The Vergecast - Chat for Android, Nintendo Labo, and Motorola (like a) G6

Episode Date: April 20, 2018

It was a slow week until Google decided to attempt another fix for Android messaging and Nintendo made the entire staff fall in love with cardboard. Nilay’s still on paternity leave, but Dieter and Paul are joined again by Technology Editor Natt Garun to explain it all. We also jumped on the hot-button issues like the Russian ban of Telegram and how Alexa Skill Blueprints aren’t Turing complete. And, of course, Paul’s weekly segment “Ring-a-ding-ding” has all the insightful Bluetooth MIDI accessory commentary you crave. 1:20 - Chat for Android 20:48 - Telegram 29:22 - Nintendo Labo 37:41 - Amazon Skill Blueprints 41:09 - Motorola G6 43:44 - Paul’s Weekly Segment "Ring-a-ding-ding" 46:39 - New free Spotify 48:51 - RIP vaunt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that 16 million new collar jobs will be created by 2024? To help fill them, IBM's new education model will give high school students, workplace experience, and an associate degree. 90 P-Tech schools are already preparing graduates for tomorrow's STEM careers. Let's put smart to work. Find out more and how at IBM.com slash P-Tech. Hello and welcome to The Vergecast or since NELI is still on paternity leave, I will say greetings, mobile accomplishers. I am Dieter Bone. I am joined by Nat Garen. Hi. And Paul's here too. Hi, Paul.

Hello. How are you guys doing? Good. Good. So I think this episode we're going to bring back something in honor of Motorola's announcements. I think that this episode needs to be sponsored by Cizzer vodka. Cut through the night. Because Motorola released a G6. It's like a G6.

It's like a G6, but it's Motorola's version of it. It's not the G6. That is actually great. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. There's other stuff. So as you're listening to this on Friday, because I guarantee you that you downloaded it right away right when we released it.

Because I don't know, actually maybe you didn't. Anyway, on Thursday night, we released a story. I released a story, worked on by a bunch of other people, made a great video about Android chat. Or actually, it's just a story. called chat. It's just called chat. Not to be confused with Google chat. Not Google chat.

It's Android chat. It's not G chat. It's not G-chat. This is already starting a real great. It's not hangouts. Not Allo. So almost to the day. So we went down to Google.

We talked to the person who's now in charge of the communication team. It's a new executive. And he actually lives in Australia, but he like telecommutes. And then he flies across. It's pretty just moved to Australia. Anyway, he made Google Photos good. One of the people on that team is so now he's trying to fix Google messaging. It was hilarious is when I was writing this story, Google Photos, no, I'm sorry, it was Facebook because Google Photos didn't know the timestamp.

Facebook popped up a five years ago today thing. And it was a picture of me and Ellis Hamburger having just left the Google campus when we wrote the exclusive on how they were creating this app called, Hangouts that was going to fix their text messaging problem forever. Yeah, if you scroll back through my Twitter feed like a couple of weeks, you'll find a picture that I posted of me and Ellis, and it was because I was working on their next solution five years later, Android chat. I'm sorry, just chat. It's not Android chat.

Damn it. I wrote 4,000 words about the thing, man. Okay. Go ahead. Let me see if I can explain this, and then you can tell me how I'm wrong. Okay, and you explain it and then Nat explain it, and then we'll see which one of you is more right. Okay. Competition.

I like this. No. Okay. There's a new standard spearheaded by Google, but not owned by Google, but the carriers are adopting. Yeah. That's fancy new text messages with read receipts and video. Yep. And all sorts of stuff, except basically no encryption.

Right. And Google is putting that in chat. And anybody could conceivably put it in chat, but because Google's putting it in chat, it will be popular on Android phones, but it probably will never come to iOS. So what is the point? That's pretty close.

I don't know. The way I've been seeing this, it's like, it's kind of like if BBM came back. But then they're like, oh, but carriers have to be the one to, like, activated it. It's I gotta say I literally don't know what's different about

this other than the fact that there's just one app now. So what's just the simple explanation is imagine if SMS didn't suck the end. It's like SMS 2.0? Yeah except it's called RCS except RCS is terrible because RCS has been around for 10 years

rich communication services and nobody everybody made different standards so it sucks. So Google made this thing called the universal profile which is hey everybody your RCS should actually work And everyone's like, fine, okay. So it's like a spec. It's a spec. And calling something RCS sucks because I'm not going to be like, hey, man, send me an RCS.

So they're calling it chat. Everybody's calling it chat. Everybody's calling a chat. Google managed to convince all the carriers not to call it Verizon super duper messaging 4.0 plus with premium ad on, whatever. And then the other pieces, Google is going to make its Android messaging. messages app, the default on a bunch of different manufacturers. Samsung's also going to support it because they don't like Android messages. And it will be the chat client.

Okay. And then the last piece, which we totally buried the lead about, like, the VergeCast is about jokes and we have given up on the easy jokes. They're pausing investment. Quote-unquote pausing investment. They're basically taking everybody that worked on aloe and they're saying, yeah, you know what, Just don't work on that anymore. Why? Just leave it.

Why should I ever try? I get why Google. It sounds like a good idea, Google. Yeah. So did Alo. Yeah. Why should I ever believe Google on anything when it comes to messaging? Why will they...

But also, why do they use the word pause? Because they're not... That's like pausing your gym membership and saying you're like, I'll go back. Like, yeah, I'll definitely go back. Like, but no, but you're not. I think because, like, they don't want to shut up. it down tomorrow because that'd be a terrible thing to do to the 30 people that use it.

Right. They also, if you think about it, Allo is the only, they've got Hangouts chat, hangouts chat, I think it's called, which is their Slack competitor. That's what Hangouts turned into. They've got Allo, which they're pausing, but Allo is their only consumer product that offers

and that has an option for end-to-end encryption. And so, like, SMS, or sorry, RCS, I'm sorry, chat. Is like the carriers control it. So Google won't have any thing that they're doing to do that. Can you chat, quote unquote, through Allo? No, Allo doesn't support SMS or RCS. Okay, so while Apple, who did this 100 years ago,

allows you to easily move between green text, which suck and blue messages, which are great. Yep. Google, who has been working on this problem for literally five years, at least minimum, can't even give you that much unification. So they used to do that with hangouts, and then they took it out because it was too confusing, I think, and also because the carriers maybe didn't like it. I don't know. The thing to know is, like, Google couldn't make I message in 2018 because the carriers basically wouldn't let them, right?

They could, but it would be a nuclear option. And like there's actually a bunch of leverage that Verizon and, I don't know, telephonica and whoever have over Google is my understanding of it. What do the carriers gain from having these non-encrypted messages go over their networks? They get to see who you're talking to and who's talking to you. They, if they're in control of the rich text messaging platform, then if IKEA wants to talk to you about your. furniture. If they want to send you a little video that tells you how to put it together, or if Virgin Mobile wants to send you a plane ticket that actually has a plane ticket in the text message, they can't do that right now. They have to use iMessage or Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp

or whatever. All they can send everybody is a text. And so all of these companies want a universal standard for being able to send good chat messages to people. And so the carriers and the carriers can charge those companies a bunch of money to do that. And so there's a revenue stream there. It's going to be the GSMA, the consortium of carriers, thinks it's going to be, I think it was $74 billion in the next six years. Be able to send me spam? Is this spam or is it like truly?

I mean, the airline ticket is a nice example. Instead of having to click a link and go to the browser. We don't know yet. I mean, the only stuff we've seen so far is like Subway Sandwiches supports it. Virgin supports it. But there's no reason that has to be unencrypt. Well, it's not about the encryption. Well, no, yeah, they're right.

There's no reason it has to be unencrypted, but encryption's hard. And Verizon and AT&T like doing things when the government asks them, because then the government doesn't get mad at Verizon and AT&T, when Verizon and AT&T go to the government and ask more spectrum. Yeah. Yeah. It's not fun. World sucks.

Let's burn it to the grub. I mean, it's... It's capitalism. But Google tried to do, like, like, Alo was like a Facebook messenger or a WhatsApp clone, right? It was just a completely owned and operated service. And they just didn't get anybody to use it. It was perfectly fine. They could have added texts as like an alt if they wanted to at some point.

But they never did. And so whatever. Now, chat will fall back to SMS. So here's the other thing is will Apple ever support it? Who knows? So there's going to be this weird purple text. Yeah. There's going to be this weird bizarro world where it'll be Android's version of the blue bubble

where like I want to send somebody a message and it'll fall back to SMS because they're using an iPhone. Right? It's gonna be weird. I've always used an Android, so I've been on like the green bubble, and I've never seen what it's like to be in the green bubble. What shout apps do you use? I use Hangouts.

Use Hangouts, really? Yeah, yeah. Wow. I still use Hangouts. You got to move on. I feel like I keep coming on this show, and it's like, why do you do the things that you do? No, people love Hangouts. Hangouts has got a huge group of people.

Also, Hangouts is the only place where the blobs still live. They like forgot it's there. We're screwing up by Robs. reminding them. I'm so sorry. People will love blobs. Hurry change subject. Does chat have the blob emojis?

I don't know. I don't have it. I doubt it. I'm going to say I doubt it. It's available on Sprint right now, but I don't think it's called chat yet. And then you have to wait for your carrier to turn it on. RCS, you know what the profile is available on Sprint right now.

It's a launching person on Sprint? It's already on Sprint. It's there. The home of all great. Right? Oh my God. You know what else Sprint has? I'm having flashbacks.

Well, yeah. You know what else to Sprint partners with? Like title? Yeah. Got really good partners there. Okay, but no, you're Google. You are Google. Yeah.

You have the power of Sundar Pachai. Yes. Bam, right now. Here's what I would do. What would you do? Take Allo. Yeah. Ask people when they're using the phone if they want upgraded messaging features or whatever.

Have them sign an agreement. Then all of your Android friends, you message them in the deep. default texting app of the phone. Yeah. You message them through ALO. You'd I message it. Yeah, you'd turn ILO into I message. They have a huge market share.

They could totally I message it. Yeah. And then you get all that I message advantage of you hate all your friends that don't have blue text. Yep. You know. Yep. Like maybe even brace it. You green text and SMS on Android comes in as a blue text.

Yeah. So you're Google. All this confusing. And you're doing this. I'm, I don't know, let's call me Verizon. And I'm the GSM.

I'm Verizon and I'm Orange and I'm Deutsche Telecom. And I see that my SMS revenue is gone away. It's going away very quickly. And that Google's swooping in and take what's left of whatever the replacement might be. I can't make a bunch of money off of businesses because you have gone and done it. You've done gone, gone, done it. And done the SMS thing, gone the I message thing. What do I do?

Well, do I switch to Tysen because I'm mad? Probably not because that's terrible. But you know what? Who gets to who gets the final word of what shows up on Android home screens and what gets to be the default apps? The carriers do. So you know what I do? I make my own browser based off chromium because it's open source and I make being the default search engine. Okay.

I buy a email. I make some crappy app developer create an email app that is, you know, I get to look at the data on it because I'm an evil carrier. And I make that the default email app. and you have to, like, go find Gmail. I replace a Google assistant with something else, right? Like, they could do a bunch of stuff to start, like, slicing into the revenue streams that Google makes off of Android to retaliate for the revenue stream that they would feel like Google's taking away from them. Well, it seems like Google ran away from that fight. Google could have done, if Google had done this five years ago or seven years ago, it would, they would have gotten away with it just like Apple did with I message.

And it wouldn't bother me if it wasn't, if it was encrypted by default. If there was a standard that was encrypted by default, but this sounds like Google chose something that was less good for their customers in order to appease carriers who, your description of what a carrier would do to customers. Doesn't make it sound like the carriers have their best. Who's defending the best interests of Android users? Well, right. Anybody? Well, so one of the arguments they make is that people, People just use the default texting app anyway.

Because, like, SMS works for everybody, and so everybody ends up using SMS. And so somebody finally has to step up and fix SMS. At the same time, every other thing they've tried short of going full eye message has failed completely. So what else are they supposed to do? Well, you definitely wouldn't want to go full eye message. Okay. Can I defend my hangouts usage for a second? So, like, for people, like, for people, like,

Like, I don't use Android messages that much. I use Hangouts because most of my friends have a Gmail account. Therefore, that makes sense for me in terms of what I message or, like, ICloud or whatever, all the iPhone users use. But, like, you know, I have Google Photos. It would, like, tag my friends for me, even though I think Europe is, like, suing Facebook about it. But, yeah, like, I'll tag my friends for me. It'll make it easy to share Google Photos stuff with my friends because all my friends are in my contacts and have a Gmail account. Google and then therefore that also just inherently means they can use hangouts like I don't see a problem with that it's an easy app it has the blobs it has gifts it has um different google keyboard stuff that you want to use with it like I don't see an issue uh so so that and and that says that that's like Google's WhatsApp yeah um I mean like yeah so what are you going to do if you know I'm sure nothing I don't know I'm like I'm going to ask but

assume that Hangouts is going to just sort of continue to work as like basically G chat for a little while longer, but that at some point they like it starts to falter and they sort of let it like die like they're doing with Al-O what are you going to do? Are you just going to switch to chat to these RCS messages? Are you going to switch

to something else? If it's directly tied to like the phone numbers I already have in my account or like the g-mails that are there I think the important thing, the thing that made it easy to use Hangouts, it's because most people I know I have either their number or their email. Therefore, using Hangouts is very easy because it's already there. If chat brings all those in and helps me transition very easily from Hangouts to chat,

sure, that could be a potential, like, solve for finally moving on. But if I have to, like, start all over, I don't have any, like, history. I have no context of what the last message is with this particular contact was. It kind of sucks. Starting over sucks. When people buy a new phone, they don't like setting it up. They buy a new computer. People don't like setting up.

People don't like to set up things. If the transition is smooth, possibly, but I don't know. I really don't have a problem with it. I use it every day. And if it goes away, like, sure, I'll relearn to use it, but hopefully the transition is not drastic. Wait, where will you go if it goes away? I mean, I guess I have to go chat. Or go, I mean, will Android messages continue to exist?

Yeah, of course. No, Android messages is the default app now. And they're going to make a desktop client. And it supports chat. And it supports chat. That's the whole thing. So chat is, no, you're not going to go download chat. Chat is just going to get turned on when your carrier decides to flip to switch inside Android messages.

I see. It's just going to appear like magic. And the Google assistant will be in there. Google's whole thing is we can add a ton of features to Android messages. We don't need to control the entire transport protocol. I see. And so we can do. everything we want just by owning the app

and the carriers can control the transport protocol they can do whatever the hell they want with that as long as they stick to the universal profile also on the back end Google offers like server services that support if you read. Yeah then I guess I'll go back then I guess I'll go to Android messages because like that is my backup

yeah theoretically won't lose anything except like your history. Yeah which is I guess fine yeah right it's like fine like Allo that was my Allo review this is fine this is fine There's no blobs, but it's fine. Well, I'm giving up.

Well, I mean, you say you shouldn't trust Google. I do not disagree. On the other hand, like, there's nothing left to trust. They gave it away. They're just like, they don't make a message gap anymore. I mean, they make like 20, but they make one for you. Yeah, it's just, I don't know. Yeah, again, it's just like who in the world of Android is fighting for the users?

And it's fighting for the best interest of the users. It's not obvious to me who that is supposed to be or who it actually is. And I feel like Google does a lot of things that are like, okay, carriers, enough of that, or they like try to re-architect Android so it can't, is harder to mess up. So Google tries to have a partnership with the carriers instead of an antagonistic relationship. So in a certain sense, this decision from them, like, I know I'm needling you by saying this, but like it's just the market at work. They're just doing what the market tells them.

And the market isn't just us. It's also the carriers. But they could potentially, I mean, Apple has found a huge upside in how it did IMessage. So the thing I'm angry at Google about is not seven years ago right after IMessage came out saying, okay, now we're doing the same thing. Right. And just to clarify. Just done that, we would, everything would be fine.

And we'd have like IMessage versus Android, whatever. We could fight forever about it. I mean, just to be clear, Apple is, has not seen to the best interests of its users by not opening up IMessage. That's right. Apple should ship an Android app. Oh, man. It would be the most amazing. This is great timing for it, too.

If Apple's response to chat is to bring I message to Android, oh my God, that would be so much fun. That would be great. And that would be wonderful. So Apple's not blameless. That would be great. But at this point, I'm full embrace being the green bubble that I would just do it out of protest. Just refuse to download out of protest. I mean, when I use an iPhone, I don't turn out of it.

on iMessage because getting out of iMessage is so painful that i refuse to get back into it again well half the time like my friends ask me all the time whether they should switch to a pixel or like an android and they're like well if i lose i message then like that's literally the only reason they don't not buy an iPhone yep they super know it too crazy on that standard verge cast note i'm going to read an ad and then we're going to talk about more text messaging at least a little bit i think yeah all right population will reach nearly 10 billion people, 10 billion people, and food production will need to grow by 70%. But what if artificial intelligence could help? Farmers are already using it to help increase crop yields.

Watson and the IBM Cloud provide access to weather data and analyze satellite imagery to help them monitor soil, moisture levels, and reduce water waste. So as the population grows, just like food grows, more food can be put on the table. Let's put Smart to Work. Find out more at IBM.com slash smart. All right. I've talked a lot about chat. I'm done having feelings about text messaging, except we have to have feelings about Telegram. What is going on with Telegram? It is very confusing. I saw a picture of the CEO without a shirt on.

It's not appropriate. It's not cool anymore to call somebody a hunk, but dude's a hunk. Why is that not appropriate? Nobody says the word hunk. It's like from like 1984. Dieter, would you say Dwayne the Rock Johnson is or is not a hunk? He's very hunky. He's like a chunky hunk because he's like over muscle.

That's not nice. Chunky is like, unless you're like describing peanut butter. There's no chunky that is like positive. I meant chunky in the vein of peanut butter. Like his muscles are like rocky and they stick out. He's a rocky hunk. Would you call the rock?

He's craggy. I would call the rock. We have completely derailed. What is happening to Telegram? Someone give me the basics. The basics is Russia wants encryption keys for Telegram to operate in Russia. And Telegram is like, no. And Iran and Russia and a bunch of other countries.

Well, no, just those two. Iran temporarily banned Telegram at some point, but Russia was straight up like, well, you can't operate here if you won't give us the encryption keys. And subsequently, that means that I think they like took down parts of Asia. WS to make this happen. They like, they like, oh, well, Telegram uses these IP addresses, so we'll ban those IP addresses,

and it was the same IP addresses that a bunch of other apps use, right? Right, and subsequently, because of that, a bunch of video games got taken offline, like people can play Splatoon. It got super messy, super quickly, and, yeah,

and people were upset, because, like, Telegram in that part of the country, like, is the Internet, I guess. Like, people use it to communicate with each other, yes, but also, like, they read stuff online. Like, that is their Facebook.

That is their... Yeah, I didn't know about these channels. Yeah, of Telegram. How hugely popular they are. Yeah. So, like, in other parts of the world, WhatsApp, usually, is their internet. Like, people use it to read the news, you know, check prices for random stuff, like, you know, follow up with their communities or neighborhoods. They're, like, you know, it's very localized. Like, people use it for commerce.

It's, like, it's quite insane how they really just use it for more than just texting each other. So Telegram is that in Russia. So it's a big deal. I don't think people have been able to access it through BPN, have they? There's been, like, there's been ways. There's, there, like, people have been talking a little bit that they found some work around. So Vlad talked to a couple people in Russia. And it ends with this just amazing quote from this Anton guy, who is quoting his own mother.

Yeah. Thank God repressions are handled by such incompetent idiots. My family remembers full well how it was. was when they were carried out by professionals. Oh, man. Which is, I don't know, it's great. Like, you can't trust government. Everybody knows that.

Governments are going to do horrible, bad things. But the hope is, is that they're so incompetent at it that they won't do a good job at actually repressing something. Well, what's funny is this kind of goes back to eye message a little bit, right? So I remember way back in the day, a bunch of governments got real angry at black. because they did not have their servers hosted in the local countries. India was actually one of these countries. I think Brazil. And they ended up capitulating and hosting their server in India's jurisdiction so that India could,

if they wanted to try and go, like, look at the data. But they had previously, and they tried to route everything through Canada, and they would not open up to governments to let them snoop on BBM messages. I don't know what the current state of what's going on with BBM now is, and if I mischaracterized what happened back then I apologize. But the point, I think, is Telegram. I think the CEO, like, he had to bail in the country a while ago so that he, like, would be able to continue to run the thing.

There's also signal, and now there's iMessage, and now Google's not doing what, not doing anything, whatever. There's also WhatsApp with Facebook. Mm-hmm. And if you're going to pick, if you, if it matters to you to have a chat app that's encrypted, that is protected from being subpoenaed or snooped on, the first thing you need to do is like look at the technology itself and be like is this actually secure is it audited does the electronic frontier foundation say yep green light this is fine but then there's a second step which is do you do you the company that makes it is it possible for them to look at your stuff if there is there's some key they could grab sometimes most of the time the answer is yes sometimes the answer might be no and if the answer is maybe or yes like you have to pick your messaging app based on whether or not you think it's likely that the company that makes it is going to stand up to, like, the Russian government and the Iranian government and the U.S. government.

That's a very, very heavy load to put on, hey, what chatting app do you use? What texting app do you use? Like, that's crazy town. I mean, ideally, you'd have a system that's been developed in the open so that whoever is physically or whoever, whatever entity is actually putting it on an app store or something like that, doesn't really even have. the ability to do it. Right. But I'd say, I mean, right now it looks like props to telegram for how well they seem to be resisting these asks. Right.

I mean, it was basically the whole point that telegram, because telegram and Signal kind of showed up around the same time with a pretty similar. And like people have reasons to prefer one or the other. I feel like Signal is developed a little more in the open, so it's a little easier to like audit how secure it is. But I don't know. Yeah. Good for them. So just last month, March 27th, the EFF published a big series of articles. And it's called Secure Messaging, more like a secure mess.

And they straight up say that we can't give anybody a recommendation. We can't, the EFF does not have a recommendation for what texting app people should use. So, for example, Signal has strong security, but its reliability can be consistent. WhatsApp is user friendly, but they can also undermine encryption. I'm trying to quote here. I mean, also just a general distrust of Facebook. Right. So, like, there's no, like, go-to answer.

Pick this one right now. But there is one thing that you can do to be a lot more secure than sending messages in the clear. Yeah. I'm sorry, Google. I'm sorry, Google, but that's so dumb. Okay. I think it's not end-to-end encrypted, but it is, it is, like, like whatever the step below that is.

So it's encrypted in transit. But like it can be read on the server. So like the carrier can look at it. But like if you're snooping on my Wi-Fi, you can't read it. So it's like SSL, right? You know what I mean? So SSL, blah, blah, blah. Still.

I don't have anything. I don't know. We don't know what's going to happen next with Telegram. It's like an ongoing story as we record this. But the important thing is go to James Liam Cook's tweet of Durav where he has a screenshot of this guy in the dead. desert. And his Instagram post is also amazing because he says, my favorite movie is 300. And he, to compare himself to like, you know, 300 people fighting off a giant army.

The creator of Telegram? The CEO of Telegram. Do you think he planned that before this happened? Or was he like, this is happening. Fly me to Dubai and like compare me to. It's so jeeat. He tagged it Putin's shirtless challenge. So he's straight up like, sweet.

I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I'm the joke about him being shirtless all the time. I see. And that's why he's on the horse because boom. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, look at those abs. I just can't. Wow. Okay. Great. It's very troubling. I just, I'm getting old, okay?

And like, I've developed the punch and I am nervous. Okay. We're moving on. But I will definitely check out this, this interview that Vlad did. Yeah. Because it gives you this insight. I feel old for not even knowing about telegram channels. And just, I know it's probably mostly a cultural thing, but it's cool that people, you know, don't just rely on Twitter to subscribe to news.

Like, people are just like, hey, I'm going to join this underground gossip stream and get completely unverified things. And that's just, I trust that more than state road media. So here we go. So this entire Vergecast, I've been sitting here staring at a cardboard piano. And I haven't touched this thing much at all. But Nat, you just played with it. Yeah. Tell me about...

Andrew reviewed it, but tell me... Tell me about it. So, Dami and Andrew... Andrew reviewed it. Dami actually played with it a lot more. She made it seem super cool. And I was like, well, Dami did it. I want to play with it.

So, no. So I grabbed it out of the closet and played with it. And it's super cool. I think it's just the most... One of the most creative things. It's like, you never think of cardboard being as exciting.

And it is. And I'm just impressed with the way that all these different pieces kind of fit together. It's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle when you grow up playing jigsaw, but in 3D. And yeah, you like put the switch on it. It becomes kind of a dock. You stick the joy icon in the back and the IR, like sensors read the machine. And then like we have the piano one in front of us so you can play with it.

And it's like kind of accurate, kind of crazy that, you know, each key. Wow. Yeah, it has a really good feel. Like you press down. It's very satisfying. Yeah, it's just kind of nuts that something, you know, like a flat cardboard can turn into this like 3D magical thing. And it's like really creative, really cool. I'm not sure why it costs so much, but I guess you pay for creativity.

Do you know the prices that's like one's like 70 or 80? Yeah. The robot one is more expensive. Yeah. Like the cheapest variety kit. I think is like at least $70. So like that'll come with the keyboard. That'll come with the fishing rod.

It'll come with like the little robot thing that you can build and it'll like like an R.C. kind of thing. Yeah. And then it goes up from there. The robot is more expensive because it's just more involved. But it is really cool to put on and like walk around. Paul and I played the robot like destructor game, which is really cool. you basically strap two parts to your feet

and you stomp around and the other two parts you hold with your hand you punch and you can fly around you can turn to a car it's just super fun and it's very like for the first time like I own a video game

I play video games like I think of myself as like an adult person playing video games versus putting on the labo and playing with the labo you literally feel like a child and not in a bad way in like a very like nostalgic creative, like inspiring way.

It makes you feel like, yeah, like, creativity is fun. It reminds me of, what was it in Calvin Hobbes? What was that called? The transmogrifier. The transmogrifier, yeah, yeah. Basically, all of Calvin's inventions were just literally a cardboard box. And whatever he wrote on the side was the function. But within this, I feel like Nintendo has created a way that, like, it actually does something.

Yeah. It's like, oh, this is a robot. Sure, Calvin. No, actually, it turns out it's actually a robot. I mean, like, it does cost kind of a lot, but it does remind me of feeling like when I was kid, when I was a kid, I didn't have like a whole lot of toys, right? So you had to be inventive. Like, you had a piece of paper.

You, like, you drew a house. You drew a paper doll. You, like, folded something and made a plane, right? Like, you got creative with what you got. And, like, this feels like the next level of what being created with what you got means. Like I said, it is expensive to buy. a switch and the kit. But once you have it, it is really cool to, like, kind of think back to those moments

where you kind of make do with what, like, this thing you got, and, like, it just, there's so many different possibilities out of this one thing. Like, Paul and I were trying to make a music machine with it. It comes with a keyboard, which you can easily play as a piano. But we also programmed it so that it would work with the robot kit. So every time you stomped and punched, it also played keys, so you were, like, a walking piano. Because you just have four inputs. There's punch left, punch right, and stomp right.

And so with those four inputs, just wired those to keys. I've got the, but you can also just put it as like touch. Let's see if there's any audio on here. This is a real great demo. You know what? Not my best work. So I did, I guess I just didn't follow the coverage like closely enough with this. I was not aware that they were doing.

like a whole node-based programming environment, which I just recently got an iPad mostly for doing music, and I got this software called Audulous, which is for making your kind of own modular sense, and it's all about like you have little pieces and you wired together. So I was like, oh, I'll make a computer out of you.

Yeah. The thing is you can make a computer just from Nandgates, which is an and with a not phone, The two logic gates that are in here, because the way they split it up is you have input, so like you shake a joycon or you look an IR sticker or you press a button or something. That's an input. And then there is like the middle, which is like logic, like if and and and and not statements. So like for instance, for the robot, because when you are standing up, you're always playing that piano.

note, I added a knot so that if, unless you lift your leg, it won't play it. That's why when I just push play, it's just played that all the time. And then there's the output, which can be sound or flashing something. Right. But because you have and you have not, you can basically build, you can build all possible conceivable computers, given enough memory and time. Yeah. Yeah, because you only need sure or false.

You need if and or or. or if and or not you need and or and not but if you have and or you can build if and if you have God this is a logic 101 It's bullying logic you don't need if but it's and not an or the main ones

But if you have and you have not You can create a NAND which is a not and Yep And with three NAND gates you can create a Or gate Right. So you can like, if you have NAND, you can make everything because we have not an and. Yeah.

You can make all computers. So like on Audulus, I made the nice thing about Audulus, which hopefully Nintendo will like, I'm scared that they like maybe phoned this in a little bit. It's a little bare bones. Yeah. The screen, you can't see it, but it's just covered in boxes. It does not look good. So Domi's, so Dami did a project with the Toy Kong garage with, um, she took the,

piano. She didn't really use any kit. She kind of just built her herself. No, yeah. She and Meg together, so Dami coded it so that, so you can resize the boxes because some of them you can program it so that when you touch it, it makes it responds. So she programmed it in a way so that

the boxes were long enough so that they look like guitar strings. And then so that when she touched it or stroked through all the keys, it sounded like she was playing guitar. And then Meg, our production person, had helped her build a guitar out. cardboard so that she can slot the switch into that and then pretend to be playing a guitar,

which is, like, amazing. And then she assigned buttons on the joycon to change which chord she's strumming. Right, instead of for frets. And she played Rainbow Connection. It's amazing. Her logic diagram, it's like, surely there's like a simple, like, Tommy, you're just so naive. Like, there's got to be an abstraction. No.

There's not a lot of abstractions built into here. Right, right. He can't sum something up into a function as far as I've discovered so far. Yeah. But, I mean, the fact that she went through the lengths of like trying to understand it and clearly, like, made this like giant convoluted mess, but that worked. I think that's pretty cool. Like, no one would ever think that you can do that with a switch. It's also more complicated, or not more capital.

It gives you more power than what Amazon is providing with Amazon Blueprint Custom Skills. Ooh, have you looked through those? It was a good transition I just made there on. That is a great press. Great transition. As far as I can tell, Amazon's blueprint, custom skills are not touring complete. You basically could just like make it say a thing when you say a command. You know my favorite one?

There's one for a babysitter. Yeah. So you load it up with the need to know information for your babysitter. Like this is my baby's routine. Here's our emergency contact information. Here are the allergies and stuff like that. That's kind of like. babysitter could say like Alexa where are the diapers yeah and Alexa knows yeah it's clearly also

for like Airbnb hosts for when you come over and you're like so you show up and you're like how do I do this and then Alexa is like hello guess Alexa what's the Wi-Fi password yeah see the thing is like as basic as as this is there's a lot of useful things like they've got some games built into it they have like a flash card thing yeah so you can create your own like flash cards where it will like ask you a question and also have the answer and also be able to store a hint. Yeah, that's clever. There's a lot of, I think it's actually a great idea.

The whole thing about like, is the thing, in order to like qualify as like a real computer, one of the things that some people say, and I'm not in this camp, is that you need to be able to code it on it directly. You need to be able to create your own thing on the thing or you need to be able to create your own thing for the thing and not have to wait for permission from some company out in the world to let you create a thing for the thing. So an iPad counts because like you can sign up for a developer account and make an app and load it directly onto your iPad if you want to, right?

I wish that there wasn't gatekeepers for distributing that app, but that's a whole other matter. Obviously like Apple 2, Macs, like PCs, all that stuff. Like you can you can make your own apps for those things. And so the question with Alexa is how much skill is required to make your own quote unquote apps for Alexa. And it feels like they're beginning. to create an ecosystem where they're building up to a place where like Nintendo did with the Switch that I could

theoretically want to like make an any arbitrary thing for Alexa as a regular user not just as like a pro developer who throws it into the Alexa store. There's some that in your logical chain there that you conflated to things. Right. Being able to. I didn't use the right Nandgate. Yeah.

Being able to program any computer is a very important thing to me. Yeah. it being automatically easy is sort of assuming that software development will be easy. Right. And based on the scope of what you're trying to accomplish, it's not necessarily going to be easy. The nice thing is, but Amazon, I believe, is doing a pretty good job engaging at a bunch of different levels. So there are really advanced APIs that developers can take advantage of. You can go to like glitch.com and get just a sample project that you can just copy.

and just start coding your own Alexis Gill with JavaScript, and it's basically ready to go out of the gate. And then these blueprints are very simplistic, possibly too simplistic to truly be interesting or useful, but maybe it'll give people the taste for it. I don't know. What else happened? Oh, the Motorola phones.

We got to talk about the Motorola phones because we did the Cizzer vodka call out. I don't know. Motorola at least like eight phones. Okay, it was like five phones. A lot. Yeah, it was like, and they're confusing, too. One was like a G6. What are the phones?

There's the G6 and the G6 play. Yep. Also, there's the G6 plus, but it's not coming to the U.S. or at least right now. Yep. And there's an also E5. The E5 play. There's an E5 plus and the E5 play, and there's also just the E5.

Why do they need so many phones? Also, a different phone for every single market. Yeah, I know. How do you guys feel? They all have different processors. They all have different batteries. It's just like hit every single price point for every single region. It's like, just make one.

Make one Motorola. Also, the fact that like Motorola, like when Motorola used to release phones, it was like a big deal. And now it's like, yeah, sure, you threw some more out there. Nobody's paying attention. It's like really kind of sad. Does this work for them? But it has removable battery. One of it does.

Oh, really? Just one. And like at this point, I don't know. Like I think the capacity is really low. like what's the point, but sure. This hitting every skew is like, I don't really even know how Motorola is doing these days. So is this working for them? It must be.

They keep doing it. But like this is like stuff launching in Brazil and Mexico and then a bunch of APAC regions and other Latteam, Latin America regions. But like none of this stuff is like, oh my God, flagship. These are all pretty middle of the road phones. And there is a middle of the road market. Yeah. So the G6, the straight up G6 is a. for a

Snapdragon 450 which is like a mid-range processor. The play has a 427. The plus has a 435.

The E5 plus like sorry yeah the E5 the E5 plus has a yeah and they all have like

two or three or four gigabytes of RAM decent size batteries they're like 200 250 range yeah

I mean it's fine it's fine it just makes me sad because I'd love the MotoX so much yeah back in the day

true true It was so good. It was so good. They also embrace this whole, like, I think, like, I first mostly noticed it with the HCCU11 or where, like, the back is, like, this, like, glossy glass. Yeah. That looks like a different color kind of, or, like, when it reflects or. It's a real trend right now because the P20 Pro does that. The Honor 10 was, like, leaked or announced, yeah, earlier today, and it also looks insane.

Like, I'm kind of into it. Yeah. Paul. Every week. You betcha. Every single week, we make this joke, and the joke never changes, and neither does the name of the segment. It's a really consistent joke that nobody ever gets tired of. Nobody ever wonders, have I gone too far?

This week, like every week, is my segment called Ringa Ding a Ding. Enhancia, have you seen this wireless MIDI ring? So there's like multiple, there's a... Oh, I know what you're talking about. There's multiple of these now. I think it happened all at the same time because maybe some like Bluetooth chip got real cheap. Like some maybe combo Bluetooth accelerometer chip, but there's multiple of these now that basically... Oh, and Bluetooth over MIDI is a thing.

Yeah. Or sorry, MIDI over Bluetooth is like a pretty well-established protocol. Basically you wear this ring and instead of using like an expression slider or knob on your keyboard, You wiggle your fingers. Yeah. And you add expression to what you're playing. I like this idea of something I've thought about for a long time is the bandwidth of input. And so like a high bandwidth input is an analog input typically where a digital input, like if you're controlling a mouse, all you are really controlling is the X and Y.

And a Boolean of whether you're clicking or not. But an analog input can be very expressive. And so I just like this putting these rings on and you just add more variables of how you can perform and express music. It was just called Enhancia's Wireless MIDI ring. And how much is it? Oh, shoot. Oh, sorry. You really got coming with the hard questions.

Because it's on Kickstarter right now. It's about $260 as an early bird. Okay. So it's expensive. What I do enjoy at the very least about these alternative inputs for music, including the labo, is that I feel like it has a nice appeal for some people who may have, like, limited mobility. Like, for the labo, yes, you can play it as a regular piano, but you can also just, like, attach it to the robot thing. And then all you have to do is just kind of, like, move your arm or your leg to play music.

And it's kind of nice that you don't have to have, like, the dexterity of someone who is able to move both fingers. in different ways because I've tried to learn different instruments. I've tried to learn a guitar. I just can't do it to save my life. Just cannot move two fingers or two hands in different ways at the same time. You do a thing where you tap your head and rub your body.

Probably not. But moving your hand around with the ring. I can do that. Like stomping your legs to make music. I can do that. I think that's kind of nice. Man, I feel like we blasted through stuff way faster than I expected.

I guess we talked a little bit about what we expected from Spotify. we had been expecting them to release hardware at their event next week, and now we're sort of maybe leaning towards no, it's just going to be like a new redesign of the free Spotify. And Nat You and I and Danny like

sort of blasting through, like, they like put it out early for like some free users or something. Like it's very confusing. Yeah, it looks like it. I don't have it yet even though I'm a free user and I'm proud to be one. So Spotify, what's up with that?

Well, I created a brand new account. And when you create a brand new account apparently you have a chance of, getting it. And so I did it and then I had it. And then Micah and Danie and that were like, look at this. Look at this. Look at this. I'm like, it just looks like crappy Spotify, you guys. I don't know what to tell you. It looks fine. First of all, it looks fine. It works. The only thing that's new here that I think is worth talking about is the play on demand playlist because the one thing about free is that most of your music is shuffle, which again

is fine. But yeah, like they'll have. a few playlists now where you don't have to listen to it on shuffle but most of it will still be on shuffle and it'll mark it with this like blue icon that says you have to listen to it in shuffle sure. That's basically the only

new thing. I think another new thing is when it's playing I believe it'll like show like a full screen cover art which fine. That looks nice but that's really the only thing worth mentioning. I think like radio the radio button's a little more hidden now.

Which, okay. Sure. Sure. But yeah, there's nothing super, super crazy about it. If you're not super attentive, I don't think that you will notice a lot of these changes. Really, the only thing that you're going to notice is the fact that there's now a playlist you can play on demand, which cool. Yeah, I mean, they've got to do something more than this minor redesign if they're going to hold the whole damn event for it. True.

I agree. I don't know. Hardware. Hardware. How about you can program your own? Spotify please. Wow.

A lot of ideas. Wait, wait, what about Vaunt? Oh, God. Yeah, we should have talked about that earlier. So last night, so we're recording this

on Thursday, last night, the information had the scoop that Intel was spinning down the new devices group NDG, and the new devices

group is part of the group that made the Vaunt smart eyeglasses. I think they were called Super Light, which is their code name. And so I you know, told, hey Intel, I did a whole thing on this. Is this true? And they're like,

yeah, it's true. Um, so a bunch of people are going to get laid off. They're going to try and find them other jobs within Intel. The information said reportedly there were about 200 people left in the division. This is a group that like worked with Tag Hoyer to make a smart watch that had an Intel chip in it. It's the group that made those like weird, super weird oakly glasses that had like earbuds and we're supposed to be like aware of their surroundings. And then they made this, you know, these smart eyeglasses. They didn't have a lot of hits. Not a lot of hits.

And again, like to be very clear, like the number one question with these things wasn't like the core technology, which was really cool, but not like, oh my God, you like cracked the matrix. It's just like you found it a really clever way to use some basic technology, to use a super low power kind of laser and shine it in this little box down in the lower right. Bloomberg actually did a story not too long ago saying that, like, you know, this technology is not that good, right? And they're like, they're not wrong. It's just, it's a very clever implementation of it. But the big question was, like, can they actually get anybody to make these things?

Because Intel never does a good job at that. And then on top of that, can they not become pebble, which is to say become a third-party platform that never fully integrates well with a smartphone? And like, we were waiting to figure out how they're going to try and answer those questions. And I think the answer is the CEO of Intel is too busy keeping his company from imploding to you know spend time thinking about that.

I don't know. Like Apple is a bailing on Intel is the rumor on Max. Spectra hasn't gone away. Like, man, I would not want to be Intel right now. Well, and, you know, we didn't have this on the list, but Facebook is going to make its own chips now. Oh, yeah, I saw that. I mean, this is just something that's happening.

Mostly for servers, though, right? Yeah, I mean, but it's something, I mean, so much of what we do is happening in, in the cloud. And so anything that needs to be done billions of times a second or I don't know, I don't know how many times a second. Yeah. Facebook does things probably trillions of times. It can probably be optimized by like a specialized chip. Right. And so there's tons of work in these really hyper specialized chips.

Google's doing it for AI. It's also happening on our devices, but I don't know. But why can't Intel pivot to making these specialized chips? I don't know. They have such good like foundries, right? Yeah, well, it might be that or it might be that like these things happen in small enough batches where it like makes economic sense to just go ahead and make your own. Like, and it's easier to make a chip now than it used to be.

And so you don't really need Intel to like come in and do it for you because it'll take longer to work with a partner than just do it yourself, question mark. In my mind That's not how you say question mark, Teter In my mind, Intel People can't see But what I literally did was like the shruggy emoji With my eyes about as far to the back of my head

Weirdly, closer to the blob version of the shrugging emoji The blob is me In my mind, Intel is Still on the leading edge as far as like process size Yeah Right? Which is very important kind of like is the ceiling on how good a chip can be.

So if Intel could pivot to be like, hey, you design this risk V chip, we'll build it for you. I mean, that sounds, that sounds exciting. Yeah, sure. I don't know. I just, I, yeah, Intel's going to continue to do Intel's thing. But like Windows wants to make arm laptops, they're not very good. There's like a bunch of like stuff that's happening. And it seems like, if you.

you look over the past couple of years and you look at the new stuff that's coming out or that's rumored to come out, where is Intel on any of it? Modems to compete with Qualcomm, I guess. But, you know, they're still making computers. They're great for gaming laptops. But then again, if you're buying a gaming laptop, what chip are you actually thinking about? What was Intel's mobile chip X scale? What was the chip that they had? They had a mobile chip in like, like you get in like an IPAC or whatever. Yeah, that's whatever. Oh, but they were, I mean, what do you want?

It tells good at like running away from a market right before it's interesting. They're floating around the Internet of Things market and they've got their drones. They got their cute little drones. Oh, yeah. There you go. Well, every four years we'll have the Olympics with drones in it. Okay, what do we learn today? We learned that Telegram is fighting the man and hopefully,

the win. We learned that Nintendo makes the best programming platform available today. And we learned that you can't spell aloe without a lull. I'm really proud of that one. And the rock is a chunky hunk. That

my friends has to be the verge cast. If you'd like to listen to other things that are not full of terrible jokes, I recommend why do you push that button, season two. There's also, I don't know, there's Twitter where there are terrible jokes. I am Backlon.

Nat is Nat Garon? Yep, two Tis. And if you always see me, I'll be over there still crying about Duda's joke. I'm sorry. Paul's future Paul. We are also on Instagram and, I don't know, other places, you should rate us on Apple Podcast. You can also listen to Recode's podcast. Kara has Recode decode.

Peter Kafka has Recode Media. And we'll be back next week. Maybe with Nilai. Maybe not with Nilai. It's hard to say. You never know. You want to give him time. Yeah.

He deserves the time. Find out next week. Ooh. promo code. Rock and roll, Paul. Nat, what's your sign off? Snip, snip, snip. There it is.

Nice. By the end of this podcast, the one you just listened to, nearly 10,000 new malware variants will have launched. But now AI can help you protect your data from threats wherever it lives. with IBM security. Let's put Smart to Work. There is, of course, more that you can learn at IBM.com slash smart.