The Vergecast - Mobile World Congress: How should your foldable phone fold?

Episode Date: March 1, 2019

The latest news from Mobile World Congress including Huawei's new foldable phone, Nokia's five-camera phone, and Sony's very tall phone. The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dan Seifert, Paul Miller, Natt Garun, and Chaim Gartenberg discuss which foldable phone so far has the best design, what phone can actually get 5G, and Microsoft's updated headset the HoloLens 2. Stories discussed this episode: - Huawei has the best first draft for a foldable phone - This 18,000mAh battery has a phone in it - Sony’s Xperia 1 literally stands out from the crowd with a super tall screen - LG enters the 5G game with the V50 ThinQ - LG’s palm-reading G8 has a unique vision of the future - LG’s answer to the foldable mania is a second screen - The Nokia 9 PureView has five cameras and a lot to prove - Motorola confirms its foldable phone is coming, and it could look like a RAZR - HoloLens 2: inside Microsoft's new headset - A closer look at Microsoft’s new Kinect sensor - USB 3.2 standard gets new, even more confusing names ahead of its mainstream debut Thanks to Microsoft Azure for sponsoring this episode. Get started with a free account and 12 months of popular free services at Azure.com/trial today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, welcome the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Mobile World Congress. Is that, that's not right? No, not true. Not correct at all. One lie so far.

Doing great. The flagship podcast of The Verge. I'm your host, Nelai, friend. Paul is here. Hello. I'm going to tell you, Dieter is on vacation. And to replace him in our hearts, I realized we needed not one, not two,

but three additional people. Yeah. So Nat Garon is here. Hello, it's been a while. Hi, I'm Gartonberg is here. Hi. Dan Seafrit returns. Hi, I was here last week.

Dan will not be speaking for the rest of the show. We got a lot to talk about today real quick. I want to just plug Casey Newton was on the interview podcast this week talking about his amazing story about Facebook moderation. You haven't listened to that. Please go back, listen to it. Read Casey's story, which is incredible. I think it's very important to me all take a moment and think about the cost of these platforms. So that's the plug for that.

And now we're going to talk about a phone with a gigantic battery. Okay. So I'm Dan. MWC is going on in the Mobile World Congress. We sort of had the first wave of Samsung news, which we talked about at length. The S-10 is out. Dan's been working on the review. Well, technically it's out in like a week.

Well, we have one. We do have one, yes. So the S-10 is not out, but there's no embargo. You have one. You're reviewing it. We're setting that side for next week. I want to talk about all the other stuff that happened at MWC, including the gigantic Energizer phone, which will be.

get into. But kind of the big standout is the Huawei mate X or 10. All names are bad. The mate X, the other folding phone. Haim, just give us the rundown. So it's like the opposite of Samsung. Samsung's folding phone is kind of like a book. You have the screen on the cover on the outside and then you open it and there's more screen on the inside. And Huawei's is the opposite where it's just a big screen on the outside and then it wraps around like over the hinge and then it's on the back and then you like unfold it from the back and now you have twice the phone. Yeah. So it's like a phone and then it's twice the phone.

But so, but it has like a like a grip. And then the side of it is like a, so like the Kindle Oasis actually is a good example. It's basically a phone and then it unfolds into a Kind of where it has that grip on the side that you can hold it and it's big square. You mean the form factor. Yeah, yeah, in terms of form factor. And then that grip is actually also where the cameras are so that it's rear cameras and then it's rear cameras and then it. It's front cameras, and it costs, like, a lot of money. $2,600?

Yeah, that's a lot. All of these are prices that no one will buy them. Right, yeah. My main take on that. I mean, in terms of foldables that we saw, though, this is, like, the closest to be in Greel, like, and Samsung's. Like, a lot of the other stuff in terms of folding an MWC was prototypes, and this was at least, like, a functional phone.

Like, Vlad actually got to hold it, like, browse the verge on it. Yeah. Which already puts it a step ahead of most of the other foldable. puts it ahead of Samsung's because literally nobody outside of Samsung has touched it. Here's the debate. Which one is right? Which one is correct? Is it a taco or is a sheet of paper?

Neither. It should be a clamshell. So it opens like that? Yeah. This is a radio show and I just did the thing. Yes, yes. You can't see it, but what I'm doing is like folding my fingers into my palm. Yes, that's how it should be.

Like an old razor phone. Like a razor phone, which Mona liberal might actually make. But yeah, because then you don't scratch the screen. Like, the more screens there are, the more there are to scratch. So if you put them on the outside, like, has anyone at Huawei ever tried to put this in a pocket or a bag? No one at Huawei has pockets or bags. Apparently, because, like, why would you want this many screens with no casing and, like, I don't know how you supposed to transport that? Well, apparently they were going to have a case that wrapped around it somehow.

I don't know how it works, but, like, apparently they said this. They're going to have a case. To cover what part of it? I don't know. Just all of it. I don't know if we can answer any of these questions. This is like a sleeve. So there's pros and cons, right?

We can organize this thinking. There's the safety of the screen. The screen is obviously going to be softer because it folds, so it can't have like a solid glass to it. So there's safety in the Samsung design. But Samsung's design, I think you end up with a thicker phone. One, because you can't fold it as flat because of the radius of the screen fold. And then also Samsung has.

an extra screen so that the phone is usable. So there's real tradeoffs. I can't decide. I want to be able to come down hard in one side or the other so that I can tell other people that they're wrong, but I don't know which one to be. It is remarkable how thin the mate X is. Like each side of it, when you flip it open

and not counting the little grip part, it's like 5.6 or something millimeters thick. So it's like really thin so that when you do fold it over and it is like on top of each other. You're only at like 11 millimeters or whatever, which is, you know, it's thicker than your average iPhone, but it's not like ridiculously thick. That's like two regular-sized phone thick.

Oh, the iPhone is like 8.something millimeter's now. The iPhone's like 6.9? Like most phones, most phones are like six. That's nah. The other side of Deeter's personality is arguing with the first part of Deeter's personality. This is incredible. Okay, I'm going to make a hard vote.

I think I prefer the Huawei design. I think if you're going to have a phone that folds, the magic that you want, and by the way, this is all caveat with, I think the fact that foldable phones exist is super cool. So however we end up with functioning foldable phones, great. But the magic, the thing you want is to be holding a thing and be like, and then there's more thing.

Like the Samsung, you open it like a book and it's like, oh. What kind of books are you mean? Once you have to have an extra screen on the front, I'm tired of using this garbage phone. I think you failed at some point. Also, like, the Samsung front screen is, like, really... It's really bad.

It's designed to encourage you to open it, so you use the other screen. Right. Like, you're not supposed to get used to the front screen. It's got, like, giant chunk, like, notch. Notch. Like, yeah, there's no notch and no... Because no... Samsung does have a notch on the Wallway.

I'm saying in the Huawei. There's no notch on the Huawei. But as great as that is, as soon as you put this in your phone, One time you have destroyed it. Or sorry, in your pocket one time you have destroyed it. Probably. Or not. I mean, we have.

So we do have phones with glass on both side. Like every phone we have right now is glass on the front and back. And like, I can't. But these aren't glass. That's the whole problem. It's like, they've got to be this flexible plastic. Yes, but most phones also have phone cases that, like, protect the other guys. I don't keep my phone.

The last phone that I used that had a plastic screen on it was one of those Motorola droid something somethings that was like, the shadow-proof ones where you could like drop it or whatever and they wouldn't crack or shatter, but they had this like plastic screen on it and it would get scratched to hell so quickly and it would turn gross so quickly. And I assume in order to be flexible like this needs to be, it's going to be a similar kind of surface. Plastic. I think we kind of know it's plastic. Yeah, it's plastic, but I mean like it's going to be a similar soft plastic that's going to get gross. I mean, like you can see the creases on these. That was I was going to bring up. They're being

very careful to not let you like really examine the screen. and both the Galaxy Fold and the mate X have an obvious sort of like rumpily bit. It's, I would, a crease implies like a sharp line. Yeah. This isn't, this is like a, you know, like a, like a sharply creased set of pan. This is like you didn't iron your shit and you went to the wedding. I like, right? It's like, it's like, it's a rumple.

Yeah. Right? It's like, you should, you should really clean that up. This is like a folded shirt kind of crease, not like an iron kind of crease. Do you crease your shirts when you fold? Yeah. I don't follow. Yeah, I'm just saying everyone's calling a crease.

Because the area where it folds, which would be the crease, has the rumple. I just, in your mind, do not think of a, like, a starched shirt crease. Yeah. It's more of like a, it's a rumple. That's what it is. And it looks really weird when it catches the light. The foldable rumple. The foldable.

It's my new band name. It's right. Band for kids. It's where high. Are rumbles? Are rumbles the new notches? Is that the thing everyone's going to be really mad about? If we make rumples a thing, I'll be, I'll be happy.

So both of these phones are super expensive, but they do appear to be coming to market. The thing I do want to talk about the mate X is actually I think the camera situation is very interesting. So there's only the one set of cameras in that grip area. And you take a selfie, you turn the phone over, and the folded side of the phone becomes the viewfinder and you hold that out. What else does that other side of the phone do when it's folded? It just turns off? I think it turns off, but I think you can also, like, tent it if you want. So, like, if you're watching a YouTube video with someone who's sitting on the other side of a table,

you can mirror the screen on both sides. Like, that's a thing that we've seen already on, like, the ZTE Axon M was able to do that when it was two separate screens. I don't see why you couldn't do that on here. Tell me socially how that's acceptable. I don't think it's ever come up as like a use case, but it is a thing that's possible. It's like I really don't want us to next you while watching his YouTube video. Please put it across. I think most of the time, most of the time when it's closed in its closed state, that small screen is off.

But you can flip it over and turn the small screen on and it is like a full phone interface there. And it will be your camera viewfinder. And then if you open it, you get to a certain point where it just kind of like kicks over into it's like now on one tablet mode yeah but the I think the tent mode where like I you're a real estate agent like I don't I don't know yeah I'm you play you play battleship that's it that's it everyone's been asking what is the use case for these 100% battleship that's what it's for yeah I'm so glad we figured this out the Verchast is over thank you Dieters and that it's been lovely to see you always great when is the mate X

coming out later this summer is it also 5G because it's full of fake technology It has 5G, or it will have a 5G version inside. Yeah, I think it's going to have a 5G version. I mean, Huawei is a huge pusher of 5G. So it'll be another $500 to get it. Huawei also has, like, they have their own chipsets, so they're not really beholden to anyone, and they have a 5G modem that will work with the processor that they've announced for this.

So like... It looks like June that's arriving is when it's slated to arrive. So I don't think we should talk about the other foldables, most of which are like fake tech demos. Yes. But I don't think we can talk about a Huawei phone. I don't think I can sit here and be like, that's the one that should win without talking about the fact that you cannot buy this one in the United States because Huawei is routinely accused of spying on everyone. And they're doing this big push.

They just put out ads, like full page ads and papers, addressed, this is true, to U.S. journalists. To be like, come check us out. And then there's like an RSVP line at the bottom that's like, just email this email address at Wallway. Like, you'll come on by. Most of the most interesting phones at MWC, like we can't get. Yeah. They're just like not going to be available to us. And the Huawei phones in particular are just in this veil of confusion.

I'm not 100% sure if I did respond to like hang out with Huawei at Huawei.com or whatever that email address is. Even if I went like what would, are they going to let me see the code of the phone? Yeah, I don't know what they can do to convince people because like the argument with Huawei is sort of like that the Chinese government has. like compromise them on like a state level and because they are based in China, like that's just a fact of being a business there. And I don't know what they could do necessarily to convince anyone otherwise. Like I, there may be a way, I don't know, maybe maybe maybe blockchain. My problem with this whole, and I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but we live in a country where our government has compromised technology that we use as.

consumers in order to spy on us. So it's really hard to, so when our government issues a guidance about Huawei, it's super believable because China does spy on its citizens, that Huawei helps them spy on citizens and therefore would help them spy on us. But it's also really believable that our government doesn't like it because maybe they have a harder time spying on us with Huawei stuff. Yeah. So just to be clear, that spying is not alleged to be happening at the device level. You can import a Huawei phone and happily use it all the long as you want. Always sells laptops in the U.S. The spying is alleged to be occurring at the network layer where Huawei sells base stations and modems and sell equipment. They are cheaper than

most other competition. I think we've talked about this like rural broadband providers in the United States are like, we really like to buy some Huawei stuff because it's cheap and good and the government's kind of foreclosing on them. The problem is the government is also saying to AT&T, I think last year at CS, AT&T was set to announce a Wallow phone and the government basically told them not to and then maybe the best CS press conference of all time was like the Huawei dude being like screw this like I'm honest you should trust me no phone was ever released regardless of the veracity of that performance well not released on AT&T they did release it unlocked in the US I reviewed it it was bad I told you

I said even if you could have bought this from AT&T you shouldn't so no loss great but I think that a question right now is giving the amount of innovations happening in these form factors on phones that are just not coming here. Like is, is it kind of irrelevant that we're like, which one is better when we'll probably get the Galaxy Fold? I mean, it's irrelevant because we're not going to buy either of them.

I'm going to buy one of them. No, you're not. Come on. Max is not going to college. Well, you are, but like, you're not going to use it. She's going to be a startup entrepreneur and she'll sell her first edition galaxy fold and that's going to be like our seed round. It's going to be great.

No, I mean, like, but right now in the foreseeable future, it's going to be very difficult to buy all these phones. Yes. Not least because Huawei is like in this constant state of controversy here. My question just kind of goes to what Paul's saying is like the reason that we accept that our government spying and everything is like they're ostensibly there to protect us. Right? And like China is ostensibly.

I know what you're, I know Paul. And China is ostensibly like our geopolitical foe. So you'd rather have like the thing that's ostensibly protecting us spying on you than ostensibly the foe. But at the end of the day, it's like, is the phone so cool that people would be like, that Wauway? Like, that's like a really interesting reason for Huawei to build and promote this phone is to just get good press to change that.

So, I mean, the way that they've been trying to get good press for their products has been very aggressive pricing. So, you know, we mentioned that you, they sold phones unlocked in the U.S. They can't get on carriers, but they sell them unlocked. I don't think they did their most recent refreshes. I don't think you can get like to make 20 pro in the U.S. US for some reason, which they probably just realized nobody was buying anyways. At least not in the US.

Dan's going to say it's bad again. Well, it's just more work than it's worth. But they are selling their laptops and PC lines here in the US, and the way that they've made them really attractive to press and product reviewers like myself is they made really good products with really good hardware. And they're selling it for like hundreds of dollars less than you can get from Dell or Apple or whatever. So that's like one way that they are trying to, like, make an image of their products as being, like, very high-performing, well-designed, well-built, well-made hardware at a price that you just can't beat with another device.

Yeah, except for this phone, which is going to cost $20. Except, yeah. And it's also not coming to the U.S. I think I can beat the $2,600 phones price. With a $1,980. Yeah, I mean, like, where are you going to go? So that's real quick. I just want to, I don't want to talk about Huawei without bringing up that contract because it's, it's, it's, you know, it's, you know, it's.

It's just going to follow the company. So I want to mention one last thing about the Huawei, though. And like, since this debate is going to be ongoing as to which one's better, Samsung or Huawei, it's crazy to say this. But I have more faith in Samsung figuring out the software than Huawei. Having used many Huawei phones, having used many Samsung phones, neither of them are good at software. Huawei is demonstrably worse. So these things are going to live or die by their software. And I have little to no confidence that Huawei has it figured out.

But you can make it into a tent and play a YouTube video on both sides of the tent. Have you used the Huawei tablet? I'm just saying you can have a tent mode. You can make it in a tent. The one thing that makes their PCs so attractive is that there's no Huawei software on them. They just run Windows and they're great. Oh, God. Can we have this stock Android debate about foldable phones?

Like when can we bring all of our themes together? Google did announce in the fall that they were adding like an OS level support for both. flavors of foldable. So like the Huawei version and the Samsung version are both in theory getting like OS level support, which is good because again, I used the ZTE-Axon M, which is the closest modern thing we have to a foldable up until now. And it sucked. Software was just a trashy. But I've never seen a phone in a Best Buy attract more attention than the axon. But everybody went to go unfold it and then they were like, well, nothing is happening on the screen. Is it like slowly rotates to me big?

Why is the one screen yellow and the other one blue? It's not great. But everyone wanted to unfold it. By the way, we're coming up with names for these folds because there's going to be like multiple types. And so far, I'm just going to put this out there. The unfold the screen should be called the Huawei. Hi, I'll be playing that part of Deeter's personality today

where how does he live like this? Like the crushing silence and shame that follows upon is so difficult. I mean, it's not a very good pun. Every time I hear folding phone, I think of Mike Myers saying fold the phone in his Scottish accent. Yeah, I know. You know what I mean? So I married and axe murder is like an underrated movie. Yeah, that's what I'd say.

All right, so there's some other foldable phones. By the way, we're calling them foldables now. Apo showed one off. TCL showed one out. This is actually, you should watch this video. It's incredible. they had a bunch of TCL stuff in a glass box and Vlad went to make a video

and they agreed he cajoled them into removing the glass box but he was not allowed to otherwise touch or handle the phones so sad so we just have like a camera like panning over stuff that was previously like he's very unhappy about it and then Motorola said it's going to make not well maybe maybe yeah well it basically said that it was working on a foldable film

and that it was, quote, unquote, not going to be coming out any later than our competitors. Samsung's coming out with it in April. Always coming in some time in the summer, probably. So Motorola will likely announce there sometime in the summer. They usually have an event in August, and that would be, like, I think, the earliest we'd see something. What danger is there in just announcing a foldable phone at this time? I would like to announce the verge of releasing a foldable phone in the near future. Like, they're all fake.

I've thought about it. Our HintraZons be really innovative. Because if Motorola's version end up being a razor reboot, I think that they want that momentum to themselves. So the last time they did a razor reboot. It didn't go very well, though. I mean, granted, it didn't fold, but like... I could see it. I'm excited.

I'm buying the razor phone. Okay. Yeah. The razor fold. I mean, like... I'm buying every fun. The whole, like, picture a razor is all we folded. And it unfolds, but instead of being a physical keyboard on the bottom, it's just more screwing.

I buy the... I'd use the heck of a hell out of that. Like, I imagine the crease on that. I had a razor. Razor was my first phone. Just imagine the rumple. It's a rumple. Imagine the rumple.

My God, man. All right. Can we talk about the chunk yet? We're going to end this segment with the chunk. No one knows what we're talking about. It's going to be fine. You should look forward to that. Hime, you looked at a bunch of other phones.

I want to say LG's answer to full is actually just like a flip-out second screen. It's another phone! LG's answer. LG's answer is a case for the G8 that you just stick your phone in, and it uses Pogo pins and like a near field Bluetooth thing, I think. And then it uses that to display content on the second screen. I haven't actually seen this in person because they're not bringing it to the U.S., which is kind of a theme that you should look forward to with LG this year, is we have cooler versions of our phones that is not coming to the U.S. But none of you Americans bought our last phones. Sorry, the second screen is not the G8.

The second screen is the V50, which is their 5G phone. The V50 is coming here. Sprint is getting it first. Verizon's getting into the summer. The 5G logo glows. Literally a V40 with a glowing 5G logo on the back and a slightly larger battery. That's perfect. What more could I ask for from a phone?

Make the logos glow. And then the second, so the second screen thing, which is like the cool new thing, is not coming to America. Sorry. But there's not just like an attachment? It's an attachment. It's a case. You buy it separately. You stick it in, it powers off the phone, and now you have two screens, and then it folds together like...

And then you have one screen. Well, no, you have no screens. Oh, it folds up? It folds in on itself. It's like the book, it's like Samsung, but there's no screen on the back, so all you can look at is the glowing 5G logo on the back of your V50. Wait, why would they design it that way? You just take it out of the case if you only want one screen. This is horrible.

Yeah. Well, I hope there's a rich and vibrant black market of second screen cases. Can we talk about this size and battery hunger aspect of 5G? Is that just because it's immature, or is there something fundamental to 5G that it's always going to draw more power? Because that's a little scary. I can answer this one. Two things. One is that it's immature and just as we get better at optimizing things, it will get better.

Right now, also though, every 5G chip on the market is not built into the process. So you buy a Snapdragon 855. It has Qualcomm's LTE modem integrated onboard into the chip, but the 5G modem is a separate modem, which is the X50, or they just announced the X55, which is a separate chip that needs to be running in your phone. It takes up more space, and because you have to run both of those, if you want to use 5G, it's going to draw more power. It's like the LG second screen of mobile processors.

The other part of this is 5G, at least millimeter wave, requires a lot of the lot of antennas that need to be placed all over the device. So right now, it works better with a physically larger device because it's harder to block them with your hand. They have more space to put them, stuff like that. Quakum has already announced that it's next year it will have a processor that has a 5G modem integrated onboard with the chip, which will probably be when 5G actually starts because right now it's optional for everyone because you have to stick a second modem into your phone. And there's no 5G networks. Yeah. And also live in like one town in America. Yeah. All the good, the good people of Dallas, Texas.

Don't have it either. AT&T has 5G available in 12 cities. But not their hometown? Dallas might be one of them. But if Dallas does have it, I don't remember the 12 towns off the list. They are only offering it right now for a mobile hotspot that you have to sign up and hope AT&T selects you and live in the right neighborhood in one of these 12 towns. And no one knows how much it costs because it's like a quiet private beta. Yeah, yeah.

So, like, AT&T doesn't get credit. I'm not giving them credit for launching the first one. Yeah, no one gets any credit for anything, except for the glowing logo, which is amazing. So that's the V50. That's the V50. You played with the G8. I did play with the G8. Which seems to have a wacky camera system.

Wacky camera. So the big thing with the G8, LG has a new camera on the front, which is calling the Z camera. It's a time-of-flight sensor, and it can detect, like, advanced hand gestures. They're going very big on gestures for this one as like the big feature. Yeah. And it has one of the single weirdest security features I've ever seen on a phone. You've heard of touch ID. You've heard of face ID.

Now meet, I think it's hand ID. Of course. Why wouldn't that be the natural progression? So this is how it works. This has to be the most LG gimmick ever. This is how it works. It shines the same IR laser that you use for like face ID to map your face. So it shines that at your palm.

The laser reflects off the hemoglobin in the blood in the veins of your palm. Oh, okay. And LG uses the reflection back to create a unique vein map of your palm. And then when you put that over the front of your phone, it unlocks it. This, if you were to be making like a blade four, right? Like what Wesley Snipes would discover is that the vampires had been mapping everyone's veins in this way. Like the most popular phone in the world has secretly been mapping veins the whole time.

Blade 4 would be pretty cool. I would watch the hell out of Blade 4. I'm just saying this phone would be the plot of Blade 4. Does it work? You try it? So I tried it. It works okay. It definitely takes like a couple tries to get used to like the positioning.

Also, you just kind of feel like an idiot because you're just waving your hand. Unlock, please. You can do like gesture controls with it too, right? Once it's unlocked, you can do gesture controls. So these are also weird. You hold your hand. near the phone, near like the camera, not near the screen, which is going to be your first

inclination, got a little higher up. You hold it near the camera, then it'll light up to show, like it'll put like a little light on top to show that it recognize your hand. You pull your hand back a couple inches, and then it will bring down a contextual menu, and then you can rotate to adjust volume or flick it left or flick it right to do like things. You can preset shortcuts. You can turn off the preview, by the way, if you've reached the point where you're You know, an advanced, yes. If you're blade, if you're blade and are confident enough in your gesture ability is to do it without it telling you. Yeah, yeah.

It also works like, okay, I had like a half hour, 45 minutes to play around with this. Do they tell you when you would want to use a phone in this way? So yeah, so the arguments are. Please again tell us when it's socially acceptable. Their arguments are two, which is like one is the classic of, you know, doing dishes and you want to answer a call or adjust the music. or whatever and your phone's over there and you don't want to touch your phone. The other is like, what if you're driving in a car, which seemed a little less good to me. This is how you crash car.

Yeah. Like the, so I get it. On paper, it sounds great. You just hold your hand up to your phone. The phone unlocks and then, you know, flick your hand around and you got your Spotify going. Like, I see why someone thought this was a good idea. But isn't that what your voice is for in the car? It is.

Also, I've been watching you, like, do this as we are. and it just looks like you're playing with an invisible puppet. It's really weird. It does feel a lot like... It's like you cast a spell on the phone. You're just kind of like, arm up, head down. It works okay. I don't think anyone is going to be rushing out to buy a G8 because of these new features.

Yeah, I mean, I can't wait for the ads. The ads are like the idealized version of this. So like someone's going to be driving car and they're like doing the cool thing. The washing dishes thing, like everyone talks about when you're washing dishes, you obviously need this thing. dishes. You obviously need this technology to help you. And that always seems like an infomercial to me. Like, heavens no, my hands are wet. The phone is waterproof. I can't touch my waterproof phone. We'll see. I don't know. I'm just never convinced by the idea of a phone company being like, what if you could control your phone from four inches away within easy reach of the fingers you're

using to control your, am I this lazy? I can't. Yeah. Was this a problem? Also, it runs Android, right? Doesn't at Android Auto? Yeah. Yes. Okay. Just checking. You know, the interface that Google built for using your car? All right.

It does face ID too, though. Does face ID. It does face ID. It has a fingerprint sensor on the back. It's got everything. So it's a phone. It's got all the biometrics. It has all the biometrics.

All right. You also played with the new Sony phones, which I personally love just because this is the silliest idea. Tall phones. Tall phones. That's it? So that's their thing. Tall phones.

Sony, and this is true with the briefing, put up a slide like, it's hard to stand out or something in the world of phones. And then they're like, so what if we stretched our phones? It's the equivalent of how do I get identified in the crowd? I'll put a top hat on. Yeah. Well, so these phones look ridiculous because they have no chin,

but they have massive foreheads. Yeah. So there's three tall phones. There's the Experia 10 and 10 plus, which are like the budget ones. The 10 is a 5.9 inch. The 10 plus is 6.5 inches. And then there's the Experia one, which is the flagship that's going to replace the Experia XE3. So that's like the Snapdragon 855 flagship one.

So the budget ones actually look better, honestly, because they have like no chin on the bottom at all and just like these massive foreheads. And then the Experian one tries to split the difference, so it's a little smaller on top and it's a little larger on the bottom, but it doesn't quite hit a balance on either. Like, just pick a side. I don't understand in a world where, like, the iPhone SE is now, the iPhone SE is now gone and everyone's screaming for smaller phones. They were like, yes, let's make it taller and more difficult to hold or put in a pocket. The whole thing with Sony is that they're also a movie company. And as you know, you're joking.

This is a thing that they mentioned at the briefing as a reason. why this is Sony movies will be sold and mastered for viewing on these. So no women work at Sony. That's good to know. Yeah, but they just love watching movies the way they were meant to watch. I'm a tall person and this phone did not fit in my pocket. I just like put in the gym pocket. Do you tall people have longer pockets?

I assume my pants have longer pockets. I just should be a thing. I didn't realize pockets were proportional to the traveling. I don't know the pants legs are longer. The pocket should be longer too. If not, I would like that. We'll never know unless someone. tweets at Heimgardenburg.

Or at Levi's to tell us about true. No, don't activate the brands. Be cool. How much do these phones cost? No price release date on YouTube. Typical Sony announcement. Well, this is why they don't sell any phones. They don't tell you how much they cost.

Or when they'll arrive. They are coming to America, or at least the experience one is coming to America. It does look like a nice phone. It's very glossy. It has a triple camera system. three different lens types, which is like the thing that we've seen on most of the multi-camera phones. You can get, you know, wide and telephoto and ultra-wide. It has a 4K OLED HDR screen. It's really tall. You can scroll Twitter for days. Like, if you ever been, like a nightmare.

Like, if you're watching, like, a 21 by 9 aspect ratio movie, it looks great. Yeah. So if you want to watch, like, Lawrence of Arabia, it looks fantastic on this, apparently. If you want to watch, like, a YouTube video, there are black bars the size of your thumbs on both sides of the panel. You get to grip the phone. You're holding the video. Well, no, you have a grip because you also have the giant, you know, forehead. All right, we have to stop talking on this phone. All right. They tried. I'm going to buy this phone. I'm by two foldable phones. Wacky form factors. That's where I live, Nat, with my extra long pockets. I'm very sad for you. It's going to be wild. Everyone's going to have a good time.

Speaking of wacky form factors, can we end on the most important phone of MWC? Please. The Energizer phone. Yes. What Dan has been talking the trunk. We've been talking about all these crazy gimmicks that solve no problems. Energizer is here with the phone that solves problems. Tell me what this phone is.

This phone, everyone likes to say that they would love to have a thicker phone with a bigger battery. Well, Energizer is here for you. Their phone has 18,000 milliamp hour battery. Just to put this in perspective, the average phone has like 3,000 milliamp hour battery. The Samsung S10 Plus is a 4,100 million amp power battery. That's a very big battery. This is 18,000. So it's basically like your anchor, like, battery thing.

It has a screen on it. On the outside of an anchor battery pack. It's 18mm stick. You have to look at it. I can't pull over a new car. Yes. Go to the verge.com. There should not be another post at the top of the verge.com for the next month.

We just pin it to the top. It has a pop-up camera on the front, so there's no notch. It pops up. It's not enough that it's not sick. There's so much room for a pop of camera. Okay, all right, but somehow it doesn't have room for a headphone jack. And it has a camera bump on the back.

Why? This phone literally looks like they took an iPhone XR and just like scaled it. Like they just like stretched it. Well, if you look at the pictures on the site, which I strongly recommend, you pull over your car and you look at the pictures on the site, because the controls for like

the power button and the volume and stuff like that are all like where you would expect gonna be on a normal thin phone and then there's just like endless body behind it like they didn't make it in the middle or anything they just stretched the back of it. It feels like someone just learned how to use like a stamp tool in Photoshop and just stamped a shit out of the rest of the 100% whatever. It's the physical embodiment of a bad Photoshop but the what's horrible about it is if you look if you look at it you're like oh ha ha ha but what if it was just like how like I'd love a 9,000 mill amp. Somebody from this absurd company that has somehow managed to

license the Energizer brand to make a weird phone is going to like point at me and see and they'll say see you weren't serious about long battery life you're you're a liar because you make compromises for headphone jacks the best part about this is uh well what i've i've already said the best part but like another best part about this it has fast charging and a full charge will take eight hours perfect hi and you're saying there's already a thousand million amp phone so sam uh sam sam biford reviewed this for the verge i'm going to pronounce it wrong it's called the dodgy, the Dogey? The Dogey. The Dogey S-80. It has a 10,080 mill-amp hour battery. Sam said it lasted a week off a charge. Yes. So imagine how long you could go with 18,000.

Well, the 18,000, I just want to say the spec is 48 hours of continuous video playback. Which is amazing. I'm buying this one, too. So this is not a stunt. It's like, the first thing I thought, was this was a stunt, but Dan is insistent. It comes to summer.

It comes to summer. Do we know how much it costs? No. Do we know how much it weighs? All right. No, I wish it did. How much it weighs? I wanted to know how much to waste.

I will say that the amount of like pocket reconsideration we've had to do on this show already is like very high. And you still need a dongle with it. Oh, my God. I should be able to use Bluetooth. I feel like the hit to the battery on this from Bluetooth is just not going to be that Significant. Also, like, you know how people use your phones in bed? Like, if this shit falls on your face, will you need to go?

You're dead. You're broken nose. Okay. Here is my question. Long phone or giant phone? Or thick phone? Yeah, long phone or thick? I'm just, I don't like a.

Moving to the woods. Can I have both? I want a phone that is as long as the Sony, and I want it with this battery. I think what you're looking for is literally the very first Sphority. I want like one of the, one of like a 1980s cell phone. You want the Zach Morris phone. But, but with like a real screen with like an OLED screen on the front. Oh, that's coming.

Like some Android manufacturer heard you say that right now. And they're like, they're like, get down to the factory. And like, you're going to get one. It's going to be on Kickstarter in two months. Oh, that's right. Yeah. I'm going to go with long phone. Although this is so tempting.

Because just imagine like being in a meeting. You're like, hang on. And you're like, There's something very tempting about it. I wonder if you can use it as a battery for your laptop. There's no way this is that. Does it have USBC? Yes.

Oh my God. Siri, calm down. There's no reason in theory why you couldn't. Okay, we're way over this. Heim reminds me we should talk about the Nokia phone real quick. The Nine Pureview has five cameras. Five cameras on the back. What do you think?

It's not. Terrible. They partnered with light from the wacky 16 camera, like camera with the L-16. So they're partnering with light, and it's different from like most of the other multi-camera phones in that it is not using the five cameras for different lens types. They're all the same lens, three black and white two color, just shoots them all at different exposures, and then it just kind of flattens them together. And you get these like really, really, really crisp, sharp details. So like it does not look bad. I think I saw James Baramard, creative director, Vlad in a long argument about whether a photo was good or not from the Nokia 9.

I mean, they were talking about one of the sample photos that, like, they had one of their, like, sample photographers take and then edit, like, a lot in lightroom. I am not James or Vlad when it comes to photography, but I took pictures of, like, they had some food set out so we could take pictures of it. Because, like, that seems like a fair thing, and food looked good. Like, I would put that on Instagram, which I think is, like, what they're gunning for. Yeah, what Vlad and James were arguing about was it was a, a landscape shot and the

way that it had captured the depth map made the perspective seem really weird. Yeah. To clarify the way Apple and Google are doing this is they're taking a burst of photos at different exposures and then compositing them together. So it's not like it's going to be that different, right?

What's the advantage of doing it with a bunch of different cameras other than like a faster shutter speed? Because you can tune the camera. Yeah, each camera also, so there's three black and white cameras, two color, so you have different types of data. Also, each of those cameras can also shoot multiple exposures, so it's just even more detailed data to work with. Like, it is doing the same thing that Apple and Google are doing with one or two cameras, with five cameras, and then different color types, and then stacking that all together. It doesn't look terrible.

It's coming out real soon, too. Yeah, it's coming out March 3rd. They just announced today. It's coming out of March. Sony and Xiaomi are also going to get this technology, right? So Sony and Jaomi announced that they are also partnering with Light. Their phones that they've announced that MWC aren't using it. Yeah, I think it should come out.

Five years from now, Sony would be like the phone is very tall. Well, Sony says that their next phone will have at least four cameras, which is like too, too many. So one of the reasons they need to work with Light in the first place is because apparently Qualcomm's image processor is just not designed to handle more than three simultaneous camera inputs and if you're going past that

you either need to be doing like some funky stuff where like one of them is only being used for depth or you need to talk to someone who knows how to handle 16 cameras. Also I know you Haim, you said that you don't use phone cases but I'm just imagining what a phone case for these phones look like and they're just like random

holes in the middle just to make room for all the ones. Or just like one gigantic. It just looks like a rate Well, it's not going to protect your phone. No, no, it's going to look like a regular phone case that just, like, got shot through with a bunch of bullets. Yes. That's the only style of phone cases she made for this is the one that looks like it was shot with a bunch of bullets. Okay, we have to take a break.

I want to tell you two facts before we take a break. One, everyone said the back of the Nokia looked like fear of holes. Our science team. Tripophobia. Was very adamant that that is a fake idea. It is not real. Someone on the Internet just made it up, and the entire Internet believes it's real. I think it's real.

Two, I just Googled, do tall people have longer pockets? And there are zero results. So if anyone wants to make a quick buck doing some SEO scans, there's a page for you. We're taking a break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too.

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You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts,

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With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. All right, we're back. Deeter's not here. He just, as you know, we've replaced him with three people. But he just put a big feature on Hollins too, which was Micah. Microsoft's big MWC announcement.

As it happens, I actually went to Redmond a while ago, and I got to try on the HoloLins too. It's a weird product. Yeah, so I know almost nothing about this, just because MWC world is, a big world as it is. Tell me more. So where does this take from the original HoloLons? So their whole, Alex Kittman, who runs the Hollins project, is a super interesting guy. His whole thing is, like, this is not a consumer product.

I think Dieter and I are trying to, we talked a lot about whether that is a change for Microsoft. Because, you know, the first Holland's come out, they showed a bunch of games, they showed a web browser. It seemed like they kind of didn't know what it was for. And now they've arrived at this idea of what it's for, which is frontline workers. And it's like what they talk about. This is for enterprise workers. You are Audi.

You've got, you know, 10,000 techs in the field. You want to roll out a change in how you, I don't know, replace the tire. Like, you can roll out the code to all of people. they all look at the car with the HoloLens, and the new instructions will be right there. This is their grand vision. So they focus the product on these enterprise uses. They're selling them to businesses,

all this custom stuff. Then they've changed the display to have a wider field of view. It uses a MEMs laser. There's a micro-electric mechanical system and flip-second forth, 58,000 times a second. So it's got this wider field of view.

They have this spec. I'm curious if you think this spec is, is misleading as I do. They claim it's a 2K display per eye, which kind of means nothing. I think they're just trying to get you to add that to 4K. So VR headsets do measure things like that? I don't know if that's like a thing for AR

where you measure on like a per eye level. Yeah, that's what they say. It's a 2K display per eye. I've warned the thing. Does it look like 2K? It does not. That's why I think it's misleading. Could you describe the field of view?

Maybe I'm butching it, but the way I remember the original HoloLens is if you imagine holding a postcard at almost arms length, that was about the field. Bring that postcard closer to your face. So it's like, it's a little past your nose. So it's like big enough. So that's a pretty close postcard. Yeah. It fills a reasonable amount of the area that you're looking at.

It's still clips. It's not, you know, edge to edge or however you would measure your eyes. It's still clips. It's still a floating box of stuff. The other thing they've done is they've taken Connect, which I'm sure you remember from the Xbox. They've rebranded it as Azure Connect because every Microsoft technology will be rebranded as Azure in our lifetime. It's a really fun word to say. Yeah, that's great.

So Azure Connect is like their cloud, like something with their cloud services. It's actually two things. But they've put a Connect sensor in the front of the HoloLens and they've put two eye-tracking cameras inside of it. So you don't have to focus the lenses. You just put the visor on. It's way more comfortable to wear. You just tighten it in the back with a little screw. All the computer stuff is at the back.

Not a screw, like a knob. Like a big knob. Yeah, I wasn't going to say a screw in the back of the head sounds unpleasant. Yeah, it's the matrix. You go in, they inject you with, no. It's like a big knob and you like tighten it. It's very comfortable. All the computer stuff is back.

Is it kind of like a baseball hat or like one of those hard hats? Yeah, kind of like that. A little bit. There's a visor that flips down. They've made it modular. So if you are a hardhat company, you can get Microsoft to make hardhat versions. So that's kind of interesting.

Anyway, so you put up this thing on, and then the cameras sense the distance between your eyes and automatically calibrate the display for you, which is a huge improvement over everything else. And then the Azure Connect sensor in the front, and the reason I say it's like Cloud, there's another Azure Connect product that is more about cloud computing,

but this one is in the front, and it does the room tracking. So it does like full inside out room tracking, no beacons. You have to map the room ahead of time. But the demo I did was they put me in a room with like an ATV. And they were like, you're going to assemble a part of this ATV. And so there was an arrow pointing at the bolt that I needed to take out. Then there was an arrow pointing to another whole part of the room, which was the bins of replacement parts.

And it led me over there. It was like, follow this arrow to go over here. here in physical space. It showed me which of the bolts I should get. And it brought me back. And then there was a web page, I don't know what you'd call it, like a string of instructions next to the part. And it said, put this bolt here.

It was like showing me where to do it. And it was like, press here to be done. So I placed the bolt, screwed it in. And I like just pushed a button in the air. And so the Azure Connect can also see your hands with some level fidelity. So you're not doing gestures. You're just like pointing and clicking in space. And this is all for like training purposes.

These are the demos they're showing. Okay. And then the other thing you can do is because it's eye tracking, it can scroll with your eyes. So they're showing me demos where they're putting up pages of text. And I was just reading the text that was, you know, in AR. And as I got to the bottom of that page, it just automatically scrolled up, which is super cool. But that actually worked? It actually worked.

It was like probably their single best demo was like you walk into a room. There's like a thing to read. and you're just like reading it and it's just like moving in space as you read it. I mean, the first demo sounds, I know it's so far from actually being a real consumer thing but imagine you wake up

and then you put on this headset. What's not supposed to be a consumer thing? Right. That's what, oh, did I, I misspoke? Yeah, I'm saying, I know that they're not talking about consumer stuff right now because they're sorry that they promised Minecraft and they don't have Minecraft. But, but imagine waking up

and then you put on your HoloLens four and then you have like basically your whole day is just like quest givers like you know like you just go to and then you just like I don't feel motivated today I don't feel like doing any thought I just want step by step instructions from this display to tell me how to live my life right and then imagine the government owns that display and you are nothing but a worker like autonomy autonomy moving through the moving through the motions of your right and the rich the rich live in a space station orbiting the planet yeah That's called Alicia.

I wonder if in that demo where it tells you how to walk to the inside of the room to get your materials, does that factor in if there's another person in the room that's like maybe headed to the same place? Because they're basically you're both wearing the glasses. Again, as we program our future ultra-capitalistic society, worker collisions in AR will have to be addressed. No, I mean, like this, it was very obviously a demo. Like my questions were like, okay, does this mean like every Kawasaki dealership in the world will have to be set up exactly the same way so you can like roll these changes out, right? Like the screws will have to be in the same place so you can like write this program.

Right. And their whole thing is like we don't know, basically. They have like this other whole program where they're trying to do world scale AR positioning so that you can map a room and then an AR kit app on the iPhone or an AR core app on Android will be able to like. access those beacons and those points of reference. So Microsoft is in full-on nap the world mode. They kind of don't know how it's all going to play out. And then they also, I think this is probably the most direct, it's like great to talk to a tech executive who is just like super honest.

So Kitman was like very honest. He's like, this product is not comfortable enough, is not flexible enough. It doesn't provide you any value out of the box. Like a consumer product, you take it out of the box, you turn it on and like you expect, I don't know, like Bigspeed to show up and be like, I'm going to help you out. It does stuff. This thing doesn't do anything. All they have to do is get IKEA to make a how to build your furniture.

Sure, but you're not going to spend $3,000 to do that out. Would you? Akea furniture is not that hard to build. I'm going to go on the record here. My point here is, like, Kitman is very honest that he knows on what metrics this thing fails. As a consumer product, it is not good. You spend too much money and get too much, too little. utility out of it. But as an enterprise product, he's like, this is the thing where a bunch of

construction workers can wear it all day and they are going to like get wiring diagrams, like, in real time is like build a building. A bunch of like high end mechanics can roll out changes to modern cars, which are very complicated. And those service centers will have to do less trade. Instead of every Audi mechanic in the world having to fly to Audi training headquarters, they can distribute this stuff across HoloLens in real time. And they, They can do the training in real time on those cars. Those are the kinds of use cases they're looking at with HoloLens instead of the consumer stuff. I think that stuff is really interesting.

Where Deter and I just couldn't agree is, is this a change? Was HoloLens supposed to be? It was a developer kit. They kind of didn't know what it was for. They found some uses, and they realized all the uses are in enterprise, and none of the uses are in consumer. The original HoloLens demo was in a house, and you had this virtual Skype icon on the fridge. and you played Minecraft. Now you repair an ATV.

Which is like, which I don't know what's going on in your house. That is a dream of mine to have the ATV repair shop at my house. But yeah, they're totally focused on Enterprise. And then they have this other Azure Connect sensor, which is a little box. And their, you know, the picture of that is there's all kinds of reasons you want to do motion tracking in the world for enterprise uses. Again, this is not like an Xbox Connect. It's an Azure Connect.

So you buy this camera module, it connects to the Azure Cloud, where your hospital is running some Microsoft Cloud Service. And then their use case was you'll put these in hospital bedrooms, and then it will tell you when someone's... That's a literal company. Somebody is making that product. It's fall detection. Yeah. And fall detection is a really big deal because there's an aging population. It's a thing. But it just struck me as there's a lot of ways in a hospital to tell if somebody fell down. and the idea that you're going to install a bunch of custom hardware and a cloud computing service. Yeah, it seems like this HoloLens too. Just seems like there's a lot of different learning curves. Like there's some gestures that are like...

The gestures are mostly gone. Okay. Right? So the old HoloLens, you had to do these like weird, flippy hand twisty gestures. Sure. And you'd like tap to click. Like you were basically like doing like hand mime the whole time. This one is very much the gestures are you're mostly, you can like just reach out.

and grab an object and like pull it and to scale it and like manipulate it. So gestures really come down to, they're pretty natural, but you have to acquaint yourself with what the sensor can see, like the fidelity of the camera in front of you. And so it looks like you're being a little bit more careful, but really the gesture is like you just like reach out and poke stuff. You just have to do it in a way that you think the camera will understand, which took five minutes to figure out. But they're not like just, there's no like gesture library.

There's no like, the old HoloLens was very much like, I'm doing this pinch, I'm doing this twist. This is just, push that by. The sensor is much more high fidelity than the old connect sensor. Yes, that's exactly right. So it's super neat. It's just very, they've just targeted it enterprise. And the way they're talking about that is by saying on these metrics, comfort, usability out of the box, price, all this stuff.

It is not ready to be a consumer product. I think that implies that they will get there. But at the same time, Magic Leap is in this world. Apple's like, look at all the AR on our phone. Like, there is a consumer product revolution happening there. That stuff still isn't quite as good. I was about it happening there? Like, as you're talking about Connect, this feels a lot like Connect, where Microsoft is like, this is a thing.

Like, ARVR is a thing that exists. We're going to build a version of it that is different and in theory better. But like, it feels like the first hull lens was like catching the tail end of that, like, first wave of VR with Oculus and Vive. Like, Connect was catching the tail end of, like, the first wave of motion. control with like the Wii and like Microsoft then had all this cool technology and know where to put it and it's like okay throw it at Enterprise yeah I mean the idea they're still calling it connect is like very cute to me it's like but that team is the connect team yeah like it's largely the same people I mean it's really cool it's

just like the answer to we have a cool piece of tech and it's not ready for people yet is maybe not always let's see if enterprise users can use it yeah I think the idea is that it's more enterprise users buy a solution. Yeah. They don't buy a product. They buy a thing that it like trains engineers. Or they buy a thing that hospital, like you're going to see if the patients fell down. Like they buy a solution to problems or they buy a solution that makes some existing work more efficient. They don't buy this like multi-use converged product that has to do a lot of things well. And so I think that's why they can do it because they can tailor the limitations of this to the enterprise.

At the same time, it's like if AR is going to take it. off, it's going to need a piece of hardware on your face, right? Like that seems to be the case for now until we get the microchips directly implanted into our brains. And what Microsoft, I think their lead in this, where they had the opportunity to actually lead is the thing runs Windows holographic. It's a Windows computer. They're going to get a bunch of ad developers building these enterprise things for it. They're going to get this map of the world. Magic Leap is like, what weird version of Android is that?

That's like, that's a real question over there. Apple obviously has iOS, and people are building AR kit apps on iOS, but they've got to actually build hardware and interface and all those paradigms. So Microsoft is at least putting this foundation in a place, whether or not it's any good, whether or not a bunch of Kawasaki dealers are going to put in their ATV repair shops. By the way, I don't know what the total market of ATV repair is. It just seems like if it can support people wearing AR headsets must be very lucrative. Yeah, I was going to say, because it's not cheap. This thing is $3,500. Yeah.

Again, so look, it's currently a very small ATV repair shop that I run, but we have big dreams. And you have some very skilled people that you really, really just want to train remotely. Yeah, they're so smart. They're really great at computers, can't find a screwdriver to save their lives. And I cannot tell them to do it. I'm telling a $3,500 robot to tell them to do it. Can you put on this face computer and just figure it out? Yeah, I mean, like, those are demos.

They are what they are. It's just, it's super neat, right? And the fact that they've solved field of view and they think they're years ahead on Field of View is the thing. Right? Because that's what everyone is chasing is Field of view. So come out, hopefully people get to try it like a Microsoft store or something. But Deeter isn't here

and I get to play with it. So I want to talk about it. All right, we're going to take another break. And then Paul and Heim, I think, something very special to happen on the show. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited.

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Yeah. Every week, my friend. Yeah, well, not this week. Because I'm going to interrupt this week's regularly scheduled segment for an important announcement from the USB implementers forum. That's what the segment is called. Words are meaningless and nothing matters. All right.

All right. All right. So when you make a new thing, it's like a sequel, right? So maybe you had nine before and now you have 10 or you had like three before and now you have four. You had 3.1 before and now you have 3.2 gen 2. right it's not it's not like you now that you have USB 3.2

right yeah it's not like which to be clear I did not know that we okay well you do so what you're saying is I got a free upgrade to USB 3.2 yes yes that's the thing everything used to be 3.1 now that USB 3.2 exists

everything that was USB 3.1 is now USB 3.2 Gen 2 It's free upgrade. Wait, what? Yes. Hi, tell him. Tell them I'm lying.

Okay. I wish I could tell them that you're lying. This is how USBC implementer forum does its name. So they first released USB 3.0. Yes. So just to also like basic point of clarification here, this does not refer to a type of technology. It refers to speed. So like you could have the USB C port that's USB 3.0.

3.0. You can have a USB A port that's USB 3.0. You can have, you know, micro USB that's USB 3.0. Like, it just refers to the specified speed that you need. Okay. Okay. So, USB 3.0 comes out. I'm a little wavy on that one, but we're going to keep going. Okay. USB years later, like two years later, USB 3.1 comes out. Okay. Okay. But so USB 3.0, transfer speeded up to 5 gigabits per second. USB 3.1. 3.0 equals 5. Yeah. No, no.

3.0 equals 5. 3.1 offers speeds it up to 10 gigabits per second. 3.1 equals 10. Now, here's where things get screwy. Okay. So when 3.1 came out, because, according to the USB implementers forum, the 3.1 spec absorbs all previous versions of the 3.0 spec into it. So from a branding perspective, they are now USB.

3.1 Gen 1, which was 3.0. Yeah. And USB 3.1, Gen 2, which is USB 3.1. I can't even handle it. Everyone got upgraded. And then, now, so now, they announced 3.2 last year. Okay. And now we're finally at the point where we're going to start seeing hardware,

hopefully later this year. So they had to come out the formal naming. So, USB 3.2 is out. So the one that you would call USB 3.2, if you say didn't work at the USB implementers for them, is now USB 3.2 gen 2 times 2. Oh, gen 2 times 2. So I can already hear you asking why is that not? Why is that not USB 3.2 gen 3? Wait, I'm not completely on what happened here.

I hear the unspoken jumps. Wait, so USB. So here are the three now. Yeah. So USB 3.0, which was USB 3.1, Gen 1, is now USB 3.2 Gen 1. Oh, I see. USB 3.1, which was USB 3.1, Gen 2, is now USB 3.2 gen 2. So it just bumps up.

So Gen 1, Gen 1, Gen 2. Nail it. One that was Gen 1 is still Gen 1, Gen 2 is still in 2. Dead ahead. USB 3.2 is USB 3.2 Gen 2 times 2. Is that listed as a 2x2? 2. So there's a reason.

It would be just easier if they just put the damn speeds on them. Wait, wait, just, please, please, by all means, continue. So the reason, and I can hear, I can hear readers, listeners, screaming from podcast. If this person driving in the car hasn't crashed our car because of the gestures, they've just done it now. Why is this not USB 3.2 Gen 3? Because it's the third one. And that is because it is not actually getting speeds of 20 gigabits per second, which is the maximum theoretical spec.

But it's not doing that in a single lane of USB traffic. It is just doing it in a way where it's using two lanes of 10 gigabit per second traffic at once, which previous generations can't do. So in theory, the total throughput is equivalence to 20, and it is an upgrade, but it's essentially, and this is where the name comes in, It's essentially two USB3.2 gen 2 lanes together, hence the name, two by two. So I just want to the universal serial bus. Yes.

The latest version is two buses in parallel. Yes. It's two bus lanes. They should just call it. Parallel four. They should just call it a parallel four. 5 gigabit, 10 gigabit, and 20 gigabits. So they do have official marketing names.

The 5 gigabit one is officially supposed to be called SuperSpeed U.S. This 10 gigabit one you are supposed to refer to as SuperSpeed USB 10 gigabit per second. Sure. And the new one is supposed to be called SuperSpeed USB 20 gigabit per second. Okay. I just want to stop you there. If you're listening to this, you are the only class of people that might have ever done this. But I suspect I know what the answer is.

If you have ever in your life referred to one of these ports as SuperSpeed USB, I want you to tweet at Future Paul. See Gardenberg. C. Gartenberg and tweet at C. Gartanberg. I just want you to reveal yourself. I'm the person who regularly refers to it as super speed USB. I walk about my daily life saying, please provide me with a super speed USB cable for my super speed USB port. You don't know me like, you know who you are. It's like, when you get in the Uber, we'll send a photographer out. You hop in the Uber and you're like, excuse me, sir. Can I please have your super speed USB 10 gigabyte to charge of my phone? Does this, does this dongle support my super speed? Yeah, I'm just saying, just reveal yourself to us. You want to shame these people, but do these people, it's better than USB 3.2 gin two by two.

No, if you are that person, I will, where you reveal yourself immediately and we'll shame you. If you're the person who's just like, you know what, I do live in a world of brands, and it's important for me to just say things what they are. I'm going to say, I want to glorify you. We'll come by, we'll put you on the Instagram page. I will take a photo of you. Yep. 5,000 word profile, but you have to prove to us

that you have lived your entire life saying super speed. I don't know how you'll provide such proof. Okay, okay. But you do it. Does anyone, no, no. Does anyone have a super speed USB logo tattoo? That's how you prove your agent.

You just made somebody get a bad tattoo. Just to wrap this up. Dan, if I have to write 5,000 words on this, I'm going to be thrilled. When there is another USB, right? When there is a new faster USB standard, what happens? Does Gen 1 become USB 3.3 Gen 1? Probably.

Is there a king of USB? Who runs this thing? The innovators forum, it's made up, it's a consumer organization. So when you say forum, it's not like a web forum. It's not a Reddit. It's like USB names. No, no, no, no. Because I will tell you, this.

I don't think there's like a grand council of USB that meets and has, you know, meetings to decide. Because when you say the USB implementers forum, I literally think to myself, yes, this is how if there was a subreddit, they would choose to name things. Right? Like, if you just get a bunch of people typing in a room, you end up with this. Yeah. Do they have meetings? I assume. I don't know.

The president and chief operating officer of the USB implementers forum is named Jeff Ravencraft. Sorry to doxy, Jeff. It's not a doxist just his name and title. He's a public figure. Also, I just Googled this logo and it looks like an MLB, like, logo. Well, Jeff, he's got the logo. He's going to tweet it. So I do have one or two notes that will make this worse.

Oh, good. So the USB Implementers Forum also wants to caution manufacturers, first of all, that when they list USB 3.2 to specify how fast it goes, It's in the document that it's very important, lest you confuse someone. That's clearly the priority. It also notes that there are other names which have been used in the past in various forms for referring to the super speed spec, like SuperSpeed Plus, enhanced SuperSpeed. And Super Speed Plus, but the plus is a plus sign and not written out.

Those are separate ones that they've used. Don't use those anymore. Don't use them on marketing things. You don't have that. You have super speed USB 10 gigabit per second. Now, what's actually going to happen is every single PC manufacturer is just going to list all their ports are USB 3.2 ports now, and no one is going to have any idea what spec they have. Aren't they all just going to say their USBC? So here's the thing.

USBC does not guarantee that you are any of these. You can have a 5 gigapit per second USBC port, and that would be USB 3.2 Gen 1 USBC port that goes to a USBC port that goes to a bit. slower speed. Can we just stop for a second? Heim, in the middle of the person who knows the most about this, stopped to look at his screen and make sure he was getting that right. Because it's so confusing. Are you sure he didn't stop to just literally take a breath?

Because how can you not? He's been yelling the whole time. You could on the same laptop have a USBC 3.2 Gen 1 port that has slower speeds and USB 3.2 gen 2x2 port that has faster speeds. That frequently happens all the time. We review gaming laptops or Windows laptops that have more than just like the two ports Apple gives you. You have to know which port does which.

Like I just reviewed, speaking of Huawei, I reviewed the MAPUK 13 earlier this year, and one of the USB ports had charging, and the other USB port had video out, and they were both USBC ports, and like this confusion exists already, and it's just going to get worse. So those are also different specs.

It specifically says this is not USBCPD. This is not, those are also separate things. But like, and I love joking about this, but like they do actually do, like, genuine harm, in the sense that you can do harm with a USBC naming type of like, this is misleading to consumers and it probably could be easily avoided

if you just called them 3.0, 3.1, 3.2. Yeah. Or if you use different connectors. Yeah. That would be great. I feel like the connector thing and the speeds thing. So really, what's nice about the connectors at least, is if you do, if you are, say you have something that has,

I'm going to try this, USB 3.2, gen 2 by 2, I'm sorry, that's pronounced SuperSpeed 20. Super Speed 20. If you have a Super Speed 20 port, it's backwards compatible with a USB 3.1 Gen 1 device. Yeah, that's Super Speed 5. And vice versa. Because they are the same port. I got it.

I'm in the Matrix. Also, at a certain point, it starts to not matter. Like, USB 3.2 gen 2 by 2, that speed is only, super speed 20 is only capable on a USBC port. Like the USB Type A technology stack does not support it. Thunderbolt 3? Which also uses USBC connectors. Yes, it does. That's why connectors has to be divorced from all this,

because specs are terrible and nothing makes sense. But that's why you had different connectors. Yeah. In the first place, we simplified the wrong thing. It seems very obvious to me. We took the thing where you looked at it, and you're like, I know how this works, and we're like, we'll make that more confusing, but make the types of things longer.

Counterpoint, though? If you have more different types of connectors, you need dongles. You have more dongles. Or you just add the ports to the computer. You see this computer here? This vintage 2015 MacBook Pro. Nilai is slapping the hood of his MacBook Pro. You see this?

I can plug. There's a modem port on this beast, my friend. I hate you all. This laptop's seen some stuff. Look, all I'm telling you is that I have an ancient AMD GPU and a fan that runs all the time, but I can plug anything into this. All right. I think that's it. I hope so.

We've come to the logical conclusion of the purgecast, which is I'm talking about my 2015 Metro pro. The pinnacle of technology, everything's going to be great. Deter will be back next week. We'll have all of you back soon. Paul, how are you feeling? Is that good? I feel great.

I feel great, too. It really did take three of you to replace one Deter. But it was good. Come see us at South by Southwest that is happening very soon. We'll be there live. Casey, Ashley. Dieter and I will be doing a live panel. We're working on some other stuff, too.

We'll see if it plays out. So check that out if you can. Listen to all of why'd you push that button. Listen to Pivot with Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher. Listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. All that's available. Wherever it is that you do podcast-y things, you just type those things in your podcast app.

They'll show up and listen to them. But then find us and give us five stars. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Call. Promo code.