The Vergecast - AI gadgets, bendy phones, and more from MWC

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of region locked phones:  The Verge’s Allison Johnson and Jon Porter report back on all the tech we saw at Mobile World Congress this past week.  MWC 2024: all the phones, wearables, and gadgets announced in Barcelona Peering through Lenovo’s transparent laptop into a sci-fi future  What if phones actually bent to our needs?  The Phone 2A makes a guest appearance at Nothing’s MWC event. The Humane AI Pin worked better than I expected — until it didn’t  Samsung has big ambitions for the Galaxy Ring  A short gif of Infinix’s color-changing charging E Ink phone concept. Now there’s a 28,000mAh battery with a phone in it  Xiaomi’s new Watch S3 has a bezel you can swap as easily as a strap. Honor’s Magic 6 Pro launches internationally with AI-powered eye tracking on the way HMD is making a Barbie flip phone alongside a smartphone for tinkerers Later, David answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline about web crawlers and AI.  With the rise of AI, web crawlers are suddenly controversial The Vergecast and Decoder are live at SXSW this weekend, March 8th and 9th. SXSW attendees can see both shows live on the official Vox Media Podcast Stage at the JW Marriott, presented by Atlassian. Learn more at voxmedia.com/live. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of region locked phones. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am standing outside of the Alamo draft house where I just saw Dune Part 2. Now, I don't know if I'm like the expert on whether Dune movies are any good. I saw part one just the other day on an iPad on a train. I haven't read the books. Love the first movie. Loved the second movie. It's really long.

It's really intense. It's really loud. I had a great time. Everybody should go see it. Ideally on the biggest screen you can possibly find. But Dune is not what we are here to talk about on the Vergecast today. Today we're talking about Mobile World Congress. MWC is one of those trade shows that some years is kind of boring.

It's just a bunch of companies being like, look, on Android phone. And some years is really interesting. And this year was one of those interesting years. So we are going to have John Porter and Allison Johnson, two Verge reporters who were at the show in Barcelona over the past week, and they're going to tell us about all the interesting gadgets they saw, and maybe whether we got a hint of what the future, of gadgets really looks like.

All that's coming up in just a sec, but first, I'm going to go home and sleep for a bit because it's really late because that is a three-hour-long movie, then we'll get to it. This is the Vergecast. See you in a sec. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets,

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And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy.

cover host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. All right, we're back. I got some sleep. I'm now deep in the dune behind the scenes YouTube rabbit hole.

I've learned a lot of fun facts about Austin Butler's hair. Let's get into the show. So Mobile World Congress is, I would say, typically the second most. interesting trade show of the year, at least most years. CES is the big one in Las Vegas for the whole electronics and tech industry, but MWC has for years had kind of a special niche as a place that is all about one thing, and that one thing is obviously mobile. Often that just means lots and lots of phones, and this year it meant that too.

But the thing about mobile right now is that the definition of that word is starting to change. So thanks to AI, we're getting new kinds of devices. altogether. And because Apple and Google have so thoroughly dominated the smartphone era, there are lots of companies that are looking to figure out what's next, even in the smartphone world, the idea that your phone should just be a slab of glass that runs a bunch of apps that come from an app store that's run by either Apple or Google, there are so many good reasons for companies and for people, frankly, to try and get past that idea. And so not only are we getting

lots of new phones, we're getting lots of new ideas about what a phone or a mobile device in general should look like and how it can work and what it should mean in our lives. This is my kind of stuff to talk about. So we're going to talk about it. The Virges Allison Johnson and John Porter were both at MWC last week. They played with all the devices and they tried to figure out what they all say about the future of mobile. And somewhat miraculously, they both made it home safe and not sick and they're here to help me dig into all of it. Allison Johnson, hello.

Hello. John Porter. Welcome back to the Vergecast. Hello. So you guys survived. Yes. Tell us a little bit about what MWC is like, I confess, it's been a bunch of years since I went, and it's like in Barcelona, so it seems very romantic and lovely in a way that like going to Vegas for CES does not seem romantic and lovely. But like, give me the 2024 vibe check of MWC this year.

So I read a lovely comment that referred to MWC as a very nice overseas trip for this journalist. And I read that comment whilst sitting in a dingy hotel room with a bathroom. ceiling that was leaking at approximately 11.30 p.m. on a Saturday evening while I was just writing my third embargo of the weekend. So I think that I think that kind of sums up maybe how glamorous MWC is. But I mean, like a lot of trade shows, I think a lot of companies want to kind of get out ahead of the show itself. So it means the weekend is kind of filled with these press events and you kind of end up kind of rushing from from one to the other to the other kind of barely keeping track of what's happening because every single company is just trying to jostle and not step on

each other's toes too much, but maybe step on them a little bit. And then the show kicks off on Monday in earnest. And then it's just this frantic rush to see the kind of the smaller players that aren't able to hold a big press conference over the course of the weekend and actually kind of get hands-on time with the gadgets themselves. Alison, what was your read? This wasn't your first MWC, was it? This was my first MWC. It lived up to the hype, I guess. Yeah, I was surprised by how busy, yeah, the weekend was. It was just like darting around Barcelona just to see different stuff and just the added, like, difficulty level of like, I don't understand any of these street names, but I'm going to find this place where I'm going to look at a phone that bends. But it was great.

It was you can't beat eating some meat and cheese in your hotel room at 1130 writing embargoes. Glamorous job we do. It really is. It really is. It did seem like watching from afar, not. not only kind of an unusually newsy show, but an unusually cool show in the sense that there was like not just kind of the giant slew of all the phones that are kind of the same as the other phones that MWC falls into every once in a while, where it's just like every company shows you their version of the same phone that everybody else is making. And there's 60,000 of them and that's MWC. This year it felt like there were some big weird swings in a way that I don't remember seeing in a while.

Did it feel like that on the ground? Like, was it cooler and more exciting than maybe some of these we've had in recent years? That was my impression. It was kind of a lot of running around to see, like, weird little things. Like the Samsung Galaxy ring was kind of out on display for the first time. So we got to go see that. The humane AI pin was kind of an unannounced guest appearance. So we got to see that in action.

I think the Deutsche Telecom booth, which in the U.S., is like T-Mobile. It's a very like T-Mobile vibe of like everything was magenta. They were like blinking lights and stadium seating and kind of like carnival-ish. I was like, wow, this is really wild. We saw some cool stuff. Yeah. I made a list of kind of the coolest gadgets that I read about you guys seeing. And I just want to sort of run down your experiences with a bunch of them. And it seems to me that if you were going to pick one that was kind of like the star of the, the, the star of the, you know, show that everybody was talking about. It feels to me like it's Lenovo's transparent laptop. Do you think that's right? Is that the right answer?

I love Lenovo's transparent laptop. I can't articulate what I would ever use it for. It filled me with joy hearing Lenovo themselves trying to articulate what you would use it for. But then that feels like a kind of part of the process with unveiling a concept laptop like that. You show this thing off to the world and a bunch of people see it and a lot of people go, I don't know really what this achieves, but then maybe like one person right in the back raises their hand and goes like, what about? And then you can take it back to your lab and kind of like optimize it for that kind of like idea that just came up. I will say Lenovo's big idea for this laptop, which if you haven't seen, firstly, go see it. It's a transparent micro LED display,

gets as bright as like a thousand nits, but it doesn't have a kind of a contrast layer. So that thing is just transparent in a way that you can't control. When all the pixels are lit up, like when it's bright white. So if you say had like a notepad open or something, you can't see through that. But other than making the whole screen white, you kind of don't have control over this thing. So it doesn't have like the, there's that LG TV at CES that could sort of roll up the thing behind it so that it would have something to contrast against. This doesn't have that. It is just see through all the way. It doesn't have that. A thing Lenovo told me when I asked was like, oh yeah, we'll definitely try and include something like that if this were over to make it to production. But their idea for why you might want this was they kind of had this artistic idea for it,

that, oh, maybe you're an artist and you're sitting there and you're sketching, and you can see things behind it. So maybe you put some sunflowers behind the screen, and then you're, which then brings me on to the lower half of the tablet, which is this kind of drawing tablet, where when you bring a stylus close to it, the keyboard, the illuminated keyboard disappears, and suddenly it's kind of like a whack-on surface type thing.

And then you can kind of sketch what's behind the laptop, which I think would make sense if this thing was the size of a TV, like Lenovo's thing. But when you're talking about, I forget exactly how big the screen is, I think it's maybe like 14, 15 inches. You can just look around it. I don't know anyone out there that's like, are the unknowable joys of what could be behind my laptop. So, like, my theory for who would buy this thing if it did ever make it into production. Like, to be clear, they're not making any promises about being introduction. They were kind of confident that the technology would maybe appear in a future product. But my guess would be that this would be a thing for kind of really high-end front desks in, like, banks to buy.

And like the kind of place you walk into, and maybe nowadays they have an IMAC because they want to project that air of high-tech sophistication. And maybe in the future they go, hey, check it out. We all look like we're in Minority Report. Don't you want to, you know, spend a bunch of money at this business? because it's a real, it's like a showy thing, but I don't know, like, where the practical element of this thing comes in. But I hope that, like, I hope it started the conversation in the way they hoped. And I hope that someone at the back is kind of now thinking, oh, actually, I have this perfect use case for a transparent laptop display. Yeah, I appreciate that with the whole transparent display technology happening right now,

nobody knows what to do with it except to put it in fancy waiting rooms, which is so funny. And it's like the LGTV, they were like, it could be a virtual fish tank at your dentist's office. And it's like, all right, like, sure, I'm down. Let's do it. I have no issue with that. I also will never, ever buy one for my house. But I'm just honestly glad that anyone is doing weird laptops. The world is better when there are weird laptops. And I appreciate Lenovo for not just making think pads, but for also making weird laptops. We should also point out that they're very sensible business laptops are probably actually. the more impactful announcement from the show because they've kind of done a bunch of work with I-Fixit to kind of make these things more repairable. So I went through this cool demonstration with a couple of I-Fixit guys who were kind of like pointing out all the kind of like the little

things they've done. So I think for starters, loads of components can be removed with just a Phillips head screw. And then they've got little icons kind of printed into the shatty to kind of go, okay, if you wanted to remove the battery, you want to remove these three screws. And then they've got little QR codes in there that you can scan and it takes you to a page on a Novo's website where it shows you, A, what part you need, and B, a little video showing you how to replace this thing. And, like, that's, it's like the transparent laptop kind of gets you in Lenovo's door. And then when they're there, they're like, okay, but this is the less, less attention-grabby thing. That's actually going to have, like, a huge impact on, like, the thousands and thousands of businesses that buy those think-about laptops.

No, I remember years ago somebody, I think it was at Lenovo told me that they make really cool colored laptops to bring you. over to the shelf so that you'll buy their black laptop. And I have thought about that ever since that they're like, everybody loves this like rad orange thing that we made and absolutely nobody buys it, but it is literally marketing for our other colors. And it's just like, you know what, if that's what we do with this new stuff, I can live with that for a while. Alison, speaking of truly insane things that will probably never come to a real product, but I love to pieces anyway, you saw a thing that I believe you have named Bendy the Bendy Phone. Yeah, Bendy Phone. Tell us about this.

It's a phone that bends. No, this was a similar thing. Motorola, you know, owned by Lenovo. Oh, yeah, we're just doing a whole Lenovo thing here. I didn't even mean to do that. Okay. Yeah, that's all we saw at the show. It was Motorola phones. Apparently. No, they have this, it's a concept phone. So similar, they're just kind of like, we're trying this out. It's just to see if we can do it. They showed it off, I think, late last year or earlier this year. But it's an actual phone. Like, they showed me it runs apps. all that stuff, but it just bends backwards. You sort of get to that point of like, okay, so why? And the couple of things they had worked out was like, there was a little metal bracelet you could put on and then it was the case that the, that bendy phone was in would just kind of clamp onto it. And then you have this like massive, chunky bracelet or watch on your arm. And it's like, okay. Probably not though. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to wear that. But like, okay, that's a thing you can do. And then it is sort of like, it doesn't just kind of bend one way.

You can sort of like curve the top part of the screen a little more. And they had it. So it would kind of run a little launcher on like half of the screen. Just pretty much the way the flip razor phones like cover screen works. So you get like little widgets and you can run a full app if you want, but it's weird. Yeah, it was just kind of a fun like easy. it and you're like, oh, I don't know, what is this? But then I've come around to like, it's a gadget. Like, this is fun. Why shouldn't we have fun? I totally agree.

And then I think all the way in the other end of the like, is this a thing spectrum, you also saw the galaxy ring, which you mentioned, which I am totally fascinated by. I am desperate to become a smart ring person. But the only one I have is the aura and it's just like a little big and I notice it too much on my hand and I don't love it. But I am very excited about the galaxy ring and you got to try it, which we had not before. How did it go? What did you make of it? So as a disclaimer, I do not have an aura ring. I'm not super familiar with the category, but I was allowed to put the galaxy ring on. It's surprisingly light.

Like the pictures of it, it looks kind of dense and you think, you know, there's like a battery and a bunch of sensors in there. It might be kind of heavy, but it wasn't. It has kind of like this concave shape on the outside. So it sort of like takes up less space on your finger than you think it's going to. And just the overall concept is like, you know, not everybody wants a smart watch or can really wear a smart watch. Maybe you don't want like notifications buzzing on your arm all day, but you want some kind of fitness tracking or wellness tracking kind of deal. And that's where this will come in. And I think that's a pretty compelling pitch. I agree. John, are you a smart ring guy? I'm not a smart ring guy.

So I wasn't able to actually hold the ring, but I did peer at it through a Perspex box at Samsung's booth. And that thing looks so slim and sveled. So I'm really tempted by it. But I'm also kind of really in the Garmin health tracking ecosystem. And so the thing I want out of smart rings at the moment is basically for them to kind of be a little bit more commoditized and kind of work across different ecosystems. I believe there's one quote that kind of suggested that maybe the Galaxy Ring would work exclusively with Android phones to start and that they're kind of hoping to support iPhones down the line.

And that feels like that could be the tricky thing to get over it initially that if this thing is going to be a, hey, you're in Samsung's ecosystem or you're in the Android ecosystem, that it works with all that stuff. But there's a wall between that and the kind of like the broader wearables market. Yeah, that is very fair. Speaking of wearables, actually, I think there were two kind of big name watches that dropped at the show, right? the Xiaomi one and the one plus watch, were there any other big watches that people were talking

about? I just saw those two. I think that was it. The Xiaomi is super cool because you can take the bezel off and they have different ones you can interchange it with. Like instead of just changing your strap out to make it look different, you can actually change the bezel a lot. That's cool. I'm into that. Yeah. Like hypothetically, maybe you got a Garmin watch as a gift and it's in this kind of fetching turquoise color and you can change the strap but you can't change the bezel around the screen, so it will never quite look right. So you're just kind of stuck with turquoise. Hypothetically, if you're in that situation, the Jaami Watch S3 could be exactly exactly what you need. So the Jamie actually had two watches. They had the Watch S3, which is their

kind of lower end watch. And then they had the Jaami Watch 2, which is their kind of slightly higher end wear OS watch. We didn't really get too much of a chance to play around with those, but certainly from like an industrial design perspective, they look, they look pretty cool. Like a lot of Jamie stuff, really. I think Allison got a chance to try out the the Jeremy 14 and just, there's a very nice looking phone. It is. Yeah, tell me about it, Allison. Yeah, into the straight edge phones these days and the Xiaomi 14 has embraced, you know, they're on the right side of history with the no curves, the straight edges. No, it's just very nice. And we got to see the 14

ultra. That's the one with the like one inch camera sensor and, all the stuff and the vegan leather back, which I also like. That's the one. It has the round camera bump, right? Yes. I love a round camera bump. Yeah, yeah. It's like, we're not trying to hide this thing.

It is right here. This is a camera with a phone attached, basically. So I've used the, the Xiaomi 14 a little bit, but 14 Ultra wasn't quite available yet to us. And I really want to get my hands on that one. It looks, it looks awesome. You have a pull quote in the story you wrote about it that just says, I witnessed the aperture moving, which is such a, like, ominous thing to say, but it's also like, it means it's a camera.

That's so exciting. Yeah. Yeah. That's their thing this year is that it has a variable aperture that actually, like, every smartphone camera basically has a fixed aperture. That's when the aperture can get bigger and smaller, just like a dedicated camera lens. Is that a good idea? I don't know. Like, I don't think it's actually that practical.

I kind of put it in the category of like Sony Xperia phones that had like an actual continuous zoom between two focal lengths. And it was like very small and you're like, I don't know quite what the point of this is. But you did it. It works. You did do it. You can't argue with that. They did. John, you got to see nothing's new phone, right?

At what seemed like one of the more bizarre showings of any kind of gadget that we had at MWC this. here? Yeah, this phone is ostensibly being launched on March the 5th, but nothing is at the point in its hype cycle where it's just posting full-on-on-on-boxings on its YouTube channel, right? And we kind of, we know the processor, it's a media tech dynasty, 7200 pro, I think. And then we kind of went along to this event in the evening. So, of course, nothing, like, the MWC show floor is so stuffy. It's just, that's for like Deutsche Telecom and Qualcomm, you know? Nothing doesn't play by their rules. So nothing instead has this kind of like evening event where we show up and like everyone everyone's kind of like milling around and there were just these like 2001 style monoliths just kind of

like dotted around and I just like catch Allison's eye and I'm like, I'm betting you there's a phone two way behind inside that monolith. So we just kind of spend the rest of the even just like standing by one of these things and of course then nothing stand up on stage and they go oh we know thank you for coming everyone this is our it's going to be our third smartphone we're so We're so excited to reveal it to the world. And then suddenly, like, all of these monoliths that the sheath gets taken off and it's, oh, look, it's a Perspex box with a nothing phone 2A in it. And, oh, it's the flashing gifts.

So we got, okay, I don't know, like, how much inside baseball you want here, David. Very. Keep going. Okay, cool. So, Alison and I again planned this. We were like, we're going to stand by where we think the phone is going to be revealed. I will have my camera. You will have your iPhone 15.

I will snap the photo as quickly as I can. and I will hand you the SD card, you will quickly put the SD card into your USBC adapter, put that in the phone, get that uploaded on the verge. And then, like, rather than, like, tweeting it or putting it on threads or whatever, we'll, like, have the images on the verge super quickly. And then, of course, just way over-engineered this entire situation. It all fell apart. It's so quickly.

And the iPhone sucked up the raw file. Well, first off, like, Alison opens up my SD card, and it's like, why do you have so many pictures of keyboards in it? here you're on. You have to scroll through. It was 1,000 pictures of keyboards. And then right at the bottom, we had the nothing phone 2A shots. And then she kind of copies them over.

And we upload them into our CMS chorus. I had to log back into chorus. It logged me out, of course. And then chorus is like, we can't, we can't take a raw file. We're sorry. And so just the whole, it was not nearly as quick or seamless. Yeah. This was in the category of, you know, luxurious trip to overseas.

countries where I'm like literally standing under a plant. Like there was a big plant like right and I had my laptop out at this fancy restaurant and I'm like opening, I mean, camera raw like to retouch some photos and upload them with chorus and I'm like this is, I just don't know how to explain this to any normal person. Yeah, waiters and waitresses kept them coming by and like leaning because we were on the kind of matriety table and they were trying to get like cutlery out of this. And then of course friend of the verge, Sam Byford just like shows us his phone.

He's just like, you should have just taken it on your smartphone. Smartphone cameras are real good. He was just watching us, like, not saying I told you so, but it was like all over his face. If you're listening to this and you're wondering if you should get into tech journalism, the answer is yes, but also that is what all of your days will look like. It just is what it is. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then more MWC talk. We'll be right back.

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that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back with Allison and John. So the last thing I had on my, like, cool things you guys saw list is also kind of the big picture thing that I feel like was happening at MWC, which is basically what is a phone if it's not just a collection of apps that Google or Apple runs.

And John, you wrote about this going in as kind of what you were thinking about entering into the show. And I think it really proved out, right, that the idea is what is sort of the post-apps, smartphone look like. And Allison, you got a demo, I think, of a phone or an app, or I don't even know what to call it, from a company called Brain AI that is doing something along these lines, right? I still, I have trouble explaining what this thing is to people, but you've now seen it. Can you explain what this thing is? Yeah. So they're kind of billing it as an appless phone. And the spoiler alert is that the phone has apps. It's like a regular phone. But this company, Brain AI is launching it, or planning to launch it with Deutsche Telecom, aka T-Mobile.

And it's right now what it is, is it's sort of like you have the normal OS, and then there's this almost like digital assistant where you can launch a page. And it looks a little bit like a chat GPT kind of text box where you're like, tell me about this. But the idea is you ask for things. You want to book a flight. You want to look for a gift or something. You kind of type it in.

and it starts building this interface around whatever you're asking for. So you're not going directly into like a travel booking app. You just sort of like ask it to become a travel booking app and it builds it around you. But instead of just doing text for everything, it'll actually try and like redo the interface for whatever you're trying to do. Yeah. They say they've trained this AI on interfaces. It's not like a large language model.

It's sort of like here. Here's how you present information so someone can do something with it. And then I think the really cool part is like you ask for something like the demo they gave me was like, show me ideas for a gift for my girlfriend who likes tennis. And you get, you know, kind of a page of results and you're scrolling through and you can stop at something and kind of tap on it and ask for, you know, a question. You can ask a question about it. You can say, show me a video of this thing.

And it did. Like it answered the question correctly about how, fast it could shoot the tennis balls. It was a tennis ball machine or like a little YouTube video module kind of pop up under it. So it all just kind of happens in the same like kind of fluidly in the same space. You're not going, I want to watch a video of this. I'm going to jump over to a different app. I'm going to type in some text, which is a really compelling way to think of like, yeah, maybe our phones don't have to be these, you know, boxes with drawers in them where you're. you're constantly, you know, drilling down to the thing you want.

There's so much that's unproven about this right now. It's very focused on, like, shopping, which is, I think AI companies love the idea that we just always want to book flights, you know, from San Francisco to Maui or whatever. I'm sorry, like, I want help with my email. Like, what about productivity and all those things? And Jerry, you, the founder of the company is like, that is coming. That's kind of the next step. But yeah.

Yeah, and they don't have a launch date. They are targeting Europe and the U.S., but couldn't give, like, a definitive time frame. But I'm super interested in it. It's a neat idea. Yeah, John, what did you see? I know you came in kind of looking at this question of like, what's next after app stores. Do you see anything that piqued your interest? I will say no.

I think I saw a much more traditional show than I think I was expecting. But also, I think my kind of my takeaway from a lot of the stuff we saw was, for me, I kind of ended up kind of comparing and contrasting the humane AI pin with the Rabbit R1 from CES. And the Rabbit R1 wasn't present at NWC. But I think that so much of introducing a new product category is talking about a potential rather than what exactly it can do. And I think when talking about potential, it's very easy to kind of get very philosophical and very navel-gazing in a way that kind of puts people off.

which I think is the direction that Humane has kind of gone in. And then if anyone's actually seen the pin, kind of goes, oh, this is a gadget. This is a gadget-y-gadget that does a bunch of gadget stuff, and that's cool. But it's kind of been wrapped up in this very philosophical idea of, oh, we want to get rid of smartphones and screens are bad and stuff. And it's so interesting kind of comparing the reception of the Humane Eye Open

to the Rabbit R1, which from what I could see was very warmly received, despite having a similarly kind of experimental approach towards what a non-phone gadget can be. And the difference seem to be in that kind of pitching. I mean, also I think that the Rabbit R1's kind of teenage engineering industrial design kind of helps. And you kind of have to look at the humane eye pin and go, were you just one teenage engineering deal away from like a much more positive? But yes, that was like a lot of my takeaway is that it's the story that you want to tell about the next step. I think if you kind of shoot high, you lose people. And if you shoot low, then you end up with a kind of, this is today's smartphone, but slightly faster.

And so there's that kind of, I think the appless phone thing kind of sits in the middle there quite nicely where you go, you already have this thing, you already know the form factor of it. But what if there were less apps that you downloaded and what if it was more kind of customized towards your needs? Yeah, Alison, you got to use the pin. Well, use might be a slightly strong word for what happened with you and the pin. But what was your experience? What did you make of it? Yeah, I hovered near a couple of people as they used the pin and I just.

Yeah, I think the way you said it was somebody used the pin at you. Yeah. That's good enough. I did try to like, I was like, can I just like stand real close to you and like have it project on my hand? And we tried that for a second. It was very awkward and didn't really work. You had to like hug them from behind and reach your arms around. Can I just like put my head on your shoulder?

It was like very sweet of them to let me try that. That's nice. Yeah, exactly. Like John said, it's a gadget. Like you hear all the marketing and the TED talks and all this stuff. And there's just like no piece of technology could ever live up to like what I am hearing about. And you see it in person. And you're like, this is just kind of cool.

Like, I think it would make a lot more sense if it was something that was designed to complement your phone. And the spokespeople I talked to were very like, no, no, this isn't supposed to replace your phone. It's like, you know, it's just when you kind of want to unplug from your phone, you have it. But it costs $700. It has a subscription fee. It has its own SIM card. Like, I don't know a lot of people who are going to have a phone and a budget for, like, a big. basically another phone. So it's, I still have weird feelings about it. I still have questions.

But what I saw was, was kind of cool. Like the, the navigation, you know, that you do kind of a pinchy pinch thing to scroll through the menus that the lasers projecting on your hand. I saw one of these spokespeople. She had to like check the Wi-Fi settings on it, which just sounds like a nightmare thing to do. And it kind of made sense. She was like, doing the little like maneuvers and I don't know it's going to be a wild one I think I really love the idea of projecting a settings menu like huge onto the wall next to me while I slowly scroll through all the Wi-Fi options this works for me I'm into this it's the future all right let's do we're going to do a really quick MWC awards lightning round and then I'm let you guys get out of here because you you both need to sleep after MWC the silliest thing that you saw at MWC that you kind of love anyway John go first uh

The idea of HMD make a big song or dance about a Barbie flip phone that's coming. That's a good one. Fair. Very good answer. Alison, what do you got? I think I got to go with Bendy phone. I played Connect 4 on it. They had it like set up.

That's like one of the things you can do with it. I'm like, oh, I love this. Actually, I'm so sorry. Can I change my answer? Sure. 28,000 millian power battery phone. Oh. Yeah, I think your headline for that was this gigantic battery has a phone attached.

to it. I 100% stole a former colleague Vlad Savovs. Oh, yeah. Like four or five years ago, they had an 18,000 million power phone. Now they're back, 28,000 million power. That's called progress, baby. Yeah, get out here with 18,000. Come on. That's what inflation does. I love this. All right. Thing you think a lot of people are most likely to buy very soon that you just saw. What screams like Big Hit coming soon? Well, I mean, I don't know about Big Hit, but Lenovo's repairable laptops, that's just going to be businesses all over the world are going to have those things and people are barely going to think about it, but there's going to be some IT admin with his little Phillipshead screwdriver just going like, oh yes, this laptop will live another

day. Thank you very much. Love it. Alison, what about you? Yeah, I don't know if big hit, but like Galaxy Ring, I think has a lot of potential, I would say, especially for something that, I mean, it's not brand new, but it's sort of a new category for Samsung. So it's like, it's like, kind of rare to be like, oh, yeah, I can see where you guys are going with this. And I'm, I'm curious to see what happens. Okay. I love it. Yeah, I am super bullish on smart rings as a thing. I think there's like a lot of stuff left to do, but I think that category is going to be really interesting for a while. All right, last one. Thing you held in your hands in most wished you could have just taken home with you in that moment, that you're like, this is mine now. I'm going to

leave. I'm going to pick pocket someone in Barcelona, and this belongs to me now. John, what do you got. Okay, so this company Infinex, this wasn't like brand new for NWC, but they had a concept concept phone called the E color shift where basically whenever it charges, it has an E-ink display on its rear that rapidly changes between different color schemes. And then the idea is you like yank out the power cord when it kind of hits the color that you like. And you're like, cool, this is the color of my phone now. This is great. That's so fun. It's so great. And like, it's not even a functional phone. And it is, it's a concept thing. They think, Maybe in the next couple of years they'll actually bring this thing out.

But yeah, you're just like at checkout. You can't decide between the like really adventurous color and black. Like, why not both? I love that. Alison, what about you? I'm going to go with the Jaume 14 Ultra with the like subcategory of the photography kit. They introduced this with last year's series and it's like a little camera grip you put on the phone. It sounds so stupid, but I loved it.

It has a little shutter button. They're doing it again this year for the 14 Ultra, but it's actually more useful and it has a battery in it. I love what they do with their cameras, and it's just like a camera nerds phone. I want one. That's a good one. I like it. All right. You both need to go get some sleep and recover from all of your many travels.

Thank you both for doing this. This is super fun. Can't wait to do it again? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and answer a question from the Vergecast hotline. Support for the show comes from Anthropic.

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two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think, that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that.

That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID?

Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus, and yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning, and we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back.

Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge 1-1. The email is Vergecast at theverge.com. We love all your questions. We try to answer at least one on the show every week. Thank you, as always, to everybody who calls in emails. We love hearing from you. This week, we have a question from Taylor.

Hi, this is Taylor from Colorado. Love the show. And I was curious to speak with you talking so much about crawler bot and the consequences of AI. What do you think the impact is going to be on websites like the way back machine that are archiving the internet? And in some ways, have already been accessing. New York Times and other places behind paywall.

But also really important to Wikipedia and the history of the Internet. We'd look to know more what you all think. Thanks. Bye. I love this question because it gets it something that actually I wrote about on the verge a couple of weeks ago. I'll put the link in the show notes. But this idea of access and basically who controls what is public and what is private on the web.

And just, Taylor, to answer your question directly, the answer is yes. It's a huge deal and it's potentially a huge change in how a lot of these things work. So there's things like the internet archive, right, which is going out and literally just downloading versions of web pages periodically in order for you to be able to go find them later. The internet archive a bunch of years ago essentially said, we're doing this for the good of humanity and we are going to do it no matter what you think. So every website in theory has this thing called robots.t.

which is just if you go to whatever the website is, Amazon.com slash robots. It's just a simple text file. And basically what it does in most cases is say which web crawler bots are allowed in and which are not allowed. And for like three decades, this was actually a thing that was created in the 90s

back when having a bunch of crawlers on your website could actually crash your website because internet infrastructure was slow and didn't work all that well. But for the last three decades, it's mostly been about search engines. The idea was, do I, as a website owner, want Google to crawl my website? And it's essentially a question about exchange of value, right?

So you say, I want Google to crawl my website. That means Google is going to use some of my bandwidth costs. It costs money to let its crawler come and look at all of my web pages. And it means Google has access to a cache of every one of my web pages at some interval of time. In exchange, I get to be in Google's search engine and Google will send traffic to my website. So there are a bunch of versions of that. Bing runs a crawler that does very similar things, but for a long time, that was the exchange. The Internet Archive was a slightly different one where in a sense you're getting something back from the Internet Archive, but it's not like they're sending you traffic. The traffic to the Internet Archive goes to the Internet Archive their download of your website. In general, I think most people think the Internet Archive is like a net good for humanity. So I think this wasn't really a huge issue. But if you didn't want the Internet Archive to crawl your website for whatever reason, and there are plenty of valid reasons not to, you could, in theory, in that robots.txte page,

block the internet archive. The internet archive said, I think, in 2017, that it was just no longer going to respect that, that its mission was too important, that it was doing things that were good and valuable, and it was no longer interested in respecting the wishes of somebody's robots.txti page. That page has huge sort of normative value on the internet,

but no actual real legal authority. It has no technical authority. It's just kind of a way, of saying, you know, please keep out. It's like putting a sign on your tree house. It doesn't really accomplish anything, but it does send a message. But if you don't want to listen, you don't really have to. So that has all been happening over the years.

And there have been people who want more sophisticated tools to actually keep people out. There have been more sophisticated reasons for the protocol to exist behind robots. But in general, it has just been around and it has more or less worked and more or less been okay with people. But now, like Taylor is saying, with AI, two things are happening. One, a lot of these companies that run websites are starting to think a lot more carefully about what is and is not allowed on their website. So you can say not just I want to block Google, but I want to block OpenAI because I don't want my stuff going into OpenAI's training data for its large language model.

So you can block GPTBot. That's the one that OpenAI does. Most of the other AI companies have crawlers of their own. They all need this giant mass of training data. So not only are all of these website owners having to go into that web page and say, I want to block GPTBot or whatever else, it's causing them to think more broadly about access, right? You have an antitrust case against Amazon that is fundamentally in large part about Amazon's ability to crawl the web. It was doing this thing where it would go around the web and look for prices on products that were also listed on Amazon and then allegedly doing a bunch of really shady stuff if it found that. you were listing something for cheaper than you were listing it on Amazon. You can't do that if you

don't have an automated way to crawl the web. It's just too much work for a single person to like go click on every product page on the internet. So this is the kind of thing that's used in tons of ways, right? And not only are these companies going in and saying, okay, who do I want in and who do I want out? One particularly powerful way to keep people out is a paywall. And like Taylor said, one of the things we're starting to see is more and more companies, publishers, whatever, putting their stuff behind the paywall. Like, one of the reasons Facebook has always required you to log in is because it doesn't want Google and everybody else to be able to access all of the data on Facebook, because

that data is really valuable. And now we're seeing companies like Reddit start to realize how valuable their data is and strike deals with AI companies. So there's just this shift in how data on the internet is understood. For a long time, it was kind of net public. The idea was to be in their place. It was going to be fine. And now, to some extent, the website or the app or whatever is actually less valuable in sort of real dollar terms than the data underneath it.

Like the content of Reddit posts is probably more valuable and more important than Reddit, which is weird because one can't exist without the other. But that is very much where we are. So all of this is up in the air right now for the first time in a really long time. And in a pretty big way, I think, threatens to kind of rewrite the web. It could put much more stuff behind registration walls and start to silo things off even more. We've talked a lot about the sort of open future of social with activity pub and the Fedaverse and Mastodon. And I think all of that is very cool. I also think there are lots and lots of incentives for all of these platforms to build bigger walls, not knock them down.

Because if you knock them down, you give lots of companies and crawlers and people access to your stuff in ways. that can be adversarial and problematic for you. This is one of the things I have spent a lot of time thinking about and talking about with people, because it's one of the sort of norms of the internet, right? That, like, if I have a web page and you have a web page, we should both just be cool. And it is amazing how far that got us.

But now there's so much money and so much change and so many new reasons both to crawl someone else's website and to be worried about someone crawling your website that I think a lot of this is about to change. And what I've heard from publishers and stuff is that they didn't touch their robots.TXT page for years. And now it's becoming like a C-suite level meeting you have to have about who do we want in, who do we want to block, and who do we want to go try to make some kind of commercial agreement with.

So I don't want to overstate it, but I'm going to kind of overstate it. Like I think this is possibly going to be part of the huge change that we're about to see on the web. We've seen the problems with closed platforms. And we're now in a phase, I think, where there is a real. push back toward the open web, but there are also really good reasons if you are part of that open web to close your doors. So we'll see. But my great hope, if I'm completely honest, is that things like the internet archive and Wikipedia and all of these things continue to be free and open because I think the idea that they are generally good things and should continue to

exist on the open internet, that feels right to me. All right, anyway, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to John and Allison for being here. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more from everything we talked about on Theverge.com. Our MWC coverage was awesome. John and Allison made a bunch of really great videos. So if you go to our TikTok or Instagram channel, you can see tons of good stuff from them touching and spinning around and playing with all these cool gadgets.

But in general, it's a super newsy time right now. So check out Theverge.com. Lots of going on. As always, if you have thoughts or questions or feelings or want to get my humane AI pin from me when I finally get one, you can always email us at Vergecast at theverge.com. Or keep calling the hotline, 866, Verge11.

We love hearing from you. Send us all of your thoughts and questions and ideas. We are rapidly nearing what I would say is like the first gadget season of the year. We're going to get some AI stuff. We're going to get some Apple stuff. We're going to get some Google stuff. There's just a lot coming. So keep all your questions coming.

Tell us what you want to hear about. We love hearing from you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Willpore. The Verge cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neilie, Alex, now will be back on Friday to talk about the new MacBook air and everything else happening in tech right now. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.