The Vergecast - Motorola Razr review, Samsung's Galaxy S20 event, and T-Mobile and Sprint allowed to merge

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

Stories discussed this week: Motorola Razr review: folding flip phone flops Motorola Razr undergoes iFixit’s ‘most complicated’ teardown yet Samsung learned some tough lessons from the Galaxy Fold debacle Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip beats the Motorola Razr in nearly every way Samsung Galaxy Z Flip first look: folding glass changes everything The Galaxy S20 is the first high-refresh display phone many people will own Why Samsung’s 108-megapixel camera isn’t just a gimmick All of the biggest announcements from Samsung’s Galaxy S20 event Samsung confirms its AirDrop-like ‘Quick Share’ is launching on the Galaxy S20 Here’s how Samsung’s Galaxy S20 stacks up against the Pixel 4, OnePlus 7T, and more Samsung’s regular Galaxy S20 doesn’t support ultra-fast 5G Samsung’s Galaxy S20, Plus, and Ultra first look: cameras, 5G, and 120Hz screens Samsung confirms its AirDrop-like ‘Quick Share’ is launching on the Galaxy S20 T-Mobile and Sprint win lawsuit and will be allowed to merge The court let T-Mobile buy Sprint because Sprint completely sucks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast Dieter reviewed the Motorola razor. He went to Samsung unpacked. We talked with a Galaxy Z Flip, the new Galaxy S20, and we get into the Sprint T-Mobile merger. Let's come up now in the Vergecast. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

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security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom,

a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Verge cast. Flagship podcast with the Verge experience. Let's try to be really dramatic this week. Is it work?

No. All right. I'm your friend, Eli. Dieter Bone is here. Deeter Bone is creaking his Motorola razor at you. Paul Miller is here. Hello. All right.

Should we just get into it? It means like there's a lot going on this week. There's so much going on this week. We're going to talk about the Razor. It's the first thing we're going to talk about. But I just want to note it is somewhat big news in the world of technology in the world of mobile and the world of the coronavirus that MWC, Mobile World Congress, was canceled somewhat inevitably because of fears of the virus. Right. And that story just sort of built over time.

There's one company dropped out. then another company dropped out, then there were whispers. It seems like everyone is very, very afraid. It's strange to me that huge global corporations just sort of all privately decided that they were terrified of the coronavirus. Right. Yeah. And like, is that if you're justified

and, you know, usually for big public health decisions, you would want the big public institutions to make those calls. But it was just, it was so inevitable that as soon as these, you know, the dominoes started falling, it was just not going to happen, so they canceled it. So I would like to announce today that The Verge will not be going to MWC.

This is true. We're a little bit behind the curve, I know. But we were expecting some announcements there, particularly from Chinese phone vendors. That stuff is still going to happen. We're in phone season. Yeah. I do think that it is possible that the race to 5G will be delayed. This is the only race in the world, which is mostly,

conducted by people sitting still in suits. That's what that race looks like. This was going to be a big year for 5G deployment. There's a lot of like Huawei talk in this world. There's a lot of can we build a competing sort of open network standard to flood them. The MWC is where those conversations happen. And it is somewhat notable that they will not be happening even though the tensions around Huawei as a network equipment vendor.

And John Ledger can't like go have a victory lap. Right. Yeah. He can't just walk up to people on the streets of Barcelona being like, hi, I'm also the C of Sprint. Although he's not doing it, though, right? He's not doing it off to Seaford or whatever. Seabert, yeah, in a while. For now.

Guys are getting way ahead of ourselves. Okay. Do we know if any of these companies are going to do like a Nintendo Direct style, like mini live stream kinos? A bunch of them are, some of them might try and hold their own separate events. And this is my expectation is a bunch of them are going to hold their separate events. and they might be like, oh, that's great. Why are we going to this stupid conference? So that could happen.

I will tell you that one company, which I obviously can't name, has emailed us and said, yeah, that embargo is going to change. And we said, yeah, we figured what's the plan? And they said, we don't know. That's great. Yeah, I mean, there's some value for us, particularly for the smaller companies being there, right? The journalist's already there, the press already there, the buyer's already there. That's bad for that smaller part of the ecosystem.

I think the bigger companies, they'll just let us know. Hey, there's a, it's a phone. Are you guys interested? And we'll be like, yes, that's our job. And that's how the media works. I don't know if anybody was confused about that. All right. That's enough Barcelona talk.

Actually, it's not enough Barcelona talk. We have a separate podcast, Barka Chat. Dieter. Yeah. I'll just give some backstory audience. We're sitting down as we do before every Vergecast, quote unquote, organizing it. Yeah. An unsuccessful project historically, but we do it every week anyway.

And we were trying to figure out where to put the Razor review. And it occurred to me that you are so mad at this phone. I've spent a busy week, and I've seen it boiling in the background. But I was like, we shoot the razor first. And you're like, yeah, to get it out of the way. And I was like, oh, he hates it. But I'm going to make you do it. Why do you hate Motorola and when they try hard, you push them into the dirt?

Why do you do that, Deere? I don't, I don't hate Motorola. I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed. Oh, wow. That's worse from Deeter. All right. Well, let's listen to it creaking.

Okay, here we go. Oh, that's really bad. So that was the sound of the phone opening. Yeah, and here it is closing. Oh, that's worse. Reading through your review, most of the trailer is, you know what, I could deal with that to look like the coolest person. I addressed this specifically in the interview. But when you mentioned how it's embarrassing in a silent room to have your phone creak, I was like, ah, oh.

It's going to be a great bit for like a comedy movie. So just in case you're wondering what is going on, Dieter reviewed the Motorola Razor this week. I'm holding it in my hand. He's got it. the process of just sort of getting a phone, reviewing it, sort of, I would say, tipped our hands that maybe the product wasn't ready. Because to me, there's no bigger red flag. I think we said this about the Iowa caucus app.

Like, what's the biggest red flag that something's not ready? It's like, we're not going to let you see it until it's out. So that happened. But you have it. You reviewed it. What do you think? I think that if this phone didn't fold in half and it cost a penny over $200,000, $250, I would tell you do not even consider buying it.

Wow. Yeah, it just, it has a pretty bad camera. It's got a pretty slow processor, which is totally fine. The slow processor is fine. It's got pretty weak battery life. You know, all the stuff that you would expect to be pretty good on like a $250 phone. In fact, Motorola makes a very good $250 phone, the MotoG power, just isn't as good here. And so what you're paying for is the flippiness, the flip action, the folding screen.

and the flip action just isn't that good because of that creak, because of the way the screen feels. And I will admit that I am actually, especially with like the way the screen feels and like the presence of the crease, which actually isn't too bad here, I am ambivalent. I keep on misusing nonpluss, but what I mean is ambivalent about how to judge a folding screen. By what metric is a folding screen good? Because if I compare it to a Galaxy S-10 or S-20 screen, there is no folding screen that I have seen yet that is anywhere close to as high quality is that. So you mean in terms of brightness, sharpness, sharpness, like how much of a crease is acceptable, how much of it feeling bumpy and lumpy under your finger is acceptable, right? You kind of just want to say, well, if it misses on any of those things, then it's a fail. But that's not true because the thing folds in half and you get other benefits.

And so judging the tradeoffs, for me, gets a little bit more complicated if you actually do want a phone that folds to fit into a smaller pocket. Which I do want. Yeah, I think a lot of people want that. Honestly, I think that's like the big meta story of the Razor. It's like they missed a big opportunity, but we'll come to that. Yeah. On the screen itself. So like a useful comparison here, there's maybe like LCD versus OLED, right?

Sure. Like Apple had LCD screens for a long time. Samsung beat them to OLED screens. we would compare them directly. They're different technologies, and they have different benefits. Right? In particular, Apple is able to use

RGB stripe pixel layouts. Oh, my God. Here we go. Oled Pentow layouts. That's just me. But we're going to be talking about RGB later on in the Galaxy S20 section, so stay tuned.

Today, we're going to talk about how to organize pixels. What shapes are best for your pixels? So, like, it's that. Is it, the blacks aren't quite as black, or is it just, it's not quite as bright? It's a vibrancy thing. It's not quite as bright.

You know, you can get like searing phantasmagoric colors out of like a Samsung screen. You know, Apple has, you know, got its color accuracy and everything just looks just like right. And, you know, it's not a haze, but like it's just a screen that like looks fine. It's not like a, wow, this looks great screen. In addition to like the actual practical issues of if you want to watch a 4x3 YouTube video, the screen is a 21.9 by, no, it's, I don't. know, it's 21 by 9 something. It's very, very tall, which means that the letterboxing, the black bars are gigantic. Yeah. Okay. Here's my, I mean, I haven't actually seen the razor.

I certainly have not had it as long as you have. And you've seen the Z flip now, too. I have. Which will come to. So you've seen more of these. You've gone through an entire emotional journey with the Galaxy Fold. You have, so I'm going to say something that is not based on any level of experience to compares to yours. And then I want you to react to it. Here we go. They have to be as good as real screens, non-folding screens. That's how you know they're good. That's when they're working.

Flagship? No. I would say as good as a mid-range OLED screen. Okay. As good as mid-range Oled screen. As good as the iPhone 11. Right. Minus like the crease.

You get plus 10 for folding minus 8 for a crease. And you roll a D-20. What about durability? And plastic versus glass. Like, it's an entirely. different set of tradeoffs that we don't know what the answers are yet. That's why I'm just confidently saying stuff and asking you to react to. Yeah.

I just, I'm, that's my reaction. I have this weird, I haven't actually held any of these folding phones yet. And I have this weird intuition that the screens will be more like paper, which I'm sure is not true. That's not true. But you know,

not even a little bit true. There's something about a phone that folds. Well, you know, what else folds? Paper folds. Like, what if the screen had that sort of, what was it now? Mirosol displays.

Oh, my God. That's a horrible deep cut. Remember when Mirosol was the future? A failed Qualcomm display. No, we're not going to talk about this at this time. Just Google, like, and gadget posts from 2007, we went on a journey then. We're not doing it now. It's creaking again.

So, okay. So the screen, whatever, quality-wise, sort of on the regular metrics, a little bit worse. But the bumpiness, the lumpiness, the sound, that's the real issue here, right? Yeah, the bumpiness and the lumpiness in the middle of the screen is like, okay, I get it. But they want the screen to sort of tuck in as you fold it so that it doesn't bunch up or whatever. And that means that it floats at the bottom of the phone, which means when you hit the back button, which on Android you hit a lot. You can actually feel it like move. It's loose under your finger.

And then it like hits the back of the phone that's like behind it. Does it have haptics? It has the worst haptics you have ever felt in your life. Is there a word for like, accident? haptic feedback. Like, we actually made this a button. The screen is basically the equivalent of like a playing card and a bicycle spokes. No, that's really bad.

It's not that bad. That's an exaggeration. But, like, you know, it's a metaphor. So as far as I can tell, no one likes it. I don't think anyone likes it. I see the good phone inside this bad phone. Wow. That is like the most deeter.

That's like, we should put you out in the world with that. It's your like marketing. tagline. What's the good phone look like? If they had just done everything, it different. No, what's the good fun look like? The very good thing that Motorola did is they came up with this teardrop hinge that allows it to fold into the screen with that bulge so that it doesn't have a hard crease.

And the other very good thing that they did is they made it look like a razor. And it looks retro and cool. And they also, I said the hinge feel like doesn't feel. feel as deeply satisfying as it should. It really doesn't because the screen provides a certain weird resistance so it can't snap closed like really like a like you really want it to. But you can, you know, once you start using it, you get that little flourish of like flipping it out.

You know, you stick your figure in the little edge there and then you just give a little flick and then it flicks out. And that's cool. The way you cover the speaking sound is by going, kapow. Yeah, exactly. You say it out loud in the quiet room. Yeah. Yeah.

But Motorola prioritized. thinness to make it, you know, make it match to the razor brand. And that meant that the battery was too small. And it meant that they, well, now they have to compensate with a slower processor. And then, you know, Motorola's never made great cameras. And so just the knock on effects of their initial decisions just started adding up. And nobody at any point in the process or laid in the process when they should have said, hey, did you hear that? Maybe we should do something about that. Because doing something about that would have meant like going back to the drawing board, I think.

So here's my big take on this. Motorola, you said they make really good, low, and mid-range Android phones. Incredibly good. Yeah. They more than are holding their own in that market. They're owned by Lenovo, which is a big company, so they have some insulation from phone market dynamics. And not for nothing, Lenovo itself likes to make weird stuff.

They make weird laptops all the time. So they actually are owned by a company with money, resources, and a willingness to let them try weird stuff. Okay. I think they did this two years too early. That's my read on it. You only get one shot at nostalgia. You only get one shot at what I've been calling the morning show circuit, right?

Yeah. Do you remember the droid razor, though? Yeah, but that phone sucked. Doesn't count. That phone also sucked. That phone in particular was a pentile LCD that was so bad that you could see green fringes around every line on the thing. and I took photos of it, and Motorola called me and said,

that phone has to be broken, and they sent me another one, and they had just lied to me. But it also had magnets on the back. I ended up buying a macro lens so I could put photos the screen and, like, the forums in 2011. I mean, like, I promise you, I'm not crazy. Anyway. That was a different time for Motorola.

Different Motorola. Anyway, you're right. They had one shot at, like, bringing the razor back. They had one shot at the Today Show. and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Wasn't it the really best razor, the razor V3? That was the first razor. The first razor was called the Razor V3.

That's correct. Again, a different Motorola. Hey, why did Motorola go through so many management changes and ownership transitions? I couldn't remember, like, what the predecessor, but I just assumed that there was earlier razors for some reason. Yeah, they were. No, I definitely thought the same thing you did and then had to check myself because I, like, you know, just went back and, like, V3 was.

first release in Q3 2004. That was the razor. Anyway, so they had this big shot to go from their pretty solid position in mid and low end phones. Again, they don't have to make a high end phone. Like, Lenovo is not

like demanding that it happened. But this would be the one to do it. This is the one. We're going to go take a chunk out of the $1,000 phone market and we have this thing that looks different and we can get all of the marketing support in the world. and earn media from, again, what I just think of is like, you know, what's the hot holiday gift?

The razor's back. Well, you get that moment. And then you don't deliver the product because you're ahead of the technology. That is just a miss. And I'm wondering why they did it. Were they trying to get a – did they know that Samsung had the Z flip and they were trying to get out ahead of that? And they just got delayed so they only got out ahead of it by like a day. But it got delayed so they could do a better job of it.

Well, one assumes, I don't know. I do not know if they're like easy to find in stores. I know that on launch day, Chris Welch and I spent a significant portion of our day just trying to buy this phone and failed. Yeah. I would assume that Motorola would be aware that this flexible, because I wasn't as a pleb out in the world, did not know that flexible glass was on this way. But you would think Motorola would know. And so they had to, because Samsung didn't have to wait too much longer, apparently a day or, you know, a month longer than Motorola and managed to get a much better part, right? You're correct.

Samsung did the Z-flip, but their bring-up time was probably years before. These things were probably happening concurrently. Right. Well, let's just talk about it. So Samsung had unpacked this week. You went. They put out the S-20. S-20, the S-20 plus and the S-20 Ultra.

Linear numbers are no longer a thing that happens in tech. we're just changing however we go. But the star was the Z-flip, which they basically just sort of announced during an ad at the Oscars. Yeah. Just put it out there.

You saw it. What did you think? So it is a folding phone with a glass screen instead of a plastic screen and good Samsung internals instead of mediocre motor roll internals. That's kind of the long and the short of it.

It looks like a Samsung phone. Everyone is comparing it to like a Game Boy I think it's Game Boy SP, the folding Game Boy. The advance. Almost like a compact out of it. It looks really good. And you open it up, it's pretty plain. But it has a glass screen, and you can see the crease, but the glass feels way, way better.

Is it actually glass? I feel like this is controversial. It's actually glass, although Samsung is being skittish about how the glass gets made and who supplies it and who makes it. They say that they're partnering with a third party, and I don't think it's corning. Yeah. And when I was like, how do you make it bend, blah, blah, blah. Well, it's ultra thin. I was like, well, what else?

Well, you know, there's treatments. There's things that happen to it. Yeah. I like the idea that there's a secret vendor for Samsung. Like, they think no one will figure it out. Is it naive of me to believe that glass can't bend? Well, clearly. I mean, there's...

Like, I've seen a lot of glass in my day, and every time I try to bend it. That thing. Plastic bends. Yeah. Often. What you don't want it to. I mean, this is like we have to get the phone. I fix it'll tear it down.

But to me, this is the big tech innovation of the screen, is the glass, and we just kind of don't know a lot about it yet. Right. And the other innovations are sort of, it's around the hinge, so it doesn't fold completely flat like the razor does. However, it is narrower than the galaxy fold was in the way that it folds. And I don't know how much of that is like they can get a tighter bending radius and how much of it is. They're bending it vertically and sort of across a big long length, and so they just feel more confident that they can get a tighter radius there maybe. Or maybe the glass lets them do that. Who knows, but it is, you know, it still doesn't fold completely flat, but it's better than the fold.

And then Samsung put in just better, like higher end components. So the battery is bigger. It has wireless charging. And it has 12 megapixel cameras. And we trust Samsung to make pretty good cameras. Could turn out to be wrong there, but we trust that. And then the fingerprint sensor is on the side on the power button instead of on the bottom. So I think it's more conveniently placed.

So just in general, it's a more elegantly designed, like, competent thing. It's reasonable to believe this camera is probably on par with, like, the S-10. Is that correct? I would hope so. Yeah, I think so. I think that's fair to guess. But, again, we'll have to see. The fascinating thing, and this might get back to the glass, is you can't just, like, whip it open.

You kind of have to use two hands. You can maybe use one hand if you push it, but they've limited the speed at which the hinge will open. And I'm putting it that way instead of saying they've done this amazing thing where you can like set the screen at any angle and it'll stay there. Because I actually think that that is just a thing they decided to do because of the limitation of how fast you're allowed to open it is my conspiracy theory. My conspiracy theory is that if you open it too fast, it might harm the glass or something. and so they limited how fast it can open, which means that, well, we've got to do something to explain that. So, oh, we'll do the thing where you can, like, put it in an L shape

and set it down on a table and do video calls. This could be wrong. So is a hinge tight? Yeah, tight's a pretty good way to describe it. Well, it's just, you know, we just listen to another hinge creek. Yeah. I feel like hinges that require an amount of force to move often also make noise. Yeah.

Did you hear any noises? I did not hear any noises. We could see what'll happen. Maybe they're better at cams. I don't know. The other hinge innovation here, which I think is just... Kinjivation. Kinjivation.

The other hingeavation, which is clever as hell, is they put brushes on the edges of the hinge in order to keep debris from getting in. Because brushes are flexible. They can move, and they can... But they also can form a bit of a barrier. Which is, you know, like, it's smart. And it's like how biology... work sometimes. Do you think they had to make the galaxy

fold just to like make a list of things they flubbed so they could make this phone? I mean, I would say yes. The answer is yes. But the caveat to that yes is they didn't have to announce or release it. But like if they, there's, it's crazy to me how far Samsung has come in, it's not even a year. Yeah. Less than a year.

Less than a year. Like how, like a year from now, the phone will be like, it'll be like perfectly thin. It will be paper thin when it falls. I don't know. Like that's hinge evasion, baby. That's a, I just feel like all the, all the great minds at these phone companies have not been dealing with hinges for like over a decade. You know, they've all been making slabs. None of them have been doing anything but slabs.

And like, they were rusty. But now they're getting into hinges. and they're getting rapidly better. Yeah, like the team in the basement that's working on Samsung Swift phones is like, what now? Challenges. We want the new offices.

We've had a number of ideas that no one has paid attention. Windows. Real desks. We don't just want glass at our phones. We want it by our desk. They're very excited. I'm excited for that.

So when's it? It's expensive. It's like $1,300. $1,180. which is $1, I don't know, $19 less than the Galaxy Razor? Or the Galaxy Razor. So it's substantially cheaper than the Galaxy Fold. Yes.

Substantially cheaper than the Galaxy Fold was 1980. This is 1380. Why all the folding phones are ending 80? I don't. I do like the idea that Samsung undercut Motorola unprice just a little bit. Yeah. It's amazing. Even at the most ridiculous price point for the most ridiculous thing, it's like, yeah, we're

going to be the cheaper one. Can you imagine somebody looking at these two phones and be like, I don't have an extra $200? The aspect ratio isn't as crazy on the Samsung. They're both crazy. They're both like more than 21 by now. I would think about this. So sometimes when I'm on my phone and I'm watching TikTok, like TikTok, like TikTok is portrait video. And so all the TikTok controls, let me tell you.

cover the video. And I think that there's probably a way to get those to disappear, but I don't know what it is. It's one of those secret gestures. Like, you know, the cool. Yeah, the only teens know. But you get one of these long phones, you can put all the controls at the bottom,

and you've got the perfect viewing experience. It's just something to think about it. Yeah. To take advantage. I mean, you know that you're describing one UI and one UI2, wherein Samsung puts all of its controls at the bottom and puts big headers at the top of everything by default so that you can reach the messages with one hand

and only scrolls them up to fill up the full screen when you scroll up and need them. There you go. Samsung's not as bad at software as everyone thinks they are. I mean... I'm not saying they're good. I never said they're good. I mean, this is a company... But they're thinking about long phones and they're taking it serious.

Yeah, who doesn't think about long phones? I mean, this is a company that launched a voice assistant, added a button for the voice assistant, removed the button for the voice assistant. What if those are separate teams? Just like the software was not good enough to support this button. You in the basement hinge team upstairs. Let's go. All right.

So you've seen all the folding phones. You've seen this latest wave. Obviously, you have to review the Z flip. Where are we at? We are at the point where we're able to start making real calls about what folding phones need to do in order to be successful. This gets back to my ambivalence. about the folding screen on the razor,

we now know that we should expect glass on a folding phone. That is an okay thing to expect. We also now know that we should expect top-tier specs. We've had two of them that have top-tier specs, or at least mid-tier specs, right? The Z-flip has last year's high-end specs. So we can expect that. We should expect good cameras.

We should expect a hinge that doesn't create. We should, honestly, we should expect things that fold nearly flat or completely flat. We should expect some level of durability, and that is one of the big, big question marks. Because the razor folds completely flat and whatever they did with the hinge, it did not run into the catastrophe that the original galaxy fold did. They did a better job there. And I should have given them more credit in my review for that. It's possible that when more people get these, these things are going to start breaking all over the place. But I kind of doubt it.

But we need to see that continue. Like the Z flip needs to be as durable as the razor, if not more so. And that that trend needs to continue. So yeah, so like it now is no longer in a place where it's like, oh, what a curiosity, who knows? Now it's like, oh, here's another one. We can judge it compared to the other ones that came before. And we can say whether or not it's any good. And we can hopefully watch the prices come down.

One more metric. And I'm super undecided. I'm interested in what you think. Which is the correct form of external screen? Because Samsung went tiny. Both of them, the both of them are nice in the sense that they allow you to preview what a selfie looks like, which is cool. Using the primary camera, you can take a selfie. That's cool.

But it seems like Motorola is doing a lot and maybe not super well. Samsung's being pretty minimal there. Yeah, I think that that's like a hard question to answer because there needs to be more experimentation and there needs to be better execution on that, software on the front facing screen. Motorola didn't do a great job with dealing with notifications on it. Samsung, the screen is so small, there's just not room to make a lot of mistakes.

So yeah, I don't know. For me, right now, I think I like the Z-Flips answer because I would rather have a small screen than only does a couple of things and an extra 400, I don't know, however many milliamps of battery that provides you by not having space taken up by a screen than a big screen.

Right now, I'd rather have more battery until Android and or Qualcomm get radically better at preserving battery life on small milling amp batteries. So it just seems like we're at the products are going to come out, iterate on the formula. We're not going to be wowed by the fact that they fold. Hinge of eight. I mean, both of them are going to hinge of eight. Actually, can I, I'm just going to tell you where we are.

Are you ready? Yeah. We are at, I want to say it's like 2004, 2003. We're at like Trio 600. Oh, yeah. And like the big blue, the first Blackberry phone that had an earpiece. It wasn't the big blue was the one that came after that, I think. The first Backberry phone that was actually a phone.

Right. Like that's where we're at. Both of those phones are like, oh, we should have a cordy keyboard. We shouldn't try to have it flip because that's bad because the trio had like a flip-up screen. And it should actually like make calls directly on the thing instead of requiring like a cable. And, you know, like a couple other things they started to figure out for that generation of smartphones. That's where we're at. You're absolutely implying that this category of products will be paradigm shifted out of existence by Apple.

By Nokia. Well, I'm just, right. It's like, you're going to compare it to Palm and Blackberry. And I actually hate that when people dismiss entire categories because Apple hasn't done it yet, right? Like, oh, this is dumb, but as soon as Apple does it, it'll be great. Like, that drives me nuts. So I don't want to imply that. And I apologize if that's what I implied.

But in terms of like the industry is figuring out how to make a phone. Yeah. Like that is where they're at. I agree with you. Like it is annoying when people like Apple, do it right. The reason Apple does it right is because they just don't release the products, which is the thing that we just said. Like they certainly have a folding iPhone in a lab somewhere. Yeah.

Right? It's just they don't like it because it probably has all of the problems that these phones have. Oh, no, no, no. They don't like it because it turns out you can't make a folding phone without an open app ecosystem and that's unacceptable to Apple. I mean, I wish I understood exactly what you meant there, but I don't want to. I just want to. I don't want to dig on that any more than necessary. But these are like, these are the high-end sort of concept car-y.

People are going to buy them to have them. No one should buy them to use them zone of phones right now. For the Razor review, we bought and didn't use like a collector's box, like an acrylic thing that you put like action figures in, you know, so you can buy it and put it in the box. never touched it again. That was our idea. And then we used it and it was bad. We're like, it doesn't even deserve to go on the box. That's horrible. All right, we're going to take a break. We're going to come back and talk about the phones you should buy the Galaxy S20. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Murrow to move faster. With real-time collaboration

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No endless searcher required. You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upwork.org.com. Upwork. All right, we're back. So there was a Z-flip, which Samsung announced in a commercial. It's obviously what they want, the attention around build the buzz.

That's not really a useful phone for most people to buy, we don't think. Right. The S-20 is like the flagship phone. Yeah. And speaking of most people, most people figured that out, looking at the audience attention on YouTube at our site to which phones people actually wanted to read about. It was the S-20. And that's why we made you wait 30 minutes before we talk about.

Tell us, there are so many S-20s. Help me understand what's going on here. So there are three of them. And so last year, Samsung did the S-10E, which was like a lower end, and that they didn't like. And so now they're doing an ultra-high-end one. So there is the regular S-20. There is the S-20 plus. And then there is the S-20 Ultra, which is just huge.

Yeah. But ironically, I was like, it's huge and it's heavy. and it was pointed out to me that it's actually like, I don't know, a tiny bit lighter than a iPhone Pro Max. Of course. 5G, whatever the big one is. It's not 5G. Well, it is if you have AT&T. Yeah, 5G.

It just says 5G on it. So speaking of 5G, these are the very first mainstream phones that are just 5G by default. They've got the Qualcomm 865 processor, which doesn't come with the modem, but the only modem that works with it is Qualcomm's modem, of course, and that modem is 5G. So they all support 5G by default, which means that people are just going to start getting 5G phones, whether they really are looking for that or not because they're just going to get it when they buy their S20 phones. The thing that's interesting about these three models is Samsung isn't doing like a really clear, like, oh, they're all the same. They're just different sizes. There are like weird differences from the S20 to the S20 plus and from the S20 plus to the S20 Ultra.

So for example, the S20 only has midband 5G, whereas the plus. and the Ultra support millimeter wave. Who has mid-band 5G in the U.S.? That's... Team Mobile. AT&T, yeah. So it's basically not Verizon. So there's a not Verizon phone.

Yeah. Well, I think Verizon's actually getting this thing later than the other carriers, too, which is fascinating. The other main difference besides screen size between these phones is the camera stuff. And I don't know if you want to put off talking about the cameras because there's so much to get into, or if you want to just do it right now.

Because there's other stuff. What are we here for? The big thing that Samsung is doing is they are switching to high megapixel sensors. So normally and traditionally, up until a year or two ago, and even like last year, if you saw a phone with like a 64 megapixel

or higher sensor, you knew that like that phone was going to be bad. You just did, right? Because like they don't, they can't make a good camera. They'll throw more megapixels at it, hope you don't notice, hope you're snowed by the big pretty number

and you buy it. But the S20 has like 64, 48, and even 108 megapixel camera on some of these phones. And that's fascinating. One assumes the regular S20 has the 48, the middle one has a 64, and the top end is the 108. Yeah. So the thing is you put me on the spot here. Figuring out which one has which one is actually like requires me to look at the chart. Because they each have their own, they each have three cameras, a wide, a telephoto, and an ultra-

The two bigger ones have time of flight cameras, and the matrix of which one gets which megapixels gets really complicated. So, for example, the S20 has the 64 megapixel on the telephoto. So does the S20 plus, but on the S20 Ultra, it's got a 48 megapixel on the telephoto and 108 on the standard wide. Which is, it all just gets like blah, right? Yeah. The key takeaway here is I think Samsung wants to take business away from Sony when it comes to camera sensors. They're tired of Sony, like everyone uses Sony sensors. And so they're betting on this new 64 and 108 megapixel sensor that they've made that is able to do a particular kind of

pixel binning that supposedly solves the problem of low light photography on high megapixel sensors. So the micron size on like the 108 megapixel sensor, for example, is 0.8, which is real bad. But it's a slightly larger sensor, and by default, it bins nine of the pixels together into one single pixel. It does it right there on the sensor, so there's no software involved. And then it lays out the RGB pixels on that sensor for that binning, such that when it bins by default, it looks a little bit more like a traditional pixel array so that it is able to have fewer or fewer problems with color aberrations on that binned file.

photo. And then if there's enough light where they're like, we don't need to bin, this is great. We can get all the detail we want. It can switch over to 108 megapixels if you want it. Let me just step you back for one second. What does the word bin me mean? There it is. That's the one. Damn it. That just means group, right? Yes. It's not a binning, according to Samsung, which stands for nine. Nonabinning. Nonabinning. Not a binning. All right. We got hinge ovation. We got non-abinning. This is a red-letter verge cast.

Okay, so pixel banning, you just group the pixels. You just group the pixels together. And, you know, for a pixel, the light has to hit it. There's like walls around the pixel. Remember, Neely, remember the deep channel stuff that Apple? Deep pixels. Deep pixels. Right.

So if you have smaller micron size for the pixel and you just group a bunch of them together, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get more low light, you know, the same amount of light that you would from a regular pixel that size. the way they've done it is they think that the things that form the walls between their pixels is thinner and better and because the way that they lay out the RGB.

So when there's a pixel, it's not just like one thing. There's an R and there's a G and there's a B and it senses those different colors. And Samsung is laying them out slightly differently so that when they get binned together put together, it forms a more natural layout of RGB than it otherwise would if they just had

each one be traditional. We promise you pixel layout talk on this episode of the Veritas we are bringing it to you. So there's like a stronger together aspect of the fact that you've got nine of these working all at once.

Right. Somehow understand the R and arness and the Gness and the Bness. Yeah. So like you normally think it'd be RGB, RGB, RGB, RGB, right?

And just whatever. And they're doing like RRR, G, G, B. Right. I'm oversimplifying. And so that means it's designed from the jump for them to be bin together so that there's less color aberration from that, and it does it on the sensor, so there's less like waiting for the software.

All of which is to say, Samsung was faced with the problem, and the problem was the pixel and the iPhone were taking better photos than the Galaxy S-10 by a noticeable margin. And so they needed to solve that problem, and they solved that problem with hardware. Yes, and that is what I love about Samsung than most. And to be clear, it's not just high megapixel. It is also a very large sensor. It's a large sensor, but by Air Force. Yeah, but that's what I, that's what large means.

Yeah, I'm doing great. But like, it's linear in terms of pixel density. Right, the 0.8 micron is the same for the 48 and the 64 and the 108. It's just the 108 is a bigger sensor than the 48 megapixel. Right, but the other thing that Sam's like would tell you is judging it, just saying it's 0.8 microns is unfair because by default, it's something closer to like 2.4 because the thing is designed by default to bin those pixels together. All right. I'm just going to,

I'm just going to, we've said binning so many times. They're cheating a little bit. A little, a little bit. Yeah, because they get to say it's 108 or 48 or 64. What they really mean is like 24

because they've just taken their little discrete pixels, which they're counting for the big number. Mm-hmm. to create larger, like, logical pixels. But if you have a ton of light, you can shoot the actual 108. But yes, most of the time you're not shooting one. Yes. Yes.

And all of this is actually... We have tried to sum this up so many times. All of this is just the technical underpinnings for what they actually want to do, which is convince you that these phones can do incredible Zoom photography. So the S20 Ultra has a periscope lens, so the light hits a prism and it goes across the phone. Samsung calls it a folding lens, and so it like goes horizontally across the phone. All these phones do this weird combination of sensor cropping when you zoom, and then they also will take multiple photos and stitch them together in sort of an HDR plus mode to improve the zoom.

And they say that they can get you up to 100 zoom. They will tell you that the S20 Ultra can do lossless zoom, at up to 10x. How do they do that? Well, it's optical zoom using the periscope lens up to 4x, and then between 4x and 10x, it's some combination of optical zoom and then sensor cropping and orbiting

depending on how far your zoomed in and what's appropriate from the sensor. And then you're just cropping a photo after that. Remember when they're like, deep fusion is pretty complicated to understand and really know when it's on? Samsung's like, okay, there's a periscope. Yeah.

Step one. Periscopes makes so much sense. I'm sorry, but they're super practical. Here's what we've done. We've introduced a math problem and connected it to a periscope. Yeah. And Deeter has to say the word binning 500 times. But then you get 100x soon.

Can I actually just step away from this extremely dense conversation for one second? I just want to point out that I wasn't going to go this hard. No, I wasn't going to go this hard, but I needed to finally show up Neli and be nerdier about pixels than he is. No, that's true. It is very fair. And I do think this is super interesting because this is, these are the two fronts in the fight. Yes. Right?

There is sort of all the way on the far end of the spectrum, there's Google saying we just bought an off-the-shelf sensor and we can software our way through it. Yep. And that has been very successful through them. Somewhere in the middle is Apple saying, our sensor's the best one. And we're good at software. And that combination has been very good for them this year in particular. And then there's Samsung all the way on this side being like, this is a muscle car that we've made. We've made it out of multiple million smaller muscle cars that add up into one gigantic muscle car.

And I love it when Samsung just goes full in on hardware, because that's what they're best at. Are they going to do any computational photography stuff or is that just sort of the hocus focus of the Zoom? They are doing some computational photography stuff. So the Zoom does include some of that computational photography. On low light, I think they're increasing the number of photos they can stitch together up to something like 30 or something, which gets really close to the night vision stuff that Google is doing. But again, with camera stuff and in particular, I hate to say, and in particular with Samsung camera stuff, you got to wait until you try it because they always talk big game about their cameras.

And this year, especially they are like, this is a revolution in photography. Everything changes today. And it's like, wow. Well, let's see if you live up to that. Yeah. Well, they do compute all the details away from your face by default. Yeah. That's a classic Samsung.

We've examined your face and our computer will now remove all wrinkles and texture. I was listening to some podcasts that they were talking about like ray tracing in the future. It'll just be like AI algorithms that just know what things look like. You don't really need to render games, right? You just kind of render your best effort, kind of a simple rasterization, and then you just use AI to fill. I know what water looks like. I'm AI. I'm smart.

I feel like our photos are going to more and more be like really weird because of that. Like, oh, I know what that background. I know I've seen grass before. I'll just fill in some grass from my library of grass. That's great. That's what our photos are going to be. Just this amalgamation of what AI thinks reality is. We're so close to that already with some of what.

what the pixel does. Anyway, we can't do that again. We've done it once. We've done it 10 times on the show. We can't do it now. Can I just tell you what my favorite camera on the S20 is just by looking in the spec sheet? Yeah. Selfie camera, S20 Ultra, 40 megapixels F2. They did it. Someone finally did it and just put the big camera on the front. It makes me so happy. Is it any good? I don't know. Okay. I will tell you that my favorite new, uh, I think it's called single shot, single take, something like that. It takes all of Samsung's weirdo camera modes and just does them at once. That's great.

You point the camera at somebody, you hit the button, you wait 10 seconds while stuff happens, and then you just get a collage of all the weird camera features that Samsung has and you can just pick the ones to want to save. That's so smart. That's such a good solution to Samsung being itself. Yeah, I love it. Like, we've given you too many choices. Because we're Samsung, we're not going to choose to help you understand those choices. We don't want to limit those choices.

We're not even going to help you pick one. We've even created another mode that's all of the choices. That's the best. It only shows you the stuff that it thinks actually turned out well, so it doesn't do everything. Oh, it doesn't? No, that's what I want. I want the one where it's like, it's high noon and here's night mode. Let's see what that's like.

Nothing in this scene is moving. Here's a cinematograph. Let's see what happens here. That's great. The screens are 240 hertz. Not 240 hertz. Sorry. The screens are high refresh rate, 120 hertz.

They come out of the box at 60, but you can tick it up to 120 if you want. And Samsung isn't screwing around with trying to dynamically change the refresh rate based on the content. And if the screen's moving or not, they're like, nope, screw it. If you turn it on, it's on. Really? Yep. Isn't that supposed to save battery? Yeah.

That sounds like a recipe for no battery. Well, they claim that it's only about a 10% hit on battery if you just turn it on. We shall see. Yeah, that's a big question mark out there. I mean, between the 5G radio, high refresh screen, the periscope, I'm sure, is costly. Shoot an 8K video if you want? Yeah, 8K. Are these the first 865 phones?

What are? I think they have been, I think they've been beaten to the punch technically on both 8K and maybe the 865 by like, a Chinese phone manufacturer that's escaping me. Because I just wondered if the 865 is just bonkers good. We'll see, 120 hertz? No problem. I'll put that one on one of my little course. Yeah.

I think there's been 865s out. I definitely saw it on a spec sheet around CS time. Yeah. The big takeaway for me, though, was looked at the phones, took a bunch of pictures, tried to guess if it was any good, shot video of it. The Xiaomi Me 10. There it is, yeah.

looked at all the stuff, walked away, and was like, yep, those are Galaxy phones. They are incredibly wildly impressive. They have every spec you could possibly ask for, but they're just, you know, they're just, quote unquote, they're Galaxy phones. Like, they don't, I don't know if they feel like they're the start of a whole new generation of phones that justifies jumping from S11 to S20, which is Samsung's claim. Well, I like it because it lines up with what year we're on. So it's just going to be easier to keep track of.

Yeah, that's probably it. But yeah, it doesn't seem like a leap forward other than the price is a bit of a leap forward. The price is a leap. Well, the cameras could be a leap. That's the claim. The 5G and the cameras are the two things that they're most excited about. The cameras because Samsung gets to flex that their sensors are really good and they can do all sorts of crazy math with photos. And the 5G because it's 5G and that means that carriers will sneak.

knees and back it up with marketing because they have to. That's right. VR and AR is now enabled because that's my favorite 5G feature. I just want to point out, I'll get to it. I just want to point out, the Me10 was announced today. Also has 108 megapixel. Looking at the news wrong. The ZT-Axon 10S Pro came out before Samsung.

That was it. I just want to get it right. I mean, I think that battery life question is super real, right? But the batteries are huge. 4,000, 4,500, and 5,000. And that's why it's a gigantic phone. Yeah. Okay. But still, like, you've got new radio,

a new network that is probably going to be switching a lot between LTE and 5G, just based on the coverage that exists that we know so far. So you've got a new radio switching and hunting a lot. It's the first generation of those radios, really,

aside from the sort of gigantic monster version. It's kind of the second. It's the second generation of those radios. First generation of this network still. Yeah. Okay. You've got monster camera sensors, gigantic screens that you can run at high refresh rate. Yep.

Like, I am just like already worried about battery life. And you've got a really powerful processor. Like, yeah. It's just a thing. Yep. All of that is a thing to worry about. But it's possible that it'll be fine. You know, when LTE first came out or YMAX, you know, there were settings to just stay on the

older network, right? to preserve battery life. And a bunch of people did that, especially with that very first generation of LTE phones. I was like, nope, I'm just staying on 3G. I want my phone to last one in two hours. Is there any greater indictment of 5G than people buying the first expensive flagship phones for the network and not using 5G? Just based on all of the hype that you have heard. Yeah.

Like, how will you do robot surgery with your Samsung S20 if you turn off 5G? Fireman see through smoke? Yeah. Is it, will there be any greater? indictment than when we do that how to turn off 5G and your Samsung has 20 you know who wins the race if you do that I'm assigning that post right now I don't even know if you could do it I just know that post will get more search traffic than anything we do that month yeah I like the idea that like I mean if you think of I mean phones are very much like this already but there's just different modes for what you do like when you're listening to music on your phone and the screens off is very different than when you're playing like a 3D game you know there's obviously lots of different tiers, but I definitely could see the internet being like, I need a boost mode. There's also, there's also this interesting thought with the internet where is it, let's say

the 5G could buffer your video so quickly that it only does like half a second worth of, of internet activity, and then it just goes to sleep because it's already buffered the whole YouTube video. You know, that idea, that could theoretically save battery. You sound right now like a telecom executive. You're just making stuff up that sounds good. The problem is that they don't pay me anything. I'm just saying, like, you could be just a random 5G network equipment vendor right now.

Imagine a network where all activity took place in fractions of a second, enabling a future of smart cars and robot flower vendors. Less network congestion so that first responders. There's no MWC this year. Where are we going to get this kind of information? Can I say one more thing about? the, well, two more things. One, they put enough RAM in these phones,

so it's 12 gigs by default. The Ultra can get up to 16. That's amazing. Two, the Samsung event, it was, first, it was like the coming out party for the new president of the mobile division, TM Row, and so he was on stage a bunch, and I think that was a good call.

But two, it was, there was this surreal parade of partnerships. Netflix came on stage and said, we're partnering with Samsung, and I was like, what does that mean? and they're like, we're partnering with Samsung. There's going to be a Netflix screen on the Bixby screen or something. I don't know. Google came on stage and was like, we're friends with Samsung too.

We get to say the word Android on stage because Samsung won't do it. And also, we are the first and only operating system to support 5G natively, which is a thing they got to say today, which is kind of amazing. Isn't there also some like Duo thing? Oh, yes, there's a Duo partnership where Duo is now the blessed first party video chat app on Samsung. I literally thought they canceled Duo. No. No, it's Allo.

Yeah, alo is canceled. Duo is the good one, the popular one. That's basically becoming the standard video chat on Android. Okay. Microsoft on stage, not to talk about the office stuff, but instead to talk about Fortza. There's a normal version of Fortza. They didn't talk about XCloud for some reason, although we later got a statement that

was like, yes, X cloud good, Samsung good. Wink. Just to be clear, the Forza is just a game that runs on your phone. It's not an X cloud game. No, correct. Okay, interesting. I was very confused by that. Yet another battery life drainer for the Samsung Galaxy.

Yeah, they're just, they, Samsung is like trying to form like this like, I don't know, like Axis, that alliance of companies to make sure that Apple doesn't take over. which is weird because Samsung has got huge market share, but they are definitely hugging a bunch of other big tech companies pretty close for some reason. And maybe it's that, like, they know that no one is ever going to, like, really want to start signing up for and paying for Samsung services in the near future. So they figure they may as well get the services that people actually like and have those brands associated with Samsung.

That's my guess. I mean, I think that makes, I mean, how many services have they tried to make it? They made milk music. Like a massive music service, it doesn't exist any. Like, they can't do it. Like, there's no Bixby button on it. We actually have not. There are two things the phones don't have.

They don't have a Bixby button and don't have a headphone jack. Wait, they don't have DECS either, right? No, they just didn't announce it because Dex is one of those Samsung features that, like, they announced it real big and it'll just stay on the phone forever and no one will use it. Yeah. Like MirrorCast. Oh, oh, so the 8K that you can shoot natively on the phone, you can cast to an 8K TV directly from the phone. And I was like, wow, how does that work?

Does Google cast support 8K? Here's what happens. You push the button. No, no, no, no. They said, you know, I think it's some kind of mirrorcast. Yes, it's still there. All right, we got to stop this. The phones look cool.

One are they coming out? They're coming out March 6th, pre-order start February 21st. They start at 999-99, which is pretty expensive. and you can spend up to $1,600 you want, which is very expensive. If you'd rather just get an S-10, they've dropped the price on all of last year's S-10s by, like, I think, around $150. I mean, again, this is going to be the – this is the year when the 5G networks come out and the 5G hype train's rolling, and people buy the S-20 and they turn off the 5G radio, or they just buy an S-10 because it's cheaper and it'll work just fine. Yeah.

The rubber is going to hit the road on the 5G hype this year, and I cannot wait. It's very exciting. Let's take a break and talk about that when we come back on the first. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers.

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Look, we've talked a lot about exciting hardware. We've talked about the future of cameras, the organization of pixels into bins. It's been great. Yep. I'd like to ruin that all. I'm so excited.

By talking about a merger. So let me actually just set this, go ahead. But first. Oh, yeah. Because we never forget every week. Sorry. America's falling apart. It's overfall.

Do it anyway. You do a segment every week. I can't believe I forgot it. It's fine. It's called bring back bump. Because the very important feature that we forgot to mention is that Samsung has reinvented AirDrop, which Google has tried to reinvent a couple times. Reinvent is not the correct word for this. But you know what I mean?

People have files on their phones. and they want them to be on other people's phones also. Apple has solved this internally inside of its ecosystem. Nobody's really solved this on Android. I was not even aware that there was a feature in Android to do this in the files app. I don't know. And now Google's kind of working on another thing. But now Samsung has its own, what's it called, QuickShare?

So Samsung's working on QuickShare. So I'm guessing this is between Samsung phones. All I'm wondering is, like, why, like, if you don't remember, bump was early on in the Apple app store ecosystem. There was this app. You'd put it on your phone. And if you and somebody else both had it open, you'd physically bump your phones into each other.

And then the bump app would check your location and who else had bumped at the exact same time. And then it would transfer contact information. This is the first original misuse of cloud computing resources. It's terrifying if you think about it now. You know how it's like we got to turn on this light bulb by sending a command of Amazon Web Services? And then it's going to send it back to a local device your network. Hey, Paul.

Hey, Paul. Can I just tell you what happened to bump? Google Bump. Google Photos is what happened to bump. But all of this to say is like bump as messed up as that was. We're going to track your accelerometer, send it to a cloud server along with your location. It was a method of sending information from one phone to another. Something that palm, like we bring up this ad like every other episode, but palm solved with IR beaming, right?

But nowadays, unless you have an Apple phone and someone else has an Apple phone, people don't really know how to send files directly between phones. And so I just think, you know, all our phones have NFC now. They should just, there should be some protocol. Yeah, you just touch two phones and it says like, hey, we saw that you just touched phones. Here are some services that you both have. Do you want to engage in any of them? That was called Android Beam, and it was so bad that Google just quietly killed it. And they're supposedly working on a new replacement, and it may or may not work, you know,

university across Android phones. It may or may or may not work across, like, Windows or Chrome OS. Meanwhile, Samsung's like, well, whatever. Then they just built their own. It works across Galaxy phones. And they also built, they're just doing a free link service where you can just upload up to five gigabytes a day to their cloud, and they'll just live in their cloud

for anybody to download for, I don't know, 24 or 40 hours or something, so you can share files that way to people that don't have Galaxy phones. Also, I'm hijacking your segment to talk about the Bluetooth sharing feature. Have you heard of this? No.

So, here's a problem. You're driving in your car, and your friend is sitting in the passenger seat, and your friend wants to play music on the Bluetooth on your car. What do they do? Yes. If they pair to the Bluetooth of your car,

your phone's going to get unpaired and that's a hassle. So what if? Imagine if instead of pairing to your car, they could pair to your Galaxy phone. And then once that happens, they are able to use Wi-Fi Direct to stream the music from their phone to your phone

and then your phone to use the Bluetooth to stream it to your car speakers. I mean, okay, okay, so that sounds horrible, you know, but they're doing the work. You don't have to imagine, Paul, because it's real. They're doing the work. You know?

Because that's what I'm saying. All that's happening is like, I'm a friend in a car and I want to play music, right? And these tech companies, I don't care. They do it. They've got to solve the problem. Samsung at least is doing, put it in the effort. I just want to at this time point out that there was a hundred-year-old hardware interconnect Stanford that never failed.

Eight track. It just, it was there. It was fine. It worked really well across every device. Also worked for file trance first with the iPod shuffle. There you go. Maybe we extended it too far with that one. I'm just saying, it is amazing that we're like, we got to get rid of this port so that we can send music over Wi-Fi so that we can send music over Bluetooth.

Again, destroying the battery under Samsung. You can charge each other when you put the back together. It was really good, the headphone jack. It did a lot without... How do we add more computers to music? The Samsung executive said that day. I don't even... Now I'm just out of juice.

All right. T-Mobile was allowed to buy Sprint. Wamp-Way. Can I just read you some of this? So there's that... Look, everyone kind of knew this was going to happen because the Department of Justice and the MCC basically corruptly brokered this deal.

I'm sorry. McCona Del Reyum, he's in charge of antitrust in this country. He's like sending emails to T-Mobile executives being like, you should call that senator of yours. Really? It doesn't seem like what the guy in charge of antitrust enforcement should do. Yeah, if that's what he did. It's all in the trial.

Great. Everyone knew was going to happen. Like, John Ledger spending millions of dollars at Trump's hotel in D.C. It's going to happen. Just a coincidence. Yeah. It's a nice hotel from what I'm told. Also owned by the president.

The president, by the way, hated the deal until he started staying in the hotel. tell. Really? Yeah. It's like, it's shady. Everyone knows it's going to happen even though it's lost. It's going. Right.

I don't love it. But sprint's bad. I think this plan to make Dish Network a fourth carrier seems shaky. But like, okay, like, we know it's going to happen. What I was not expecting was for the world's most emo judge to start this decision with like 10 pages of poetry about how no one can predict the future. Let me just read this to you. It's not wrong.

You can't predict the... How the future... This is the judge before he even starts talking about wireless networks. How the future manifests itself and brings to pass what it holds is a multifaceted

phenomenon that is not necessarily guided by theoretical forces or mathematical models. Now I ask you, is that copy from Judge Victor Marrero of the United States Second District of New York

or Gwyneth Paltrow. Because that's some goop shit right there. I'm just putting that. No, he's clearly making the case that the Hegelian dialectic, which was the foundation of Marxist theory, is incorrect. And because we are not communist or socialists, obviously this merger should go through. Courts employ various behavioral measures that not even the most exhaustive and authoritative technical expert study could not adequately capture or gauge as a reliable prognosticator. Of likely events set in motion fundamentally by. business decisions made by various live sources, relevant market competitors, other market

participants, public agencies, and even consumers. You can't predict what's going to happen in the market. The way you figure it out is you just let the market act out, let people do what they want to with the things that they own, and then you see how it shakes out. Maybe. Sure. I 100% agree with you on that. I just, I don't, usually judges don't just like, they don't say things like.

all of these experts cancel each other out. Like that's not, you're not usually like what we'd like you to do is put on your trial, put on your case. And then the other side will put out their case. And then I, as a judge, will say, your cases have canceled each other out. Well, and those cases are the state's attorney general were saying to this judge, don't do this, don't allow this merger, which this merger has been going on for like a year a half.

Two years. They're saying don't do it because of this will be bad for Verizon and 18C. So the way this, they back up out of this feelings zone, the way this goes through, just like the boring practical process of this. The DOJ says, you guys want to merge. We would like you to make some concessions in order to get the deal. Whether you do that above board or not, whatever. In order to get the concessions, the DOJ files. to stop the merger.

So the DOJ filed a complaint saying, we want to stop the merger. You can read that. It's out in the world. It's a different proceeding. That complaint laid out a whole thing. Then T-Mobile and Sprint agreed to their concessions, and the DOJ filed the settlement agreement.

That's how all this dish stuff got involved, right? Yep. And that's where the dish stuff came in all. They made the deal. They brokered this arrangement. So just from the jump, the government's position is, don't do this. On its face, this is bad,

but for these conditions that we've agreed on. And then they agreed to those concessions. And they've agreed to those concessions. Then all that's done, the state's attorneys general say that deal isn't good enough. So we're filing to stop it. So it's not just stop it on its face. It's already the Department of Justice said, in order to merge, in order to pass our review, we filed a complaint saying your stuff is bad. Team Mobile and Sprint made a bunch of concessions to get over that hump.

DISH Network agreed to do a bunch of stuff. And the states are saying this isn't good enough. So it's not just like purely stop it. Do you know what I mean? Right. Like they were already, this is bad. We're going to give you a bunch of stuff to get to okay. And we're saying it's not good enough.

So they want maybe more concessions. Potentially or whatever. So the states put on the case saying, if you let this happen, here's all this evidence we have, beyond experts and economists, we have, here are some emails from executives from these companies saying, we're doing this to raise prices. Would you like to read those emails, Judge? And the judge was like, I've read the emails, but that John Ledger, he's awesome. Also, Sprint sucks.

And, like, mostly what he talked about in this decision is how bad Sprint is. This is my favorite part. Like, even if this is a trash network, like five years from now, like in a couple months from now, Sprint people will wake up and they'll have a way better life. Like Sprint customers. Oh, yeah. You're saying like the bar is so low even if they blow it. Okay.

So he's like, look, Sprint is really bad. And my evaluation is that if we just leave them apart, Sprint will actually stop being a competitor. So you won't get the thing you want. It'll go to four to three anyway because Sprint will just like fade into oblivion. That's one of those like unknowable things. Like would it fade into oblivion? If it faded into oblivion enough, would just buy it and be? Or you could argue it has faded into oblivion and they are in the selling off the assets phase.

Right. So the question is do you let the third competitor buy the fourth one when they're in that phase? Or do you let someone else enter the market and try to revitalize the fourth carrier so that you have four? The whole goal here is the math, the models, the history. Right. It's trying to predict the future and try to centrally plan the economy. No, it's very much like when you go in every other country in the world, when you've gone from four carriers to three, prices go up. That's a thing that we know.

You can just like go to Canada. They have three carriers, price are sky high. Other countries in Europe, they've gone from four to three prices go. It's just the thing that happens. It's not unpredictable. The judge is like, everything's unpredictable. But he knows. He's like, okay, we got to have four.

So I'm going to evaluate this deal on whether John Ledger, who I think is the best, is going to raise prices. and or whether DISH network is actually going to build a network because there's some evidence here, emails from Deutsche Telecom executives, being like they're going to build a network that the lawyers can see, like, pass legal muster, but no consumer reuse. Right. Which just, I don't think we've mentioned it yet. Like DISH gets some spectrum and also gets to be an MVNO that uses T-Mobile's network for like... Seven years. but there's like three years of real good times or something like that. Yeah, so it's just like very complicated deal.

Right. So DISH gets boost, which is a prepaid service. They get this MV&O access to T-Mobile, the new combined T-Mobile network, on some favorable terms for some amount of time. And then they get some spectrum. They already have a lot of spectrum. What they're not hurting for is spectrum. Like Dish owns a lot of spectrum.

They own so much that the FCC has been like, you've got to use that spectrum. They pay penalties for not using the spectrum. The question is, why does this have so much spectrum that they don't use? This really bothers me. But they have a lot of spectrum they don't use. So this is like, the government's like, well, if we gave you some more spectrum, would you use it? And they're like, yes. Everyone thinks they're just holding on the spectrum so that when there's a big crunch,

they can sell it at a higher price, which is a smart strategy. All of this, like, wraps up in the judge looks at the case. He looks at the evidence. He looks at the email saying the prices go a lot. We actually ran this on his site. He looks at slide decks that T-Mobile made, being like, what's our future? We shouldn't get into a price war so that we can buy Sprint and then raise prices. Oh, there's favorable signaling from AT&T at Verizon that we can raise prices.

And he says, you know what? I don't think John Ledger is going to do that. I've evaluated him on the stand. I've observed his demeanor. I think he's going to hold to his principles and keep prices low because otherwise T-Mobile would lose its image. Which is just the moat. Like, what are you talking? First of all, he's leaving.

Like, Ledger's out. He's announced his plan to leave. Mike Sievert's coming in. He's the new CEO. Severt's like a good dude. Like, we've interacted with him before. But like... There's no ledger.

It's just like, you cannot... You cannot say a telecom executive is not going to try to make more money. Of course they're going to try to make more money. That's what they do. That's what telecon executives do. The whole point. The question is, you can't... Are they going to be competitive in the market?

Or are the big three now going to just collude and everybody has the exact same plan that basically starts at $100 a month? And what I'm saying to you is that the history of the world suggests that when you get to three networks, that is what happens. I just don't understand what's so special about three. Like often three is like a good, like you want a three-legged stool. No, you don't have a very cheap challenger brand that keeps everybody honest. Right? And that's not, like, Sprint was like ran out of money by just like literally giving service away. But it forced T-Mobile to try to peel off some of those customers and underpriced the big two.

So now if you've got the big network and you can just be a little bit cheaper than the big two, over time you'll gain market share. You'll even it out. Yeah. And everyone will have the same prices. I could see that happening. The other way I could see it going is that now there are three truly best-in-class networks. There's three networks that have AT&T and Verizon-style coverage, which Team Mobile, I don't think, never quite got there. They didn't.

Sprint definitely didn't get there. There's a logic to this where you say Sprint has a bunch of good spectrum, T-Mobile has some okay spectrum, T-Mobile has good management, Sprint has a disaster. It's such a weird. We'll just give the good spectrum to the good money. It's like if there was two paint stores and like one store only had some colors and the other store had some of the other colors. And they want, you know, like the spectrum thing, the exclusivity of spectrum is a really makes it such a weird situation. Also, it really bothers me how much unused spectrum there is. I'm just mad thinking about it.

I'm just saying that this decision to me is I've read a lot of bad court decisions. aside from the dunks on Sprint, which we really need to just enjoy together at some point in this conversation. I'll just read you some of it. I mean, it's like a lot of them. If you'll recall, I bought a pre, I was stoked on the pre,

I had to take back the pre and cancel that subscription because Sprint was not sufficiently serving me as a customer. For roughly the past 15 years, Sprint has made multiple ill-advised technological and business decisions, which have resulted in a chronically

underdeveloped network that is inconvenient for consumers to use. Sprint's offers deserve some consideration for their pro-consumer posture, but in retrospect, they reflect a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful effort to stay relevant rather than a sustainable long-term business strategy. Yeah, the company is at best struggling to even tread water. That's the opinion of the United States. Oh, Sprint. It's good.

I mean, it's like they're not wrong. Yeah. But I don't know, due in part to several questionable technological choices, Sprint's Network is poorer in quality than those of its competitors. And it's a brand image, it's correspondingly poor. Like, all right, so Sprint, they messed up. Yeah. Fine.

I think the big question is, do you believe just based on how charming these executives are, which is fundamentally how the judge made his decision, right? From this evaluation, the court called a number of telltale patterns of conduct. business managers manifest that could serve as persuasive predictors of whether or not commercial firms are likely to engage in anti-competitive actions. He just watched them. And he has this big list of things that he was looking for when they were on the sand. John Lager and Charlie Ergen, the chairman of Dish, very charming people. Do you think you can just look at those two and say, even though in every other country where we've gone from four to three, prices have gone up?

Even though they're sending each other emails being like, can't wait to raise prices. they're not going to raise prices because they're charming. And that is how he made his decision. Yep. And that is just bonkers to me. Even though I expected the decision, the fact that he was like, they're so charming and sprint sucks. Let's just spin the diet. Like, fine, but usually you address it up by being like, I've, like, when I did the AT&T and Time Warner decision that I thought was bad,

I have to at least admit, I had to cut out, like, I just skipped 100 pages of the judge doing math to figure out whether cable rates would rise. 17 cents. And I was like, well, I respect this effort. It's very boring. I do not think the audience wants to read it. But he was in it. This judge is like, this all cancels each other out. John Ledger.

Super cool. Maybe one of those people could just read people. So DISH, which is being gifted all this access to T-Mobile Network. Yeah. What they have proposed to do is actually very smart sort of on its face. They're like, we're not going to build a 4G network. Oh. we're just going to do 5G.

And then we don't have this legacy stuff to deal with. We're going to... Okay, so it's already kind of risky. Your ears behind. But you can sell today's phones at Rone and T-Bubbles Network at this presumably favorable pricing strategy. So that's their, like, big plan. We're going to use all of our spectrum

and all these decommissioned sell sites we're getting from Sprint. And we're going to build a 5G network. Okay. Then their next plan is they're going to build a software-defined network. Okay. Which is like a whole...

The holy grail of the wireless industry. The problem is there are no vendors for this. Okay. There's a bunch of small companies, but the big companies don't sell this stuff. They should buy Erickson. So we should buy Erickson. So they got to, like, buy a bunch of parts from the smaller vendors

and actually build the software and integrate it to build this network. This is like a risky plan. Then on top of that, they want to use this thing called an open radio access network. Okay. So right now, radio networks are like closed systems. So you buy your stuff from Nokia, Erickson, or Huawei. It's their stuff. Their hardware runs their software.

That's your cell service. They're max. Yeah. It's just like there, it is true that Nokia optimizes its software for its hardware when you have their network grid. O-Ran is this like plan to have like some standards of hardware and software such that you can buy software from one vendor, hardware from another vendor, this whole thing. Why does this plan exist? This will succeed when we hit the year of the Linux desktop, is what you're saying. So why does O-Ran, by the way, O-Ran, it doesn't matter where in the tech stack you are.

It's always the same problems. There's like an alliance for O-Ran that all the companies have started. They're going to ship an open standard. You know this story, whether you know the acronyms or not. It's RCS, but for radios. It's the same deal. The Zygby Alliance has formed for O-Ran. So there's like an alliance of industry vendors that are going to make an open standard blah-la.

Why are they doing this? Because Huawei is coming in and undercutting the big vendors. And it is very expensive to build the full stack. So if you can decouple the stack, use an open standard, you can get more vendors in the marketplace. Hopefully you can drive prices down and compete with Huawei. Yeah. It's like a very American, how are we going to defeat the big, bad Chinese firm? Competition and hustle.

Like, that's the idea. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Bill Barr, who you might have some feelings about one way or the other, is like, actually Oran is stupid. It's a pipe dream. It'll never work.

In order to defeat Huawei, we got a Binochia. Now, and speaking, okay, why does Bill Barr, the Attorney General of the United States, have any knowledge about how 5G networks work? He used to be a telecom exec. There you go. It's all the same. This is also somebody who wants to get rid of the protections afforded by encryptuble. Yes. Yes. That's why he wants my note.

So I'm not really trusting this guy from my like tech. I'm not saying you have to trust him or not. I'm just saying like deep in the heart of all of this T-Mobile craziness is this plan of dish. Okay. Okay. To build a network using the stack of technologies. That doesn't exist. Unproven. But isn't that what businesses do? It's just trying to make things work and maybe it works out maybe it doesn't? I am just contextualizing the fact that the judge wrote all of this down is. though it is definitely going to happen, definitely going to work, and importantly. He led off saying

nobody can know the future. And yet, and yet, let me just add, let me just read a line to you. Okay. Although the full impact of 5G remains to be seen,

it promises significant increases in the speeds available consumers, lower consumption of mobile devices, batteries. Yeah. Do you think that future is a knowable, Paul? I was just saying. It's just this it's he bought all the hype.

That's all I'm saying. He bought all the hype that DISH can definitely pull off this plan, that they will definitely enter the market, they will definitely build a network that is cheaper than everyone else's network using. He didn't mention O'Ran is an unproven technology. Here's the judge. Dish's innovative network plans also demonstrate that construction of its mobile network will be less costly and time intensive than normally expected,

while the mobile cores of traditional network requires. large amounts of hardware that are costly to install and maintain. DISH plans to construct a virtualized network that relies more heavily on software and cloud hosting services provided by potential partners like Amazon. First of all, those are all just declarative sentences. It will be less costly. Second of all, what are you talking about at this time? Like, Amazon's going to show up and build Dish a network?

Like, he just bought it. Like Dish was like, here's our plan. Amazon will help us build a network with AWS because of software provided radio. And the judge was like, yes, this will definitely. As is they're right, this is what companies do. They take a lot of capital and they invest it and try to build things so that then they can make more money. Sure. I'm just saying if you're the judge and you're saying, I'm trying to keep four networks alive.

Buying the hype is not what you should do. I guess what bugs me is this default position that like by default, the U.S. government, no to business. No, you can't do anything with the business you own. You are not allowed until you come to us and beg for permission. and only under the very specific strictures that we apply to your business, will we allow you to act with the things that you own and the ways that you want? No one's stopping DISH from doing any of this. They have a bunch of spectrum they're not using. The government's actually trying to get them to do this.

That's true. That's the whole deal. It's the government pushing DISH to do this. Yeah, well, DISH is only pulled into this because the government told Sprint and T-Mobile that they couldn't do what they wanted to do for years. Is the government going to pay damages to Sprint and T-Mobile now that they're allowing this to go through? Like how much damages is this done to both of these businesses who couldn't really move forward? But this is the cost of... Plan clearly for the future because of all the uncertainty in their industry built by, specifically by the government.

But you're supposed to do merger review. Like, at the end of the... Sure, I can give you this example easily. If you didn't have merger review and you didn't block mergers, The next thing that would happen, the absolute next thing that would happen is Verizon AT&T would merge. The next thing that would happen after that is that Verizon, AT&T, and NewTMobile and Sprint would merge. Immediately, no questions asked. Why?

Because then they would have 100% market share and they could just raise prices. It's obvious that that would happen. It's not even a question. The only reason it's not happening is because the government would stop it. The next thing that would happen is that Ford and GM would merge and create one big car company. Like, you need competition in the market. The government has to protect that because that's actually the foundation of the system. Before we had antitrust law, it's not like there was just one business in the country.

Why is it called antitrust law? Because we hate trust. No, because all the big companies form trust to own their collection of the market. I mean, that's literally, before they're called monopolies, they're called trust. So like standard oil had all the oil production in the country. And oil prices were going down, were there? Yeah. This is like my zone.

I'm pretty good. I'm pretty sure the oil prices were going down on the standard oil. No. All right. I mean, like, they were going to buy railroads. Like, they were just going to buy, like, it's a threat to, like, literally the government if private industry gets this power. I mean, there's a whole episode. So you say we could, wait, we could bring down the government?

Yeah, do it. I mean, look, my goal, at the end of all this, and I support this. I think we should merge all the companies. Right. Merge the companies with the government. And then I will lead a scrappy rebellion. I can't get to that place unless we do the other thing. So it's merging all and just murder my god.

The only reason that a single carrier would be any problem at all is because the FCC gives exclusive rights to Spectrum. You don't think that there's any reason a single carrier would be any problem at all, except that the FCC exists. You could start a new competitor if you wanted to if you had access to Spectrum. But literally Spectrum, it would be unusable unless it would be unusable. unless it was managed. We all share this tiny little sliver of Wi-Fi spectrum.

It seems to work somehow. Well, that's just a function of how far Wi-Fi goes on that spectrum. It's a function of the fact that the radios are limited in power output. And 2.4 gigahertz is not a good piece, slice of spectrum. But we regulate the power output of the radios. So it's unlicensed, but the radios are not allowed to interfere at distance. Have you ever been in an apartment building? There's lots of Wi-Fi access points?

There's 20 access points available. It's a lot of laptop. Is that a great experience? It works. It's, like, it obviously degrades your experience, right? Sure. Look, it's fine. Like, that's a great, there should be more on life than spectrum.

But if you want to operate a cell network across the country, you need to manage the spectrum. For example, if you would like people to watch television, you cannot encroach on their signals because you would just destroy the television networks of the country. As far as you know. I'm pretty confident in that one. Like, that's just like, like, there's no debate. about managing spectrum. I know we can't have it, but I would love the counterfactual universe and go visit there where they don't give anybody exclusive rights to Spectrum and just see what would it be like. Paul, there are other countries in the world where they manage Spectrum wildly

differently. This is like one of those things where it's like the reason I know four to three is bad is because you can just like look around. It's not the first time the experiment's been run. And like there are many, many ways of managing Spectrum. We've picked this. I'm not saying our government like operates well. I don't know. Please, God, no. I'm just saying like four to three is just a known bad outcome. And here the two bets we're making is that the big third carrier that's about to be created, new T-Mobile, will not do the thing that the big third carrier traditionally

has done in every other country. And you can bet on the personality, you can bet whatever. But you're betting that they won't do that stuff. And then you are betting the DISH network will build out a fourth wire. carrier to take that spot of Sprint. That's a bet on whatever terms you want to make it. And that network will work. Right?

Instead of saying you two can't buy each other, someone else should buy Sprint in a network that exists right now and operate it better. Like a Comcast or Spectrum or something like that. Sure. There's a billion options if people want to enter this business. Which is basically exactly what happened with T-Mobile. When AT&T tried to buy it, the government said no. T-Mobile took their break fee.

they took a lot of money from AT&T. They took some spectrum. They fired everybody. They hired new management. And that guy is awesome. And cool. And they became T-Mobile. Yeah.

Like, there's like a million ways for this to go. And I, yeah, sure. I wish spectrum was not like a limited by the laws of physics. And yet it is. Like it's just a scarce natural resource that you have to manage. Anyway, I think we can agree that sprint sucks. I mean, they do now. Look, we'll see.

Maybe it's all going to work out great. Let me give you another example. 18T bought Direct TV. They have done nothing but raise prices on DirecTV customers. They have done nothing but increased the debt load of their company and raise prices across the board. Like these things don't work out. They don't have that cool, innovative, uncarrier spirit. I just looked at him and I thought to myself, Judge, you can trust him.

I just want Space Internet so bad. Why can't Elon Musk give me Space Internet yet? I feel like the we hear a lot about Starlink people talk to us about a lot and it's like there's so many sad astronomers in the world

who are like I can't see anything anymore because of these Starlink satellite go give get over yourself I want internet connection all right that's the Vergecast

that's basically our motto go to the dark side of the moon to build your own telescope there don't don't ruin my internet experience for a guy who is once on this very episode this podcast complained about

Not having very much capital. You know what? You need astronomers. You need to go to the moon. Yeah. That's how it's going to. That's great. I will say get over yourself.

I want internet is basically our motto. And that's the verge cast, everybody. That's it. That's our show. Dieter, you've just been watching this happen. Yeah, I was just enjoying it. Enjoying the show. It's been fun.

We're back on Tuesday. Domi Lee and I interviewed Scott Belski, the chief product officer of Adobe. Ooh, did you ask about my Surface Pro X? No, but we definitely asked him about our Mac Pro. Okay, good. When that stuff's coming. I like talking to Scott a lot.

So that's coming on Tuesday, we're back on Friday at the chat show. You can tweet at us, I'm reckless Paul's future Paul. Dieter is at Backlon. That's correct. Review season is like here. There's more stuff coming. So we used to say keep it locked, remember? Keep it locked.

Keep it locked. Rock and roll. Paul. promo code.