The Vergecast - Amazon buys Roomba, non-watch wearables, and the best cheap(er) phones

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

David Pierce taps into The Verge's reviews team to explore where we're headed with smart home gadgets, wearables, and midrange phones. 01:56 - Verge smart home reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy comes back to the show to break down the news of Amazon acquiring iRobot, maker of the ever popular Roomba robot vacuum. 24:46 - Verge wearable tech reviewer Victoria Song joins David to explore the fascinating world of non-watch wearables: rings, earbuds, sports bras, and sleep trackers. Afterward, we hear from Whoop CEO Will Ahmed about his approach to wearable technology. 53:40 - Verge mobile reviewer Allison Johnson and David discuss the ideal version of a mid-range smartphone, and what are the best trade-offs for the price. Further reading: Amazon to acquire Roomba robot vacuum maker iRobot for $1.7 billion Amazon bought iRobot to see inside your home The best sleep tech you can buy right now Whoop 4.0 Review Oura Ring Gen 3 Review Google Pixel 6a review: midrange parts, Tensor smarts Apple's new iPhone SE is a modern phone stuck in yesterday's design Apple should have followed Google’s Pixel 6A playbook with the iPhone SE OnePlus 10T review: call it a comeback Nothing Phone 1 review: something else Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast of Chargers not included in the box. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I'm at the gym because I was on vacation for a week, and pretty much all I did was sit by a pool and drink beer. And it's just time for me to get back to the gym. So today's plan is to walk slowly on the elliptical while I watch the office on my phone until I feel good enough about myself to leave. Anyway, we have an awesome show today. We're going to talk to Gen Tui about Amazon's big I-Robot acquisition,

and what it means both for Amazon and for the floor plan of your house. We're going to talk to V-Song, about the best non-smart watch wearables and why sleep tracking is all the rage right now. And then Allison Johnson and I are going to try to figure out how to make the perfect mid-range phone and which trade-offs are actually worth making in the name of saving a few hundred bucks.

All that's coming in just a sec, but first I have to go look busy near an exercise bench for five minutes before I can give up on the gym and not come back for three months or so. This is the Virchcast. See in a sec. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets,

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Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. 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 Hubbard, 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. Welcome back.

We had some big smart home news last week. Amazon announced that it had bought I Robot, the company that makes the Rumba robot vacuum, for $1.7 billion. I had a lot of feelings about this announcement, both as a tech reporter interested in smart home stuff, but also as a person who has owned a Roomba for a really long time and generally really loves the thing. My Roomba's great. So why is Amazon getting into the vacuum game?

Could Alexa make the Parks and Recreation dream of DJ Roomba really come true? I strapped an MP3 player to one of those floor cleaning robots. Call him DJ Roomba. Little guy cruises around and plays music. What's hot, DJ Roomba? And maybe most of all, is this a bad thing? My Roomba knows everything about my house. Should I be worried that Amazon is now going to know

even more about where I live and what kinds of messes I make all over the place? Also, wait, why is Amazon so obsessed with the smart home in general? Like I said, I have lots of feelings. So I brought in Gen Tui. who's a smart home reviewer at the verge to help me sort through the wall. Hi, Jen. Thanks for being here. Hi, pleasure as always.

Okay, so Amazon buys I-Robot for a whole lot of money. What is going on here? Why would Amazon want to buy a vacuum company? Well, first off, it's interesting that it isn't actually that much money in the scheme of things. I-Robot really wasn't in a great shape financially. It had quite a big loss recently. Huge amount of competition in this space. So I think they were really looking for a buyer

for a while. So it was interesting, I think a lot of people noticed that it was a bit of a deal. And I think that is probably because I think Amazon wanted to buy it more for what it can contribute to its smart home ambitions and data collection around the smart home than that it wanted a robot vacuum cleaning company. I mean, there are a lot of robot vacuum companies out there now. The competition is fierce. Every day, another company starts producing a new robot vacuum. TCL suddenly now has robot vacuums. I mean, it's like everyone has robot vacuum. So I'm not necessarily thinking we're going to be seen an Amazon robot vacuum coming out of this.

I think Amazon bought I robot for what it can offer in the smart home in terms of data and in terms of what it can bring them inside your home. And those are the maps. Right. Okay. So before we get to that, I think the robot vacuum thing is actually an interesting point. Because one of the things I've been trying to figure out about Amazon all this time is like, it's been buying all these companies. And part of it is like, is this just a vehicle for Alexa?

Is this just a vehicle for it to sell you more stuff through your doorbell or whatever? But like Amazon has really invested in Ring as like a line of products. And ERO continues to be ERO and sell products. And I don't know, Blink is probably out there doing stuff. I haven't thought about blink in a really long time. But like I feel like you're right that the robot vacuum world is like huge and all over the place and very competitive. but my impression at least is that the Roomba is still kind of the best thing out there. And at least it would make sense for Amazon to like keep giving a crap about robot vacuums.

Right, I think, maybe? Yes, no, you're right. I mean, from a broader perspective, yes, Amazon's bought now the kind of key smart home companies. So what most people want in their smart home is a video doorbell, a robot vacuum, good Wi-Fi, and security. Wow, that's true. When you put it like that, geez, okay. That's what you want. And you look at the most.

recent product that came from Ring was a combination of an ERO and the ring security and almost like a little smart home hub. And, you know, that's basically, you now have the kind of four most important and most popular smart home products owned by Amazon, the product leaders in those categories. So yes, from that sort of company perspective, they've kind of got the, not the trifecta, but all four. Quad-factor, yeah. And they also have obviously blink and there are others and Amazon has their own smart home line. And yes, so I think that, from that perspective, it makes perfect sense. And I don't think they're going to subsume Roomba.

I believe it'll continue to run as a separate company in the same way that Ring has and ERO has. You know, the CEOs are still there. Nick Weaver at Eero, Jamie Siminoff at Ring, Colin Engelstein at I-Robot, as they've announced. So I think they're going to continue. It's going to continue as is as a smart home company that's a leader in its space. It has a lot of competition, but so did the others. But for most people, it's also the smart home entry level point.

The same with the ring doorbell. It's, you know, the robot vacuum is one of the first things you buy that could be connected because it's got such an obvious use case, just like the video doorbell has such an obvious use case. So it's what we like to call the sort of the entry drug to the smart home. And once you get one connected thing, that's when you start, you know, depending on your personality, going all in and getting totally smart. The only thing that they don't really have is smart lighting.

So, hey, Phillips, signify, watch out. I was just going to say. But then I kind of feel like that stuff is becoming sort of rapidly, like, commoditized. I think we're going to get pretty quickly to the point where like a smart light bulb is just a light bulb. It's just a light bulb. And all the other stuff is where you can do really interesting stuff. And then it's like, who cares about the light bulbs? Right.

And that's really key. And I know this probably didn't come top of mind to most people when they were commenting on this acquisition. But this does have a lot to do with matter. It always does. Tell me more. Okay, so commodified smart home devices is key here because all of the large smart home companies and the small ones, they always have differentiated themselves based on who they worked with. And who does everyone work with? Alexa.

Right? So Amazon was a leader in the space because pretty much anything you bought that was smart home related worked with Alexa. It was wide open. The APIs were really easy for people. I mean, you could even build your own skill. like you know in your own home so they made it super easy to use any of their device any device with Alexa but now when matter comes connectivity and who works with who isn't going to be as important because the whole point of matter is everyone will work together so what the smart home companies platforms so the amazon Alexa Apple home kit Google assistant Samsung smart things what they're going to be doing is looking for ways to differentiate the platform making that platform more innovative

useful and Amazon's already started to do that with their hunches platform, which is where it will automatically come up with scenarios that you might want your home to do for you without you having to do anything. So all of these platforms are looking to differentiate now that matter is making connectivity less of a conundrum. You won't have to worry about who works with who. So that's one of the reasons why I think they bought I-Robot because there's an excellent platform that I-Robot's been working on called Robot OS, which Colin Angle, the CEO of IROB told me before the acquisition, they're designing to help smart home products communicate with each other where they are in the home, which is a really key part of the smart home. So when you buy a smart light bulb and you go,

put it in the lamp, you have to open the app, you have to connect it, you have to say it's in this room and you have to say, okay, I want it to do this during the day and this at night because it's in the kitchen. So I want bright light in the morning. and dim a light in the evening. But in theory, what Colin Engel was saying his platform would be able to help do is you screw in a light bulb and the robot OS platform will know where you've put the light bulb, which room and can automatically set all that stuff up for you. This isn't, to be clear, something that was already happening, but this was his plan because what his robots can do is provide context because they can map, they map your home and they know where everything is. Right. Well, and this comes back to the like this big question about like, what is Amazon actually buying here?

Right? Because I think. Yes. My immediate reaction, I've had a Rumba for a long time. And it's like sort of a weird thing to open the Rumba app and look at the map that it has of your house. And it's, it makes sense. Like it understands where all the things are. But like it understands where all the things are.

And it's like it can't go up and downstairs, which is probably for the best in the scheme of things. But it's, it's annoying. It's a vacuum. It's good for, you know, the robot take over the universe. But it has this like. square inch knowledge of things in a way that no other smart home device can really do. And so the immediate jump that I made, and I think a lot of people made, is like, this is Amazon essentially like buying the floor plan to your house.

Is that what this is? Is that what's going on here? Yes and no. I mean, a lot of people point out, well, Amazon already knows what's in your house if you have the Alexa app because you've labeled all your rooms, right? Or go on to Zillow and you can see floor plans for your neighbor's houses. But the key here is that it's constantly updated data. So your robot runs every day, most likely, and is constantly updating its map.

And so it can see when you, you know, if you've moved the couch or if you've taken the spare room and taken the bed out and now you have a crib. So maybe you have a nursery. So maybe you're, you know, this kind of data, this changing data about what's in your house will be so valuable from a, sales perspective in terms of knowing what you might be buying in your house, knowing how big your house is, knowing how many rooms you have, knowing the context of your house, from a sales perspective, and yes, Amazon's primary goal in life, I don't think anyone would dispute, is to sell us more stuff. But from a smart home perspective, I think it's also useful because you see the context when things change. So I believe the map data is one of the largest elements that appealed to Amazon about

buying this company. I think Amazon's been trying to do this for a while. They've got their Astro Robot actually does map your house. That's their day one edition still in beta robot that's meant to help you around your house. Yeah, what do you make of that actually? Because one of the things I wondered is like if Astro was great, would Amazon feel like it was worth spending $1.7 billion to buy iRobot or would it feel like it can solve this problem on its own? Is there anything? Should I read any tea leaves into that? I think it was trying. I mean, I think it just shows that this is what they want, is that Amazon wants to get this data, that it will be useful for the company on many levels.

Because Astro, they claimed, I think David Limp said when it was first released that it didn't really have a purpose. They were wanting to see what it could bring and what it could do in our homes. I mean, they didn't specifically say, we want it to map your homes. But it does map your home very well. And again, it's something that does it every day. It goes around the house all the time. and it can actually identify different pieces of furniture in your house. A lot of robot vacuums do this too.

They can tell a fridge is where the fridge is, where the stove is, so that you can say to your robot vacuum, go clean by the fridge, to make it a lot easier. And then they also have the ring always home cam, which is still not out, but it also has mapping capabilities. So they were already trying to add this mapping capability to their products, but it was going to be a really long time.

I mean, that's a thousand dollar robot, the Astro. I don't see that as a map. market appeal that wasn't going to be in an everyone's home by the end of this decade. Same with the flying drone. Don't know if that's going to be in anyone's home by the end of this decade. So yes, I think it's getting inside our homes. It sounds scary, I know, and I know we'll probably get to that part shortly. But that context is so valuable for any smart home ambitions. And Amazon said very publicly that they are striving for the ambient intelligence in our smart home, where our home knows how to react to us.

And the one thing you need in order to know how to react to the occupants of the home is to understand the layout of the home, where things are and how, you know, where the furniture is. So it's an obvious piece of the puzzle here. Yeah, okay, let's talk about both sides of that because I think the two sides of that, the, like, scariness of it and the sort of like beautiful, perfect vision of this ambient computer that is wonderful, are like, that is the tension of the future, right? that it's like all this stuff could be so cool and personal and great. And also it requires things that are like deeply terrifying to a lot of people for a lot of really good reasons.

So let's talk with the sort of ambient computing side of this for a while. Because I think Amazon has been talking about this for a long time as like one of its main goals. And it seems like it's less interested in like the smart home as a thing and more in the smart home is like an avenue to this kind of big ambient computing vision that we've talked a bunch about on this show before. Why Amazon? I've been coming back to this over and over. Like Amazon fundamentally wants to sell me stuff. And you can draw a straight line from everything it makes to making it easier for people to buy stuff. But this like ambient intelligence thing, I have a harder time drawing that straight line.

Why they want to do it? Yeah. What's your sense? I do feel like it's a very sort of separate part of the company in a way at this stage. Like when I talk to the engineers and the people that are working on the smart home side, you know, most of them have come from smart home startups. You know, it's a different part of the business. But obviously there's a lot of synergy.

there, a lot of advertising potential. But I mean, Amazon is a technology company now. It may not have begun that way. I mean, it began on the web, but it began as a storefront. But today, it's become accidentally almost part of our smart home because, again, Alexa was released that Echo Speakers came out without a very clear idea of what we were going to use them for. I remember I had the original one, and it was quite a while until there was much you could do with it other than just ask it to play some music. But once they started to realize the potential of voice in the smart home, that has become a very large part of what Amazon is striving to achieve. Because the smart home, and I say this all the time, so forgive me if I've said it before, but in my opinion,

the smart home isn't a fad or a sort of just for techie people. The smart home is the natural evolution of our homes, you know. We used to have homes that didn't have doors or doorlocks or electric lighting. Our homes have become technologically advanced and the next stage is the connected home that understands what's happening, understands the people in it can adapt to be more energy efficient, which is great for the environment. Also help save you money because you don't run your AC when you aren't home and you can turn your lights off when no one's in the room and is more convenient and more fun. It is fun. The smart home has a lot of great benefits. So for Amazon, I think they just see it. This is the future of the home. Their main selling point is the home. Most of what you buy on Amazon is for your home or for how you live in your home, from food to reading, to furniture, to consuming content, Prime Video. They're in every corner of our home. So it's an obvious, you know, again, an obvious move for them to move into the smart home. And as a technology company, they've got the tools to do it.

Yeah, I guess it is true that Amazon is definitely a company that wants to sell you stuff, but is also like increasingly a lot more than just a company that wants to sell you stuff. And this has like as a sort of connective tissue across all of that stuff does make a certain amount of sense. Yeah, the smart home is not mainstream yet. And that's why a lot of people, I think, find this a little confusing and they don't, you know, especially non-tech audience, which probably isn't our audience. But it is the future of our homes, whether most people are willing to adopt it at this stage or not. The question is, what kind of a future is it going to be? Is it going to be a locked-in ecosystem? You know, do you have to choose your ecosystem of your home?

Or is it going to be open and free? Or is it going to be locally controlled? Is it going to be in the cloud? You know, Amazon has a huge investment in the cloud. So most of the smart home companies that run cloud services use Amazon web services. So they've kind of got the lock-in there as well. And matter is going to bring it back to potential of local control. And I know that's the thing a lot of people are looking for in the home.

not just for privacy, but also because it works better. Waiting for your light switch to talk to the cloud and then come back down and turn your light on, not fun. No, not great. It should work like light switches. That is the rule. That's what we're aiming for. We will get there.

And then people will understand why the smart home is great. But right now, it's like, yeah, it takes longer to do it this way as opposed to just flipping the light switch. Yeah, light switch is just right there. I love that as a bar, right? And I think it's like a perfect thing for this because it's, It's like, okay, if you can make your product easier than that switch right there, then we'll talk. Until then, we've accomplished nothing. It's so true.

But real quick, before we go, the scary side of this. I confess, I own a Roomba, and it has been in my basement for a long time, and I honestly, I love it to pieces. I hate vacuuming, and I absolutely love my Roomba. I have looked at it sideways a couple of times since this announcement, because it's like, I don't know, there is a thing that makes me nervous about the idea of any company that already has this much data about me now knowing this extra piece of data about me. What do you make of this? Are people who are afraid of that stuff scared about nothing?

Or is there a reason to be nervous about sort of Amazon's coalescing of all this stuff? I think there's two parts to that. The first is, you know, I-Robot was an independent company. It's always kind of sad when an independent company gets snapped up by a big corporate entity. And many people who had Roomba's now may not have had Amazon devices and now sort of feel like, I've got this thing in my house that I didn't want. And that's really unfair to the consumer. But we don't know yet what Amazon's going to do,

whether they're going to change the privacy policies because you can turn off smart mapping in your Roomba if you have one. Not every Roomba maps your home, just to point that out, only some of the newer ones. And there are options to sort of shut that down. But it doesn't work as well, which goes back to what we were talking about before. you know, it's convenience versus privacy. You know, do you want it to do that?

Do you trust it? A lot of people don't trust Amazon. I see in our comment sections, lots of people saying the Roomba's going in the bin. Well, that's, you know, there are a lot of other options out there. Whether you trust those, other options is another question. I'm sad from that perspective. There are so few standalone companies left in the smart home today. But Roomba was one of the leaders in the space, I robot.

And, you know, it's definitely, it's kind of synonymous. Roomba is the Kleenex of the robot vacuum world. That's what people, that's what you think of. And they've been around for 20 years, which is, you know, it's not like they were a little startup. And so from that side, you know, I can understand people being upset. They kind of maybe feel bait and switch. But again, we don't actually know yet what's going to happen. So keep an eye on those privacy policies.

We will be doing that for you too. From Amazon knows everything about you perspective, if you already have a lot of of Amazon devices in your home. I don't think you're going to feel like this is suddenly going to tip the bucket. But I do understand why people would rather not have this kind of data shared with Amazon. And I think people should be right to be concerned. I mean, Amazon says we do everything we can to protect customer data. And we feel, I think the direct quote they gave me was customer trust is something we have worked hard to earn and work hard to keep every day. And so that comes down to your personal feelings about whether you can trust Amazon or not. Yeah, the like, do you trust

the tech company? It turns out to be like the existential question of our lives right now, which is cool and fun all the time. I know. And it's like you don't see there some scrappy startup coming in and knocking these big boys off their perch right now. But I do again believe that matter will help with some of this concern because you'll be able to, you won't have to rely on one platform. You won't have to be locked in on a platform. And when one platform does something that you don't feel comfortable with, it will be really easy to switch to another one. So that's going to really help people feel to be more comfortable accepting smart products into their home because it's going to be, it should be, we don't know, because it's not here yet. It should be a lot easier

to say, right, I'm done with anything from this company and I'm going to switch over and use someone else's platform. I like it. Well, as you know, the Vergecast is the official podcast of believing in matter. So we're going to have to come back and do this a bunch more times. But thank you, Jen. Appreciate it. Thanks so much. Okay, we're going to take a break, and then we're going to come back and talk about wearables. But not the Apple watches and pixel watches and Samsung watches and whatever else watches that are out there.

I want to talk about the wearables that aren't just big touch screens on your wrist. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I'd really. really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce. They offer a host of

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In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Welcome back. This is going to be a big fall for smartwatches. Apple probably has a new one coming. We already know Google's Pixel Watch is coming,

and Samsung has an event today where I suspect we're also going to see some new smart watches. We're going to talk about all of those and all of that later. Right now, I want to talk about wearables that aren't watches. Because remember when those were going to be a thing? We were supposed to get sensors in our clothes, and our shoes, and our glasses, and our headphones. Everything was going to be wearable.

And I feel like instead all we got was smartwatches. But maybe I'm missing something. So to find out, I brought in Victoria's song, we all call her V, who reviews wearables for the verge. We're going to see how many she's wearing right now and what to make of all of it. Hi, V. Hey, what's up? I'm very glad you're here because we're talking about something that has actually been like strangely on my mind for a very long time. And I have a lot of questions that I feel like you are the right person to answer.

But basically what I want to talk about is all the wearables that are not smart watches. Is this an interesting topic or am I just the last person who cares about non-smartwatch wearables? No, no. There's a lot of reason to care about non-risk-based wearables, particularly in the arena of sleep tracking, because, you know, I'm not the only person out there, but there are, like, my best friend. She basically is like, I can never use a wrist-based smart watch or a fitness tracker because I'm just going to rip it off in the middle of the night. And she does.

She used to be my roommate. and I would hear like a thunk in the middle of the night because she was throwing off her Fitbit. It was just way too uncomfortable for her to sleep in. So like that's why something like a smart ring is a great option for that particular thing. It's just very few people have kind of nailed how to do a smart ring that people actually give a crap about. I think, or it might be the only one out there right now that is like in the mainstream mind. Like people have heard of it. But there are a bunch of.

other experimental ones that I've seen. And I have one that does ECGs, actually, in my review queue. Oh, interesting. But yeah, smart rings are probably the non-risk wearable people think of the most. But I actually think that we're going to see a lot in terms of clothing and smart glasses going into the future. The clothing's going to take a while. But there's a lot of interesting research being done on that. Interesting. Your point about sleep, I think, is right and really interesting because it's like when we first started talking about fitness trackers it was like 10,000 steps, right? It was they were they were step trackers. Like fundamentally that's what they were. And now they do all this other stuff and they, you know, they measure your blood oxygen and

you get your glucose levels and they tell you everything you need to know about how you are as a person. But it seems like the next thing like beyond step tracking, like the thing that seems to have caught for people is sleep tracking. But I feel like I still talk to people all the time who are like mostly convinced that sleep tracking is sort of bunk science. That it's just like a lot of lies were being fed by the industry to try and convince us to buy new products. Is the sleep tracking thing real? Like how good is this stuff at actually being useful to people at this point? So I do a lot of sleep tracking. I just finish a sleep tech buying guide. So I've just been testing sleep trackers nonstop for the last few months. And, you know, they can tell when you're

awake and when you're not. That is something that they can do. But it's more accurate now than it was a couple of years ago because they actually do have the ability to track your heart rate and your SBO2 or your blood oxygen levels. So, you know, based on that, they can get an approximation of your sleep and your sleep quality, but it's still not what I would call super 100% accurate depending on the use case that you want to use it for. Like, you know, Fitbit has been shipping away at the sleep apnea diagnostic feature since 2017, that's when they introduced the SPO2 tracker, not SPO2 tracker, but the sensor on the Fitbit Ionic RIP, that thing got recalled.

It was a hot mess. So that's like about as long as people have been thinking about sleep tracking and sleep apnea having some sort of like relationship there. But it's not there yet. I think the only tracker on the market that has any kind of FDA clearance for that would be the Wythings Scanwatch. And that's just to see if you have breathing disturbances. So that's kind of where they've gone with that.

They're like, oh, we have SPO2 trackers and we can see when you have breathing disturbances. And so that's kind of the angle that they're going with there, kind of like how heart rate sensors dovetailed with ECGs and telling you when your heart rate's out of out of whack and AFIB and arrhythmia. So with the sleep trackers, they're really kind of leaning into sleep apnea, which is a serious problem. Yeah. And on the other flip side of that coin, they're using sleep trackers to track your nighttime heart rate variation, which is the change in time between your heartbeats, which is apparently a very good indicator of how well recovered you are from physical activity or other kind of stress.

That's an interesting one because I think like a bunch of the stuff you just described strikes me as like not sort of like mainstream useful in the sense that like 10,000 steps is mainstream useful. You know what I mean? And it's like, 10,000 steps is like not a perfect metric and became this like magic number based on nothing as far as I can tell. But it works, right? And it's like, okay, if you're, that, that is a good number to shoot for that many people

don't get. And if you don't get it, the solution is to get more steps. And it's like that as a sort of circle of fitness tracker is sort of perfect in a way that I feel like nothing else that any of these devices have ever tried is. Because the thing that drives me crazy about sleep things is it's like, David, you didn't sleep enough. And I'm like, I know I didn't sleep enough. Or like, that's why I'm.

angry, like, leave me alone. And the solution is just like, sleep more. And it's like, you were awake for two hours in the middle of the night. Don't do that. And it's like, well, that's not, this is nothing. You're not doing anything for me. And I feel like the sort of, what do I do about it question has always been the thing for me with fitness trackers. And it feels even more necessary with sleep. But then on the flip side, all these companies have just said, like, forget that. We're going to market this towards people who have like actual health issues that they know about and would like to better understand. And maybe that's just where this goes. And is the future of kind of all of this stuff? Is it's not like a, you know, woo-woo feeling about how to do

better. It's like actually solving medical issues for people. Yeah, I think it's going to be a little bit of both because it depends on the person. Wearables, I think, is one of the most personal types of technology you have out there. Like when people are saying, well, who would you recommend this for? I always like sit there and I sigh because it's like, well, this particular device is good for XYZ person who does this, this than that. But particularly when it comes to health, well, you know, the Apple Watch got so many accolates for adding ECG. Most people don't need ECG for like AFIB detection. Like the biggest risk group is people over 65.

So unless you're over 65 and have known cardio issues, you're never going to use the ECG app. I almost never use that app except for when I'm testing it or comparing it to other. watches that have added that. But now they all have it because Apple did it. But, you know, something like heart rate variation is a lot more popular nowadays because there is something actionable about that. You know, you can look at your heart rate variation and go, oh, wow, I worked out and I'm so tired. That's probably because I went really hard on a run yesterday. And you know what? I think I'm going to take it easy now. So recovery is an actionable thing that a lot of people actually need help with when it comes to tracking because, like, I'm guilty of this, and I think

everyone is where you just go, oh, I have to lift until I'm sore and then go hard for two weeks and then totally fall off the wagon. Like recovery is a huge part of your fitness and your health that everyone ignores in favor of going all out and then burning out. So that's why you're seeing that shift towards recovery in this space. This sounds very familiar. I really like to go to the gym three days in a row, get really sore, and then don't go for eight months, and then three days in a row, and then, yeah, it's a really, it's a great system. I highly recommend it. But the rings I hear about, it's basically just aura. And I feel like, especially during the pandemic, aura, like, really had a moment, right, where, like a lot of people were worried about their health again. They started talking about, like, can my aura detect that I have COVID before? Things do, like understanding body temperature is really important. Is aura sort of winning this space as big as it maybe was a couple of years ago? Is there new, interesting stuff coming in? Alyssa ORA just released the Gen 3 back last fall, like November-ish, and they have basically gone all in on predictive features. They just announced a partnership with natural cycles so that those users can use the ORA ring's body temperature information as a contraceptive, which that personally, I'm kind of like, okay, but the FDA did clear it for that purpose. Although cleared is different from approved, we could go into that for a long, long time.

So, you know, it is cleared. They have at least reviewed it. And they just basically added the SPO2 features, which, as I mentioned, is basically scanning for what kind of breathing disturbances you might have night to night. And ORA themselves says, like, this is a very passive feature. You probably won't look at it day to day. But once you understand what your baseline is, you may understand when you're starting to get sick. And they also did that with period information. That was one of the big things that they launched within the last year to kind of predict women's cycles based on their bodily biometrics.

So it's interesting. They're definitely doing a lot of research in this space, which is funnily enough why they added a $6 per month monthly subscription, which our readers have let me know vociferously in the comments that they are not a fan of. Fair. Understandably so. But yeah, they're super into the research. A lot of researchers use them. So they are definitely winning when it comes to the smart ring space, but they're not the only players out there.

Like at CES, I would talk to this really small startup called Movano, and they were really interesting with their ideas for smart rings. It's, you know, similar to the ORA ring, but also not. I just think it's a very hard form factor to master because, like, a smart ring is small. How are you going to stick all these sensors in there and have good battery life? It's a tough thing to do. Yeah, the aura is kind of amazing in that sense. And I even argue, like, I have an aura ring and I sort of intermittently wear it because

it's, like, big enough that I never really stop noticing it. But it's small enough that, like, I can genuinely wear it all the time. And that in itself is kind of an incredible achievement that it is not four times the size that it is. Like, it's an impressive piece of kit. I still think it's bigger than I'd like it to be. And there's like, I wear a wedding ring. And, like, there's a time.

when it's going to be that big that I will wear something like this. But we're already closer to that than I would have expected, which is cool. Yeah, it is, it is chunky. I'm also wearing my or ring gen 3 right now. Is that the gold one? It is the gold one. I like that. That's a good look at.

I opted for the gold one over the silver one because the two I had was silver. But, you know, it is chunky. Like, I have other rings. And that's the other thing about wearables in general. That's really hard to solve is style. because everybody's body is different. So, like, if we're talking non-watch form factors, glasses are the big one that everyone also is trying to solve,

but they are not getting it for whatever reason. Like, I am a pretty big skeptic that we're going to see a workable pair of smart glasses anytime soon, just because there are so many problems that they have to solve that I don't think anyone has a solid enough grasp on for the consumer space. Okay, so I agree. but I also have a counterpoint.

And my counterpoint is that the Bose frames, which I think, if I'm not mistaken, you like as much as I do, are kind of like a magical, incredible device that, like, I can never explain to people why I liked the Bose frames that I tested so much because they're just, it's a pair of glasses that have speakers on them, essentially. But I love those things. And I feel like that's a space where I'm like, okay, there's much more interesting stuff to maybe do here with glasses than just AR smart glasses, which are going to take God only knows how long to do.

Am I right in remembering that you liked the frames that you thought they were pretty cool? I do like the frames. I especially like the second iteration of the frames just because the first iteration of the frames tried to really lean hard into audio AR and there just wasn't a use case for it. They had like an app store, right? They were like, look at all these games you can play in audio AR. And it was like, oh, Bose, like, we're good. They were bad apps.

They didn't work. Like, I thought the most useful app would be directions, right? So I'm directionally challenged. I get lost all the time. Smartwatches, they don't help me find where I'm supposed to go. So I was testing this and it was supposed to tell me when to turn and when to get to places. I got lost. Didn't help me. It just wasn't there yet. But the second iteration kind of got rid of all the AR aspects and just really leaned hard into being an excellent pair of open ear audio sunglasses. And when you're running, that's amazing because you get great audio quality. You can still have awareness of where you're around you.

And those things lasted five hours on a single charge continuously. I wore them at the New York City Half Marathon in February. I really, really like them. But it has a specific purpose because the tempo, I mean, you look like a gibroni wearing it. But they help you see better. And you can listen to your tunes. And there's wetproof. Like, it's great.

I freaking love my frames. Well, and the reason I'm glad you brought this up is I feel like that is still such, like, interesting, unexplored territory. And I've always felt this way about the aftershocks bone conduction headphones. And there's just like, there's this interesting space of like stuff you can do on people's face and in their ears that is not nearly as complicated as we're making it. And also I've talked to people who are like, what an amazing place to put, you know, biometric sensors like on your face, all kinds of good things we could do there.

But it feels like at least as far as I can tell, that is a thing not that many people are paying attention to. Are we just kind of waiting on the next next thing? nobody's really worried about it in the interim phase. Well, there are definitely people out there who are thinking about it, trying to figure out ways to make it work. But let's talk about the ear and the face in general. So have you ever tried the North Focles by North?

Yes. The ones that they got bought by Google? Yes, they did. But back when they had a little boutique in Brooklyn, I went and I had to get my face 3D scanned. I had to go back a couple weeks later. Oh, I remember that. Right?

So your face is very unique to you. you. Like, your glasses are a unique fit. And from like a mass production purpose, it's just really hard to make a pair of glasses that look good. So when you look at the echo frames, when you look at the Google glass, when you look at all of these smart glasses that have come out, they look like the same boring pair of most basic Warby Parker glasses that you can see because they're just trying to fit everyone's aesthetic. But, you know, we're a vain species for something that are like glasses, which is the first thing people see on your face, you want it to say something about your personality and your style. And I had a bunch of different options for the focals by North, but they

all basically were like the same kind of boxy, big, hipster-looking frames that are out there. And if that's not your style, that's not your style. And if it's not in, then what are you going to do with that? With the ear, like you mentioned the face is like a really good place for biometrics. And that's so true with regard to the ear, because it's actually a better place. to get heart rate than your wrist. Your wrist is actually a really bad place to get heart rate because there's just so much noise from your tendons and all that stuff moving around that they have to tweak in the algorithm. Your ear is a much better place for that, as is your fingertip. But then again, fit. Your ear is different from my ear. And, you know, everyone argues about whether or not the AirPods Pro will

fall out of your ear or not. And for some people it does and for some people it doesn't. And that's the problem that we have with ear-based tech just because fit. Fit is incredibly personal. Everything about wearables is incredibly personal. So how do you get something that really fits on your face well that fits everybody? That's the hard part. Rings you can size. Wrists you can size.

And that's why I think these are the two form factors that we see most commonly now. Got it. And I guess the other part of that is even beyond like style and comfort, you have the fact that like to get good metrics from these things, they have to be. really specific. Like I remember getting a like a tutorial on how to wear some old fitness band. And it's like it has to be this tight. You have to wear it right here. It has to be like placed just so on your wrist. And that's true all over your body. It's like if the whole point of these things is to get good data, having them flopping around in everybody's weird ears is just not going to work.

No. Like there was a pair of Jabras. I forget the exact model. I think it was like sport elite. You know, they all have those kind of things. But there was this one specific pair that actually. actually had a heart rate sensor in them. And I was testing them. And it was super cool because I was getting heart rate from my ear and I didn't have to necessarily wear a watch to get that data, except half the time the fit wasn't right or my ears would get really sweaty. So then the contact was bad. So it's just a tricky thing. And like to your point about where you're supposed to wear a smart watch, I have that down pat. It's one inch or one finger length from your wrist bone. Oh, wow. And I got chewed out a couple of

years back by some companies because they were like, you're wearing multiple watches on one wrist. You're going to get bad data that way. And I was like, I was just thinking that I would save time and not have to run 70,000 miles in a week to test multiple things. But as it is, you can only wear one watch per wrist. So there you have it. So you're doomed to running 70,000 miles a week? Yes. I have to run so many.

It's actually like for my beat, it's not fair. Like I have to do from my standards at least three, two mile runs, at least two mile runs to see how accurate one particular device is versus another. So that's just that's just a lot of running. Yeah, that's like eight months of exercise for me. That's tough. I feel you. So last thing before we go is close. You mentioned it at the beginning.

And it feels like there was this future a few years ago where it seemed like the world we were going to live in was not that like you had sort of specific tracking devices, but that, like, like everything you wore was going to have sensors in them. And you'd have some in your shirt and you'd have some in your shoes and there would be some in your headphones, whatever. And they would like sort of collectively like smart homify your body and make it all make sense without needing tons of dedicated devices. That does not feel like the world we live in, at least to me, anymore, that like Nike seems to have sort of walked away from the idea that like, what if we put cool sensors in your shoes? Is there cool stuff going on in that space too? Or was that like a bad idea that we gave up on? No.

people have not given up on that. Under Armour kind of took up the torch that Nike let down. They have a whole line of smart shoes that help you track your running form. They're okay. I use them for a few years, but they're not like good for my feet and I ended up with like shin splints. Another good example, by the way, of fit being the thing, right? It's like not all pairs of shoes work for everybody. Exactly. Like this is a very common theme with wearables just fit being something and a challenge to the form factor. But, you know, that's the shoe space. Under Armour is doing a lot there. And then you have clothes. I think where you're really going to see this first is with the professional athletes. I just saw an article today, actually, on NBA athletes adopting, like, compression pants that help track certain things or some fabric in their shoes that can measure the force of how they're jumping and how that relates to their health.

So I really do think you're going to see it from the sports sector first because they're one of the first like first adopters towards wearable technology with regard to that. Like the NBA adopted the ORARang back during the pandemic. The NBA actually, like you got to keep an eye on them because they're super into just adopting wearable technology. So yeah, I really do think at some point you're going to see basketball players wearing smart shorts or whatever like that. And then whoop. Whoop is another athletically focused wearable that has started experimenting with clothes. So they have their own line of sports clothes that have these little pockets sewn into specific places that you can stick their tracker so that you don't have to wear it on your wrist if you're running.

So they sent me like a sports bra when I reviewed the Woop 4.0. And I was like, oh my God, this is a gimmick. This is so stupid. But then, you know, I stuck it in there. And I was like, wow, this is so comfortable. And it's tracking my heart rate data. This is great. So I really do think when it comes to clothing.

and other types of unique form factors, you're really going to see it in sports first. So I don't know the first thing about basketball, but I do pay attention to the tech that the NBA adopts. The clothes are the most important part, so you're doing fine. Don't worry about it. Okay, actual last thing.

And then we should go, I need you to recommend a product for me. Do you remember the original jawbone up? It was just like it had no screen. It was just a band. It looked cool. It didn't do anything when I was just wearing it. It was just a thing I wore.

I want that again, but jawbone is dead. And it's like I can buy an Apple Watch, but that has a screen. All the Fitbits have these big screens. I just want a thing that feels like a bracelet, but that like is also a fitness tracker. Does that exist? And if so, which one should I buy? Do you have any recommendations for me? So if all you want is something unobtrusive that's never going to notify you, then the

Woop 4.0 is actually pretty great. Fair enough. It tracks your sleep and it tracks your recovery. The only hesitation I have. say with that is that who comes with a $30 monthly subscription, which is pretty rough. That's a lot. The hardware is free, quote, unquote, it's not. It's built into the, built into the subscription there. And, you know, you already have the other one that I would recommend, which is the aura ring, because that does track your steps. It does track your activity. And it's not going to notify you

because what are you going to see on a ring? Nothing. There's just nothing there to distract you from day to day living. It's very seamless. So there's that. The one I would not recommend. is the Amazon Halo, just because I don't like their 3D body fat imaging tech in the app. I think it just makes people feel terrible. Creeps me out, not a fan. Yeah, no, if you feel terrible, you're not going to stick with it. So that's my issue with them. But that is another tracker that's much more affordable than the ones that I just mentioned

that has a no distraction type feel to it. Fair enough. I like it. All right, I'm going to go charge my aura ring. V, thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, this is fun. Okay, so V got me thinking that maybe WOOP is a company I need to know more about that's actually doing some interesting stuff in this space.

Whoop's been around for a while, and I've kind of known of it for a bunch of years. But I always thought about Woop as this like super high-end thing for professional athletes. But maybe it's more than that. So I called up Woop CEO, Will Ahmed, and asked him about some of the things that V and I had been talking about. Here, for instance, is what he said about why Woop didn't want to make a smartwatch. The problem with being a smart watch is you're, one, doing a bunch of things that don't relate to your health, which is going to therefore cut into all the resources that you need for really great health monitoring. And two, you're then competing with every other watch out there. So much magic from health monitoring comes from being able to measure the body 24-7.

And if someone's wearing a wearable one day and not wearing it the next, even taking it off to charge it, then you're not getting, accurate data or you're not getting continuous data and you might miss the important moment or you need to intervene on someone's health. And not only is Woop not a smart watch, it's also not really a wrist wearable at all. Will told me he thinks the sensor is the thing and that the best version of the sensor is one that works basically anywhere on your body, which is why Woop is suddenly a clothing manufacturer. When I founded Woop, I didn't think I was going to be designing bras and thongs and bongs and boxers and shorts as part of a mission to improve people's health. But we have discovered that making

whoop as easy as possible to wear anywhere on your body will overall enhance the likelihood that we can improve your health. If you're a nurse or a doctor, for example, you just can't wear something on your wrist during the day when you're in an operating room or when you're in certain environments. So that led us to looking very carefully at how we could collect data accurately from anywhere on the body. And then designing clothing that was able to make the sensor collect the data at the same accuracy level. It sounds simple when he says this, but I asked him, isn't that hard to do? Like V was saying, bodies are different. People are different.

And getting good data requires things to work and attach to your body in these really specific ways. So can you do clothes in a way that actually works for everyone? We have what's called WOOP labs where literally every day we have different people coming in, different body types, different skin colors, different hairiness levels, different BMI indexes, and wearing body suits of WOOP data collection mechanisms. And through that process and hundreds and thousands of data sets, we've been able to triangulate around certain locations and certain. garment fits. That's a never-ending process, and we're going to inevitably over time come out with

more locations and more types of garments. Will has this thing that he likes to say about how wearables should either be cool or invisible. And I really do think that invisible is the future. You want to wear it on your wrist? Fine, good, great. But the best kind of wearable, I'm convinced, is one that you wear all the time. And that means it has to be super, super flexible and versatile and just stops looking like a thing on your body. Getting there is tough, but I think it's possible. Okay, we're going to take a break, and we'll be right back to talk about this run of mid-range phones

that we've seen over the last few months, and which trade-offs are the right ones to make when you're trying to save a few hundred bucks on your smartphone. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the first. right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn

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Welcome back. So over the last few weeks, we've seen a bunch of new phones launch that are trying to thread a really hard needle. They want to be a really awesome phone without costing $1,000 or more. The quality of phone you can buy for $5, $700 has gone way up over the last few years. And just this summer, with the Nothing Phone 1 and the Google Pixel 6A and the 1 Plus 10T, the possibilities there are going up even more. But the thing with these phones is that they all require tradeoffs.

That's how you avoid being a $1,000 phone, right? you can't have the best screen and the best camera and the best processor and the best everything else and still be cheaper than an iPhone. It's just not possible. So all these phones make different tradeoffs. And I think some of them are the right ones to make and some of them are not. The Verges Allison Johnson has reviewed all of these phones and knows how those tradeoffs feel better than anybody. So I brought her in to see if we can figure out the right ones for manufacturers to make.

Hi, Allison. Hello. So I brought you here because I was reading. your review of the one plus 10T, which seems like a very good phone. But it just made me think a lot about like what a good phone actually takes. And we spent a lot of time, especially on this show, talking about like the best of the best and like the high end stuff, things that cost thousands of dollars. But like lots and lots of people don't want to spend a thousand dollars or more on a phone. And so the big question is like, what do you get when you buy a phone for like four,

five, six, seven hundred dollars? And a lot of your 10T review is basically like here are the tradeoffs that that requires and there are some tradeoffs that are bad. What I want to do is like try to figure out which are the right tradeoffs to make. And I thought this would be a useful exercise. There have been a bunch of these phones out recently. And I want to just go through and figure out what you can get rid of to make a phone cheaper and what you shouldn't. Does that make sense? Is this, is this a good way to go? Yeah. It's like a, it's like a fantasy phone draft. It's exactly right. Yeah. Okay. So I listed a bunch of the things that I could think of. And we're going to get into all of them specifically, but I'm just going to, I'm going to rattle them off to you

here in this list that we have in our Google Doc. And I just want you to know if there's anything you can think of that is missing from this list that we should talk about. Okay, so here's the list. It's body size, just the size of the phone, screen size, and under that screen quality, camera, which is like overall camera quality, and then the number of cameras, and then battery operating system stuff, charging, which is basically just like wireless charging versus is not wireless charging, processor, waterproofing, and updates slash general sort of life cycle of the device. Am I missing anything else that feels like it belongs on that list?

I think that's a good list. I think that covers it. I think I would like, if I was ranking, that would be where it becomes tough. Okay, good. So this is what we're going to do here. We're going to come up with an answer at the end of this. Uh-huh. But let's just go through a bunch of these.

So the first one, and this is the one that really jumped out to me with the one plus 10T, There's this debate about sort of size of phone versus price. And we've had this kind of idea for a while that like the cheaper phones should also be the smaller phones. And you pretty aggressively made the case that that is actually the wrong set of tradeoffs. Tell me why, because I violently disagree with your take. But I want to, I believe in you and I want to know your take before I tell you mine. All right. The challenge is set before me.

So I'm a small phone proponent. I'm a small phone enjoyer personally. this is not like the reality we live in. Like most people want a big phone. They want a bigger screen. So I very scientifically, based on nothing except my own thoughts, come to the conclusion that 6.1 inches is the perfect screen size for a phone. And, you know, it was some modest bezels if it's a mid-range phone.

I like it. You're just looking for like a balance of, you don't want to feel like it's too small and you're squinting at it and scrolling forever. iPhone SE. I'm looking at you. Yep. But then I don't, after a certain point, I'm like, this is need to be so big.

The 10 T's on the big side for me. But pixel 6A, 6.1 inches, so good. I mean, I guess I agree in the sense that just having a smaller phone is not where you should save a lot of money. And like the theory would be basically, it's like a smaller body, smaller parts, smaller screen thus cheaper to make. And I'm not actually sure how true that actually is in terms of like what it takes to make a phone.

I don't know that shrinking two-tenths of an inch is like a $700 difference in the phone. But I do think it's true that most people want bigger phones. And the idea that like the iPhone SE is like the proof of this over and over, right? Apple keeps being like, look, it's the phone that you want. And everybody's like, no, I'll take the bigger one. Like what people want is cheaper phones, not smaller phones. And so I think in that sense, I do tend to agree. But I also think there should be a world in which you can get a very good smaller phone.

I'm not sure it's possible just because of like physics and batteries. But like I want there to be high-end small phones. Yeah. But I guess also mid-range big phones is a thing that should exist. Yeah, I agree with that. I want there to be a small phone at every price point. And I can concede that mid-range phones are probably going to be kind of on the big side. That brings me to the next thing I want to talk about, which is battery life.

because one other thing that tends to be true on these mid-range phones is they tend to not last as long because they don't get the newest processors, which tend to be the most efficient. They're not usually as big, which means they don't have physically as much battery. They tend to be less long-lasting. And for me, at least, I would put that at like the absolute top of the list. I'm like, give me a worse phone that lasts three times as long, charge me $600 for it, and I'm a happy, happy, happy, man. Do you agree with that? Yeah, personally. And that's what I sort of lead with in my reviews is,

especially in this class. You don't want to go shopping for a phone again in three years or get the most phone you can for your dollar, I think, around the $500 price point. $500, you can absolutely buy a phone now that's going to last five years. The iPhone SE, you know, for its flaws. I have an iPhone SE from 2016 that I put iOS 15 on and it's okay. The screen is too small to actually use, like a human being. But yeah, I think I put that, I put that really high up on the list of what you should consider in this price point. And you can, you can expect more than you could, I think, a few years ago. What is the battery champion of the mid-range phones right now? Is there anything better than the just like use it all day, charge it every night? They kind of are

a little middling, I think. Motorola especially will do the like, you can get three days on a single battery charge, but that's kind of in the like under $300 bracket. And I think that's sort of like a, well, this phone can't do much else. So here you go. It has a really long battery. But I think they hit a sweet spot in the mid range where it gets you through a day, maybe a day and a half, if you're kind of conservative with how you use your phone. But it's generally not something you need to worry about or think about and kind of coupled with the longer software support updates that are coming for some of these phones.

I think that you can reasonably expect the battery and the phone to keep going and keep up for four or five years. Yeah, I mean, that's a good point because I think it's easy to think about how long my battery lasts today and tomorrow. But the thing that's much harder to figure out is like how long will this battery hold out

before I have to get a new phone. And I think especially for people shopping, like in this price range, that is just as important, right? It's like, if I have to buy a $500 phone twice as often, I have accomplished nothing by saving a bunch of money. Or spend your life by a power outlet and never leave. Right. Which is currently, I have, I have an iPhone 12. And as of like a month ago, I have reached the point where my battery dies at like 1 p.m. Oh, no. Which I enjoy, because that means it is inevitably about to be iPhone time again. So, congrats. Yeah, I'm, I'm going to be the person chasing after the 14. It's going to be good times.

But anyway, okay, so next on the list, and this is one where I suspect you and I disagree. And I think I also disagree with just like the verge as a whole, which is displays and not necessarily size because I think we, the size thing I think we're actually like relatively aligned on, but like quality of screen. If I'm trying to make my phone cheaper, is it the right thing to do to put a worse screen on it or is it the wrong thing to do? I think, you know, I think there's a kind of a bottom line and you don't get the best screen. You're going to have to make some concessions to get a $500 phone that's going to last. So I think the screen ends up being one of those places.

It definitely is on the Pixel 6A. You get the standard refresh rate and it's just not a very fancy screen. But I end up like, I'm okay with that. But I think there is like a kind of basement level where you don't want to go, low. Like, there's some bad LCD panels out there on budget phones. I've seen them. Yes. I think it is a good point to make that the quality of the screen is something to really consider beyond, like, looking at some specs because that is your phone. You look at your phone screen 10,000 times a day. If it bothers you a little bit or if you're squinting at it outside,

then like, do you want to live your life that way? I don't think. So that's fair. And I think there is a floor, but what I think is true is that my floor for display quality is much lower than everyone else that we work with. Like, I will take just about any screen that I can see. Right. If it works in daylight, which is not nothing, not every screen is easy enough to see in bright light, and if it gets very dim at night, which is like I want to be able to look at it outdoors and in bed without it sucking. And as long as it accomplishes both of those, I will take almost anything. And that's possibly a bad tradeoff and a mistake, but that's generally how.

Like, I'll look at a phone with like a kind of low end like 1080p screen. And I'm like, it's fine. Yeah. I'm fine with this. I have no issues. You can see the content. The content is there. Yeah.

And it's like, I don't know. I'm not buying this phone to spend 12 hours a day playing high end AAA games on it anyway. And I think, I don't know. I'm not that worried about the refresh rate of my screen in general, much less if I'm trying to like find ways to save money on my phone. Yeah, controversial. The flip side of this is the one where I think way too many of these companies do compromise, which is camera quality.

Like, to me, the only thing you cannot get wrong about your phone is the camera. It is like the single most important thing. And to me is like the first thing I would not sacrifice in a phone. But we see tons of them that do. Like, am I wrong? Do I care way too much about like massively high-end camera quality in smartphones? No, I think that's totally fair. and these are our cameras.

There's, we're not carrying around point and shoot cameras anymore. This is it. So it's fair to expect good, decent quality from a camera, from a phone, uh, around $500. And this is my biggest bone to pick. Well, maybe my second biggest bone to pick with the iPhone SE is that it's a really good camera overall. They did not put night mode on it. And there's really no good explanation for that. Except that Apple wants you to buy a more expensive phone.

Apple kind of hates the iPhone SE and wishes it didn't exist. It's the explanation. Yeah, it's an unfortunate reality for them, I guess. It just gets back to like, what are the reasonable kind of bare minimum expectations you can have for a budget phone? And decent, low-light photos is one of those. So I think there are more, I mean, around, $500, I think the camera quality is like decent overall. Things get a little hairy under the $300 mark.

But even in like the Pixel 6A, right, like Google made a bunch of decisions about what to keep and not to keep in trying to find ways to make the 6A cheaper than the 6 and the 6 pro. And one of the things they did, I think, was like relatively aggressively downgrade camera quality. And they're like, their big bet is they have a bunch of software that can do a bunch of extra stuff. but like the camera is not as good. And to me, that just feels like the wrong call. I would rather have downgraded a lot of other stuff and keep the good camera.

Okay. I'm going to disagree with you on that one. Okay. Because I think that it's good enough. It does meet that like, is this the most amazing camera? You know, you're going to, you're not going to wow all your friends with it. But it's good enough. You get decent low light performance.

Some of those like tricks that tensor does. Like there's a mode on it called face unbler. And it's one of those things that like the phone just does. You don't enable it. You don't know that it's doing it necessarily. But you're taking a picture of a kid in low light. They're moving and squirming around. And it'll use the ultra wide camera to kind of fill in information and give you a sharp photo.

Like that is, that's cool, I think. For a mid-range phone, you know, I don't even expect that from every flagship phone to be able to figure that out. So I think it does do just enough. It is old hardware. You've got that in the ultra-wide. Nothing fancy. But I think there is enough of that software kind of magic to make it,

especially that price point, like pretty good. All right. I mean, I guess it's fair. I just feel like, to me, it's like the camera is like the main thing people do on their phones increasingly. it would be like shipping a worse keyboard on your mid-range phones, right? It's just like it's like how you do stuff that it just feels like it's the hardest thing to sacrifice. But you bring up a good point with the pixel stuff, which is that Google made a big bet,

that the main thing it should continue to spend money to put in its mid-range phones is the processor. And that if you have enough processing power, you can solve for a lot of these other things. And I don't really remember companies making that bet before. everybody would ship their high-end phones with like the high-end snapdragon stuff and then have either, you know, older Snapdragon or like severely sort of downgraded processors in these other things as a way to save a lot of money. But Google was like, no, like tensor across the board, high-end chips in all of our phones no matter what they cost. And I feel like I haven't spent any time with the pixel 6A, but reading your review of it, it seemed like that might have been the right call. Yeah, I think it really showed Google's priorities. and it has shifted from, I mean, a few years ago, you sort of thought of the pixel as like,

oh, it's that phone with a really good camera. And the cool thing about like the pixel 3A was that you were getting that same camera as the more expensive model. Kind of felt like you were getting away with something. So when they moved to tensor, I think they had a choice. You know, they couldn't do everything. And it's like, what is this phone known for? What is a pixel phone? And I think the answer has shifted to like a pixel phone does cool stuff for you. It can translate things. It can whatever else magical AI things that they want tensor to be doing. Like that is what you're getting in the 6A and like a camera that's pretty okay.

Fair enough. So it's like, I mean, I guess that's true with a lot of these, right? I think kind of where you land is like you can make some sacrifices, but there is a floor below which you just like can. not go. And if you're going to, if you're going to ship me a phone that's good, even if it's $5, $600, it still has to be a pretty good phone. Like when we start talking about like $100 phones, that's a very different universe, right? But like for this sort of mid-range space we're in, you do still have to make a pretty good phone. Like there's increasingly a smaller list of things that seems like you can get away with. And speaking of, there are a couple of things that I

think you can get away with that I'm curious if you agree. One is charging. To me, the very first thing if I'm making a mid-range smartphone and trying to find a way to cut money is I just get rid of wireless charging. Done. Nobody's going to miss it. Don't care. Easy one. Not worried about it.

Totally great. This is kind of an SE versus pixel 6A thing is iPhone SCE. You get wireless charging. That's really cool. But at the end of the day, I'm going to pick the 6A every time and get a usability-sized screen. And I'm not going to miss wireless charging. I'm just going to plug that. in at the end of the day and live my life.

Yeah, that's fair. And then the one that I'm conflicted about, and I'm curious how you feel, is waterproofing. Because one of the things we see on a lot of these phones is they go from, you know, pretty, like you can drop it in the water and it's likely to be fine to like splashproof, which is like something, but it's much worse. And I get that like that's actually from what I've heard a relatively expensive thing to do to waterproof a device like that. What's your sense of how mission critical that actually is?

You know, I think it is important, but it is one of those, like, I wouldn't expect IP 68 for sure. I think, you know, the 6A in the Galaxy A535G are both IP 67. And that feels, at least to me, that's like a reassurance and sort of like I can live my life with this phone and not feel like, well, I don't know. Like, is it going to be all right if it gets splashed? and can I throw it in the bottom of my purse, which was like the dustiest environment in the world? Like, you know, it would be great to do kind of long-term testing on that or some torture testing on mid-range phones and see, like, what really is splashproof.

But, yeah, not something I've done. Yeah, to me, it's like I should be able to drop my phone in the sink while it's running, and it should be okay. And I fish it out after one second, and it should be fine. I don't like, the thing where like I throw my phone in the pool and get it out 20 minutes later, it's like, all right, I can sort of understand that that might not go great. I would like for my phone to be fine after that.

And I appreciate that, like, most very modern phones are. But I get that that's not how that works. But it does feel like the basic thing of like if life happens and I drop my phone in a puddle, it's going to be fine. Or I spill my water, my glass of water onto my phone. Like, that stuff feels like table stakes to me at this point. Yeah, exactly. Okay. And then, oh, the last one is something I have not thought a bunch about before thinking about this stuff, but is something that has come up in a bunch of your reviews is like promise of updates and sort of operating system longevity. And this came up in particular talking about the nothing phone, which is a new company that has no track record of being bad at this, but also no track record of being good at this because it's a brand new company. And there's this question of like, it goes back to the same thing as batteries, right? It's like how long am I going to be able to use this phone? And I think one easy way for companies.

companies to not have this stuff cost a lot is just to not support their devices for very long. And that has been an issue in the past. How sort of high does that rank for you? Yeah, I rank it really high. And I kind of tie it in together with, yeah, everything that points to like, what is the longevity of his phone? What is the chance that someone could still be using it four or five years from now? And they're not just like cursing the day. They read my review and told them to buy it.

Samsung has been leading the charge on giving you more years of security support all the way down through its A series. I think that A53 is slated to get four years of OS updates and five years of security updates. And they slow down at the end of that. I think you get maybe like two a year on year five. But that's awesome. I think pointing that out as loudly as I can and as often as I can, I hope. hope kind of spurs other manufacturers to try and meet that and keep pushing, you know, you can keep using your phone after it's gotten its last security update, but it's often

not a great experience that just degrades very quickly. I'm just thinking about this as you talk. Like one of the things I've said to people for years is that you should try to buy the absolute best, highest and newest phone you can possibly afford because if nothing else, it's just going to last you the longest, right? It's like, this is the same way I say it with laptops, right? Like, if you buy a crappy laptop, you're just going to need a new laptop sooner. And ultimately, what you pay ends up being not that different and you'll be much happier if you just buy a nice thing. But I think with phones, like that shouldn't be such a huge tradeoff. And it sounds like the

good news is like those two things are getting sort of increasingly close together where it's like, if I buy a $1,200 phone from Samsung, I can reasonably expect it to last four or five years. And now if I buy a $600 phone from Samsung, I'm increasingly able to reliably, assume it's going to last four or five years. And that's good. And I think pretty new. Like, that was not the case, not that long ago. Yeah, I've been, I've been really happy to see that. And I think phones are such a part of our life now. Like, it's, it's just the thing that you have on you all the time that's getting you through every part of your day, pretty much. And it's so good to see that at a multitude of price points, there's good quality hardware. It's being backed up with, you know,

software that's going to keep on going. So I appreciate it. I think it's also kind of exciting. Like, you know a flagship phone at this point is going to be really good. The next $1,000 phone that Samsung makes is going to be really good. Yes. It's going to be slightly better than the last one, which is just where we are. But, you know, kind of finding those gems in like the midrange class or a $300 class where they stand out and you're like, this is actually a lot better than I expected for this kind of money. Like, that is really exciting to me. Totally.

So, and that's actually a fitting place to end. So, okay, just to recap and tell me if I'm getting this wrong, but I've been taking notes as you go. I think the perfect size for a phone is 6.1 inches, which is here tofore gospel truth. If you disagree, I don't even want to hear it. Battery life, important, but like as long as it lasts all day and hopefully a little more, no problem. Display big is important, but mostly good, but it doesn't have to be the greatest thing you've

ever seen in your life. Cameras, again, same is good enough. Oh, here's a question for you. There are three camera options. There's the Zoom camera, the regular camera, and the wide camera. And it seems like most mid-range phones pick two, which is the correct two to choose. I have very strong opinions about this. Oh, I have so many opinions. So, I mean, you've got your standard wide camera. Go with the ultra-wide after that. And then so many manufacturers are guilty of crimes where they put in an extra like one or even like two camera sensors. It's like a two megapixel macro or a depth sensor that's maybe like not that helpful. Yeah, two.

Let's go with two cameras. Don't don't be throwing in a bunch of extra lens. It's just because you got them line around. No. So it's the we're at the 1x and the 0.5x. The wide and the ultra wide. That's where we're at. Okay.

I'm with you. Those are also my strong opinions. I think a lot of people are like, give me a Zoom camera. And I'm like, no, walk closer. You know what I can't do is make your eyes bigger. But I can teach you how to walk closer to things. The telephoto camera seems to be off the table for the mid-range class right now. Maybe that'll be next year's like, oh, Samsung put a telephoto in the A-54.

Who's going to do it next? But right now it seems to be the thing that you just can't get. Yeah, unfortunately. I would take three. Don't get me wrong. But if those are the two, it's the wide and the ultra-wide. I totally agree. Okay, so then we have charging.

We don't care if there's wireless charging. In fact, please get rid of it if it saves me money. That's my opinion. And then longevity of software and security updates is very important. So is that a good summation of where we've landed? I agree with all of that. I thought we were going to fight about much more than this. This is very upsetting.

Oh, that's great. So given all of that, what do you feel like is the best option out there right now? There's obviously a million of them. You don't have to just pick one if you don't want to. but is there like a, is there a manufacturer or two who is getting this the most right right now? So I would put the pixel 6A right at the top of the pile. And if you're an Apple user, then we're so sorry. This does not apply to you.

So sorry about that. Maybe consider switching to Android. Yeah, no, the 6A just, I feel like it just nails all of those. Do it well enough, but it doesn't have to be fancy. Like, it's just there. You get a decent amount of storage at the base level model. which is 128 gigs. The iPhone SE starts at 64 gigabytes, which, come on.

That's not enough. Agreed. All right. So the Pixel 6A is the one to beat so far. It is. I think that the Samsung A53 is pretty close behind it. I would give the 6A the edge because of that flagship level chip set. And I think I like its odds in the long run of like four years from now.

It's going to be running pretty well. The A53 has the nice. screen has a bigger screen if that is important in your life. And it matches the pixel for number of years of security updates. It's just a question of my mind of, is it going to be running fast enough in four or five years? It might not be doing great. All right. Well, Allison, we're going to come back and probably do this at some way very soon with a bunch of new flagship phones that are coming. But for now, thank you. This is really fun. Appreciate it. Yeah, this is fun. Thank you.

That's it for the Vergecast this week. Thank you so much for listening. As always, there is tons more on everything we talked about at the verge.com, and you can also follow all of us on Twitter. Jen is JP2E, V is Vic M. Song, Allison is Allison Joe One, and I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Norie Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, birthday invitations, or big thoughts on foldable phones,

you can always email Vergecast at theverge.com. Alex Neely and I will be back on Friday to talk about whatever Samsung announces today, plus the future of private messaging, fancy new Sennheiser headphones, and a bunch of other stuff. See you then. Rock and roll.