The Vergecast - The Samsung Galaxy Fold is here and so is the Galaxy S10

Episode Date: February 22, 2019

Samsung unveils its new Galaxy foldable phone and the new S10 at their latest event. The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Dan Seifert, and Paul Miller react to the latest Samsung event and debate whether a foldable phone priced at a nearly $2,000 will be a game-changer. They also discuss the new updates to Samsung’s S10 phone, including a headphone jack. Stories mentioned in the show: Samsung’s foldable phone is the Galaxy Fold, available April 26th starting at $1,980 Samsung officially announces the Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus, starting at $899 The Samsung Galaxy S10E is small without skimping too much Hands-on with Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch Active Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch Active measures blood pressure Nike says it’s ‘actively working’ to fix its broken smart sneakers Samsung’s Galaxy S10 5G will temporarily be a Verizon exclusive Trump wants 6G internet ‘as soon as possible’ AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson on Recode Media Google claims built-in Nest mic was ‘never intended to be a secret’ Apple dug a tunnel beneath the App Store, and the rats are getting through Apple to combine iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps by 2021, says Bloomberg You can remap the Bixby button on Samsung’s Galaxy S10 to do whatever you want Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On this episode of Veritcast, I'm being honest with you, almost all Samsung, the Galaxy Fold, the S10, the S10 Plus, the S10E, and the Galaxy Buds, your best friends. 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. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise 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 news. 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, the VIRGcast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media podcast system, a system that will make you healthier and happier. It's a system of an up. It's like cheerful. Oh, God, that was horrible. That was Dieter Bone. Today will be his last day at the verge.

I'm your friend Nelai. Paul Miller's here. Hello. Dan Seaford's here. Hey, Dan. Hey. So we have Dan on the show because it's Samsung Week. It's Samsung Week.

Dan and Dieter have played with all the new S-10 phones. Y'all looked at some watches. We've done some stuff. We're going to get into all of that. I really quick want to tell everyone to go listen to our interview with the CEO 4Square, Jeff Glick, which went up on Tuesday. If you're all interested in something we talk about a lot, which is how companies track you, why they track you, what the limit should be. Got really deep into that. So go listen to that if you haven't listened to it yet.

But let's talk about these phones. And so we had an argument before. where we began the show. It wasn't like a heated argument, but an argument nonetheless of do we begin with the Galaxy Fold or the S-10? Right. And Paul made a strong case

that we should begin with the fold and Neli tried to make the case that we should begin with the S-10 and after the argument, you know, everybody made their points and Nelai folded. Here's what swayed me. Tweeted this morning.

I will say it again on the show. I think we all, we're all too jaded. fundamentally the reaction to the galaxy fold was entirely too jaded. So the fold is the fold. It has a little screen on the front with huge bezels. And then you unfold it to a big screen. I believe Dieter coined the term mega-bezzles in our live box. It has mega-bezzles on the front.

You unfold it to a big screen, which is a towel. It's 7.3 inches. It's like huge. It costs $1,980 and its base configure. To start. To start. You can spec it up to more than that. It'll come out in April.

Like four people are going to buy this thing. So everyone was like, I don't want this. Android apps are tough. These mega bezels are stupid. It's $2,000. Who cares? You just look at the GIF on our site of the thing unfolding. And you're like, there wasn't even CGI to fake that like 10 years ago.

Right? Like you couldn't even fake it. It's a computer that unfolds. It's crazy. Like we should all just be happy with that. For one brief minute of 2019, we should all take a break and watch the thing unfold and pretend we live in the future. And then, you know, next week we'll watch things unfold. Next week we'll have Casey on the show and he'll tell us why Facebook is going to kill us and it's going to be fun.

But like this moment, you know, it unfolds. It's so cool. I'm watching the GIF right now and it's just like I can watch it over and over again. Even with the mega-bezzles. Like you look at the outside and you're super turned off by the thing. You're like, what is this? And then they do the trick. And it's like, whoa.

All right. So, Dieter, you were there at the event. I was there. This is the one thing from this event that did not leak. Yeah, except for the name, but whatever. The vibe was cool. So it was at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, which is a space that Apple has held events in.

So I was very curious to see how Samsung handled the space. I think they handled it pretty well. They had seating all the way up to the very front of the stage. I was literally three feet from their light-up stage where that floor of the stage was a screen, which is wild. Samsung does pre-briefs, and so we got to look at the phone ahead of time, a bunch of other people did,

but it still had a hands-on area, so we rushed in there. They didn't have the fold there. But it was like a pretty decent vibe. It doesn't reach like Apple levels of hype and craziness. I don't know. It felt like it was well put together. You know, the Wi-Fi failed like it always does. But I think Samsung put on a relatively good show as a Samsung keynote.

It wasn't weird. It wasn't Samsung weird. It was pretty dead ahead. I think they strategically chose not to address. stress certain things. But overall, I thought it was, you know, a nice atmosphere, a nice place, nice, you know, nice. It was nice. That's the bottom line. It was nice. But yeah, they led with the fold. And I will say that in the actual auditorium, there were two moments when the entire audience like had the exact same reaction. The first moment was when they announced the price of the galaxy

fold of $1980. I'm just going to recreate it for you here. Well, yeah. Watermelon, watermelon, water. Watermelon? Yeah. Watermelon's the thing that you say when you're an actor on stage and you're supposed to act like you're mumbling to somebody. You're trying to create noise.

So everyone was taking it back, and then they kind of got it, and then they wanted to talk somebody about it, and then they realized that $1,180 is a super strange price point. Why wasn't it in 1999? Why not just 2000? You know, it's a joke. What's the joke? What happened in 1980?

I was born First of all I was waiting for him to say that But yeah That was good Very fond of it Ronald Reagan was elected president The other thing that I couldn't

I didn't realize In the moments During the keynote But I knew But there was something in the back of my mind That was bugging me Tom Warren nailed it They did the exact same

Like cadence and song As Microsoft's Surface Studio reveal They did Pure Imagination The Willy Wonka song As strange Samsung staging, you should go watch it if you haven't seen it. I'd be shocked if no one, if anyone

listening to this hadn't seen it. But, you know, they had that big crazy stage, the wraparound where the floor and the background were one giant video display. They're basically standing on a giant screen. Which is awesome. Yeah. And it just, it occurs to me that, you know, Apple's vibe is like very friendly. Like, you don't need to know about these specs. Everything's great. Like, we're just all here in the Steve Jobs Theater. It's like being at home. Samsung's vibe is like, we're a giant technology corporation with the most advanced technology, and we can put one of these in every part of your house in life. Welcome to the Samsung lifestyle experience.

One will be provided. It's like, powered by Bixby. Right. It's so much more aggressive in a way that I respect because Google wants to be really friendly, Apple wants to be really friendly. Samsung is like, get on the Samsung bus, go to your Samsung job, use your Samsung phone. Here's a Samsung laptop. Here's the Samsung theme song that we're going to play on loop the entire time.

Yeah. You'll be protected by the Samsung missile defense system like the whole time. And like, it's great. It's good to be a little bit different than everybody else. I can explain that vibe. Google and Apple and even to some extent Amazon's ecosystems are super real, right? You can go live in Apple World. Apple has to be nice and friendly because like you probably live in Apple World or Google World or whatever already.

And if they are like chest thumpy about look at you can live in our world, people will get creeped out. Samsung World, Galaxy World. It's real. It's like, does anybody really aspire to, like, have all Samsung stuff? Right? And so they need to, like, they need to really tout the fact that they have this all-encompassing ecosystem. Because if they don't, people just wouldn't notice, right? Like, how many people are, like, hype for Samsung health in the way they are for Apple Health or, you know, even, like, Fitbit's system, right?

It's there. It's like, but it's just there, right? It's the same thing with name a Samsung software product or name a Samsung. ecosystem product. What you don't love using Samsung Mobility Connect telecommunication services with your Galaxy Buds and Tab S5E, which is... I'm just saying, man. Real sentence they said yesterday.

All right, let's talk about the actual Galaxy Fold. So it is hilariously $1,980 to start. It's going to hit AT&T and T-Mobile in the U.S. It will come with the Galaxy Buds for free. Good deal. It is arriving. Because there is no headphone jack. There is no headphone jack.

It's a real kick in the pants. Can I ask one question? quick question is is 1980 before or after a carrier subsidy is that a real number it's the real number yeah they will they will split that 1980 up into 36 payments it's coming April 26th 7.3 inch infinity flex display that is like a weird kind of four four by two four three aspect ratio with a giant notch in the upper right hand corner that is way bigger than I expected it to be yeah and So hilariously, they use Google Maps to show this thing off.

And it looks, I thought they were showing off a Chrome page at first. Because I thought it was a browser tag. And it's not. It's just a gigantic, weird notch at the top right of that screen. That's where the cameras and stuff are. On the front, it's got a 4.6 inch display that's used for phone mode that has the megabuzzles around it. It is weird to be in a place where we're like a small 4.6 inch display. but that's just where we are in the industry.

It's a strange screen. 12 gigs of RAM. It's 500, 12 gigs of storage. It's got a Qualcomm processor. It's six cameras. Three on the back, two on the inside, one on the front. Yeah. Yeah.

It also unfolds. That's the thing that it does. What's fascinating to me is they put like two on the inside. So they expect you to be taking selfies with the fold open. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I would. Absolutely.

Can we dive in to this hinge? Yeah. because the obvious thing with folding screens, and correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, there's no true creased screen fold. You always have like a, there needs to be some,

well, there's no such thing as an infinitely perfect fold even with paper, but you always have to have, there's some radius, right, to the actual fold part. So Samsung is hiding that radius in a hinge in a sense. No, no, no, you can see it. And Gadget, like, they zaprooter one of the promo videos.

And there is one angle where you can see there is a small gap when the thing is closed next to the hinge. I was kind of hoping the screen would sort of, when it closed, it would be perfectly flat. It would, like, balloon out inside the hinge in some way. But it's not, it's just, there's a tiny little curve. There's a tiny little gap when it's closed. But it's nothing like the Royale or whatever that was we saw at CS. Or, like, I think of, like, the Microsoft Surface Book Hinge. That's this big, like, book hinge.

It's nothing of that sort. Somebody found the actual thickness when it's closed, and it's slightly thicker than like a Nintendo Switch when it's closed. That's not terrible. It's not terrible. And it unfolds. Right. So, I mean, kind of the specs don't matter, right?

Like, you're not really going to buy this thing. You don't really care if it has a 12 megapixel camera and a 16 megapixel ultra-wide and a 10-mix selfie. Like, right, like, we're not, when we review this thing, are we going to spend, you know, like, when we review the iPhone, like, Dan and I spend a day looking at extremely close crops of iPhone photos and arguing about, like, that is not,

you're not going to do that with it. I hope we're not going to do that. No, I mean, like, really, it's, we'll talk about the S-10 in a little bit, but it's basically the S-10 technology stack with this crazy stuff. Yeah, but I'm saying the point of this is not how good the cameras are,

the point of it is not even how long the battery lasts. Well, the point is that it, It unfolds. Yes. I mean, I tweeted this and then I deleted it because I had a typo. But, you know, in the... And then... Neely, you were born in 1980, so you remember this because you're old.

Someone's going to steal my social security number in like 20 minutes, okay? We stopped saying what euros for it. The Gordon Gecko phone. Like, it was a status symbol. And people used it. Sure, they did business with it. People thought it was cool. Whatever.

But, like, you bought that thing to say that you had that thing. to pull that thing out and be the person who owns that thing. That is the Galaxy Fold's primary purpose so that the people who buy it can be the kind of people who buy things like that. Yeah. And also to prove that Samsung got there first. Oh, yeah. In the real way. I think it is the most astonishingly status symbol-y status symbol that we've had in this industry.

I can't even think since the Razor. I don't know if I agree with that, because, like, Samsung sells $2,000 Android flip phones in China that run, like, old-ass technology, like, busted specs and, like, bad software, and they sell for $2,2,200 because they are pure status symbols. So what you're saying is people want folding phones. Yeah, well, these are, like, flip phones. But, like... I'm saying this has all the status symbol-y parts of being a status symbol, like, being very expensive and flashy, while, also being like a true technological feat at the same time. Yeah, I think the expensive part of this is a strategic move to discourage people from not buying

S-10s. Like if it was priced at like $1,400, say, yes, that's extremely expensive. It's on the high end of smartphones, but you can buy an S-10 for $1,400 if you get enough storage. So like, this is priced so high that if you were considering buying an S-10, you're not likely to wait for this because it's just going to be so high out of your budget anyways. But I don't think they're even going to make that many. Paul, I think that the status symbolie part of this is, like, I enjoy a spectacle, you know?

Like, every now and again, I, like, slack Dan, like a eBay listing for an escalade. It's a thing that happens. I can't imagine just, like, calmly sitting at dinner and being like, hang out, I got to, like, check a tweet. And, like, unfolding this phone. Like, that's a moment. And some people want to buy that moment. And that's great. But to your point, Paul, like, the razor was a status symbol.

The original iPhone was a status symbol. The iPhone 4 had a status symbol on into it. The story with all of those is that they got past their status symbol level and became the ultimate mainstream things. The Razor became ultimately mainstream in a matter of a couple of years. The iPhone obviously became very mainstream very quickly. So does that mean that the folding phone, it's a status symbol this year, how many years until everyone's got a folding phone? Four. Yeah.

You think four? Four. How long until it's the best phone? Right? It's already a very interesting prospect as a tablet that can kind of be a phone. But it might be a long time until it's the best phone, right? Yeah. Oh, so somebody tweeted this at me today, which is like, I was tweeting like, this thing

is magic. Like, we should all just take a minute and just like do this and then we can go back to complaining about Android on tablets, which we, I assure you people do. It's standing by. It's coming for us. But someone was like, we get hype about all kinds of things that aren't real, like, VR or, holographic displays or Google Glass. And my counter argument to that

is that the utility of those things is still like unknown. Right? Like I don't, VR's pretty cool. The AR stuff is neat. Like, great. But the utility of it is still kind of unknown. Like, we have to build apps for that.

Google Glass was always dumb. It just always was from the beginning. It just was. It was exciting, but it was ultimately like dumb. The utility of this is very obvious. It makes a big thing small. Right. Like you don't have to sell that to anyone. You're like, you have a big thing and you can make it small, right? And if you can get that to a mainstream price, you can put the top end specs in it, suddenly you're like, are you the sort of person who wants a small phone? But have you thought about having a small phone that turns into a big phone? And everyone's like, oh, that's great. I love this. So I think that alone is going to drive, like demand to it. Like, there's a very simple thing of the big thing gets small. People are going to be into that. And I think that's why the selfie cameras are on the front when it's unfolded. I think a lot of people are going to use it as a big thing and then put it away.

Like, it's like if books didn't fold. Like, no one's like, why does that book fold? I wish I had a scroll. Like, you're like, no, this is great. It folds up. I have an exciting proposal for both the technology and the media business. What about bring back the 4-3 aspect ratio? Now, hear me out.

Step one. IMAX movies are tall. They're not super. super wide, they're tall. Step two, folding phones, it's easier to have a 4-3 aspect ratio. I thought I had three things, but basically, bring back 4-3. When it's unfolded, it's 4.2 by 3. I was reading that spec, and it was, it was, my brain was breaking because there were so many

dots and numbers, but it's 4.2 by 3, so it's pretty close. Imagine watching a Tarantino movie on this. It would be mostly black bars. No, but then you fold it up and you turn it sideways. And you got that tiny. You got the tiny. The way Quentin, look, I don't want to name check Quentin too many times. I think Quentin would be fun with this.

Q. Look, look, we're going to get it and we're going to play with it. And we're going to find all the apps that don't work on it. Yeah, so Deere, this is your moment. But like, I just, before we do all of that, can we, like, the fact that they're going to make this piece of hardware, and it will be, my guess is it will be medium good. Yeah, the hardware, like, the thing is, like, Samsung can innovate on the hardware, which they're showing very well. And the hardware will probably be fine.

It's obviously going to have lots of software struggles. Right. So I'm saying, let's all just take a moment to appreciate the hardware. Take a beat. Pull over in your car. Be like, folding phones exist. One is shipping on AT&T and T-Mobile on April 26th or the absurd price of 1,900. Just pull over and think about that.

Two months away. It's two months away. You live in that world. Yeah. You can walk into your local T-Mobile store and be like, give me this folding phone and they'll be like we would like $1,980 and you walk out of your team mobile store. I'm going to a T-Mobile store and being like, I only want to pay $45 a month for my service,

but I'm going to buy the $2,000 phone. That's perfect. But you live in that world. Let's just, that's great. Okay. You also live in a world where Android tablet software has to run on this thing, which is ultimately why I'll be medium good. Dieter, what did you think of the three apps at once, the sort of unfoldy, was a janky?

I think it's going to be a little bit janky. Now that said, this thing does have 12 gigs of RAM. So that's probably enough to run three apps at once decently. And Samsung already, like, if you have a S9 plus or you get an S10 or an S10 plus, like you can long press on the icon and multitasking to like do the split screen or do like a little popover thing. You could like take any app in a Samsung phone right now and just make a little app window that floats around on your screen like a chathead. You can just do it. It's wild.

So they know how to have multiple apps running or active or on the screen at once. Think about the elegance of even though it's awkward. Like on an iPad, you can like slide over from the side and have like an app scooch in and then scooch out. Or on Windows or on an iPad, you can split screen and then adjust the width between that stuff. And having used some of those features on like Android on Chrome OS, Android is not ready for that. The apps expect to be one size when they open on the phone the end. So I think that's why Apple, or not Apple, why Samsung went with this. panel system because it solves the problem of Android apps expect to not be resized by and large.

And so they expect to just be how they show up. I actually think it's one of the reasons that the side over thing works the way it does. Maybe that'll get better over time, but I don't know. I'm looking at the pictures that we have in our article of the three up apps. And I don't think this screen's big enough to really make this make sense. Like you look at the WhatsApp screen, it's tiny. You look at the browser. it's like you're not using that browser.

So like what is even the point? Wait, look at the size of the YouTube video. Yeah, that's great. It's amazing. Think of the original sort of criticism of Android tablets. The apps are bad on big screens, but if you get a small Android tablet, like a Nexus 7, say, everybody's favorite Android tablet of all time. And if it's not, you're wrong.

It's great, right? Because it's just like a big phone. And now we all just have big phones. So why would you buy Nexus 7, et cetera, et cetera. But this is only 7.3 inches, which is like not. that big. And so even though Android apps don't play well at like full on tablet big screen sizes, I think at 7.3, you're going to be like, yeah, sure, this is fine. Yeah, if you, if you stretch it out to the whole thing, like, I'm just saying like in this three panel, three apps multitasking

world that they showed off, I can't imagine that working very well. Yeah. I mean, right. This is like a weird set of apps, like just like kind of flatly. Who is? is ever watching a YouTube video. It's this tiny size while looking at, literally there's more screen real estate in this screenshot devoted to the next three videos you might want to watch than the video you're watching. Then they've got three conversations in WhatsApp.

Well, so like the ultimate move for this. And then a tiny Google browser. On Samsung phones where they have the split screen and like Deeter mentioned, the floating apps or whatever, is you park your YouTube video at the top and then you tweet about it in Twitter below it using like two thirds of the screen for Twitter.

or like you were watching a live stream of a football game or soccer game or whatever and you tweet about it. Like you can multitask like that. All of this just brings me back to this like very core thing. We talk about all the time with the iPad and we just don't talk about it with Android tablets a lot because they're Android tablets. But like you need a windowing system to like actually make this thing sort of work. Like you can't lock these things into these boxes because no one really. really wants to work this way. But it's possible that there is like a two window system here, right?

That you've got a big one on the left and a skinny one on the right, which is how the iPad started, right? So, like, I'm, I am not that mad about this thing yet until I actually try it and see how it is to, like, open these things and how do you actually manage these different windows and whatnot. So, and, like, I don't know, man, it seems a little bit hypocritical to be like, oh, my God, there's too many apps on the screen. I'm so confused when like in, you know, 1980 when you were born, Eli, you could get a windowing system on like a 480 by 320 display.

And like we wanted that and it worked, right? Yeah. And that's what I'm saying. I think that's actually the solution to these constrained displays is overlapping apps, which is what windowing systems like. Are you kidding me? Have you heard of a tiling window managers? Yeah. I use one.

Like I have a tile manager on my app on my Mac. It's just, I don't. Like, I often overlap windows in this space. I find it so liberating. Once you have a system that keeps your windows from ever touching or overlapping, you feel more productive and smarter. Paul, were you that kid who, like, didn't let your green beans touch from mashed potatoes? Maybe.

You don't want the juices. It changes the flavor. I mean, that's definitely how my kids eat. And that's what this is. That's what Android and Tablets is. And that's exactly what this layout is. It's the special plate you get for the kids that keeps all the foods in little compartments. I've never been a big phone person, so I don't really understand the mindset.

But I'm guessing most people aren't getting the note because you can have two apps at once on it. They just want a big screen, right? Yeah. And we're doing phone things on large screens. I think lots of people do picture and picture video notes, right? It's like one of the best things you can do with a screen that size. So, yeah, sure. And like, that's a great thing you can do on an iPad.

It is bizarre that you cannot do it on the. larger iPhones. I wish you could. Ultimately, though, the thing folds. Like, I just want to bring us back to that. I think, right, the utility that fundamentally to me is big thing made smaller, so that's cool. But this, the sort of like what happens when you unfold it, I don't know if this is connected to any Android tablet ecosystem stuff. Right? Like, Google built some facility for these displays, but they didn't connect that to the tablet version of Android as far as I know. There's no such thing as a tablet version of Android. It doesn't. doesn't exist.

No, I, I, uh, that's a real answer. It's just, it's just Android. They have been trying to build out the, the, you know, ecosystem for people to, the resize apps so that apps can exist at any arbitrary, you know, heightened width. And like that is what, and then it'll, they'll be on Chrome OS, but, you know, the only company's making Android tablets worth of dam are Samsung and Huawei, right? Yeah. And that, that's fine.

But, uh, I'm less worried about like the, of course. OS level stuff of Android than I am about app support. And Samsung's going to play around with different ideas for windowing systems on this bigger screen. But ultimately, I don't think they're going to matter that much because at least as of right now, it folds out to 7.3 inches, which is like the size you want for like a one app,

maybe two. But you're not going to use this thing like you would an iPad Pro. You're not going to open up a ton of apps at once. At most, you'll like do a picture and picture or have a second like slide app over on the side. Yeah. You know an app, a layout I would really like on a screen like this is along that right side, instead of trying to squeeze two apps in, squeeze kind of like a dock, like just a row of icons

so you can quickly switch between apps and you can like drag and drop things just like to that bar and then use that to switch the next app. I wonder if this thing supports slide over. I was going to say, I wonder if it supports decks. Like how wild it would be if you plug a dock into this and it just turns into like a full-on desktop computer and then you've got a second display. Paul, Samsung has a thing on its phone called Apps Edge or Edge Screen where you

like swipe in from the side and it brings this like tab of shortcuts that's kind of like a launcher. I could see them adopting that kind of idea like you were just describing onto this pretty easily. It could just stay up. Well, you can't on the phone because it takes up like a third of the screen, but I could see them allowing you to keep it open.

I cannot wait to play with this thing. How much like how much Samsung crazy is in the software? Like we kind of don't know. Yeah. Is all the crazy? Like, could they not fit in all the crazy? Because just like the, making the fold work was enough. I can't, I'm very excited.

I'm going to buy one. Can I say two things that are kind of related? Yes. I remember the third reason for four, three. If you look at most TVs on a wall in a living room, there's more room above the TV than there is to the left and right. That's just one thing. And then the other thing is, you know, the next phone, the, or, you know, the next,

the next milestone that we now can look forward to is the phone that folds twice. Yeah. What? Something that can double it. See, this phone doubles its screen size when it opens. Yeah. But a phone that folds twice will quadruple its screen size. Right.

So you basically open it to like a small tablet and then you open it again to a big tablet. Is that your thought? Your phone is the size of a razor when fully folded. And you fold it out and it's a razor size. for making phone calls. The razor phone, you mean, not like a man's face razor. Sorry, yes, the razor phone.

And then you fold it one more time and you can watch Quentin Tarantino movie. My God. All right, we're going to take a break from that, from that hopeful vision of the future. And we're going to talk with the S-N. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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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 upw-w-rk.com. Upwork.com. Okay, we're back. We talked about some future phones. Dan, talk about the now phone.

The now phone, literally now because... It's right here. We've got one here. You can pre-order it now. It's going to be in stores in like a week and a half or whenever you listen to this a week later or whatever. And it is not like one S-10. There are four of them. All right, walk us through it, buddy.

So you've got the S-10 and the S-10 plus. Those are like the successors to last year's S-9, S-9 plus. Then you've got the S-10-E, which is perhaps making. be the most interesting of the new line, which is a small phone priced against the iPhone 10R. And then coming even later after the fold, after the fold, anyways, there's a 5G S10 that's coming to Verizon first and then hitting other carriers. And that is not like a 5G version of the S10 plus. It's like its own separate model with an even bigger screen and other features. But the ones that are like important right now, S10, S10 plus S10E.

And this, Deere, you made an entire video about one UI, which is this new gesture thing that's happening at the bottom. That's an option that's not necessarily the default. I turn the option on on the phone Mila is using to confuse him greatly. It is so confusing. No, it's not. It is because the one thing that you want to do the most, swipe up from the bottom to go home, is also, depending on the timing of your swipes, the thing that activates Samsung pay, or, The Google Assistant. Yes.

Oh, Samsung pay is down there. What's going to happen when you swipe up? Am I going to pay for coffee? Am I going to talk to Google? Or am I going to go to the home screen? Describe this timing. Are you flicking up? Are you dragging slowly?

Before we get there. So, Samsung has options. The default is your standard Samsung layout of multitasking, home button, back button. Unlike Google, which is trying to come up with a full swipe system, Samsung defaults to that. You can switch it to a swipe-up system where you swipe up from one of those three parts of the screen to activate one of those buttons.

However, you know, holding down on the home button or like a slow swipe, if you go to a full swipe system, they still need a way to get to those other features at the bottom of the phone, and this is why Nilais were under this problem. One last point, the last couple generations of Samsung phones had like Samsung's version of Force Touch, which was just on that one spot

you could like press hard and get home. and that is now gone, I assume because they needed to make space for the ultrasonic fingerprint sensor to replace it. So, having said all that, the swipes are like, they're there and we can get very angry about them, but it's not on by default,

so I guess. There's a learning curve. I think once you get used to it, you kind of learn it. I've now learned to completely be unable to bring up Samsung pay. When I first picked up this phone, it was all I could do, and now I can't do it to save myself.

I think it only from the home screen is the Samsung pay thing. Anyway, let's talk about the changes to this phone from the S-9. So the most notable one, well, the two most notable ones, 1A and 1B. 1A is that the top bezel is much smaller. And the bottom bezel is much smaller. And we got the Infinity O cameras punched out, the whole punch cameras. Whole punch cameras, yeah.

Dan has pointed out to me that every one of Samsung's wallpapers fades out to a black gradient in the top right. So it hides it, which I think looks great, actually. Like, just hide it. Which for what it's worth is the exact same thing Apple does with its default iPhone wallpapers. Yeah. And then when you like do anything, there's just like a black rectangle oval thing there. And then obviously the fingerprint sensor. Yeah.

So on the S10 and the S10 plus, there's no rear fingerprint scanner. There's no capacive one. It is under the screen ultrasonic, which I believe, I'm not sure if it's the first on the market, but it's the first ultrasonic fingerprint scanner I've used. Other underscreen ones, like on the 1 plus 6T, is an optical base one. So this is a little bit different technology that Samsung says is more secure,

faster, harder to spoof, stuff like that. But basically, you place your thumb on the lower part of the screen and you kind of find the right spot and it reads it and unlocks the phone. Is it fast? With a ripple effect on the screen, just like the S3.

Yes. The Riverstone S3. You know, it's funny, Nealai. You listed what you thought were the most important hardware aspects of the S-10 and you didn't mention the fact that they like threw another camera on there. I think it's fascinating. He hasn't turned it over yet.

No one seems to care. Well, no, I was just saying the big two design changes from the S-9 are the front camera and the fingerprint sensor. Yeah, the stuff you look at all that. Yeah, yeah. Right. And the fingerprint sensor in particular is like a hilarious narrative of Samsung just finally getting here.

Like, where's it going to go? We put it in this drawer under this rock. How about on the back? Right next to the camera? The S&E does not have this fancy underscreen fingerprint sensor because it's cheaper. So they put it in the power button on the right side of the phone, which is what Sony has done for a few years. And it's like a capacitive thing on the side of the phone. Anyway, so we can talk about the cameras.

So there's two on the front. On the S10 plus. So I'm holding the S10 plus. There's two on the front. The regular S10 has just one. Correct. This camera is not what I had hoped it would be. Correct.

So the pixel 3 has like a wide angle selfie camera, which I would just, for the record, told Dieter on this show would be the most popular thing about the pixel 3. And he poohed me and I was completely right because everyone loves it. However, Samsung did not copy this great idea and then said this is like a depth camera. Right. So the main camera is a 10 megapixel auto focus camera, which I think is unique in that Samsung is basically the only mainstream manufacturer using autofocus front facing cameras. Everyone else used fixed focus. So that's pretty interesting. They've been using them for a couple years.

But then the second camera on the S10 Plus is an 8 megapixel RGB depth sensor. And they are using it for better what they call live focus, but basically your portrait mode types of features and stuff like that. They are not using, it's not a like a face ID array. So you can turn on face unlock, but it's just using a simple picture of your face as opposed to a 3D scanning array.

and you cannot get like an ultra-wide field of view. What is interesting though is if you, I think he's, Neil likes playing with a camera app right now, there is a button to go a little bit wider than normal, but I think they're just cropping and uncropping. Yeah, I think that's what they're doing. Yep, that's what they're doing.

It's hilarious. That's wild. This camera, Sam Biford wrote this story for us about how every company copies the iPhone camera app and it is probably the most influential software design in the world. Yes. Yeah, that's true. You should see a Huawei camera app.

Okay, so that's the front cameras. That's the front camera. What's going on in the back? So on the S-10 and the S-10-plus, they have now three cameras on the back, which is basically your standard, which is a wide angle. You've got the telephoto camera that was on the S-9 plus last year. And then the new camera is ultra-wide. So it goes even wider than normal. So you kind of have, it's kind of neat because it's like you've got three different perspectives or field of views in your phone.

tap a touch of a button away. Yo, I love this wide angle camera. And it's extremely wide. The wide angle camera's great. Yeah. Like if I don't know the exact specs of it, but if I had to guess what the equivalent of that on a large camera would be,

I think it's like 10 millimeters. It's really wide. It's also extremely distorting. Yes, which is why when you are very close to your subject, it will distort. Interesting about that camera is it's not an auto-focus camera. It's fixed focus, but at those extreme wide angles,

that doesn't really matter that much. So do we think these take better? I mean, that's a lot of lenses. So it's a lot of lenses. So it's three different lenses and three different sensors. The only real new lens and new sensor is that ultra-wide camera. Based on what I've been able to gather so far, the wide camera or the main camera and the telephoto camera

are basically the same ones as we're on the S-9 last year. So F-1.5 switching F-2.4 aperture on the main camera still has a mechanical aperture switch thing. F-2.4 aperture on the telephoto. same size sensor, same dual pixel auto focus on them, but they're not like stepping forward with the sensor technology. Like we're seeing lots of phones this year with these 48 megapixel sensors that capture 12 megapixel images and they compress them down

and get a whole bunch of data out of them. Samsung's not doing that. So we really need to do a lot of like more work and testing with this to say whether they're any better or worse. But on paper, it's not really pushing the envelope. I will say that I'm just zooming in on some of these wide angle shots and they don't hold up great. They look really cool.

Yes. They don't withstand. Yeah, so the wide angle camera is a 16 megapixel sensor. So that's a new one. And it's like an F2.2. It lens or something like that. I don't know what I just did, but now it wants me to use Bixby Vision. Yep, sounds about right.

I just like, use the phone for a while. And I was like, Bixby's here. The dog comes out in his little bow tie. Looks like you're taking a photo. So we should talk about that, too. There is a Bixby button. There is a Bixby button. It launches Bixby.

It does Bixby things. But on the units that I looked at at the hands-on area, there was a setting inside the Bixby feed. It's not like in the main settings. It's in the Bixby feed settings. You go to that, you tap the hamburger menu, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you can find a place to customize the behavior of the Bixby button. And there's three things you can do with a button.

You can press it once, you can press it twice, or you can long press it. Long pressing will always launch Bixby voice for you to ask a question. of Bixby. And then you can pick... Why, Bixby? Just because. And then one of those

single or double presses will always launch the Bixby feed. You can't do that. But then you can customize the other one. So you can set the single press to launch an app or to launch a Bixby routine.

So you could, you can in some ways customize it. Now, Dan is saying on his unit, it doesn't have that option. It does not. And that was the first things I did after pulling it out of the box

was to see if we could change that. You definitely looked in the right place, right? Yeah, I was looking in the right place. What it lets me do is, say, launch Bixby with one press or launch Bixby with two presses. But it does not let me choose a different app. I've reached out to Samsung for clarification on this. They are currently working on it. So I don't know if it's a software update that might be pushed to this review unit.

It is ahead of launch right now. We're about a week and a half away from launch. So it's possible that could be adjusted. It's possible that the ones they demoed had software that might not make it to the retail one. So we'll find out. We'll definitely clarify and let you know for sure. Yeah. Samsung, by the way, notorious for having 5,000 builds of its software,

customized for every carrier, for every region, for every random, like, different chip that they use. Who knows? Yes. It's always a delightful grabback. But you know what's going to be there? Bigspe. Yes. So on the S10 and the S10 plus, we talked about them a bunch.

Inside you got your Snapchat 855, like specs out the max or whatever. You can get a one terabyte S10 plus. That's $1,600. You can also get an S-10 plus with a ceramic back, which is kind of crazy. The one thing that's remarkable that I've been showing us around the office today, everyone says it's smaller than they expect. And it does feel pretty small for what is arguably a big phone. Like there's no getting around.

This is a big phone, big screen. It feels smaller than you would expect. But if you really want a small phone, that's like the S-10E, which is kind of an interesting story. So, okay, S-10. I guess we'll just compare it to what you miss from the S-10. So you don't get the ultrasonic fingerprint sensor. You only have the single selfie camera on the front, and you have the, is it the regular and the tele on the back,

or regular in the wide? I can't remember. You get two lenses on the back. It's the regular and the ultra-wide. It does not have the telephoto. I actually think that's better. I would rather have that. The screen is flat instead of curved,

so it has slightly bigger bezels, but I don't know, man, they're pretty small. If you're really complaining about the bezels on it, whatever. It's $750. It stills a headphone jack, still is USBC, still as wireless charging, still has the same processor, still has. The cheapest model has a little bit less RAM,

but whatever. The slightly more storage one has the same amount of RAM. And that's kind of it. It's a 5.8 inch screen, so it's a little bit smaller. It's like comparable in size to the iPhone 10, but it feels a little bit narrower in my hand. And I think it actually is like half a millimeter, millimeter thinner or whatever, or less narrow, less wide.

I don't know. Like, I think it's pretty solid. The question is, is does it feel small enough compared to the S-10 that people would be like, oh, yeah, I want the small one to justify it? And it's only $150 less than the S-10. And if you're the kind of person that goes on a payment plan, that $150, like, becomes a couple of bucks a month. And so, blah. So I have no idea if this thing is going to, you know, live or die, succeed or fail or what. Now, Samsung phones get discounted pretty aggressively, pretty quickly.

it's possible that this thing will get more discounted than the S-10 does. And so it will end up being like the cheap phone option and be more successful at being the cheap phone option than the iPhone 10R was. If that does happen, like it's, it would be really compelling because you're getting like cutting edge 2019 tech inside of it. Yeah. In terms of processor, LTE, sport, stuff like that. The other confusing part of all of this is the S10E we mentioned has a 5.8 inch screen and it's smallest. Last year's S-9 had a 5.8 inch screen. but the S9 is bigger than the S10E

because the S9 has more bezels. So the S9 is like the size of the S10, which has a 6.1 inch screen. So like it gets kind of confusing. You really eventually should just go. Yeah. Well, actually, hey, but if you do that, it won't help because if you hold the S10E

and the S10, you're like, man, these are really close in size. I could barely tell the difference. I guess I should just get the bigger one. And then you set down the S10E, and then you pick up the S10 plus. and you hold them next week. They're like, man, these two are really close in size.

I really can't tell the difference that much. I should just get the bigger one. If you put all three of them together, you can see the size difference, but when you try to compare them one to one, you're like, ah, it is almost, like, insane that they have three phones at almost, like, they're not identical sizes.

They're obviously different sizes, but they're so close to each other that it's hard to know which one to get. That's not so insane. That's like the Samsung story. Do you remember when you used to have a chart of Samsung some screen sizes and it was everything from like 1.2 to like 12.7. Like literally every little incremental screen size was available. So if it does get discounted,

so in America, obviously that I would say the big competitor here is not only the sort of $500 crop of phones, but the iPhone 10R. To Dan's point, if you get a 10R, you get the Apple's best processor, but you don't get their best wireless performance. You only get one camera. You do get face ID in the front. So you can do an emojis. That's great. That's whatever we cares. Yeah, what you're getting with the 10R is the battery life is like the biggest value to me.

Well, you get the battery up, but you don't get their best screen. Like the cut downs from the 10S to the 10R are noticeable. Are noticeable. I think we all agree that 10R is the best phone for most people because if you want that other stuff, you can just go buy the 10S. But in like Samsung world, the cut downs are not nearly as severe, right? You still get the screen. Yeah, it's still a, it's a little bit lower res, but at the smaller size, it's like, negligible difference to your eyes.

You get the new modem. Super Amelad, whatever it's called. You get the same processor. Yep. Yep. You do get two cameras in the back. Yep. Like, that's, and if it gets discounted at 500, now Apple's like really looking at some competition.

Well, so it's Apple, but also, the other competition to keep in mind for the S10E is One Plus, because it makes killer phones at a price point that's, you know, lower than that. They might be creeping up this year. Who knows? But like they make $500, $600 phones that are really good, but then the downfall is always like, eh, the camera. So if the S10E's camera maintains or does better than what like One Plus and those other, you know, 500-ish phones do, then it's golden.

But if those phones step up their camera game, then this thing is going to get squeezed because you're going to have people saying, ah, screw it, I'll get the really nice one. Or as screw it, I'll save, if I'm going to save 150 bucks, I might as well save 150 more because the camera's almost as good anyway. And get like a bigger screen and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, it's in a weird spot. So I think Samsung did the right thing by touting it as the small screen phone, because I do think that is its best selling point. And to Samsung's credit, they're very good at sort of Harnett, like, looking at like meme-based consumer demand.

Like, I don't really know how else to put it. Like, we hear about small phones a lot. We write about small phones. We tweets about small phones go viral. And then you, like, look at the raw data. And nobody buys small phones. And nobody buys them. You know, I think it's a convenient marketing line for them, to be honest with you.

I really think that the S-10E exists so that they can have a phone at $750 and then push the price of the S-10 and the S-10-plus up. Because the S-10-plus starts at $999. Like I said, you can spec it up to $1,600. The Galaxy fold is at $1,980. The fold is 1980. I mean, like, it gives them more headroom for their higher pricing. And, like, for what it's worth, the S-10E is $750. It looks like a deal.

It's still starting at more expensive than the S-9 started. just a year ago. So like, yeah, it exists to allow them to raise their prices above the board and then, or across the board and, you know, compete with Apple on pricing in terms of the,

can I just say how bonkers it is that we're talking about a five inch, 5.8 inch screen is a small phone. Just put that out there. Not that small. Oh, I want to talk about the headphone jack. Yeah, so all of them have headphone jacks.

All of, and this is kind of what I mean about like meme-based demand, right? So that, like, anti- iPhones, right? So they don't have a notch, they've got a hole punch cut out. They have a headphone jack. They have a smaller screen on the $750 model instead of a bigger screen, like the 10R.

It's almost like all of the things that people get really mad about Apple, the iPhone at Apple, Samsung's like, well, you're mad about it over there, but if you come over here, we have those things you're mad about losing. So it feels very much like an anti-Iphone. Which is what you want. There's competition in the market. I just, it's there. I'm very happy and excited about it.

I think they will actually move units because it's there. But the fold doesn't have one. And they were very clear that the fold is like the future. Right. Yeah. Is this the last one with that, Fond Jack? What do we think? Good question.

I mean, like, I wouldn't have been surprised if they dropped it this year. Like, I'm actually more surprised that it has it than it doesn't have it. Like, I don't know. We'll see it. Like, you know, they're going to do another. flagship phone in the fall with the next note or whatever? I will say the fact that this phone in this design, with this

set of features, with this amount of stuff in it, this thinness is just like a slap in the face for every Apple person who's like they could never fit it in there. Right. Yeah. It's waterproof. It's got a tiny bottom bezel. Actually, the bottom bezel is smaller

than the iPhone's bottom bezel. Yeah. And like everyone loves to talk about how the iPhone has no chin because they fold the the Amelette panel or whatever. Like, I mean, Samsung didn't talk about how it did this display, but it did it. Yeah. And it's just like every excuse Apple has ever given outside of we needed to spend a couple hundred bucks on AirPods.

It's like non-existence with this phone. I just want to put it out there in the world. It's also funny that they included the headphone jack because they're pushing the Galaxy Buds so hard. Get free-free order that's 30 bucks cheaper than the AirPods. You can charge the Galaxy Buds. from the phone. I know that there's a rumor the next iPhone will have like reverse wireless charging or whatever,

but that feature alone is killer. I don't know why I'm so excited about the fact that the phone can charge other things, but I love it specifically for the idea of traveling to a hotel room having just one charger for your laptop, for your phone,

and you don't even need to bring one for your earbuds because you can just set them on top of your phone. It's the best. Turn on the charging mode real quick. Let's try something. Oh boy. We're going to try to put my Apple Watch. So I'm going to tell him this isn't going to work.

I'm going to let him try. It's either not going to work or it's going to start a fire. It might not work with an Apple Watch. It should work with an iPhone. It won't work with an Apple Watch because it is a cheat charging and the Apple Watch doesn't use it. But you've got an iPhone there. It's charging my iPhone. Now it charges at 4.5 watts, which is less than slow wireless charging. Slow wireless charging is 5 watts.

So it's not a fast charge. It's really designed for like DeterSad accessories, like your headphones. And it's funny that you mentioned that they're pushing these Galaxy Buds. You get them free if you pre-order. Their latest true wireless headphones, you can charge them with the phone. That would have been the perfect excuse to drop the headphone jack. Like, oh, we dropped the headphone jack, but Apple charges you $160 for AirPods. Here, these are for free.

And you can charge them with your phone. Yeah. All right, so let's talk about the Galaxy Buds. The Buddies. I love that they're called Galaxy Buds. Just as a thing. That's a win for Samsung. They have a product called the Galaxy Buds.

I'm trying to remember what they used to be called. The Galaxy Best Players. Icon X. Yeah, they had the worst name the prior generation. So now the Galaxy Buds. They come with a little case. Dan was shown it to me earlier. Yep.

They charge wirelessly on the phone. We don't know if they sound good. They sound okay. I've been wearing them for a day. Vlad's going to do the full review. But I will tell you that they're a little bit less noise isolating than, say, the Jabra 65T elites, elite 65 Ts. They're also slightly more uncomfortable after like three or four hours, which is funny. but they're smaller and they're lighter.

And yeah, they pair fine with an iPhone. They're cheaper. They supposedly have six hours of battery life, which is basically as best as you're going to get. We've seen it from these fans of things. They have identical touch controls on both sides. And because it was okay for Apple to not give you volume control on AirPods, Samsung decided it's okay not to have volume control on the buds.

So you can play pause, next track, last track, and invoke a digital assistant like Sierra Bixby. and it's just straight Bluetooth? Yes. So what's funny is like they do the same thing as AirPods. If you put them next to an S-10, you open the case, it pops up on the screen, it tells you the charge. If they're not paired, you can click that to pair, just like you would do with AirPods on an iPhone,

which is kind of fascinating because I don't think I've seen an Android platform rip that off quite so hard before, but it's there. It's a nice feature to have. I'm not mad at it, but it is not original. How much does it cost? $130 bucks. So they're right in the range. Or free if you pre-order an S-10 or S-10 plus.

That's not bad. No. And it's better than when they were giving out like Galaxy Gears or whatever. Like your VR's. Do you want this like kind of Doom smartwatch platform or how about this plastic shell? Like it's better than that. I'd take that. Yeah.

No, I think it's a good little giveaway. All right. Speaking of Galaxy Gears. I've walked. I veered us right into it. Uh, there's a new smart watch. Yeah. The smart watch is at the same time disappointing and also maybe kind of interesting.

It's, it's, it's $199, right? It's $200. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So it, it, they got rid of the rotating bezel. They made it, I feel like, just like, maybe a little smaller. It's only a 1.1 inch screen.

It's super ridiculously light. Um, but it's, uh, it took an operating system on a watch that, like, felt really cool because you got to, like, rotate a thing and like the whole OS was like designed to work with something being rotated. And then that rotation. got replaced with like a swipe left swipe right mechanic but you still have to rotate and so it just feels a lot jankier to use than the last one even though it's like the exact same thing as the last one in terms of you know the core UI and stuff it just feels worse is this thing are they selling

these they sell them to Samsung device owners or or there's oftentimes lots of bundle deals especially even on the holidays you buy Samsung phone you get a free galaxy I'm just like they added this feature to where it can measure your blood pressure? Are they converting people who are like, that's a useful feature for me? I mean, you're not selling it to iPhone users. It works with an iPhone, but it's super clumsy. Like, people who own iPhones are either buying Apple watches. Maybe someone's buying a hybrid watch because they don't want to charge it or they're not

buying a smart watch. Other Android owners, which really don't matter because Samsung owns the market, but like other Android device owners, if you buy a Samsung smart watch with it, you have to install half a dozen apps. It's kind of a clumsy UI, clumsy experience. They really work best with Samsung phones. They're designed to be used with Samsung phones, which kind of makes a whole lot of sense. But I don't think they're converting people over here.

They will sell them as many as they sell of Samsung phones, but not everyone's going to buy one, right? Yeah, I mean, this gets back to the, like, this is why Samsung has to pound the table and say we have an ecosystem of galaxy stuff. They need to convince you that you want to live in that world and that they have got everything you want there. and they're a real big boy ecosystem. What's interesting is that this, at least they didn't announce it one, there's no LTE version of this watch, which is one thing that Samsung has had for a past few years on its generations of smart watches

and seems to actually be popular with a segment of customers who want to have connectivity and can't have a phone on them. So I know a lot of service workers use these kind of watches with LTE connectivity because they can get text messages and calls without having their phone out on the floor or something like that. I love my LTEs. watch. Yeah. I mean, I'm doing this thing where like we go out with the child on the weekends and I don't take my phone. And then I'm like, this thing should, I wish it had more apps.

But that's good. Yeah. But so like, so what's interesting is that I think carriers are the ones that probably push the most galaxy watches because they do bundle them. They do sell service on them and stuff like that. This one does not have LTE. Carriers are probably not going to really sell it. So that's really interesting. Can you charge the watch? on the phone. Yes, yes. Yes. Nice.

It uses, this is, one of the other new things with this watch is it uses standard cheat charging, so yes. And it does sleep tracking. So if the battery lifelands lasts long enough, that's one feature that it's one feature that has that the Apple Watch can't really do. Natively. I was not aware that we were ready technologically for reverse wireless charging. I guess I just wasn't paying attention. Apparently it's not the newest feature, but... You missed it on the one Wawai phone.

Yeah. But it's exciting, right? This idea of my gadgets, we're all going to die together. We're all going down. We're at 5%. We're not going to last long, but I'm going to be listening to music for every last percentage of that. Yeah. Dan laid out the scenario, and I was just talking about it too, of you go on the road, you plug in your phone, you flip it over, and you charge your earbuds by just sitting on top.

That's like, I'm okay with that. I'm into that. I mean, it also implies that instead of ever getting true USBC on all these things, they'll just integrate extremely slow Chi charging, which is like not the correct nightmare that I was anticipating. Well, nobody's doing that yet. Like, the nightmare is coming for you, but right now you still get a USBC plug, at least on the Galaxy Buds. Yeah, I just, I anticipate a world in which, you know, Apple's like, you know what? No more ports. extremely slow wireless charging for all.

And then everyone else does it too. You're holding your phone up against a blank wall outlet. Yeah. Yeah, everyone's at the airport just sort of like desperately pressing their phone to the wall. That's the nightmare. Well, like the, if, you know, if you've ever been to CES for the past, like, decade, you know, true wireless power, man. That's coming. No.

No. That's great. That's amazing. All right, let's take a break. Paul's going to do his regular occurring segment, which I did not forget. And we're going to do a little lightning around. It's going to be great. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

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cloud.AI slash vergecast and check out Claude pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. Paul Miller. Uh-huh. Every week, you captivate our audience with this ongoing series of extreme consistency. What's it called? It's called Don't Brick the Shoes. And if you remember a few months back, I did a segment about, you know, don't.

of don't brick the shoes about a jacket. And it's like, why is he talking about a jacket on don't brick the shoes? I was talking about this, this Levi jacket that was receiving a software update. I was talking about this fancful idea. What if, ha, ha, what if they brick a piece of clothing with a software update? Well, Nike has bricked a piece of clothing with a software update. They have bricked or some of Nike's Adapt Bibi smart sneakers. Apparently, some of them were running like an earlier software build or something like that.

They've been bricked by a software update, and I'm just really excited that we live in a world with folding screens and bricked shoes. Wait, I want to be clear. I once got into a lot of trouble for saying that Microsoft had bricked the surface tablets in an NFL game. Oh, right. Yeah. Which was true, because they didn't work. But the tablets were fine and the network that Microsoft had built had gone down. And I've received many emails.

explaining that the surface product itself was wonderful. Great. But just because of that experience, I want to be clear about what happened here. Nike put out the Adapt BVs. Ashley Carmen went to Nike, saw the shoe, Met Tinker Hatfield did the whole thing.

Great video. Go check it out on YouTube. Read her article. The shoes work with an app to automatically lace, right? They're like the Back to the Future shoes. There's an iOS app and an Android app. The iOS app is good.

In that it doesn't break the shoes. It does not. The Android app is very bad. In that it does break the shoes. Well, it is unclear. It's bricked. So if you've got the iOS app, your shoes are lacing, you're, you know, you're, I don't know what you do. You're jumping.

You're jumping all over the place. Your shoes aren't falling off your feet. You're living your best life. If you have an Android phone, it is probable that your phone will only pair to one of your shoes. leaving the other shoe unlaced. Now, where, so your jumping will be constrained. Where it is unclear is whether your other shoe, the unlaced shoe, is fully bricked or works manually with the buttons on the shoe.

So if the shoe, some users report that the buttons don't work for them. Right. So some, so it's really a grab bag. You've got an Android phone, you got your robot shoes, what's going to happen next? Who knows? But it is important. I was using the word brick loosely. There's brick as in completely unrecoverable.

And then there's my, I use brick to mean turning it on and off again doesn't fix it. It is broken to the point that it needs some serious intervention. And then there's like, obviously, there's something like a crash. I wouldn't call a crash a brick. Yeah, I think you're right. I think the loose definition of bricked is a simple power cycle does not restore you to a known good state. That's good. I'll go with shoes working.

Shoes being laced on your feet. Just to, yes. Agree, Paul. That is a problem. If you own a pair of these shoes, if you own a pair of these shoes, just put them on and just, you know, open up your app and just like a very simple test is that if the shoe fits, software it. Wow. Well, as I said at the top of the show, this will be Dieter's last episode of the first cast. What a, that segment always delivers with the brick shoes.

There's one more little segment of Samsung stuff to talk about, and then we're in a new lightning round. Samsung also announced the S10 5G. Yep. Which is a real phone. Yep. They announced it with a bunch carrier partners. Well, it's exclusive to Verizon for a, quote, limited period, and then it will be going to the other carriers. But then Sprint...

Just like Fortnite. Yeah. But they put Sprint had a video. T-Mobile was there in a video. Vodafone was there in a video. Notably AT&T, not present because, well, I mean, they're going to get it. Yeah, they are getting the fun. They're just...

They didn't want to hang out with Sprint and T-Mobile. But right now at this moment, Galaxy S-7s on the AT&T network are showing a 5G-E logo. So I'm not sure how 18T is going to walk through that. And I really want... It's like, it's great. They made a 5G phone. no one knows how to talk about 5G. Well, I can tell you, I will talk about it.

Don't buy this 5G phone. Like, just do not buy this phone. Well, there's that. But what I want to get to, specifically the way that Samsung thought to demonstrate this phone was like a video, like a glossy product video. But it was just like zooming lines through Chicago. Like overhead shots of Chicago with lines zooming through the streets and making right angle turns. And they ended it.

And the presenter was like, that was amazing. And I was like, that was just lines. That was just zoomy lines, man. So they're going to launch it. You shouldn't buy it. It's a tech demo. You know, the sort of carrier hype around 5G is it full tilt? And I think you should wait for 6G.

Right. So then Trump is out there. He doesn't know what to do with Huawei, which he wants to prevent from coming into the country. But rural broadband providers are saying Huawei's equipment is cheaper. So that's going to prevent their, like, 5G rollout. This is all stuff. So today he tweets, I think we should have 5G and even 6G networks as soon as possible, which probably if you're like...

Do you disagree? Yeah, but if you're Verizon, you're like, we didn't even get to this G. Oh, no, Verizon's probably thrilled about it. They're like, we could just call it 6G. ATT is like, flip the switch. Get it done. Have it tomorrow. And AT&T, by the way, put out a 5G fact sheet about its upcoming 5G network that does not

even mentioned 5GE. But just... By the way, just real quick, on Trump tweeting about this and tweeting weird things about, you know, you couldn't tell us of Huawei so tweet or what. It was very confusing.

Heim Gardenberg, intrepid reporter, reached out to the CTIA, the industry association for the cell phone carriers, and asked them for comment on Trump's call for a 6G network. And they were just like, I don't know, man.

Whatever. Here's a statement. Just sure. It was the best. Okay. So, connect two dots for people. So there's all this 5G hype, there's this 5G phone, there's Verizon saying we're going to be in 30 more cities. There's AT&T just lying, just what they're doing.

And then there's like the reality of what the 5G, what they really think it will do, which they don't say out loud. So Randall Stevenson, who is the CEO of AT&T, was on Recode Media with Peter Kafka. You go listen to it. Great podcast. And Peter, if you know Peter, is kind of like, no nonsense. And he was like, tell me what the hell 5G is. And again, this little conversation. And so here's Randall's answer. Listen to this. This no latency, zero latency thing is a really, really big deal. It's the game changer. All of the stuff that's in that smartphone that you're holding right there, the storage no longer needs to be there. The storage can be back in the network. The compute capacity no longer needs to be there. It can be back

in the network. So their vision of 5G is that they will take storage and compute away from the consumer and they will own it at the network level. That's their like, long-term vision of 5G. That's what the CEO of AT&T is saying about it today. And I read that and I... Thin clients for all. And I'm like, I'm filled with like an existential dread about AT&T owning what is computed and stored for me.

And I don't think anybody's really like put those things together. Like why all this hype? It's not because of faster speeds. It's because they're, the telco networks. And Verizon has said something like this to me as well. So I don't want to just put it in AT&T. This is just we happen to have audio of the dude saying it. That to me is wild, right?

And I don't think it's just getting enough attention. So you hear about all this 5G stuff. There's the 5G galaxy, whatever. If the promise is we actually need way thinner clients because we're going to do compute and storage at zero latency, we should probably be having a bigger conversation on privacy and security with our telecom companies because they're not making that promise to us right now. Right. And if that's where they're going, like, you know, he has this whole line in here about how, like, we don't need Wi-Fi anymore because it'll just be 5G everywhere.

It's like, no, dude, like, I do not want you managing my network devices. Like, I'll do that on my own. Like, put a fiber line to my house. Anyway, I just want to bring it up because that, to me, it's like 5G, great. They made a new phone. No one should buy it. But if that's the promise of these networks, I think we all need to start paying more attention to it. Paul, you look very thoughtful right now.

I had not heard this quote. I have so many thoughts. first thought, a bounty hunter watching my remote desktop connection while I play like Minesweeper on a Windows 2000 box. Wait, why have bounty hunter? Because carriers just give everything to bounty hunters, as we've recently discovered. Yeah, that's really interesting because I wrote a piece a little while ago about edge computing, which is there is a sense,

there is a lot more processing and work that needs to be done on the device. Like you want to do certain, like you don't want to send everything over the network if you don't have to. And so platform companies like Microsoft and Google are doing a lot more,

I would say, towards edge computing and owning more of your platform so that they don't have to do everything in the cloud. So, and I also, the first thing I thought of is all the promises of, of light clients back in like the year 2000. Like that was what the internet was going to bring us in the first place was these tiny, thin clients to real computers. And I don't think, other than the enterprise that really hasn't ever taken off. So I'm very suspicious about this being a thing. But it's kind of exciting if it would pit the carriers against the power.

platform companies, the platform companies want to own more of our life with edge computing, and the carriers want to have more reasons for bandwidth to happen so they can spy on more of our life. I don't know, Paul. So let's play that scenario out. So we all have thin clients, and our compute and our storage are happening in the cloud because there's zero latency, and so there's no reason not to. And now there's a competition between the telecom companies to provide that service to us,

and Google and Microsoft and Apple. You know what I would like in that world? I would like some sort of, I don't know, law that keeps the carriers from, you know, throttling my access to my preferred service provider for my compute. Like it should be neutral on the net in some way. It's more of like a policy, not really a law, but just sort of like a reinterpretation of a law.

Yeah. Like a regulatory body. What if you just had a series of, I don't know, like gentlemen's agreements? Well, but to clarify Deiter, and I do love that you brought this to net neutrality, but to clarify, I think of it as is possibly a productive tension in the sense that platform companies will want more to be happening on the device while carriers want less to be happening on the device. I'm probably making way too blunt of a description. No, I got you.

Yeah. So there's one example I would use that cuts against you, Paul. you said then clients have never taken off. Well, there are an awful lot of $140,000 Chromebooks out there, right? And they are taking over one particular segment of the market in education. So I think Google actually sits right in that middle zone where they're like, yeah, do everything on the web. Like, we own that. That's actually ours.

No one else can make money here. And Apple, you know, I think Apple will continue to put an enormous amount of effort pushing things to happening locally in the device because they want to sell expensive hardware. that's a good way to do it. They've got their whole privacy thing going on. I just, that quote to me was the first time I've like really heard a telecom executive say on the record, we don't think you need compute and storage, right? We want to do that for you at the network and that will enable the things that 5G does. And they've struggled to articulate it, right?

Like it's Samsung doing zoomy lines. It's a lot of nonsense about AR. Like Samsung had a whole segment yesterday about AR. Like they're like the Galaxy S10, 5G. now we'll scan this room automatically. It's like what what does that have to do with the 5G nothing? But they need to like mash these things together so they can come up with a zero latency application and AR is a good zero latency application.

Cars are a good zero latency application. But no one's like pining to buy a 5G phone. And then you kind of like connect that to how badly the carriers want to sell it to you. And you're like there's got to be something else here. Right. You can't just be churned to sell more phones. And this is the first time I've heard of Telecom executive. Just say it out loud.

It's their fight to not be a dumb pipe. They tried to be media companies for a long time. Some of their still media companies because they don't want to be a dumb pipe. So now the next move is to, okay, we're just going to take it all. And you're just going to have this little tiny little thing. Right. And there's a little bit of business case here. Like my understanding is that the millimeter wave technology for 5G is actually very compute intensive.

So you need to build some data centers and compute centers like near the network. and so you will necessarily have this excess capacity. So, okay, now we've got excess compute and storage next to the network and all these places. We can just sell it and we'll keep that latency. But the idea that you won't need any of it, I think, is I would like to press them on that more because to me it's just openly scary, right? Like, they are not great at protecting our data right now. So why would I give them more and give them my compute?

I would go so far as to say they are actively bad. protecting our data right now. Yeah. So I'll say, it was interesting. All right. Lightning round. I don't want to actually lightning around this stuff. There's just like a handful of topics that we like want to get cleared out and then we can wrap up here.

So, yeah, what's the first thing you want to talk about? Google claims the built-in nest mic was never intended to be a secret. You dumb mother. If you put a mic in the thing, you're owned by Google. You say so. You stupid. So, by the way, just to be clear, this is not the NEST thermostat, which is the thing most people have, or even the NEST Protect, which is slightly, it's the Nest alarm system. Nest guard.

The keypad thing, right? Which I tested and reviewed last year and had a microphone in my house all the time. Yeah. If they had just said, there's a microphone in it, maybe someday it'll, like, listen for glass breaking, this whole thing would have gone away. If they had just said, there's a microphone on it's not turned on, whatever, just say so. Yeah. Their excuse was it should have been on a spec sheet, but it wasn't. which is incredible.

And then, after that, I want to call it two stories from Nick Statt that build on a ton of work that other people have been doing, including, and most especially, I think, TechCrunch, about Apple's enterprise developer program. Nick has a great headline here. Apple dug a tunnel beneath the app store and the rats are getting through. This is, you know, there's the big story about Facebook using this enterprise certificate program to install this research program that was like spying. And Google did it to, and everyone's mad. We shut down Facebook for a day because, Apple pulled this.

All that's bad. Turns out, like, there are entire secondary iPhone app stores that rely on the certificate program. They're super well known, and they're full of, like, pirated games and weird stuff. And Nick was like, here's one. Like, here it is. And I tweeted it. And all these people are like, oh, yeah, you didn't know about that one?

I've been using it for, like, four years. So. I mean, what's fascinating about this story is that it kind of like, the original story when TechCrunch broke it was, like, everyone was kind of mad at Facebook. for good reason. Like, Facebook was, like, doing this kind of shady stuff and using data from teenagers and stuff like that. And the reason Facebook was able to do that, though,

is because Apple's house is kind of a mess when it comes to these things. And this story basically shows how bad it is. And, like, Apple talks a big game about its Waldgarden, protects its users, make sure that, you know, the app stores, you know, censored and clean and all this other stuff. But, you know, there's this back door that.

It's almost like when people buy computers, they want to be able to run software that they didn't have to pay for. Yeah. I mean, like, these things exist solely for pirated. That is not entirely true. Yes, a lot of it, a good amount of it. But there is an aspect to this where I just, Apple can't, it's just very frustrating to me. And I quit iOS for this very reason, so I don't have to worry about it anymore. but iOS should be able to run software that you should be able to push a button in your system preferences that you, just like you do on your Mac, that says, yes, I do trust this developer.

I want to run this arbitrary code on this $1,000 computer that I own. You could do that on Android. Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. Paul, had you known about these stores, though, you wouldn't have had to leave iOS. I literally did not know about these stores. What I do. I'm not saying that we're telling the people about them in a positive way.

I'm just saying now you have some light awareness of it. Android has a real healthy culture around this with FDroid. It is a store full of open source programs, and I can go and check them out. Android also has a massive app piracy problem. Oh, I'm sure. Right. But so the point here is that I don't know if it's as massive as Android, but it exists on the iPhone. And so the question is, if Apple were more open about allowing a, untrusted sources to install software.

One, would it be, like, critically damaging to the security of the platform? Maybe, maybe not. Two, would there be more light, or would there be more light on these piracy sites? And would they get taken down from, like, some other means, right? The answer is probably no. They can pull their certificates right now. There's an element of this where it's like Apple wants to protect its, like, perfect house. so it exists in sort of an uneasy truce

with the people it doesn't want. You know, like, for whatever reason, I'm just thinking about demolition man. Like, they just want Dennis Leary in the basement. And, like, they're fine to let him be down there. I mean, this is, like, how cops work. Like, they acknowledge some criminal activity as long as there's, like, some regulation of that activity.

And they keep it, they can keep it at bay. But if Apple just opens it up, like, you see what I'm saying? Yeah. Am I just making a number of veiled references? references to the wire right now, because that's kind of what it feels. Lastly, Deeter, I want your take on this. Apple to combine iPhone, iPad, and MacApps by 2021, says Bloomberg. And also, there's, like, an arm MacBook is, like, sort of possibly coming in 2020 as part of this.

You know what, fine. Like, the Mac ecosystem is not doing super hot right now, the Mac app ecosystem. the quality of the Marsapan apps that we've seen so far are not super hot either. It makes sense to want sort of universal binaries. We got that across iPhone and iPad, you know? Like you used to have to ship two different versions, you know, two different things and they could just ship one thing. It's fine.

It makes sense. At some point they got to do it. Like at some point the Mac needs, the Mac OS needs to like do the next thing it's going to do. And this makes perfect sense to me. I know a lot of people are having lots of feelings about it, and I respect and value those feelings. But I also think that if not this, then what? And I have yet to hear a really clear elaboration to that answer.

If the Mac isn't going to continue to be a mass market consumer thing, they need to continue to develop ways to make good software for it. And this is, you know, probably the best shot. Now, it's easy to make fun of all this because we can make fun of universal Windows apps or Metro apps or whatever. the hell they're called now. There's lots of examples of this like big fat binary thing that have not gone well. And so it's quite possible it could not go well here. But I also think that you look at the you look at the five year timeline of what needs to happen to Mac software. And you look at the possibilities that are there. And I think just keep on, keeping on is not a good option. Yeah. I just, it makes me sad that the iOS market is so big that it's overshadowing

to a large extent how big the Mac market is. Right. So they can't get attention and support for their big market. It's a big market. Like, I think Walt, we were talking about Walt. On Control Delete, Walt would be like, the Mac alone is a Fortune 100 company. Like, what are you doing? Like, why do you keep blowing it? But it's because iOS is. so big. It just makes me sad. That's all I'm saying. It just makes me sad.

All right. I didn't mean to end on a down note. I just want LTE on a Mac. That's never going to happen. Update to earlier discussion in the podcast. BigSpeaky customization will be available through a future software update, but we don't know when. There's a blog post about it on Samsung.com. I love that they had to go all the way to blog post.

Yep. That's how much people want to customize BigSpeak. See, we ended on a high note. There's a folding phone, and you can customize the BigSpeak key. That's the Vergecast, everybody. We won again. Victory is ours. Thank you, friends.

Listen to our show. Binge, listen to watch you push that button. Binge, listen to Better Worlds, which is excellent. Check that out on wherever you find your podcasts. You can listen to Pivot with Karras Swisher and Scott Galloway. You can listen to Function with a Neal Dash. It's all available for you. Go to podcast of Voxmedia.com.

You figure it out. It's going to be great. You can talk to Dan Sefer. He's at D.C. Sefert. Paul's feature Paul. Dieter's Backlon. I'm Reckless. That's a Vergecast.

Rock and roll. Paul. Bloop bloop.