The Vergecast - Mobile World Congress 2018, Galaxy S9, and Vivo Apex concept phone

Episode Date: March 2, 2018

The Vergecast trio is back and so is gadget news. Mobile World Congress was this week, and so much happened in the world of The Verge. Nilay, Dieter, and Paul have everything you need to know. A few other things sprinkled in are the next Light Phone 2, Google Clips review, and a little bit of camera talk — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 03:07 - Samsung’s Galaxy S9 packs an upgraded camera in a familiar body 17:22 - Vivo’s Apex concept phone 19:15 - The Clone Wars: iPhone X copycats battle for notch supremacy 25:59 - Android Go is here to fix super cheap phones 32:44 - Nokia’s banana phone from The Matrix is back 36:59 - The Light Phone 2 adds messaging and more to the ultra-minimalist cellphone 38:40 - Huawei’s new laptop has a mechanical pop-up webcam in the keyboard 44:29 - Amazon has acquired Ring to bolster its home security products 48:54 - Paul’s weekly segment “Bounce shot’ 52:07 - Sony’s new A7 III is a $2,000 full-frame mirrorless camera that should terrify Canon and Nikon 52:40 - Google Clips review If you enjoyed this podcast and want to hear more audio from The Verge, well you’re in luck. There’s a new show Why’d You Push That Button, hosted by Kaitlyn Tiffany and Ashley Carman, which you can subscribe to right now! Season 2 starts March 6th. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of Vergecast real quick, and then we'll start again. Brought to you by Roboform, which is an ad you might remember from last week in the week before that. Roboform is a password manager. They don't want you to reuse the same passwords over and over again or like browsers. I'll save your login information. It's all very dangerous. It's hard to remember different passwords for your site because you've got to get a strong password with letters and characters. So just use Roboform.

We're not doing great with this ad today, and I apologize to you, but please just save it by going to roboform.com and use promo code Verge. And they will know that somehow we got through this. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of really, I would say, our nation's internet situation. And preppers. And preppers. I've got 50 tabs of generators open on my computer. Yeah. How many of them are spinning up the CPU on your computer?

Home Depot.com makes the GPU on my computer go. I've got a Twitter series going. Yeah, address book sync is my favorite. Address book sync spun up my GPU yesterday. I mean, I sync, by the way. Oh, I sync. Remember that was what you used to sink a palm pile? And a Nokia, you could sync a Nokia.

I had an Erickson phone that I synced with I sync. It was great. Speaking to Erickson. Yeah. You want to just get into MWC? Mobile World Congress was this week. The Erickson's favorite show. Are you a European continental cell provider?

Erickson has news for you at Mobile World Congress. Have you guys heard about this moon internet thing? What's that? I don't know. Cool story, Paul. This week is a Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Paul's going to do some research. Somebody sent me this article on Twitter in Icelandic that I like Google translated.

It's like we're going to put Internet on the moon so that lorries can drive around on the moon. All right. Well, I would like to just. Erickson tweaked its logo for Mobile World Congress this week. We're doing so badly. Do you know what the nickname for Erickson's logo is? What's that? Three sausages.

That's the nickname? Oh, oh, I see. I get it. The three sausages logo. All right. But that wasn't the biggest news of the show, unfortunately. I would like to just apologize to the listener for this shambolic opening to the Verge cast. All right.

We'll get there. We're here. Look up shambolic, by the way. It's a great word. We are, in fact, the flagship podcast of this company. And potentially your company, as well. I don't know if the listeners company has podcasts. Look,

Neil, you want to talk about phones or not? Mobile World Congress is this week. We had a bunch of people in Barcelona. Vlad, Sam, just like all the Europeans are out there. Just playing with phones. If you don't know what Mobile World Congress is, imagine CES without the self-awareness.

It's like a much more earnest sort of world music situation. Yeah. About phones. With better food. With much better food, because it's in Spain and not Vegas. But the big news of this week,

tons of news out of Mobile War Congress, but the big news, obviously the Galaxy S-9, which is a Galaxy S-8. Almost precisely that. I don't know what else to say. It's a Galaxy S-8. It's got a Snapdragon 845

instead of an 835. I think it was Vlad that wrote something like this. It's a compliment to say it's like the S-8 because the S-8 is so good. Do you guys agree with that? That's a real, like, Vlad take. No, the S-8 was so good, except for, you know, the fingerprint placement and the dog with shoes, Bixby. So here are the changes as far as I understand it.

Upgrade a processor. 845. 845 instead 835. They fix the fingerprint sensor. So it's below the camera, center-mounted, where it should be instead of off the side, like the S-8. And then there's a variable aperture on the cameras. And the big one has two cameras, a wide angle and a telephlet. Yeah.

The variable aperture is obviously very interesting. Right, because the iPhone, I believe the iPhone 10 has a lower aperture on its wide angle, but the fact that it's cool. The aperture thing is really cool. I think everybody was kind of freaking out about it, and now I realize that it's been a week since I've known about this, and I've got a bored of it already. Yeah. Well, I've seen a lot of tests. There's been a lot of test shots floating around. DXO Mark is all excited because DXO Mark gets hot and bothered about literally everything these days.

I will say I bought a mirrorless camera because I can put like prime lenses on it and to have just the best lowest F-stop possible. Yeah. And it's not just about shallow depth of field. When you let more light into your camera, you can turn down the ISO and you can get like more saturated pictures. I just, the colors are better. And hopefully that is the case with this phone camera because it's still a phone camera. It's not magical, but... My read of what Samsung is trying to do.

So it's a mechanical aperture. It only switches between F2.4, which is pretty normal, and opens up a little bit wider to F1.5. Right. Right? My read on it is that it is there for low-light performance. So it's darker outside. You open it up to F1.5, where you're inside and the bar opens up,

let more light in. You know what Paul's saying, you get higher quality of low light. I've seen some test shots with... there is ever so slightly more depth of field, but it's not what you might think. You mean shallow a depth? To me, the big question is, like, I imagine that somebody who is well-versed

in the interplay of ISO and F-stops and whatever else is going to be able to do pretty amazing things with this camera. But the real test is, what does it do out of the box by default, when you just pull your phone out of your pocket, hit the shutter button, is it going to improve that situation? Well, I have a similar story to Paul.

So it was our baby shower over the weekend. We go home. I have a new Nikon DSLR. Like, I don't want to only take cell phone photos for my child. So bought a new D-7500. Took it the baby shower. It's got Snapbridge. So it just like automatically sends two megapixel photos to my phone.

And we ran around with a 35-mill fixed lens on it. It was great. Took a bunch of photos. My sister was looking through my phone after the party because she was like checking out. And she liked the photos from the DSLR so much better than the many more photos that had been taken on phones that she's basically going to buy a DSLR now. Were you shooting auto? Yeah. We just put it in that no flash auto setting.

We did the thing where we just handed the camera off and various people were excited to like fire some photos with it. So it was just being passed around the party. And it was like fun to use and like, you know. and people are screwing with it. It was more special, quote, unquote, than a cell phone. I think you're right, Deeter, that the real test is what happens in auto. I also think that Samsung's processing is so aggressive. Vlad also wrote about this.

He'd tested out a little bit. I think his headline was, this is just great marketing. It will probably do better in low light. But Samsung's processing is so aggressive that you're... Like, you basically run into it. it determines the way the photos look much more than the mechanical nature of the camera. Why can't they be a toggle? Is that so hard?

Is it such an optimized part of the phone that's basically hardwired? Why can't you just like yeah, I think that's a lot of it. It's pretty hardwired into the processing chip. Although it is ironic that you are asking Samsung to give

you yet more checkboxes because they have never not done that. Yeah. I mean, you can put, and people have hacked like the pixel camera app on the Samsung phones. Like, you can do other stuff. It's, but it's not like built into the. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that's really interesting because we have, we're just at a point now where the camera hardware is starting to get more, the question has always been, do you need, do you, can you fight the laws of physics, right? To make things look like a DSLR, you basically need space. You need room for light to bounce

around. Mirroless cameras are doing a great job with that stuff. DSLR are still DSLRs. Phone cameras have tiny sensors. They have tiny amounts of distance, obviously, between the lens and the sensor, just the way things are. So what we've been doing is applying tons and tons of software

to recreate the effects of physics in, like, larger spaces with cameras. Google's done a good job. Apple's the portrait mode, right? Google has portrait. Like, we've been applying software to this problem. This is, I think, the first time, maybe not totally the first time,

but Samsung's now applying literally like hardware engineering to the problem. Like they're doing a mechanical thing and their software is sort of gating how much you can get out of the mechanical thing. And I think that balance is super interesting. Just Google's just like, here's some off-the-shelf camera parts, but our software will do all the work for it. So here's the thing that is, I'm starting to wonder with the Snapdragon 845, somebody and I forget who and I'm very sorry, popped off on Twitter and called all tech journalists

terrible, horrible people in the can for Qualcomm, and that the only thing anybody should ever write about with any Android phone is how much crappier Qualcomm processors on Android are compared to a whatever number bionic thing that you can get on an iPhone. That the iPhone processors are so far ahead in terms of benchmarking and speed and everything else that if that isn't the very first thing you mention

when you talk about a new Android phone, that you're screwing it up. And I am the person who does not like to say that specs don't matter, but likes to put specs in context. And so there's a whole lot of that going on. But I don't know, like how much does it matter that however good the Snapdragon 845 is, it's not going to be so much wildly better than the 835 is going to blow our mind. And it's certainly not going to catch up to the processor in the iPhone 10.

It might not even catch up with the processor in the iPhone 7 or 8. it'll probably catch up with that, but whatever. I don't know. I guess I'm asking Paul to respond to this. Do you care? Do you care? It's like it's got a better processor in the context of Android phones and the fact that that doesn't match the processor on iPhones is like whatever or is it like, is it the first thing we should be mentioning every time?

I think that most of the performance gains that we are seeing recently are all about hardware that is specifically optimized to run single algorithms. Like, for instance, or are small sets of algorithms. So you have these machine, machine learning. Wow. Mishur and learning. Wow, Paul.

I just got to go home. I'm done. Did you guys hear about that mood internet? Let's talk about the mood internet. So you, you know, the pixel two has a very specific chip for optimizing, um, camera processing stuff. Yeah. Apple has a lot of very specific hardware.

You know, even like Google right now, like in the cloud, um, they're like, they have their TPU2, like their tensor processing units that are specifically optimized to run specific algorithms. I think that's where most of the speedups are happening. And, you know, like, Intel is always doing this, like, has, like, you know, specific video decoding or encoding support on their chip. So I don't know a lot about the 845 or how specifically compares to Apple's new stuff. But I think you're going to get the most speed by having a marriage of specific algorithms and specific chip design for those algorithms. And the general horsepower,

the idea that you have a very generic CPU that does most of your work, I think is going away. The GPU does all the drawing and a lot of the processing now. And I don't know what CPUs are good for. Just breaking on bizarre character combinations. I mean, I'm not even using my CPU

to render Home Depot.com right now. Apparently. Melting down. Is there anything else even to say about the S-9? They're going to announce more advancements for Bixby later this year. Great. Thanks for that. Can't wait.

I don't know. And someone's like, oh, it's boring. But like, I don't know, Samsung makes a good phone. I think the real question for Samsung is if they want to be the flagship, well, here, I'll start over. It has a headphone check. It's true. It does. I was really expecting them to take off the headphone jack

and put out like Bigspy headphones or whatever. Yeah. The Samsung, like the S-9 is now the most flexible phone on the market, right? It can do the most things. You can, it has the most connections. It has the most crazy software on it. It supports the most standards. You can plug it into the deck stock and turn it into a weird laptop thing.

The deck stock now is horizontal so you can like use it as a, use the phone as a mouse. So you just have like a Bluetooth keyboard and you like use the phone as a trackpad. Oh, that's neat. Right? It is just the most computer phone. Since it's launching with Oreo, it has to support treble. And so it may theoretically be better than most of the, you know, previous couple generations of Android phones at getting custom ROMs if you still do that.

I don't think that's anywhere near as popular as it used to be, but that's like potentially another reason it's more flexible. Yeah, it's just interesting to me that it is the S-9 is by far the most. most computer-like phone. And we talk about this all the time, right? Mostly in the context of tablets and pixel books and what have you. But this thing is now the most flexible platform for doing stuff of all of the major phones.

Everything else is closing off. And I don't just mean it has a headphone jack. The headphone jack to me is just symbolic of the fact that it's easier to connect to weird things with the Samsung phone than every other phone. That's one example, but I always think of the fact that Dider was at my house, and he just like, my LGTV has some weird mirror cast implementation, and Deter was like, boop, and his phone shut up. I was like, how'd you do that?

And he just looked at me, he goes, it's Samsung phone. It supports everything. So I think that's really interesting for Samsung. I think what's also super interesting is they've got to decide how much farther down that road they're going, while their biggest competitors, and I would just basically rank Google and Apple in that list here in the States. Obviously in other places they have a wider list of competitors.

But here in the States anyway, Google and Apple are shrinking the surface area of what their phones can do. Right? Like Apple's Apple, they've got their Walton. They want you to buy their headphones and their smart speaker and use their mail app, which is just an experience.

It's interesting. The Nexus phones are famous for being like just the easy, if you want to put some rate, if you want to, if you want a phone to put Ubuntu touch on, can't go wrong with the Nexus 5. Yeah. You know, like put some weird modded version of Android

or something like that. I don't know if the pixels pixels don't have that reputation. I think they would. I think the pixel is Google's iPhone. And that's fine. I have one. It's great. People love it. Great camera. But it's, you see those two companies like flexing their ability to integrate vertically.

And Samsung just surface area for days for other things to happen. So like do you need two browsers on your phone? Do you need two mail clients? Do you need two voice assistants? Like Samsung's got a, I think they're going to have to eventually make a decision whether they want to build it a parallel Samsung universe to Google's universe. And in order to do that, they have to just kind of remain a little bit more open. You know what's funny is think of how many things we make fun of Samsung for. How many software things specifically that they are have been bad at for so many years and are famously bad at and yet they're still so successful.

I mean, I think they're successful because of massive carrier deals. Right. In other parts of the world, you know, Huawei and Jaume, like they're getting cut off. So actually, you know what's funny? I was in Cancun for my vacation last week and it was just Motorola phones for days. What? Yeah. Everybody had a motophone.

It was wild. Yeah. Are we just, are we just, we're, are we in a bubble? I think the United States is a really weird cell phone market. Yeah. There's just a strange fact. Like, in India, like, there's hundreds of cell phones get released every day. Right.

You know, it's interesting, like Vivo put out their crazy concept. I want that Vivo phone for real. It's an apex, what it's called. So if you don't know what it is, VVo just put that concept. Vivo was the company at CES that showed off the fingerprint reader under the screen. Right. And to be clear, synaptics makes the part. But yeah, you know, put it in their phone.

Right. And then at MWC, they've extended the ability of the fingerprint reader to be basically the bottom third of the screen. It's like a third of the phone. It's like a, it's like, you know that little white modal that pops up when your AirPods connect to your iPhone? Something that everybody can relate to. Wow. That large of fingerprint sensor is under the screen. So you just put your thumb on.

the screen where you naturally would put it and you're unlocking the phone. Yeah. And then because it's a full face display, they hid the camera, the selfie camera under the display and it like motors its way out, which is not a good idea. No, it's a super bad idea. But it's great. But it's great. It's everything I want and I want it now.

Yeah, I love it the most. Having more moving parts with tiny motors on a phone seems real bad. I'm imagining a strip underneath the rear camera. A vertical strip that's a mirror. And when you hit the selfie button, it like flips out and like becomes a mirror and turns the rear camera into a selfie camera. What was the phone that had the flip around rear camera? Do you remember what I'm talking about? Yeah.

It was, oh man, this is going to kill me. It didn't succeed. That's why we don't remember. But that's funny because that was such an interesting phone. And then all of the other like Android vendors at MWC are putting out phones with notches. Notch Wars. Op. N1. Opo N1. Oh, is the N1? It was the one with the flippy camera.

Apo abandoned this idea. No, but it's like Notch City at MWC. We wrote a whole story called The Clone Wars. Literally all these phones have notches. Was it? Aes-as? Who is it saying that the Zen phone has a 26% smaller notch? Yeah. And they refer to it as the fruit phone, which is terrible. They're referring to Apple's phone.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of screen-to-body ratio comments out there. Yes, I heard that phrase a lot. Which is real bad. And here's what I don't get about all these phones with the notch. The notch is not great. It's not. I have learned to ignore it.

Most people of the 10 have learned to ignore it. It's just one of those things that were all fine. I would prefer it wasn't there, but you mostly stare at the center of your screen, not the top. That's the end of it. You shouldn't copy it. But if you are going to copy it, you should copy the whole phone and not have a giant chin at the bottom of your display. And all of these notch copycats, they're like, look how small our notch is. And the immediate rebuttal that you can have is, look at how big the bottom of the phone is,

which is also visible to you when you look at the screen. Right. Okay. Okay. So there's a few things here. We can all agree there's no reason in the year 2018 to have a chin on your phone, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, okay. Well, no. A bold pronouncement from Paul met with minor squeaks from Dieter. I would like to agree, but driving a display without a chin, especially LCD is basically impossible. Driving an OLED without a tiny little chin is very, very hard. And the only company that's like fully pulled it off, I think, is Apple. Samsung's come pretty close, but they still got a little. bit of a chin, but I don't want to be like, oh, if you, if you don't have a chin, you're,

you suck and what are you doing with your life? Sure. Sure. So it is actually relatively difficult. Let me just explain why. So Apple has pulled it off because their OLED tech is crazy and it actually is folded under. So they're using the ability of OLED screens to curve and the connectors are folded under. So the screen folds under itself and it connects under the screen, both the top and

bottom. That's why it's so hard to manufacture. Samsung doesn't do that, but has sensibly decided, well, if we have to have a little part on the bottom, we'll just have a similarly size part on the top. Yeah. And that's where we'll put all the cameras. Right. These morons are saying, we're going to go notch on the top, chin on the bottom, which makes no sense.

You're saying you prefer the notch. Wait, wait, wait. You prefer the forehead to the notch. If you're going to have a chin, you should also have a forehead. head. Yeah. Standard face dynamics. It's very simple. Rules of faces that everybody has understood.

The rules of faces. Well, but so hang on. So the essential phone has a chin, a tiny little chin, and it also has a notch, but it doesn't have a big dopey notch. It has a notch that is exactly as big as it needs to be and no bigger. The problem I have with these other notches is they're just there for no, there's like, why not make it bigger? Why not make it smaller?

Why is the notch this size? It's that size so it looks like an iPhone 10. Then that's it and they know it. Yep. But the problem, so not to dwell too hard on the Viva phone, but I hate the look of almost all of these phones coming out, like shape-wise. Like I know a lot of people are excited that like there's new colors and a new finish for the S-9 and stuff. None of them are appealing to me.

Am I just like out of touch with what looks cool? No, I think we're... Why can't we get, like, at least Essential. Well, even Essential's doing... I mean, good for them. Give people choice. Choice is great. But please come, give me a matte black monolith foam.

We've always... Essential made a matte black monolith version. They just released it. Oh, I saw the color. They've got a matte black version as well. All right, well see, Essential gets it. They get you. Vivo gets it.

all these Apple cloners. This is shaping up to be one of the ugliest years for phones on record. Yeah, it's an off one. Yeah. Yeah. It's not going to be a fun year of phone reviews. It's going to be a lot of, there's a notch at the top. They didn't care enough as Apple.

They blew it. All of the iPhone reviews were dominated by, like, discussion in the notch from whether or not it bothers you. And the answer is, like, it kind of doesn't. because at least it's, you know, it's Apple. They like, there's a great medium post about how the curve of the notch into the curve of the edge of the screen is like one continuous curve. So it never tangents to vertical. Yeah.

Like, right, it's like deep Apple stuff where like Johnny I was like, don't worry about improving the software boys. Make sure it never tangents to vertical. Right. Like that software design, that was just a hobby I picked up, right? the clones are not nearly as well crafted. And I don't know. I just, I'm not, do you see the Bloomberg story, Mark Grimann,

and Sam Ken had a story in Bloomberg about how when Apple came out with the iPhone 10, the expectation was that OLED sales would skyrocket because everybody would rush to copy OLED screens. It didn't happen. So Samsung has an oversupply of OLED screens. It's coming out today. Great story. Classic great German reporting.

So they're all using LCD screens, and they're cutting the notch, but they're not, because they're using a different technology, they're just getting the look without, they're not making, they're actually making the trade-off that Apple made. Apple made a trade-off to get a full-face screen. Yeah. I don't know. It's just like... Well, and Apple was also putting an eye-ar blaster in there. Yeah, there's no, like, crazy face recognition tech packed into this notch. It's just the same as ever.

We've talked about this too much. Here's what I really want to say. Have we talked about the notch enough? Notched nearly. All right. Sorry, Paul. Just let's notch it down a minute and move on. I want this to stop.

It's not enough. All right. You know, when I saw this Aces phone, you know what I said? That's not your design. All right, we're done. That's the end of the Vergecast, everyone, forever. No. Flagship.

No longer. We've run this thing into ground. No, I'm going to say one last thing. Well, we should talk about Android Go. Okay. So. I'm sorry, Android Oreo parentheses, Go edition parentheses. Kill me.

So Google put out Android 1, like, what, two years ago and said this is our version of Android for cheap phones. Yeah. Then something happened. It's actually more complicated than that. Do you really want me to break your spirit? Yes. And therefore, that's why we do the show, Dieter.

Not for your notch puns. Android one was a specific version of Android wherein Google did basically all of the work and then handed it to a bunch of like super low-end manufacturers. And think of it almost like the chassis system back in Windows Phone 7. They basically did the whole thing other than like here to design the case. They specified the chipset. They specified the software. You weren't allowed to put extra crap on it.

And it was a bare minimum thing. And they worked, they had media tech processors and the whole thing just sort of didn't do anything. And then they're like, okay, well, Edwin I want is more of a feeling than it is like, we'll just make the thing for you. It's more of a vibe. And guess how all that worked? Not at all. And so now what they've done is they went to all of their little app makers that make all their apps, all the Google apps, and slapped them on the wrist and said, find a way to make your app smaller. and then they took a bunch of stuff in Oreo

and they stripped it down so it would work with less RAM and they're calling it Android Oreo Go edition instead of Android Go because they want to confuse us and they also want you to understand that it is a full Android Oreo phone it can do all the stuff but the big question is always why don't you just make all Android phones work well with less RAM and that's because of regular Android Oreo phone how it takes advantage of the RAM to do more graphical stuff

I think is like the really short answer There's a much longer answer, but that's the short answer. It's also like app launch time and stuff. Anyway. Can I ask a question of clarification? When you said it didn't work, do you mean it didn't sell or it was a bad phone? For Android one phones? Yes.

Both things. I mean both of those things. Because there are a lot of low-end Android. There are a lot of $100 Android phones of the world getting sold. Right. But I don't know if there's a lot. There's a few. Well, maybe there's a lot.

But we always see that these low-end attempts happen at Mobile World Congress. Like, Nokia, back of the day, started it. Like, 15 years ago, Nokia's like, oh, yeah, we're going to start selling to developing markets. And look at the phone we made for developing markets. And then, you know, five years ago it was Firefox was making Firefox phones. And they were designed for low-end markets. I think that was like a $50 phone. Yeah.

And so, like, the getting a phone that's somewhere between $15 and $100 has been a unicorn, a white whale. pick your $100 metaphor, and nobody's pulled it off. But the question is, is Android Go, which is what we're calling it, sorry, does it have a better shot at doing that than the other myriad attempts at making $50 to $100 smartphones we've seen before? You know, my read on this, because I made fun of Nokia to no end when they were like, our strategy is these developing markets. Because people aren't confused, right? Like, it doesn't matter how wealthy your country is. You still want a good phone. And all of these companies that are successful in China, India, wherever are making phones for those markets directly.

They're in the mix. The Indian market's hyper competitive. The Chinese market's hyper competitive. They're competing with – they're trying to, like, add features. They're skinning the hell out of it. They're skinning the hell out of it. They're way ahead on, like, dual sim support. And these phones that are like a regular phone that we dumb down,

they don't stand a chance except for price. And I don't think people are confused by price. I think that's why Apple continues to sell like, you know, three-year-old phones because people in those countries would rather have an older iPhone that was the top of the line once upon a time than some sort of like other cheap thing. And every time I see one of these attempts, they just seem kind of like baseline confused about the fact that people would rather have the nice thing. They don't want the dumb thing.

I don't think anyone is that deeply confused about what is the nice thing or what is the cheaper thing. One thing that's interesting about Android Go is it seems very practical. It's very designed to help you make decisions about not filling up your storage and not using too much of your data. And so for people that are constrained on storage, or I think much more common, people who are constrained on how much data they can use in a month, it's nice to have an operating system being a little more proactive about helping you make those decisions so that's interesting

here's this just can't I don't know there are some early benchmarks of the S9 that scored worse than the S8 which is not great but that's with an XEOS an Xenos 9810 chip

on in tech tested the XE the Xenos 9810 version and their headline is Galaxy S9 X-D-Nose 98-10 hands-on awkward first results. But of course, here we're getting the Snapdragon version. So I don't know.

All right, I'm going to read an ad. Okay. Then we come back. We're going to talk about the surprising resurgence of Nokia reissues. And then I'm just going to rant about Ring and Amazon. Okay. Oh, God. Okay.

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Okay, so Nokia, last year, Mobile World Congress, reissued the 30 through 10, which is like the classic feature phone. Yeah. I still have a problem just even referring to the corporate shenanigans that create these phones as quote-unquote Nokia. Like, I know I shouldn't. I know everybody understands that it's HMD and they bought the brand and blah, blah, blah, and so it's Nokia. But, like, fundamentally, like, I just hate it.

Anyway, continue. Right. The Shell company owned by HMD Global that we refer to as Nokia, that some people are going to tweet at me to say, has some ex-Nokia employees working at it. Also true. But Nokia also continues to exist as a company. Right? Very confusing. Yeah.

Making cameras or something. They're doing something. But the HMD Global variant of Nokia is now making phones again. And the first thing they did to get attention was they reissued the 3310 last year, which made a somewhat amount of sense. Right? It was like the same feature phone. They updated the screen, the OS and like stuff, but it looked the same.

Had snake. And it was feature phone. Great. That thing. Who cares? but got a lot of press people were excited people love that phone now this year they've reissued a not the same phone which is what is very confusing so if you remember the 8010 from the matrix remember the matrix yeah it had like like an ejecting it had like a mechanical action so this is a

thing so in the matrix you know Nokia Neo gets a phone call he picks up a Nokia phone right The computer says ring, ring, the phone rings. He pulls it out, he pushes the button, it pops open. So exciting. A real, wow. I got a literal.

He looks at it and he goes, whoa. Yeah. Okay, the real 8110 did not have that mechanism. No. Just pull it open. Because life, real life sucks. There was another Nokia phone that did have a spring,

but it looked totally different. Right. And then for the sequels, they like went with Modo, I think. Yeah. I think I'm sorry. Yeah. We're going to talk about the sequels.

Those are illegal. Okay. That phone looked like something. Right. So now HMD Nokia is out at this year's MWC. And we're like, we reissued the classic 8110. It looks totally different.

Right. Which makes sense because that 8110 had a little tiny screen. I just don't know. Like, great, it has the slider, pops open, does the thing. But it's not. It's like if some famous band got back together and we're reissuing one of our famous albums and they just re-recorded it all, but they were all like poca's instead. It's just, it's a different thing.

But anyway, it's out. People are excited about it. It seems like a nice thing. There's going to be like some really crappy Java apps or whatever on it. I don't know if they'll actually be Java, but they may as well be. Wait, it's going to have Google Assistant. Yeah. Twitter.

I'm very excited about this. This is the worst phone industry. The way I think about this is, okay, you're Disney. And you've been trying to buy Spider-Man for years, finally get Spider-Man rest it away from the cold dead fingers of Sony. Of course you're going to make a new Spider-Man movie. Obviously, that Spider-Man movie is not going to be a frame-by-frame recreation of all the best Spider-Man movies. It's going to be a new Spider-Man movie, but it is a Spider-Man movie technically, just like the other ones that Sony made one.

It's a reboot. Right? All your favorite characters. I think all Nokia is trying to do is they're putting out these things or getting people excited about them, and then they're going to try to sell you a mid-range Android phone. Oh, they're playing the long car. Yeah, it's like, Nokia's back. And then you're like, I don't want a feature phone.

Right. But I am in the market for a mid-range Android phone with a bad camera and no software support. Much more interesting feature phone. Yeah. The light phone two. Yeah. Tell us what the light phone, too. It's going to come out in 2035.

The original light phone was, it was as dumb as a phone could be. And it just had like LED lights would light up a keypad and you could type in numbers. And that was basically all it had. I think it had an address book. Didn't even matter. It's cool. Great look. Now with almost the exact same aesthetic, they're putting an e-ink screen in this thing.

And it's an e-ink touchscreen so you can do like messaging with this. They're thinking about like maybe you could call an Uber with this phone. It'll have like 4G. I think the best image is this image of the light phone is on its side and there's a touchscreen keyboard and a hey friend has been typed. And it's like, man, I want to be there. I want that phone. I want that e-ink.

I want e-ink phones. That's been very important to me for a long time. Hopefully there's like a cool software SDK so I can do my own stuff with this. So the first light phone, they were like, it's just a phone, no features. No feature. People were into it. The light phone two, they're like, we've gone ahead and added some features. They're on a very definite trajectory.

The light phone has gone to the dark side where they, the features are. The iPhone 3 is like, it runs Android now. It runs like Android 5. I just, I kind of don't. Like, if your promise is no features, he kind of locked yourself off from putting out a new phone. I think this is great. All right. Do you want to talk about the Maybook real quick?

Are you talking about knuckle cam? Yeah. By the way, everybody, I think I still think the knuckle cam is. So if you're not aware, it's a new laptop from Huawei. It has just a beautiful three-by-two nearly bezelless screen. And in order to get that nearly bezelist screen, which also doesn't have much of a chin, they had to put the webcam somewhere. So they put it in a pop-up button,

like one of them in the middle of the function bar row. And so it's like, it's down there. And I still think that looks hilarious, and I said so on Twitter. And basically everybody on the planet, including Marco Arment, who has been on a tear ripping into like MacBooks for the past year,

it's like, no, this is great. Nobody uses the webcam anyway. I'm the only one who uses webcams because I live that video conference lifestyle. But nobody else does. And you don't have to put tape over because it's hiding anyway.

And they'd rather have the nice screen. And so people are actually like really excited for it. Yeah. I think that is a ridiculous way for webcam. Just the way we work, we're on a video conference data right now. Although we're using a real camera. Yeah, we're using external cameras. But we're constantly on video.

I'm using one of those logitex that sits on top of the computer. I do think there is an aspect where you, it's like no matter what, I always look terrible on my laptop webcam. it's always a bad angle. So you want to lean into it. So, well, for one, I can say, hey, sorry guys, I got this new Huawei laptop. You don't want to see this angle. I'm not going to turn my camera on for this video conference. Or you're in a situation where it's so casual, it doesn't matter that you look ugly.

You know what you could do is you could make the lid just a tiny bit thicker and have it pop out. Do a vivo style? No, it's just like, yeah, just do that. Like, I get that we want the lids of these laptops to be real thin, but... They do. Just like, there's a million design solutions that aren't pointed up your nose. I do... Just like the Vivo thing, I love the idea of a pop-up camera.

Love it. Can't get enough of it. People are really into this main. I do think there's something that people... It does look... It looks stunning to see a laptop with no bezel around the screen. but can I tell you something that it has never helped anyone ever be more productive. The only thing that matters for me with the laptop is how lightweight it is.

Because as long as it's like around the size of a 15-inch laptop or smaller, it's going to fit into my bag, then after that, all that matters is how lightweight it is. It doesn't matter how thin it is, and it doesn't matter how small the bezels are, as impressive as it looks, What is actually useful for a laptop is light weight weightness, is what I'm saying. My measure of how efficient laptop is is how often the GPU turns on when rendering various websites.

No, I think you're right. I get it. Basically the theme of this show, this episode of The Vergecast, is you made it so thin, now you're making other stupider choices. Yes. Right? Like, we're not quite, we haven't, we've optimized too far in one direction and now. other things that we'd like these products to do are getting like literally shoved into corners

or compromising other parts of the display. Yeah. What if everybody just stopped? Like we've been yelling at Apple, stop making the phones thinner, just give us more battery life for five years, but they don't want to do that because apparently nobody will buy that.

And now we're making everything else stupid and thin and maybe just stop. Yeah. Let there be a forehead on it. It's okay. And that's why you should buy a GalaxyS9. I don't know. It doesn't seem like where we'd end up on this show.

The world's slowest phone. Breaking news. 845. Garbage. No, CX2. I'm not going to buy guys. I want to hear about Ring. Explain to me why I should care at all that Amazon bought a smart doorbell company.

Because, sure, Amazon wants me to let delivery people in their house and nobody's buying whatever doorbell they work with. So they bought another one. Why is that interesting? Let me read the next ad. I know I promise I'd do that, but whatever. Just get through this with me, and then we'll do ring, and then Paul do his thing, and then we'll wrap it up. This ad is for Simplsafe, which is a security company, right?

They've been around for many years. Simplsafe is a security company that's been around for many years. They've transformed into the fastest growing home security company in the nation. Now they protect over 2 million people, and they just released a brand-new home security system of the all-new Simplsafe, which has been completely rebuilt and redesigned. They've added new safeguards protecting them. power outages, down Wi-Fi cut landlines, bats and hammers,

and everything in between. Again, the spectrum of making bats and hammers. Wide, I think. Bats carrying hammers is what I'm afraid of. All new Simplica was redesigned to be practically invisible. Powerful sensors so small, you'll hardly notice them, but you know who will notice them. Intruders, because presumably they will be sensed,

and then an army of bats with hammers will come out after them. Please don't verify anything that I say in this head. Anyway, SimpliSafe spent years building a system. They added so much, but you still get the same fair and honest price. 24-7 protection for only $15 a month and there's no contract. It's smaller, faster, and strong on anything they've built before, but supply is very limited. So visit Simplasaf.com slash verge now to order. That is Simplice.

S-I-S-A-F-E dot com slash a verge to protect your home and family today. I implore you. Visit this website. Protect your home from back. with SimplSafe. So Ring, Amazon's second biggest acquisition ever. There's Whole Foods, and then there's Ring. Just below Ring is Twitch.

Amazon's most important acquisition ever. Sure. Amazon buys a lot of things. Like Amazon bought a robot company to help to make their distribution centers go in the beginning of Amazon. Amazon bought Zappos. They bought lots of things.

But just Twitch was almost a billion dollars. Ring was a billion dollars. And then up there is Whole Foods, which they spent much more money. Ring makes doorbells. They make doorbells and security cameras. Right. I have a smart doorbell. It is the least used smart product in my home.

Right. Because by definition... Is it outside your home technically? Yeah. Well, it's mounted to the home. Okay. It's mounted to the home. Is this all about home deliveries?

But do you think Ring has a... a magic product in their pipeline that is worth a billion dollars. There's some other thing that they're making and nobody's seen it yet. But Bezos saw it. I was like, oh, I got to buy that. So if it's maybe, if it's about home deliveries, the thing they need to do is open the door. What they don't have is a smart lock. So maybe they got one of those.

Maybe rings into that. Right. Amazon's got the cloud cam and that connects to some stuff. Yeah, Amazon already does have cameras, don't they? Right. And they just bought another camera company. called Blink. I have blink cameras. They're great. Blink makes a doorbell. It's just very confusing. A billion dollars. A billion dollars to this company. They make the most popular doorbell.

They have $400 million a year in doorbell sales. Who knew? Four hundred million dollars. That's the number I read. Well, then maybe it's just a good business. Maybe. But Amazon's M.O. is they look at other things that are popular in selling well, and then they go to China and say, hey, this thing is selling well, make a crappy version of that, and then we'll sell it for a quarter of the price, and then everybody will stop buying that other thing, and they'll buy our thing, and we'll be good. And that works with the Fire TV. That's like Android tablets. It's like all the Amazon basic stuff.

Like, why didn't they just do that? Yeah, it's just confusing. And what I particularly don't understand is Amazon already has this program called Amazon Key. which basically integrates with all the things in the cloud cam, and you like buy their suite of things, and then the delivery person shows up and they get to open the door and commit. Maybe Ring was just too much of a threat.

Maybe. Does Amazon seem like the kind of company that would be afraid of Ring? Well, maybe they couldn't get an edge in this market. I don't know. I'm just making shit. Right? It's very confusing. Yeah, and take it back.

Neelai, you're right. I'm also confused. Thank you. All right. But by definition. and this is the other thing about smart doorbells, by definition, you, the consumer, never use the product. Just everybody, you're in your car, you're driving right now.

Just close your eyes. Right. Both don't close your eyes. Open them. Open them. Open up. Quickly. Open up your eyes.

Left, go left. You know, just do that thing. Just close your mind's eye. Wait, no, do that. Whatever. Focus. Focus on the road. Okay?

I want you to get. to where you're going. This would be the worst Verge cast ever, possibly already is the worst Verge cast ever, but it was... If we interfered with your commute in any way, I would feel horrible. All right. Well, if you're not driving,

close your eyes. The people who are driving, pull over to the side of the road and close your eyes. And just, just, when was the last time you rang your own doorbell? It's a piece of hardware that by definition you will never use. I have a smart doorbell.

I never use it. Well, I live in an apartment, but my roommate's always locking himself out. So he's going to ring the doorbell and beep it. But then you're there with your phone. And if you have access to your lock, you're just going to open the door. Right. It's just very confusing. That's it.

That's all I got. Maybe the whole thing is. I pulled my car over to the side of the road for that. No, just when did you ring it? Whatever. Fine. All right, Paul, every week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You do a thing. By the way, we talk to our podcast advertising team.

Paul's segment is now opening for sponsors. Yeah, if you want to sponsor a weekly segment that is always named the same thing. It can be named whatever you wanted to be named. But it has to be the same as it already is named. Look, Papa John's dropped out of that NFL deal. All right. Hit me up. Mr. Papa John.

Okay. This one, like all of them, is called bounce shot. And I just want to say that as a child growing up, I always loved. I'm going to actually,

I'm going to give you a couple bucks. If you could just go ahead and call this bounce shot sponsored by Nilai Patel. I'm easily bought. I know this is an audio show, but I just want everybody to understand that Nilai literally handed Paul.

a couple of bucks just that. Today's episode of, or today's segment of bounce shot brought you by Milite Patel. All your best, do you want to know how to drive better? Listen to what Milite tells you to do. Okay. Boundshot, Canon made a flash that automatically figures out the best direction to point. So if you've ever seen like a highly skilled photographer at work,

a lot of times they'll have a flash that, they'll be like holding in their hand and they'll be aiming it at the ceiling typically or other things and they'll like bounce the light and it's fascinating to me and it's obviously there's a lot of knowledge in it that i do not possess in any way but we all know thanks to apple's advertisements that lighting is very important for photos and bouncing lighting is really cool and now cannon has a flash that literally automatically ain't like a robot it turns the flash and on a digital SLR into a robot and bounces it. And I just think it's really cool and I'm glad that they did it. So is it fire first and then read the room and then move around? It's very complicated.

When you double tap the shutter button on your camera, the flash points out at the subject, calculates the distance, then points itself at the ceiling, and does the same. Right after that, the flash reoriented itself one last time, into what it thinks is the best direction to achieve the perfect bounce light for your subject. There's also a dumber mode

where it just tries to keep like at one, pointing in one direction at all times. That's pretty cool. So 35 minutes later, it motors itself in the position. And it's like $400. I'm in. I just like this idea of pulling robotics into making things better in the world.

This one's probably terrible. Who knows? We'll get one. We'll try it out. I'm into it. Good segment. Paul. I think I got my money's worth. Oh, thank you. Also, I'm pretty stoked on this new Sony camera. This isn't part of the segment. You didn't pay for this. By the way, Paul appears to be keeping the money. Yeah, absolutely. The A73. The new, it's like $2,000, full frame.

Sean McCain read the whole thing about how Sony is being more responsive to its customers in that kind of canon. I saw a theory that Sony is so far ahead of Canon and Nikon that they're just holding features back. Just to like, they'll just like, as soon as Canon or Nikon ever look like they're waking from their slumber, Sony will like, ha, ha, well. But they do feel very far ahead. All right. Last thing. At least for video. We should talk about Google clips.

Dieter, you wrote a whole thing about it at I. When it came out. This is Google's. Google's little AI camera, like you put in a room with your kids, it recognizes them, takes a bunch of photos. Dan Sefert reviewed it. So here's... You can't review it as he... Evocerated it.

...it on fire in print and video. So I noticed an interesting thing about this review cycle for this product. And a bunch of other people reviewed it. Everybody had the same basic idea, which is like, this is a neat idea, execution flawed. A lot of the other reviews I read, they... spent their time talking about how the core idea here is very good and futuristic. And as we generally do, we talked about the execution. There's something in the middle there.

And, I signed myself a story that I failed to publish. I just sent 500 garbage words to Deeter and said, I did this. And I have not yet received a response, my friend. No, I did. I replied right away. Hmm. Was it L-O-L? Dieter deleted my text.

post. I told you it was bad. It's bad. Nothing further came up. But this is another product with a battery and a Bluetooth connection that you have to care for those things. To get the pictures off it, you've got to open the app on your phone, like do what the stuff is and go to cloud or anything.

I think if you're going to build a product of battery of Bluetooth connection, it has to deliver far more time saved than you have to think, then you spend thinking about its battery and Bluetooth connection. If you got to charge something, it's got to save you way more time than you ever spent than you got charging you. So I think time saved is the wrong metric. I think this was my response to your thing, by the way. It needs to provide some kind of value that is way beyond the amount of effort that you have to put into it. It's not necessarily time.

Like the point of clips isn't to be a time saver. It's to get you something that you never would have gotten otherwise, a moment with your child, and then also somebody recorded that moment without you having to, bus with a camera. The thing that was interesting looking at this review cycle to me is Dan did the work of judging clips on its own terms. Google claims it does this thing. Did it do the thing? Google claims it does.

No, it did not. Also, the camera quality isn't that good and you'd like it to be. But your phone camera quality is way better. If it had done the thing, then, you know, you could argue about the, you know, the, you the quality of the, you know, pictures at how, you know, did the picture right lens and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it doesn't fundamentally after a week do the thing. And so he said, this is the thing that you do, didn't do it. And here's her score. A bunch of the other stuff sort of said, it would be so great if this thing did the thing that it says it does. But it, you know, and so therefore

it seems cool. It's like, no, it didn't do the thing. So, so that as far as I understand, the ultimate calculus is how much would you pay to have footage or at least photos of your baby taking its first steps? So that's that's the wrong way to look at it in my opinion because, I mean, okay, it's right insofar as like, would this thing do it? But if you think your kid is like gear enough to take your first step, it's okay to like have someone take out their phone. Like what it's how much would you pay for a cute photo of your kid playing by themselves, you know, serving tea to a stuffed dinosaur that you would never, they would never have done if the camera were out? Well, so what seems like the ideal thing to me, because one of the things that Dan pointed out is that, you know, this is supposed to relieve him of the role of being the photographer, but he was moving. this around a lot and setting it up in like different places. And so it would be interesting to me.

You get like a four pack of cameras and you just stick them up in strategic locations throughout your home and they're off. And then when something important happens, you say, you yell, Alexa, turn on the camera in the living room. And then that turns on and that captures the footage. Because you knew it was the moment that you wanted to catch, right? And Google's trying to sell people something that they've never wanted, which is these weird, ambient candids.

Like this special moment when your kid was turning a block contemplatively. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It just seems like they, that count, at first start thinking about this for the first Apple Watch, which tried to do way too much. And it's, you've got to spend so much time organizing apps on it and charging it and monkeying with it and getting the notifications right.

Like, it just didn't seem worth it. and they've cut it down so much that basically you charge it and shows you some notifications doesn't fit in the tracking. John Gruber and Marco Armin again this week we're like just kill the apps in the Apple Watch like whatever this is not worth it.

That is right to me. Like we're starting to understand that if you're going to demand people care for something it should deliver a very focused return. AirPods, I think, another good example. You have to charge them but not so much and they don't sound great, but they're super convenient

and people like them so they're getting it back. Clips is just, the calculus is backwards to me. It's promising to save you time, but you have to, like, care for this hardware. And then the thing you get back from it is like, did I want this?

Like, this quality isn't great. And in order to actually get all these candid shots, everyone noticed, you actually got to move the camera around a bunch, so it's pointing at the right thing. I don't know. I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to figure out how to write this down.

You know, put it on the website. And then every gadget maker in the world will pin it to their wall using their printers. They all have it. All right. Is that it? Here's what I will tell you. If you would like to see this experience live, you've made a horrible mistake. But next week, we're doing this show live at South by Southwest.

Me, Dieter, Casey Newton, Ashley Carman, all be at the deep end. This is Voxpedia's brand situation. It's South by Southwest. I've got some details here that I can read to you. Yeah, it's on Friday, March 9th, I believe, at Doors are at 11. The show is going to start at noon. There's a chance that might move around depending on a fancy special guest for another show, but we'll let you know if that happens, but otherwise plan on being there.

The first 100 people to show up, there might be a T-shirt in it for you. I can't guarantee it'll be a T-shirt in your size, but we'll do our best. There will be stickers, though. There will be stickers. The last Why Vergecast had napkins Yeah

Vergecast I do need to warn you That it is 21 plus The houses Because there is a bar There and so Dems the rules What else can I tell you about it?

Oh we There's sponsors for the house And the sponsors that Are Applied to the Vergecast Are great clips And tempropetic Which if you step back

And think about it Great Clips Is about cutting things. Temporepidic is about getting through the night. So you might say that our sponsors are going to help you snip, snip, cut through the night. You know,

LG put a, they teased a G7. Yeah. They missed it. They just missed the opportunity. All right. Also, Ashley and Caitlin will be doing Why did you push that button live. They've got a great cast. That's happened later in the day. Karras Swisher is going to be doing RICO decode live.

And Ezra Klein will be doing something with my fans as well. all the deep end, March 9th through 11th at South by Southwest, please come. Is your client's going to have Melinda Gates? Yeah, I was just teasing it. I want people to Google it. Okay. But yeah, Ezra's just talking to Melinda Gates.

Doesn't be neat. Anyway, all March 9th through 11th, if you're going to be at Southby, please come see us at noon on the 9th. Ashley and Caitlin, they're doing their show on the 9th as well. There's all kinds of stuff. Register for it. There's a website. You can go to it.

Boxmedia.com slash southby southwest. well, Boxbeanaircom slash SXSW-2018. Get an invitation. Come in, open bar, watch us through the Vergecast. You can also listen to other great shows. Our friend Lauren Good does too embarrassed to ask, which is great. Karas Wischer does Recode Decode, Peter Koffka does Recode Media, all that's on iTunes. And then why did you push that button coming back right after Southby?

So that'll be very exciting. And I've been listening to some other second season. I'm very excited. Very good. One of my favorite shows. That is it for this week. shambolic, I would say. I'm so sorry to the people who pulled over.

I apologize to you, my friends, but we'll make it up to you. Come visit a scept. I'll buy you a drink from our open bar. He will venerate mo you $2. I can't believe you kept the money. Definitely keep it. All right. That's it.

Rock and roll. Promo code.