all it is is the framing of the phone as the one where you leave your phone behind is so resonant. Here is a reason to leave your phone at home. And now they've done a few things to make it like a useful second phone. So it shares your phone number. And it also has hashtag life mode. Oh my God.

Hashtag life mode guys. Where it's a combination of battery saver, do not disturb, and like weird airplane mode. So it turns on do not disturb for everything. But then when you turn the screen off, it actually shuts the radios off. So the thing just becomes completely nothing. and then when you hit the power to turn the screen back on, then the radios spin back up again so you can do stuff. So here's my question.

Could you not at this time go on, I don't know, the eBay's, buy an iPhone SE for like 150 or 200 bucks? Stop it. I know what you're doing right now. You are trying to make me go on a rant about carrier phone number lock-in, and then once I've done it, I will be forced to write an article about it before the podcast goes up, and I'm not going to do it. No.

I think you should, first of the first of all. Damn it. No, but here's another thing that's true. If you have iMessage in your life, you're already an iPhone person. Uh-huh. You can... This thing looks like a tiny iPhone. Right.

You can just get an old iPhone, an S-E that's small. You can turn off most of its notifications. You can not install a bunch of apps. You can even have... IMessage will send a text from your other number. If you have multiple iOS devices, you can say send from your primary number. And then you just have a little phone that you can leave your big phone behind. But nobody can.

can call you. They can FaceTime audio your ICloud address, man. There's ways. This is a frustrating thing. This is what I've realized with phones that people think that their family members are going to be in a horrible accident and that they're going to need to get called by a hospital. And so they think they need to have their phone with them and on and tied to their phone number at all times. Like you run through your checklist of what you need your phone for that night. And you're like, ah, I'm not going to use Apple Pay. I don't need that Instagram. I'm just going to live in the moment.

And like, ah, but hospitals, how are they going to get a hold of me? I really think that is like the key. Right. So Deeter had a line in his, in his preview. Think of this as a really big smart watch. So like another choice you have is you can just get an Apple watch with LTE and just leave. Yeah. And not have any phone of any size.

And then the hospital can call you. This is why this thing is so compelling is because people think they want just a dumb phone. They think they just want a dumb phone or they just want a watch, but they don't. Because in their heart, deep down in their heart, they know they're going to look at Instagram. They know they need it. And so they want to have the option. Or maybe it's on Instagram. Maybe it's they know they need to call an Uber, right?

Or they might have to check a work email. And so this thing lets you believe that you are getting the phone that lets you discone, connect, but really, you don't have to. Like, it's letting you have your cake and not eat it. Or no, it's letting you eat your cake and not have it. There's some variation on that. It's letting you have a giant cake and a small cake and pretending the small cake is carrots, right?

Like, yes, that's it. That's it. Like, it's just not, it's not a deep metaphor. It's like, you just eat, you just have more cake and you're like, that's not cake at all. No, this is me turning on, um, you know, the app timers on the iPhone and hitting, give me 15 more minutes every 15

minutes. Like, it's not effective. It makes me ever so slightly consider my behavior. But then I'm like, no, I really do want to watch a little bit more YouTube right now. And I just keep doing it. And that's the end of that. But I would push back on, it is a very silly, expensive, overwrought

way to solve a problem of using your phone too much. At the same time, it's a signal to other people and to yourself that you're trying to use your phone less. And it will likely result in some improved behavior with your phone if you think you have problem with how you currently use your phone. Right. And I think the fact that it's, in fact, very small will make you not watch a bunch of video on it. Right. Like, you're not going to use it as a TV unless. I wish they would just sell this phone. Just let me buy it. Unlocked. Just let me,

some people will just want this to be their phone. But you can't. You can only buy it as a phone for your phone. That's amazing. So tell me about the Verizon experience, because you have to share the number and have the texting. Right. So if you are a iPhone user, again, just to like be really clear, you cannot use GadiMessages on this because it's an Android phone. Now, it's possible that I haven't tested this. So it's possible you can use the default chat app and have your messages synced across, you know, something. And maybe someday when RCS chat launch, is for real. I'm still waiting on an answer from Google and when that's going to happen, that that will work and you'll be able to pick whatever, you know, RCS texting app you want.

But right now, if you want to have your messages arrive on both phones and be synced across both phones, you need to use Verizon Message Plus, which is their carrier custom texting app, which is, it solves the IMessage problem, but for text messages. They get synced across multiple devices, and that's a really nice thing to have. However, Verizon Message Plus wants to collect location data to give to the rest of oath for directed advertising. It has an integrated e-gift card feature. It gives you the option, if you would like, to have certain words in the text message you receive be underlined so you can click on them to buy stuff. Yeah.

I was going to make a joke, does it, to give all your data to oath? Yeah. Of course it does. Of course it does. Without question, without compunction, without hesitation, my friend. Yahoo Sports has your text messages now. Yeah. If you would like to not use the native camera on your phone to take a picture inside the app,

you have the option to use the camera that Verizon has developed inside the app, which presumably has, you know, Verizon stickers and features and whatnot. That camera is called the Canvas camera, Canvas with a K. Of course. They have their own custom emojis. Yeah, what kind of stickers you got? I don't know, man. They've got integration with GlyMPSE, which is Verizon's Tell Your Family Where You Are

and All Times feature. Oh, my. Yeah, it just goes on and on and on. So I'm not looking forward to that. You know, when Steph Curry announced the phone, he definitely tweeted from an iPhone. I'm just putting that out there. The people at Palm saw my tweet dunking. I got to say I dunked on Steph Curry, which is great.

And they say that was intentional because it's a second phone for your main. phone. So sometimes you're going to use your main phone for social media, but you wouldn't use your palm phone for social media because that's your chilling phone. That's your life mode phone. So you would never tweet from your life mode phone. You'd only tweet from your iPhone, that thing that distracts you. But you wouldn't tweet from, say, your Android phone that sinks your text messages and uses the same app store. I think the moral of the story here is because we're all going to eventually get on this boat where we have like three different phones for different modes of or different moods, basically.

We got to stop text messaging. Everybody needs to pick. It's going to be WhatsApp, telegram, or signal. It can't be I-Message because it's not cross-platform. It can't be Facebook Messenger because Facebook is garbage. Signal only works on one phone at a time.

Our good friend, Joanna Stern, today in the Wall Street Journal, wrote an entire story about trying to leave I message and how hard it is. And it was very funny to me because we took our we took Max to New Jersey to like visit Joanna's baby and like have

cute baby photos over the weekend and I was like man she's just not returning my text and then finally I realized that she had put her sim in her pixel and I texted her I sent his text message and she went on a long rant and then that turned into a Wall Street Journal

column which is amazing but yeah I mean if Apple really really cared about its users they would put iMessage somewhere else, right? Like, that's like a, at the end of the day, if you want people to have a good experience, if you want to be dominant in that way,

you should just put iMessage on Android. I don't think they ever will, because those blue bubbles lock people into their phones. Here's the most kumbaya thing Apple could ever do. They could say, hey, we've been waiting for an Android phone that we thought had security as strong as our secure element. And we think Google has finally achieved that with their Titan,

whatever it's called security chip in the pixel 3, and now I message is available on the pixel three. Why would they bless their competitor that way? I wasn't describing a kubeiab moment. I was just as a dream. You're just dreaming? Like a personal. How are you telling me that the state shouldn't regulate people?

And on the other hand, you're having fantasies about completely impossible corporate behavior. What is wrong with you? By the way, the book I was thinking of is called The Little Red Hinn. All right. It was one of those little. golden books back of the day. I'm sure Max would love it. Yeah, there you go. We're going to, and it's about, it's about capitalism

on a farm. Yeah, basically. All right, I'm definitely reading Max this book. I'm raising Max to be a ruthless industrialist. Let's be clear. I know how the game is played. She's going to achieve a dominant operating system share. Yeah. And then you're going to have to use her messaging

platform. That's how it's already working in our family. Now, look, you can make an argument for why Apple Music is on Android, right? It is almost impossible to distinguish why iMessage is not, except Apple knows it locks people into their phones. The only reason that Apple music is on Android is because it was there when they bought beats and they felt bad. No, that's not why, because they would just lose to Spotify if they were only converting their own phones.

Okay. Right? If you want to roll up to Taylor Swift and say sign an exclusive, by the way, 85% of the phones in the world will have access to your music. You can't make that deal. right so you need that scale so every argument you can make about Apple music you should be able to make about iMessage what we need is celebrity exclusives for messaging apps think about it just think about it i feel like you just saying that out loud means it's gonna happen it's like it's like it's like it's like Halloween time and like you just conjured a spooky ghost out of it no way All right, we got to wrap.

We're running way over time here. Apple event on the 30th. Yes. Apple also did something kind of wacky. They invited Ashley to get another hands-on with the iPhone 10R. Ashley had a bunch of influencer, Saradici, who has been on the show. She was on Circuit Breaker and I was on her podcast. Sarah Dichy was great.

Made a little hands-on video with the iPhone 10R. Ashley's lives on our Instagram channel. It's on our Twitter. So go check out the 10R again. It's a phone. I think it's the one that I think in this round of device reviews, it's sort of the lynchpin, like, depending on how that phone goes. I think we're going to, the other phones are it recontextualized. I'm excited for that one.

But then this event on the 30th, I think we're expecting what, iPads? iPads, and I hope the new Mac, the new MacBook. And then they'll show a picture of the Mac Mini, and they'll just go, nah. Are they late on their Mac Pro, or do they say that was coming next year? I think the met next year. They're not laid on the Mac Pro. Yeah. Okay.

Did they miss a deadline on it, though? No, they went to, they put out, they did a story with Matt Penzer on a TechCrunch saying, we're going to be next year. They said it won't be released this year. And I was like, oh, so next year. And they're like, yeah, and then it turned out, yeah, that's what happened. So the invites for this event, everyone got a different one, like different renderings, the Apple logo, like different drawings, like some 3D ones, obviously suggesting this is like

a creative focus thing. Photoshop on the iPad came out last week at Adobe Max. Actually, Dami Lee and I interviewed Scott Belski on this podcast, the chief product officer of Adobe, about Photoshop on the iPad. When they announced Photoshop on the iPad, Phil Schiller was on stage at the conference, quoting Steve Jobs about how great Photoshop on the iPad is, which is wild. So you have to assume the iPad event, new iPad Pro, they're going to show Photoshop, they're going to draw a bunch on it.

My invite, my Apple logo rendering is the most insane one that I've seen. It's something that I like to call Apple Urban Cammo. It just looks wild. And I really hope they make a jacket in that pattern. But that's the 30th. So a couple weeks from now. But I think new iPads. There's already been some renderings leaked.

Oh, yeah. Of the iPads, there have been some renderings. It's very clear that it's going to be face ID and no home button, but that there won't be a notch for it, but it'll have thinner bezels. And then they'll be in the bezels. And there was some concern that would only unlock in portrait mode. But Rambo on Twitter, it's like, no, it will unlock in both.

everybody relax. Yeah. No headphone, Jack. Bum, bum, bum. I've got a doggle life update on that. My new way to listen to Spotify is I've got some pretty nice headphones. I plug them into my iPad. And then I use my iPhone because I'm just playing threes all the time.

And I control Spotify from my iPhone, but I'm listening to music because the iPad has a... Your entire iPad is now just an iPod that you control for your phone. It's an $800. Headphone dial. That is amazing. We got to end it there. There's some stuff I want to tell you about. Why did you push that button is back.

It's at the top of the show. Go listen to Why You Push That button. It's one of my favorite shows. One of my favorite things the Verge makes. So that is great. You can listen to Recode Decode with Carrey with Carrey Swisher. You can listen to Pivot with Caras Swisher and Scott Galloway. And you can listen to Recode Media with Peter Cofka.

Those are all excellent shows available. Our Instagram, Verge Instagram, is a true story. At Virgin, Instagram. Hit a million followers today. Look at that. That is run by our wonderful social team, including Maria Abducoff, Ruben Salvadori. There's Caitlin Hat.

They're doing great stuff over on Instagram, so go check it out. It's a lot of fun. And I actually actually host a little Instagram news roundup every week. So go follow us on Instagram. Find a million of your friends and get us to 2 million. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless Paul's at Future Paul. Dieter's at Backlon.

Paul definitely wants to hear about your basketball antitrust metaphors. Did you buy a car? No. I got my bike fixed up, but I'm just fine. I don't want a car. I hate cars. I hate cars. Get a bike to Paul and then he got a bike.

Let me know. Anyway, that's it for us this week. Thank you so much. That was Verches. Rock and roll. Paul. Farewell, mobile accompliceers. That's so sad, Dieter.

This episode of Rochast was brought to you by Erickson. 5G isn't just a step up from 4G. It's a game-changing advancement. It's up to 100 times faster, and the ultra-reliable, low-latency network means it can connect more than phones and tablets. It connects everything. Imagine a jam session with fan members mile apart in perfect sync. It's happening. Imagine an 8K entertainment system in your self-driving car that rivals your home theater. 5G will have the power to revolutionize existing industry models or even create entirely new ones. That's just a glimpse at what the future will look like with Erickson

and 5G. Find out how 5G will transform the world at ericson.com slash 5G. That's E R-I-C-S-S-O-N-com slash 5G. And lastly, our friends at Eater have a new show called Start to Sale, which is all about starting a business all the way through the process, but selling it for some money. Check this out. Hi, this is Erin Patinkin, CEO of Ovenly. And I'm Natasha Case, CEO of Coolhouse. And together we're the co-hosts of Start to Sale. We talk to entrepreneurs one-on-one about what it takes to build a business from launch to exit. Our podcast is different from other business podcasts, because it delves into the journey of entrepreneurship. This isn't just about a startup story.

We'll be hosting the founders of some of your favorite brands, people like Jen Rubio of Away, Piero Delardi of Refinery 29, Jane Wirwand of Dermologica. What's really unique about our conversation is we'll really talk about the experience in the trenches and the most valuable lessons learned to get them out of there. Don't miss an episode.

Subscribe to our show today. And thanks to Smartwater for being the founding sponsor of Start to Sale.