The Vergecast - This phone starts fires on purpose

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

While most phone makers work hard to ensure their products don’t start fires, Oukitel made a phone that starts fires on purpose. This week on The Vergecast, Dominic Preston joins Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel to wrap up all the weird and wonderful phones he and the team saw at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Then, Sean Hollister takes us through Google and Epic’s enemies-to-lovers saga: A secret $800 million deal, a non-disparagement agreement, and something about the metaverse for some reason. Plus: Nilay just had the best home movie experience of his life thanks to the Kaleidescape 8TB solid-state server, Dom’s charging his smart phone on a mini racecar, and Sean delivers some disappointing news about the Lego smart brick we were all rooting for. And Brendan Carr is still being a dummy. Further reading: ⁠Nothing is finally covering up with the slim, metal Phone 4A Pro⁠ ⁠Nothing couldn’t wait to show off the Phone 4A⁠ ⁠Nothing’s Headphone A are something worth considering⁠⁠ Honor’s Robot Phone is a bad robot, an interesting camera, and maybe your friend⁠ ⁠Honor claims its Robot Phone will launch later this year⁠ ⁠Honor’s Magic V6 is the first foldable with an IP69 rating⁠ ⁠Xiaomi’s Leica Leitzphone mostly earns the name⁠ ⁠Xiaomi, unlike Google and Samsung, thinks camera hardware comes first⁠ ⁠Xiaomi 17 is a small(ish) phone with a big(ish) battery⁠ ⁠Here’s the upgrade to my favorite phone camera of last year⁠ ⁠Tecno is doing a modular phone (again)⁠ ⁠Lenovo made a Framework-like laptop with modular ports — and a second screen⁠ ⁠ Google isn’t waiting for a settlement — the 30 percent Android app store fee is dead⁠ ⁠Here’s how Google describes its fee-reducing Apps Experience and Games Level Up programs⁠ ⁠Epic and Google have signed a special deal for a new class of ‘metaverse’ apps⁠ ⁠Tim Sweeney signed away his right to criticize Google until 2032⁠ ⁠Fortnite is returning to Google Play globally⁠ ⁠FCC Chair Brendan Carr is pushing for US-based call centers⁠ I’m not ashamed to admit the Kobo Remote is the best gadget I’ve bought this year⁠ Did Live Nation punish a venue by taking Billie Eilish away?⁠ I charge my phone on a racing car. Do you? ⁠ ⁠Investigating the 61-pound machine that eats plastic and spits out bricks Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 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. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients.

And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to the Virchast, flagship podcast, the binding non-disperagement agreements. It's contentious this week.

Who is allowed to say what? About whom? I think I got the who and the whom right there. I'm your friend, Neely. I'm here. I'm running the show for the first time in years. I'm going to kind of remember how to do it. It's going to be great.

David Pierce is off because he has the temerity to have children and need to care for them. And I think that's completely inappropriate. But so it goes. Anyway, to replace David, we have an all-star crew. Sean Hollister is here. I am here. I am not David Pierce. Don Preston is here. Hey, Dom.

Hey, also him. Also, not David Pierce. Maybe we'll summon him throughout the show. No, it's fine. David, David had kids to have to take care of well-deserved break. We've got Sean and Dom. It's a huge week of gadget news. If you've been paying attention to the show, you know, we did all of the Apple News in a live stream earlier this week. You can go watch that. You can watch me get a speck wrong and then just melt into a puddle of embarrassment.

I got texts from my friends who told me it was okay because they have not seen me be embarrassed by getting a spec wrong in that way in quite a long time. Thank you to everybody in the chat who corrected me. We got it right in the end. It's an OLED display. I don't want to talk about it anymore. That's it. That's all you get from me. But aside from Apple, it was an enormous week of gadget news. Dom was at Mobile World Congress

along with Allison. A million Android phones are launched there as well as 6G which, sure. Sean, you covered Google and Epic settling a giant dispute in the play store. There's all kinds of other gadgets to talk about this week. I actually want to start by talking about the gadget one second. I do want to say there's other news in the world.

There's a war going on. There's a massive conflict between Anthropic and the Pentagon. We've got all that on the site. In particular, we're going to have Hayden on with David to talk about the Anthropic Pentagon situation in detail on Tuesday. One of the reasons we're not doing it right away is as we are recording, more things are changing. So we're just going to hold for that story to resolve one take further before we dive all the way into it, but there's a ton of coverage from Hayden on that on the site. It's some of the most in-depth reporting anywhere on what the contract terms actually mean. So go, we'll link at the show notes. Go read that. She's going to be on the show on Tuesday to dive into that in full. So we have all that coverage and there's more coming on the

show. It's just literally as we were going to record today more happen. Like the Pentagon said more stuff today. So we're just going to wait for that to resolve. And then the last thing I want to say before we get started, the new season of version history starts on Sunday with Furby, which is wild. Do we have the Furby trailer, Travis? Do you remember the most exciting gadget of 1998? It was a robot that ended up in millions of homes, and it was very high tech. It had a light sensor, it had a sound sensor, it had fur. On this season of version history, we have six stories about the tech that we talk to. What's the first rule of Fight Club?

Don't talk about fight club. You can only add some intonations. What if a conference call was a social network? And the tech that talked back. Hello, I imagine. Oh. Listen to the podcast, watch it on YouTube every Sunday starting on March 8. I think this is you guys' best podcast.

It's great. That's very good. It starts with Furby, which I believe is one of the most politically intense episodes of version history we've ever done. I mean, we did the Macintosh, like the 128K Macintosh this season. It was really fun to do. But I think the Furby is going to inspire even more emotions. Virgin History now has its own YouTube channel. It's at Virgin History Podcast.

Go subscribe to that channel. I can't wait for you guys to see this season. I think David's like really cracked the code on version history this time around. It's great. I'm excited for you all to see it. And in particular, tell us how you feel about Furbys. Because there's more going on there than you can possibly know. I cannot wait for you to see V's Furby.

It will haunt your nightmares. Okay. So on Wednesday, I promise that I would start this show with like five minutes of me just being happy about a gadget. And so I'm going to keep my promise. And I'm not, with this review isn't published, we're not ready to like issue a definitive ruling on this product yet. But if you will recall, when I went away on parental leave over the summer, I said, I'm going

to get a collide escape, the high-end movie streamer. And I'm going to, that's all I'm going to do. I'm going to watch movies with my baby. I did not do this because the idea of reviewing a gadget while I'm leaving is dumb because the baby has many more needs than I do. It turns out. This is our second time around. You would think I would have realized this, but I had this dream and I failed to realize this dream.

Then we hired John Higgins, who was like a legitimate expert TV and AV reviewer. He knows way more about this than anybody ever moved. And he knows everybody. And so the kaleider escape people were like, do you actually want to review a kaleidercape? And so they've sent John and I collide escape systems. If you don't know what a collide escape is, it is the single highest bitrate movie streamer you can get. And the way it's supposed to work is you don't just get one device, you get two. You get a server and you get clients that you place around your house.

So the reason you have to have a server and clients your house is because the files are so big. The movies you download are so big. You can't actually stream them over the internet. You have to download them first and then stream them locally on your own network. So the server that they sent me was a kaleidescape mini terraprime. It's an 8 terabyte SSD. It can only hold 115 movies because the files are so big. And then I have a stratoe player, which has its own little storage, and you can just buy the thing by yourself if you want.

The stratoe player alone is $2,500. The mini terraprime server that I have is $10,000. So I have $13,000 of movie streamer by my house right now. It's out of control. It is the single most incredible experience I've ever had watching a movie in my house, in my entire life. I've never been so happy. And it, you know, I have a Sony 895L, which is one of the best TVs you can buy.

Some would argue it's still the best TV you could buy. And then we have a 514 Atmos system running through a big Sony receiver. So we have four speakers in the ceiling. We have five O'RRN and a huge subwoofer. And basically the experience of watching like full, Uncompressed 100 megabit per second video files with full uncompressed Atmos audio or fully uncompressed DTSHD master audio is mind blowing. It's like you're seeing reality for the first time. This is a very niche thing to say.

You know, like you can drive your car fast on a highway and you know that you're not supposed to do that. Right? And you're like, you're having this thing. You're like, oh, that's pretty cool. Have you ever driven a car on a racetrack? like a fat like have ever had this experience or even like a go-car have you ever like driven a go-car and a racetrack? Go-carts are a thing. I love my guy. Right? And you're like, oh, this is how it's supposed to be. Like I'm

supposed to go this fast. Like my car is much faster than the highway. This is very much the experience of lighting up my TV and my speakers with like full uncompressed audio and video. You're like, oh wait, all of this stuff I've been watching looks like shit. Look at how much more headroom there is. It is incredible. I love that you've picked a solution to watch movies like reality that you can actually share with other people whereas I, even my living room on my couch, with a pair of glasses

watching 3D movies. I cannot stop watching 3D movies because that feels like seeing reality for the first time to be. But everybody around me is like, what are you doing in your living room with glasses on? So all I have to ask is, is this a better TV than the Vision Pro

that you are now? Yes. So here's the thing I'm saying. It's like I already had the TV. I already had the atmosphere system. It was, to your point, Sean, about wanting to be with other people. In our previous house, when we lived in the woods in the pandemic, I put up all that stuff in the basement. And literally no one wanted to go to the basement with me.

Like I was like, do you want to watch a movie? And I'd be like, yeah. Then we like, let's go downstairs. I'd be like, no. And so it just happened. So it's like I would go alone to the basement to watch a movie without my family all the time. And so when we moved here, I put all that stuff in the main room, right? We don't have like a separate theater room.

We don't have any of that stuff anymore. We just have like kind of the one big TV with all that stuff. And like that means mostly we watch is Bluey. Like the reality of this setup is like very extensive home theater is that we mostly watch Bluey on it. And then you watch Disney Plus streaming or Netflix streaming. And all that stuff looks fine and it's like appropriately that. But like we're watching basically kids movies, right, all the time because we have kids.

I want to hear about the nature of reality. when you're watching blueie and uncompressed. Right, no, but let me get to it. So all that stuff is still streaming at like 15 to 25 megabits per second. Like on the high side, you're getting 25. That's a lot of compression. And in particular, it's a lot of color compression that is like, it's very wonky, but you know, see those numbers when you set up your HTML signal.

Like, do you want 422 or 444 or whatever? Like, that is a way to describe color compression. And people have a lot of feelings about bits versus it's fine. But that is a way to describe color compression. And you get a lot of that on streaming. Just a lot of color compression on stream. That's why red, like the color red in digital video often blocks so hard. That's just an artifact of the amount of color compression that happens.

And then compression generally, bitrate compression is why when there's fast motion at the Super Bowl, like the confetti comes down, the whole image blocks up. Like there just isn't enough bandwidth to show you the motion happening all at one. So you've got a lot of color compression, you got a lot of motion compression. It 15, 25 megabits for second, this is like fine for blue and you don't see it. We get the collide escape and we're just watching Incredibles 2, right? The same movie that we watch in Disney Plus. And you're like, oh, this is way better.

Like, I'm actually seeing more of this movie. I'm noticing more things in the image of this movie because there isn't any color compression or it's much less color compression. And the overall bit rate is so much higher that framed different. frame, there's more detail. This is crazy. I accidentally watched all of Pacific Rim again, because so much of Pacific Rim happens in the rain that when you watch it on streaming, you're basically not watching anything. A 1080P Blu-ray still looks better than 4K streams from Netflix because of this. Absolutely, because of the bit rate is so much higher on a 10-AP Blu-ray that you

actually get motion frame-to-frame. So anyway, I have this high $13,000 to the movie stream I'm watching Incredibles too and rewatching Pacific Rim for some reason. And it is, it's not necessarily the TV and the speakers. Like, obviously the one I have has so much ability to show you the quality that that's what I mean by it's like driving a fast car fast. You're like, oh, this car is meant to go very fast. And like, mostly I putter around at 30 miles an hour. Like, you're like, oh, this car could actually go 100 miles an hour.

Like, that is what that feels like. So what I'm hearing is you're going to invite the verge over to have. We should all have a collide escape night. But what you really get is like, oh, it is a crime how much compression these streamers voiced upon us. Like there's a big delta between 25 and 100, right? And I would pay more to a lot of these streamers to get higher quality. The only one, like Apple is a little bit better.

Like Apple, I think will peek out at 30. Like, it's like moderately better. It's like not that much better. The only one I think you can get, which I also have on my dumb. Sony TV is Sony Pictures Bravia core or whatever it's called now where it will stream only Sony movies at up to 85

but that's like you can only get Sony movies like you can watch Spider-Man 2 as many times as you want in 85 megats per second Into the Spider-verse that color compression you're gonna like having less of it There you go all of that all Sony's IP But you should watch it in 3D It's just a movie store it's got everything

It's got TV shows I'm gonna They sent me Night of 7 King Demonstra haven't watched yet, but I'm excited to watch it on this thing. And I'm like, your options, if you want source material that can live up to the quality of the display that you've bought are to collect Blu-rays, which I think a lot of people are into, or $13,000 Kly Escape. That's what you get. I don't know. I mean, obviously it's reviewing. John and I are going to write reviews of this. I'm sure his review actually far more technical. He has things to say other than this is sick.

So I'm excited to co-buy on this review. I mean, there's some really, truly wonky stuff about this problem. Like, I had to open a, to configure it, you have to go on the web and then, like, log into a little web portal on the device. It's, like, ridiculous. Like, the, it's meant for installers to put in for rich people.

It's not meant for normal humans to have. And I, but I had to do that, not for any particular, like, complicated reason. You have to do that to enable HTML CEC. Because it doesn't, because for $13,000, you do not get a remote control. Because the assumption is, this is true, because the assumption is that your high-end AV installer has put this in as parts of an integrated system. And you're just like sitting down in the theater and your butler is beginning this for you. I feel like far too much of the tech industry has been premised on the idea that HDAMICC is a viable solution to solve everything.

I got it. It works kind of. So now we can at least click around with my TV. but to turn it on, I have to open an app on my phone. So there's some real edges here, but then you're like, it's a video playback device. So who cares? Once you're in it, you're in it. And I've just been rewatching all of these old movies that are in the catalog that came

with the device because I'm like, oh, it's like I can see what's actually going on for the first time. Highly recommend it. It's very much that Ferris Bueller scene with the Ferrari, like, I, if you have the means. Anyway, that is, it's the gadget of all guys. gadgets. I've never been happier. We're going to write an actual review of it. Like I said, there are some rough edges around this thing that make it not a consumer device. And of course,

just to get the whole system as delivered to me, you're $13,000 in the hole. And it doesn't come with any movies. Like, you still have to buy or rent the movies. Do they cost like more than usual? Is it like 70 bucks a movie, 100 bucks a movie? No, that's about all the ones I've looked at are it's like, it's like six or seven dollars to rent and $25 to buy. So it's not out of blue ray zone. That's fine. I'm confident, you can also buy a used Blu-ray player for like $150

and just buy Blu-rays. This is a thing you can also do. For now. They are discontinuing a lot of these Blu-ray players. For now. Finite results. But like I've been saying, it is, I just haven't been happier with a gadget in ages. Because this thing isn't trying to do anything. It's not trying to like

replace all white collar work. Right? It's like, these movies will look better than the regular movies. Like, yep, it's super does. No getting around that. Even my wife noticed it the other day. Like, I made her watch that's really good at concerts. So there's a lot of concert because, again, it's uncompressed audio. So we're just sitting around watching the cure and in excess and the Rolling Stones live for no reason. And she's like, this sounds really good. I'm like, yeah, it's uncompressed. And she was like out of the room by the time I finished. But it's like, it's just you get so much more dynamic

range in the audio that they have built a little business doing like concert streams or concert footage rather, because watching a streamed concert, you're like, this sounds bad. But if you have all the, all the channels uncompressed. I told the people I was a huge nerd, and so I had to prove that I'm a huge nerd after getting a spec wrong earlier this week. Just invite a few of them in to testify. I went to Neely's house. I'm sure that Klaidaski people will be happy for you to come demo their products,

13 Gs at a time. But we'll have a full review. John are going to work on it. He's got other stuff to do. He's got other products to review. You can imagine what some of the display products yesterday are that are in the mix. We're working on some of that stuff. But when we get a free moment, we will review the Kali Escape just so I can talk about it again on this show.

That's what I have for you. All right. We should start with the actual news, which is not just me, insisting that everybody comes with a mile of my home. Look at how good my TV looks. Dom, you are at MWC. I've been in MWC in years. It's since we're Mobile World Congress since in Barcelona.

It's the biggest phone show, telecom show in the world. I think a really interesting dynamic right now playing out for us here in the United States. Phones outside the United States are getting so much more interesting than anything we have here. Yep. And MWC is where that's happening. Describe the show to us. There's one I want you to absolutely start with. But then I want you to talk about just how different phones are getting over there.

Yeah. I mean, I think the big theme of MWC for me this year was hardware is getting weird. on this side of the Atlantic. And people are pushing hardware in as many weird directions that they can, mostly in the camera, but not exclusively. The emblematic handset here is the Ukutel WP63. You probably don't know Ucutel, they're a rugged phone brand, so they make these sort of big, bulky phones with giant batteries and absurd waterproofing and that kind of thing. The WP63 is pitched as a camping phone. It's got a 20,000 million amp-power battery, it's got a camping light, It's got a super loud speaker that you can use for listening to music or for sort of sounding an alarm or something.

And it also has a firelighter built inside. It has an igniter. And igniter is sort of a generous way of putting this. This is basically like an old car cigarette lighter. It's a tiny little electric plate embedded inside the phone. There's a button on the outside which has a little red fire icon on it. And you push the button. I think you can also do this like within the phone.

And this little plate slides out. And it is just the size of the end of a cigarette. Wait, are they, because are they selling it to light cigarettes? They are pitching it as a camping accessories for outdoor. I see. For rugged adventures. But the way they demoed it at MWC, I have been told, is by lighting cigarettes. Right, when you need a rugged adventure outside of the bar for five to ten minutes.

We've all been that. So this is no more stylus. Instead, your pen-shaped object is a cigarette lighter now? Yeah, I mean, they just need the slot for the cigarettes to slot in the phone as well. And then we're really talking. Wait, no, so I'm looking at a picture of this. It's not a pen-shaped object. It's just like a...

It's a tiny little disc that slides out. The whole bit that slides out is the size of the cigarette tip. It is like, there's, you know, quarter of an inch by quarter of an inch square that slides out. You know how, like, we've criticized various phone companies for the batteries not big enough? Like, just make the phone thicker and put a bigger battery in there. This is like they made the phone gigantic. And they're like, with all of this extra battery, we're going to do resistive heating on a coil of metal so you can spark up a cigarette. Like, I respect it.

It is very much a 1980s cigarette lighter. Like, this is the thing that, like, was in my parents' cars. It's retro tech. And maybe cigarettes are the next retro thing that Gen Z is going to get into and everyone's going to take a smoking. This is what I mean about what's happening. overseas. Like, you can start a company where your entire, first of all, it's called Ukatel. Your entire, like, promise to the consumer is like, it's just an Android phone, but this one can light cigarettes. And, like, maybe you have a business because there's just

like more access to the market there. Like, this thing is not going to be in the T-Mobile store. I suspect no. I'd be pretty impressive if they could pull that off. Not least because I never saw light a cigarette. We tried to see this thing work three times. And I was repeatedly in contact with I know other people did see it work. Like, it did work. I've spoke to other journalists who watched this thing like something on fire. Every time I went, it had broken about 10 minutes before I arrived. And this happened on three different occasions.

Allison, I kept trying to see this thing. But we never one saw it light up because they had one sample, and it broke every single day of the show. This is the same company that does, like, the giant batteries in their phones, right? Yes. And this one has a giant battery. It's got a 20,000-m-pound power battery as well. They have others that go bigger than that. Once you have a big enough battery,

What can we do with it? It's like cigarettes. Yeah, you can do anything with it. And just stick a little resistive heat plate next to the battery. All right. So this is what I mean. Like, if phones over there are just getting weird, right? Because there's more access to consumers. There's more Android users outside of the United States than not.

Like, there's just a different WhatsApp is a more dominant messaging platform that lets people switch more easily. There's all this stuff. And then you can see phone makers are competing on hardware. So cigarette lighters aside, we should talk about the robot phone because this to me is like the most let's compete on hardware phone in quite a while. I know they're calling a robot. It appears that they've just put a gimbal on a phone. Oh, yeah, it is absolutely. The robot phone name is a real stretch. This is the gimbal phone or the stabilized camera phone or the DJ Osmo Pocket phone. Any of those would work just fine. This is from Honor. It's well saying this one is China only, but they do say it's coming. out. This is the sort of thing you look at and you think, oh, that's some goofy concept device that

someone's come up with and they made three of them and they're never going to sell it. They insist they are making this. There is a production run. They're going to sell them in China. They talk about it like it's a product line that will have more of them. They talked about the idea that it will come to Europe in the future or future versions might. This is something they are supposedly exploring. But yeah, it is a phone with a DJy Osmo Pocket style mini gimbal that kind of sits in the rear camera and folds up out of the top of the phone. And then it can rotate, it can look around, it can do stabilise video, it can do subject tracking video. You can swivel it around and use it for your selfie cameras. You're getting this kind of

rear main camera quality for your selfies. And then the robot of it all is it has a LLM powered chat app and it makes cute noises and not its head at you and shake its head and dance to imagine dragons and all sorts of horrifying things like that. My favorite part of your video, by the way, as you point out, it can dance to Imagine Dragons, but no other songs. No other songs. That is the only song. Imagine Dragons. Yeah. I asked if it knew other dances and other songs and they were like, uh, you know, it will, but you know, for the demo, the demo we have this. And yeah. We just have Imagine Dragons. Do you think that they licensed the Imagine Dragon songs or do you think they were just like, they'll be fine? I, I hope they did,

if only for how often it was being blasted. I heard it played, I don't know, at least two or three times during the press conference. They had this dance routine on stage at their booth. I heard it played there. Anytime anyone went on the demo and said, like, hey, robot phone, play some music. Suddenly imagine dragons drops busting. Imagine that, but with 10 robot phones in a ring, and it's the one demo ever wants to see is it dancing to music. So I've had a lot of matching dragons in my life. I feel like it shouldn't be too much of a stretch for this company to come up with some reasons that you might want a robot. Like maybe the little gimbal could be your eyes if you can't see very well, and the phone could like describe things into your ears.

This feels like there could be legitimate reasons for that. Yeah, they didn't pitch accessibility uses at all. The way they went down the robot angle was that kind of, it's a companion. So they're talking about having an accessory that clips it onto your backpack. And they were saying it could describe what you're seeing. But in that kind of like, you could be on vacation and it will describe the scenery and talk about where you are to you and that kind of thing. Wait, hold on. I know this isn't the first time we've encountered the robot phone.

This is the first time you've gotten to see and hold it, right? I didn't get to hold it, but this is the first time we have seen it, turned on, and working. It has previously been shown off in a pure CGI, maybe AI slot concept video. And then as CES, I got to see one, but turned off, and I wasn't allowed to touch it, and the arm didn't move or anything. That was just to, like, here's a plausibly a dummy unit. You know, this is what it would look like. This time, they had a load of them on the booth, working, moving, but no one was allowed to actually grab the thing. And so three months from now, you'll be able to touch one.

Yeah, at some point. They said second half of this year, it'll come out. We'll see. Right. You can just see the progression. Every three months, you get ever closer to the robot phone. I'm just saying, it seems like they've backed into needing to make it more of a robot because of AI. Like, you're like, this is a robot phone.

And actually all it is is a gimbal that pops out and moves around mechanically. Like, yeah, that's enough. Like, it doesn't actually have to be a robot. The extra bit of context here is that Honor is building towards. an IPO. And they do not want to IPO as just another company that makes phones and tablets and smartwatches. And so robots. They just thought, we'll do robots instead. That'll be the thing that pushes us forward. I was told by someone to honor, they kind of looked at EVs, but the Chinese EV market is already sprawling and enormous and has countless brands and

Xiaomi's there and doing a very good job so far. So on, I kind of thought we can't fit there. but, you know, robots. We could probably do robots. And so their attempt to convince everyone their robot companies by putting a gimbal on the phone. This is all fine. I'm actually very taken with the gimbal on the phone. Like I watch your video.

I watch some other videos. And I'm like, oh, this is neat. Yeah. Like you get stabilized video. It can do the tracking. It's tracking Allison in a crowd of people in your video. And then, like, in the back of my head was, isn't the S-26 Ultra doing all this with a crop sensor?

Like, there's a real dynamic here right now where they did a lot of mechanical stabilization. And it's cool because people like mechanical gimbals. They like the Osmo Pocket. Yeah. I enjoy the gimbal I have for my phone. And then I'm looking at Samsung. And they're like, you don't need that. It's just a huge sensor.

We'll just crop it really fast. You're reviewing, like, the S-26 for us. That has the horizon lock on it, right? Yeah, that has Horizon lock as well. It doesn't have the giant 200-mecixel sensor that the ultra does. but it also has Horizon Lock, and I tested it out after seeing the robot phone. I thought, I'll go play with Horizon Lock a bit and see how they compare. And yeah, Horizon Lock seems to work really well.

It seems impressive. What it's doing on the software side is kind of amazing. I think it's plausible. The hardware solution will be better in terms of pure quality you're going to get. You're not cropping into the central as much. You can have the full resolution. You can do all this other stuff. Maybe even the actual stabilization will end up being better because they have hardware

and software going all at once. But you get all these other problems. You know, this thing is probably going to cost a load whenever it comes out. I can only assume it will be unreasonably fragile compared to any other phone on the market. In China, I don't know how, you know, well set up owner is for a repair system, things like that. They are a big company. They have a big presence in China. Maybe they're going to be able to repair people's broken robot phones.

If they ever launch it overseas, I would never really put my faith in them to be able to, like, handle fiddly repairs on, you know, this tiny little gimbal arm. I assume the waterproofing will be near zero and the dustproofing. I assume we're going back to the early foldable days where they just have to shrug and say, we can't protect this in the way that we could have a slap. I will say, as somebody who does use an Osmo Pocket 3 all the time, I film all my videos, you're actually looking at me right now through one.

I can probably get its gimbal, active track going. This thing is wonderful, but I always feel like I can't quite tell what I'm filming on it. the postage stamp size screen is not big enough. So you kind of want to pair it with the phone. So I can definitely see. You got our first robot phone customer right here. Put it together.

I've used a pocket as well and had the same thing. The postage stamp screen is very hard to work with sometimes. Getting that experience on a big phone screen, all in one device, you get to edit on that device, right? If you are willing to edit on your phone screen, but you can edit on a phone better than you can edit on an Osmo Pocket. So there's a logic. But I think the most important thing,

is getting the sensor out of the phone so you can make it bigger and you can pick up much better alone. It's not much bigger. Well, we don't know actually the size, right? But it's still a 200 megapixel sensor. We know it's 200 megapixel and that is it. Honor has said zero other camera specs.

They've said nothing about the actual sensor size, the aperture or anything like that. It will also have an ultra-wide into telephoto and even still has a selfie camera built into the screen because they... I asked him about that. They did explain. It kind of makes sense.

You might want to use face unlock or something and you don't have to wait for the robot to pop it. head up every time you want to do face-onlock on your phone. I'm just saying all the AI stuff they're trying to do to make it a robot. It's like, just put Googly eyes on the gimbal and call it a robot. And like, I remember like, it's fun. It's like, honestly, half the people are still like, it's alive.

You know, like, it's like the presence of GoogleEyes. But yeah, that's definitely alive. Like, you don't need to do this AI stuff. But you mentioned dust resistance. They also announced a new foldable, what's the V6? The magic V6. And this is sort of the most toughest foldable around. right? It is now IP68 and IP 69, beating Google's pixel time profile, which are just IP68.

The difference between those is that the eight is for submersion in water, and the nine is for high temperature and high pressure jets of water. So it has both ratings. It can survive submersion, but also, I don't know, a really intense pressure wash if you want to subject your phone to that. You know, it's funny. I still get nervous about putting my phone, my regular phone underwater, and then it's like, oh, this folding phone you can put in a car wash. It's like, I don't, I'm not going to do that. But you should.

The IP ratings, that sealant is good once, twice, maybe as salt gets into it, as chemicals eat away at the sealant. It's for that accident, but do not rely on it to do it more than once. All right. Well, I'll keep my folding phone out of the car wash. I've heard stories of a Google employee I know in the UK

who wants in the early days of an IPC 68 pixel very proudly demonstrated the waterproofing on his pixel phone by dunking it in the swimming pool, which it did not survive. Brutal. Jami was there. They had a bunch of Lyca phones, some other stuff. What's going on there? Yeah, they had a huge launch.

They had a lot of different stuff. The main things are the Xiaomi 17 series phones, which had launched in China very late last year. This was their big European unveiling. So there was the 17, which is their iPhone 17 slash S26 slash pixel 10 kind of compact -ish flagship phone. They jumped from the 15th series to the 17th series. They quite explicitly said at the time they did this in China that it was to match their numbering to apples,

which is delightful. I love that for them. The more exciting thing was the 17 Ultra, and then this kind of Lika-branded spin on that, which is officially the Lika Lights Phone. What a name. It's great. So it's actually the fourth Lights phone,

but the other three were all made by Sharp, and they were only available in Japan. and they were this kind of weird little phone that a lot of Leica nerds got excited about and could never buy unless they made a trip to Japan. So this is the first Lights phone to be global, by which I mean, not the US, but everywhere else. It is kind of extraordinary as cameras go.

It's basically just the 17 Ultra to be clear. The Lights phone is not a whole different thing. It's the 17 Ultra, but with a load of extra LICA branding. They put the LICA red dot logo on it. It comes with Lika branded accessories. The software has been not totally co-created with Lika, but tweaked with Lyca. Lika's aesthetic has been put all over Android and all over the camera app.

So it feels a bit more like you're using a Lika device from that kind of UI experience, just like the fonts that run through it and things like that. And then the big, fun, silly, gimmicky bit on top of it is that the rear camera ring rotates. So if you get the LICA version of the phone, you can use that rear camera, you can twist it around, and it can control zoom or exposure,

or you can say it's a sort of move between different filters in the camera app and things like that, which is fun, and I thought I would love this. I was so excited for it. And I discovered that although in my head, the camera, they're like the camera island on these ultra flagships feels enormous. And they are enormous. They stick out of the phone loads. There's these huge black circles on the back of the phone.

They look really outlandish compared to it, you know, what Samsung and Apple do. But when you compare it to actually a camera and you try and hold it and grip the lens, mount with your hand, you discover it's tiny. It's really flush against the camera body. There is nothing for your hand to hold onto. And it's really awkward to actually try and use that as like a zoom control or a focus or something. It doesn't actually work in the way you really feel like it should. Yeah. I've always wondered, who are these branded camera phones for? Are they for Lyca nerds who are like, I want to have a Lycaphone in addition to my like a camera? Or do these people just, they pull out the actual camera,

not bother with the phone. So I'm lucky enough to know two, Leka nerds. They buy everything Leica makes. And I'm going to say this out loud. Neither of them have any children. And so the money you would spend on college

goes directly to LICA. I hope Lika starts like a scholarship fund or something because that would be the true circle of life. But like literally everything. Down to, there is, like, I made like a subscription camera app. And my buddy was like, well, I have to have it. And I was like, no, you absolutely do not.

I just download Halide. Like, you'll be fine. And there was no, like, they're going to buy this phone, I'm sure. And they're going to buy the lens cap, which is by far the best accessory for the phone, the huge lens cap that goes over the back. Oh, yeah. For anyone on the video, you've got this, like, like a branded lens cap on the back of the case that comes with it. And it's brilliant.

Okay. How to feel about the fact that the LICA logo, on the back are meant for are in portrait. Because I think this is the, the mistake of this phone, is that those logos should be to be holding the phone on landscape. So the funny thing about this is, is that this originally came out in China as a Xiaomi 17 Ultra Lyca edition.

And it had a slightly different design there. It had a two-toned finish, whereas it's now just a single color on the back. A couple other small tweaks. And in China, it's landscape. And then the, the, the interstate. international version, they changed it to portrait. No.

And everyone is curious about it. All of those sort of like, that is the thing everyone has said, why did they change the logo orientation? They ruined it. Because that's what makes it look like a camera. All right. Well, hopefully, this is never going to come to the United States. So hopefully, if you're buying it on the gray market, you can obviously choose, right?

So I would say buy the Chinese one. Other companies, Vivo, techno. There's a Unihertz phone to talk about, walk me through these. Okay. Vivo didn't bring like a full phone launch, but it did a tease of its X300 Ultra, which is going to be its equivalent to this Yami phone, its rival, its similarly prized top top top spec, similar giant camera module. It announced for the first time that it's going to bring that phone to Europe,

which it's always been China exclusive before. They said that this ultra will come in internationally. And it teased a set of ridiculous accessories to go with it. So last year Vivo was the first of the big Chinese phone brands to release a, what they called a telephoto. extender lens, which I viewed at the time. It was a 200-millimeter lens that you strap onto the back of the phone and you stick it on top of the existing telephoto on the phone, and then you get this full 200-millimeter telephoto experience. They're now doubling that with a 400-millimeter

telephoto extender, which I think might be more millimeters than I need from my phone focal length, to be honest. It's going to be a lot of Zoom. I love All of Ellison's picture. of this one because it's just all the gear around the phone. You can't see the phone at all. Yeah. It's very good. Yeah. Then they are releasing a camera cage together with small rig,

which is a company that basically makes all these camera cages and other kind of OTT professional-ish accessories for phones. And so this is a dual hand grip camera cage with a fan on the back and a mount for a light. You can mount a tripod to the bottom and all this stuff. And they're really trying to pitch this as now like, you can be, have a professional cinema setup with a phone at its center, and this can be the phone. And they're announcing some other like video features, support for 10-bit log across all three rear lenses, the new stuff they're doing with look-up tables and compacts video things that mostly go way over my head.

And at some point, I'm going to have to get my head around because I'm going to have to review this thing somehow. But they're really like leaning in on this idea that cool, what we can do to stand out is just go full in on professional cinema as what this phone does. which I will say in their credit, one thing I like about this is it's kind of refreshingly honest for a company like this to confirm that that's what you need when you want to produce this kind of, hey, all of this was shot on a phone content. And part of their hype spiel for this camera cage, this grip rig thing is, oh, this is what we use when we shoot our product launches and produce all the promo videos for it. It's a nice contrast compared to other brands which love to tell this thing was shot on the phone. And they leave this big blank around what that means, right? Yeah, Samsung just did this at the S-26 launch. Yeah.

And I mean, Apple does this every time. But Samsung literally just did this weeks ago at the S-26 launch. And you saw the photo, the actual rig they were using to shoot the S-26 launch. And you're like, where's the phone? Yeah. Like, you kind of get to a place where it could be any phone. Exactly. Because you've put so much around it.

Viva's demonstration of this. They literally had a setup. you could go and try it out, where they had taken this whole rig and mounted it on a dolly. And you could sit and use the tracking dolly to like take a shot and try out the new Pro Video app they have. And again, I just love that they're like, cool. When we talk about using this for cinema-grade stuff, we mean with all these other thousands of dollars worth of equipment around the phone. Well, it's interesting. So their approach to modularity is like stuff around the phone.

Then you've got this company techno, which is it's all just like pogo pins and magnets, like can make the phone bigger. weirder. And then I actually want to end by talking about Lenovo, which I have a lot to say about this Lenovo. And it's modular ports. Talk about the techno, because it's, we're, we're just in an age of like modularity in like specific ways, right? Not you're going to build your own phone out of parts. But, you know, in this case, you've got, okay, we're going to be honest that what you need to do is mount the phone in a rig and amount accessories to the rig. This techno company is like, we're going to be honest that you're just going to clip a bunch of magnets to our phone. And then I think Lenovo's on drugs. but let's talk about Techno first.

Yeah, so the Techno one is back into, this is full concept territory. This is not a product they're intending to release. We've seen Modular phones before. I like this. I think this is one of those smarter implementations of it. I've seen imagined. It is just a very, very thin phone,

thinner than a USB port, and it doesn't have a USBC port. It has a tiny battery, but they have various pogopin and magnetic attaching points in the back where you can slap on power bags and you can stack multiple ones on top of each other. So you could kind of keep stacking these various 3,000-m-a-power banks on until you've got as many as you want to have. They had microphone

attachments, speaker attachments. They had various types of camera attachments. They had sort of small little action camera things you could slap on the back, but also you could just put on a, well, basically it looked like a full mirrorless camera and pogo pin that to the back of the phone. This is the dream. It is the dream. The magnets are not strong enough. I held this thing, And if you were not supporting the full weight of the camera lens with one hand, it just immediately wanted to fall off. This is the reality of all PogoPin. Yes, it is not quite enough for a full camera to stick on the back. It can be done.

Essential. The essential phone had a magnetic, Coco PIN camera attachment. Let me just ask you a real question of the essential phone. Is that company still around? Obviously not. They had so many other issues. But magnetic and Pogo Pins was not the problem. Name a progo pin product at scale that still exists.

All I am saying, are the, is the only reasons to buy a new phone in the world anymore are because your battery is too old or because you want a better camera. So at the suitor we get to, just slap a new camera on your phone, slap a new battery on your phone, the better we will be. I know. The dream of Pogo Pins is alive. By the way, I just like saying Pogo P P Pins. But it is true that the dream of modular accessories, you just bink onto the thing, it's going to live forever. By the way, I think I can answer my own question.

I believe the only at-scale still existing Pogo PIN product is the surface, because I think the surface keyboard is Pogo Pins. That's it. That's all I got. You correct me if I'm wrong. I think that might be it. There are so many Pogo Pins in my life. I don't remember which ones are still sold at retail. Who are you?

All right. The reason I want to bring this up in modularity is because I want to end by talking about this Lenovo concept, which is a concept. It is basically a framework laptop. Sean, you've covered the framework at depth. Talk about another company that is just chasing the Pogo Pin dream to its complete conclusion. So this is just a laptop you can take apart. I know you've seen it, Dom.

The thing that gets me about it, and this just kills me, is they're like, the thing you should do with modularity is be able to replace the ports. And so you can swap in an HTML port. You can swap in a USBC port. This is all very funny because they also made a little case for you to carry your ports around. so that when you need the HTML port, you open your little ring box. And it's like, no, this is just dongles.

You just made the world's most inconvenient dongles that you can never replace. But now you have a little jewelry box for your modular ports. Dom, what was the idea here? I can't speak to everything they were thinking with this other than someone wanted a port pouch, like you said. Yeah.

I mean, this was like a weird concept that combined two things at once. It was the module ports, which you can swap in and out, which I think were USB, USBA, and HTML. But then it also just had this odd setup with a screen that was mounted on the back of the laptop lid and could detach. You could then connect it as an external monitor with a cable

and sort of an external monitor that magneted to the back of your laptop when you didn't need it. But you could also grab it and stick it on the bottom and have a dual screen, laptop setup. So just screen where the keyboard should be and more screen where the screen should be. You know that I'm fixated on the ports when I don't mention

the removable screen that can go either on the keyboard deck or the back of the existing screen. I'm like, that's fine. That's some normal stuff. Let me talk about these ports. It will not surprise any long-time readers of the Verge to know that I am all over this. I want this to exist. And I am especially excited

that these modular ports are not now tiny USBC connectors that go into your motherboard, but rather tiny m.2 connectors that go into your motherboard. So that theoretically, it won't just be HDMI and USB. Theoretically, you could plug in EGPUs and giant solid state drives and anything else that

could run over a PCIE large bus. Really big. Yeah, for the, for 2026 in which buying GPUs in fast storage is completely achievable for most people. I have a lot of dreams. I love it. It sounds like Mdusu is crazy. Dom, you were also at the nothing event

today, a true hero, leaving Barcelona to go to the nothing event today. They launched 4A Pro briefly. Tell us about that. Let me go take a break. Yeah, so nothing launched two phones. The phone 4A, the phone 4A pro, and also a pair of headphones, the headphone A, which are basically just a $100 cheaper version of their over-rear headphones that they released last year. The 4A and the 4A Pro are kind of interesting because they are two near identical phones in terms of specs.

There's very little, like tiny little variations in the exact chip set and how bright the screen is, things like that. They're basically the same phone, but they look totally different. So the 4A, which is the cheaper one, which is not coming out in the US. That was just Europe in India. The 4A looks a lot like a regular nothing phone. If you've seen any nothing phone they've done over the past five years, it's got this transparent back. It comes with this design where you can see what are meant to look suggestively

like the innards of a phone, but are in fact not the innards of a phone. They're just some other bits of plastic and screws. And it comes in some nice colors. It's white black, but they've also got a really punchy blue and pink, which I actually kind of love. The only will kind of shift with the foray is they've got a new glyph lighting setup. This is nothing's kind of design they put on the back of all their phones with some sort of funny, weird lights so that you can use for notifications and alerts and timers and things like that. Here they have a new set of which they call the glyph bar,

which is just seven vertical lights in a strip, a red one at the bottom that can be a video recording light. And they just go up and down. So you can use like a volume slider and it's, you know, how many of the lights go up tells you what volume you're on. And you have a timer where the blocks count down and things like that. I do love changing the volume on my phone by looking at the back of it. It's very satisfying. I tried this for a video and I was like, it goes up, the lights go on. It goes down, the lights go off.

Great. You could do that for 20 seconds tops. The 4A Pro is a bigger shift for nothing. It's their first metal phone. So they have had these transparent designs all the way along. This one drops that. It's a big shift to their aesthetic. Suddenly the bulk of the body is just metal.

It comes in silver or black or a... kind of suggestion of a pink. Yeah, this is a very, it's blush. Even blush feels a bit generous. It's a, it's a silver with kind of a hint that there might have been some pink near it once. But then they have a camera module, which looks a bit like the other previews nothing thing. So once you get to the camera, that bit's transparent. And that bit again has these little bits of, you know, plastic doohicies underneath.

And you can see, and it looks fun and exciting. And then that phone has what nothing calls the glyph matrix. which is basically just a round dot matrix display. They also did on the phone 3 flagship last year. This isn't totally new. The version on here is bigger, but it's also substantially lower resolution. There are a lot fewer square LEDs to light up in there.

So it's actually a lot less useful in some ways. I was really ready to like the fact that it was a bigger size because I found the phone 3 one a little unhelpful. I like the idea. I didn't actually find it very useful in any sort of practice. This one I feel like it's going to be even worse. They have options like, you know, a glyph mirror where you can see yourself lit up in the squares, but it's now so low resolution,

you cannot make out any meaningful shapes in this display. It's just a blur. This, I always say I look at this photo of it all, you post a photo of it all lit up and has, my immediate reaction is, okay, there's a clock, there's almost nothing else you could put on here. Yes. That isn't one big sort of eight-bit icon. Like, you could put like a rain cloud on here to be like it's raining. And that's basically what I think, will end up being a lot of the use case they suggested before and that I think they're going to push through here. It's just the idea of like, you can set a custom little emoji-esque icon

for say different notifications. You know, the joke they made in the keynote is have a crying face emoji for when you get slack notifications or something like that. So you can, you can customize it and do things like that, which is fine. It's all very manual from the phone three at least when I reviewed that before. You already have to go through buy app and come up with these designs yourself. You can upload images into it, but it doesn't do anything smart, like just automatically pull the app icon and suggest that as a thing here. You'd have to go and download the WhatsApp icon if you wanted the WhatsApp logo to be what appears when you do it.

That's ridiculous. Yes. I can't believe they didn't join that up. It's the most obvious part of this. But yeah. I think this would be a kind of controversial design for nothing fans because the transparency is so central to all the design aesthetic they've had all the way along since they started the company.

But I kind of see the logic because they, did go transparent with the phone three, and everyone hated that design. It was not popular at all among the fans of it. I personally thought that phone was really hideous. This one is like different, but I also think it kind of works. There's more of a symmetry to it. It looks a bit more thoughtfully laid out. I like the look of it, but we'll see. Did they say why? Why are they changing it? I think part of it is that it can get slimmer. This is their thinnest phone yet, partly from going to the metal rather than using the plastic.

Otherwise, mostly just evolving the design language and things like that. They talk a lot of not moving away from transparency, but evolving the transparent design, refining the transparent design, things like that. I feel like nothing, this is,

this is like the challenge of being a sort of Android phone maker in a market. Like you're up in Asia, where you're up against the robot phone in a Lika co-brand. Like, this phone has fogopin. Like the market there is so aggressive now that nothing started as being like, we're the solution to the iPhone. Like, we're going to be the counterculture rebels.

And they got locked into, and that means our phones are transparent. And that is not enough at this point. Like, you have to do something else. I'm, you know, Carl Pay is out there and he's like, we're going to be an AI company like everyone else says all the time. But I think they got kind of backed into the phones are transparent and that's our whole brand. Because the brand was not supposed to be about. transparent phones. It was supposed to be a much bigger ideas. We'll see what they

do next. All right, we've got to take a break. It's funny. We've talked so much about the Android market, the hardware market for Android, you can just see it. And, Dom, it seems like it was very much on this way to MWC. There's stuff happening in the market. There's just not coming to the United States. Like, our market

is much more constrained. We have different carrier relationships. We've got all this other stuff going on. And then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about on the software side, it seems like Android is up for yet. round of changes that Sean has been digging into. So we've got to take a break. We'll be back.

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whatnot dot com slash sell all right we're back on this the episode of the rushast which everything about android changes forever we did it with first we did it with robots now now we're going to do with internet purchases and video games yin and the yang of android Sean huge news this week Google and Epic reached a new settlement I'm actually, you know, I was covering Apple this week, and this happened like on the same day.

So I've only skimmed over the top of it, really. My understanding is Google and Epic already tried to settle this lawsuit about antitrust and Android. And the judge basically said, I don't trust you. Go away. And then now they're just like whatever we're settling anyway. What is going on here? Let me just preface that it was incredible to be in the courtroom for the settlement hearing with Judge Donato, trying very, very hard not to say out loud, but instead to make the people in front of him, make Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and make Android boss Samir Samoa.

He was trying very hard to make them say instead of him that the two companies are completely allies right now. They have a secret $800 million backdoor deal that Tim Sweeney, who basically said he would never do anything like. And him being careful, the judge being careful not to break this confidentiality, but they can't. get around this as they're evaluating the settlement. And eventually Tim Sweeney just blurts out what's going on. All right. So I want to get to that. So just to put it everyone's brain, Epic, which makes Fortnite, very famously sued both

Apple and Google for antitrust violations in particular because they don't want to pay the 30% fee for in-app purchases in Fortnite, which is all their money. And Fortnite's so huge that they basically could afford to get kicked off of both these app stores and not have Fortnite in mobile because they will just collect money for. from children buying dances on every other platform. PlayStation especially. And this has been going on now for most of my adult life. From what I recall.

Six years. Yes. Every day I wake up in Epic and Apple and Google are suing each other, and that's the way it's going to be. So the Epic and Apple case is totally different. The dynamics that case are very, very different. That isn't undergoing its own machinations. The judge in that case is very mad at Apple in particular,

all kinds of stuff going on there. Put that out of your brain. This is a different case. in the Google case, because Google runs Android and then it has to ship Android on other company's phones, there's just more evidence of Google doing monopoly stuff. Like there's just more emails from Google to Samsung and Google to honor. Like, Google has to run its ecosystem. And every now and again, a Google executive is like, do what we want or we'll kill you. And they just have to like write it down an email and send it, which is not what Apple has to do. right? Like Apple is like, come to Tim's office and then you'll, you don't know what happens there. Like, right, Apple's integrated company, it's all one stack. Because the Android ecosystem has to be controlled, there was just vastly more evidence in the Google case of Google doing monopoly stuff.

Tremendous amounts of emails. So many, and also evidence that Google was trying to cover up some of this by deleting some of those emails. The judge was very angry about this at the time. Right. So Epic wins, like running away in the Google case in a way that, you know, you can argue about the results of the Apple case thing and that one's still ongoing. But in the Google case, because there's so much evidence, Epic just wins running away. And then there's, I'm still trying to wrap my head around this timeline. And then the judge is going to like issue a remedy, a ruling, say what the punishment is. And then these two show up and they're like, we've settled. And then somewhere in that settlement, Tim Sweeney just admits that there's like a secret $800 million deal. And the judge says, no. I don't believe you that this is bad and this is a part of it. And now they're just doing it anyway. What is going like truly what is going on here? Okay. Okay. Let's say. Years after Epic wins unanimously in this jury verdict and we've gone through, we've gone to the appeals and we're waiting to see the Supreme Court takes this up suddenly. Yes, Epic and Google come out together and say we're settling this. Now what does that settlement mean? Because you have to remember that these companies are already past the point where any company would usually settle here, the judge has already issued

a permanent injunction here that says, hey, Google, you cannot do all of these things anymore. You cannot make these secret deals that incentivize companies to bring games exclusively to Android. You cannot have all these apps on this platform completely under your control. You need to create a place where rival app stores can exist in that. inside the Google Play Store, and you need to give them access to the full catalog of Google Play apps so that an upstart app store could possibly compete against Google Play from within. It's like this entire host and carrier process here where these other app stores can maybe now break Google's monopoly. The judge agrees to all of this incredibly. And now that that injunction has not only been in place for a long time, but been upheld by an appeals court now suddenly. Google and Epic want to be friends. And the judge is incredibly skeptical about all of this. But after this settlement hearing where Judge is incredibly skeptical and Sweeney Burlerts out all this stuff about Secret Deal, we find out that they're, you know, Google and Epic are now,

joined at the hip for whatever happens next. They come out this week and they say, we are moving ahead with many of these things that the judge was skeptical about being proper remedies for the monopoly that Google had. They are going to move ahead with lower app store fees, which sounds great. Traditionally, you'd have this 30% fee that app developers would have to pay to Google. They'd take 30% of what was going through the app store unless the app in question was a subscription fee that you're paying, which case would be less, or unless it was going to be the first million dollars of revenue for an app developer. There was a smaller fee for that, but generally 30%. That is the standard app store tax, quote, unquote. Now, now that's the first.

that fee is going to be less, for one reason, because Google is going to reduce it to a 20% standard, down from 30, for in-app purchases, and also because Google is decoupling, its billing fee from its service fee. One of the things that we decided, that was decided in the Epic versus Google case is that billing and services were illegally tied together. Google is not supposed to be able to say, you have to use our billing system. The judge decided you cannot do that. You will not be able to do that anymore. You'll have to have rival billing systems. App developers should be able to choose another provider like Stripe or PayPal or something to process those transactions. So Google's saying we're going to go ahead and do that everywhere around the world. We're going to reduce our fees and we're going to decouple billing from payments. But since things are still ongoing in the United States, it's not really a settlement here until the judge is. approved that this is a better idea. So they're just front-running the judge. They're like, judge, this has already happened.

Like, don't you want to be cool? And it's going to happen almost everywhere else around the world. Google, you know, I talked to Google Android boss Samir Samad, and he's like, we're going to do this everywhere else where we don't need to wait for a judge to approve this. We're going to do this everywhere else we can. We're going to do this everywhere where we don't already have an ongoing case with Epic. We're not being sued. We'll just go ahead and just roll this out everywhere else.

And so you, United States, you can do this different, more onerous process if you want. Sure. But maybe you should do it the way we're doing it everywhere else. Why not? And so they're now proposing that the judge modify the permanent injunction yet again to reflect the new state of things that they're doing everywhere else around the world. So basically, here's our conclusion that we've come to it with Epic. Judge, don't come up with your own system. Just do the thing we did with Epic.

Pretty much. There are a couple other weird things going on. in there. Well, I'm just curious, because they've obviously paid Epic. You reported on various terms of this payments epic, this weird secret deal that we don't know a lot about, right? They're going to do Metaverse apps. I don't know what we're doing here. Tim Sweeney is very unhappy with us because we, you wrote a story pointing out that he's not allowed to disparage Google's Play Store or App Store policies, and he has to say that they're like a pro-competitive actor and he's out there being like, I can yell at whoever I want.

I don't know about that, buddy. But like Google has gotten a lot out of this. Like, it seems like Google is driving this car, an epic, which one is suddenly just like a long for the ride. But I don't, that dynamic to me only makes sense if there is hundreds of millions of dollars changing hands. Well, in this case, it's probably $800 million changing hands over a number of years because that is the number that came up publicly now because they have a secret unreal

engine and services deal of some sort where Google is now going to be using possibly some Unreal Engine things and Epic is going to be having Google hosting, I think, for these servers. But there's also the whole Metaverse app things. We don't know what that's about yet.

It was revealed in this term sheet. Well, it's quite a massively successful Metaverse concept that everybody was. If you believe that maybe the phrase metaverse browsers refers to Fortnite

refers to possibly I decline. Can I let's be excluded from this narrative? No longer being considered a game but something else. Can I just

can I stop this here? I don't mean to Sean, you are just the messenger and you're my co-founder here at the Virgin I love you deeply. I'm so mad at you

for making me consider the idea that Fortnite is a metaverse. You know? Like, I, stop it. Stop telling me that Fortnite is a metaverse.

I'll jump to the conclusion. There is a huge redacted section of the term sheet that we have now seen go through the court filings. This huge redacted section, it might just be about this formerly secret $800 million on rail engine services deal, or maybe the fact that it is redacted in a large portion of this Metaverse browsers section is redacted. It might have to do with maybe Epic has gotten some kind of secret sweet heart deal for Fortnite in general, and maybe Google is agreeing to no longer consider

it to be a game. And so they might even have a more favorable rate than the 20% or 15%. Because it's a Metaverse browser. Because it's a Metaverse browser, not a game. We don't know this for sure. It's all redacted. Lots of black. So again, I'm going to just try to bracket

my level of upset from you personally. So that's fine. I'm still very upset with you. I mean, this came up in the Apple case, right? Is Fortnite a game? Is Roblox a game? you can make these arguments that, like, in particular, like,

for example, Roblox is actually just an app development environment in which games are routinely expressed in Roblox is itself not a game. You just have to leave reality behind to do this. Like, most people do not experience these things in this way. And you're saying there's some evidence here

that Google has decided that Fortnite is not a game, but rather a metaverse. A more generous reading might be that there's some future Metaverse browser that is not Fortnite and something else that Epic wants to get a different deal for. Every time you say Metaverse browser, I think about getting up and leaving.

Like, I don't, I'm going to shut this down. Another interesting thing, which we've not spent a lot of time reporting out yet, but might be interesting to listeners of this Vergecast. Epic and Google, in these revised permanent injunctions, in these settlements that they want to make, they are trying to define

Android as the subtle, as the injunction reverse to it. Like when you're trying to decide where can Google not make sweetheart deals, where you're trying to decide where can Google not impose various things that maybe seem monopolistic, Epic and Google are trying to define Android as Android apps as things that are running explicitly on phones and tablets. And I will tell you right now that while Android is this one thing, Google is currently working on another operating system called aluminum or aluminum, or aluminum, perhaps.

I believe it's aluminum. Aluminium. Aluminium. I don't even mean like a U.S. versus UK English thing. I mean like, I believe it's actually called aluminium. It is spelled that way. It is spelled with the British English spelling. So yes, I'm aluminium it is.

This operating system, it is also revealed in court filings, is basically Android for PCs. And so if Epic and Google can somehow say, well, you know, Apple, for aluminum shouldn't be subject to all of these permanent injunction things that we don't like very much. And all of a sudden, aluminum is everywhere rather than Android and Google effectively manages to quietly

rebrand everything it's doing to aluminum. I wonder what that's going to do to this attempt to restrict Google's monopoly. That's a lot of very subtle, very coordinated moves for Google.

I don't know I mean This is true I like everybody over there They're nice to ask people But like we're gonna We're gonna do a series Of very subtle Very stealthily coordinated moves

That add up to a big result At the end It's Google Like what, come on Is it plausible? I don't know The thing that I don't understand Is why they think the judge

Will buy this Like just laziness Just the docket's full and, you know, I'm tired of you two, like, fine. Because the judge has already seemed so skeptical of all of this. On my call with Samir, head of Android, he tried to be very deferential out loud to the judge. He did not want to suggest that in any way the court would, like, take this modified injunction that Google an Epic one and run with it. We talked a little bit, myself, Samir, and Tim Sweeney about the,

two worlds that might exist after this is all set and done. And they were very clear that there is not going to be a world. There is not a third world where there will be rival Android app stores living within the Google Play Store and registered app stores that you download from the web and put on your phone. It will be one or the other and the judge gets to decide which of those is it is in the United States. But it might be the whole world is going on with. I see. Registered app stores and everybody gets their non-Google Play stores by downloading through the web. That's how it's going to be around the rest of the world.

Or it might be that the United States is the exception where the United States has to carry rival stores within its store, and you'll download the Epic Game Store from inside Google Play. And it will have all the Android apps inside it. But everywhere else in the world, you might have to do something different and download that rival app store from the web. It might be that to a world scenario. I feel like bringing that to the judge and be like, don't you want to be like the rest of the world is one of the least. convincing things you can do to a judge in the United States of America, possible. Like, they're like, yeah, I don't, I don't care about that. I don't, who cares?

And then you're like, well, yeah, because in the rest of the world, they've got robot phones. Like, it's already totally different out there. Like, just as a point of leverage, it just seems very confusing to me. Like, don't you want to be like the rest of the world historically is one of the least convincing things you can say to any person in the United States? Like, I, no. The answer, like, wholeheartedly is like, no, we will. not have health insurance. Like at no point is anyone here like, yes, the rest of the world has it

right. I think it just might be different here in the U.S. from from here on that. And I wonder if maybe that's a good thing. All of the reduced fees that Google is going to spread around the world, the best versions of them are contingent on app developers joining very specific new programs that incentivize them to be very closely tied to Google. use Google APIs, bring their apps to more devices, and to be, you know, play devil's advocate for a moment, to make their apps run nicely. I would love to have my phone app run great on a tablet

and run great in XR and run great on my TV or my car, and that's the thing that Google would like to see happen and is incentivizing. This is one of the more interesting dynamics between the Apple and Google cases with Epic. You can see that Google desires the level of control over the app ecosystem that Apple has. And the mechanism of Apple's control

is like a long history of beautiful design and like Apple bloggers saying that apps are ugly. And like there's a normative culture around Apple. And then it has the App Store where it's like, would you like to be featured? Make your app beautiful. Right. And there's just like there are layers of control there.

Some of which has nothing to do with Apple itself and a lot of which have to do with Apple's control over distribution. But because it's all just Apple, you can't be like they're a monopoly over the app store. Because if you buy an iPhone and get the app store, Google to exert the control over the ecosystem has to be like,

how do we get leverage over Samsung? And then they have to go get it and use it and write the email being like, we have identified our leverage over you. Here it is. Comply or death. Neala, you and I have been here long enough that we have, there was a point

that you and I were advocating for Google to have this control. We were tired of fragmentation. We were so tired of Android fragmentation. We were like, look at these Skyhook filings. Yes, Google's cracking the whip and making sure Samsung doesn't fuck up the phone every time. If you can write us an email and explain what Sean means by look at these Skyhook filings, I will find a way to get you some words.

That is a deep cut, my dude. No, I'm with you, right? But that was also a reflection in fact that all the skins that the manufacturers are putting on Android are bad. I'm saying here in 2026, we're not looking at whatever water droplet, Samsung touchwiz garbage, we're looking at a bunch of phone makers around the world legitimately pushing that platform

beyond the boundaries of what anybody considered it could do. Right? And it all kind of looks like iOS and it all kind of looks like this. And that's like you can have whatever feelings you want about that. But we're not in the crazy era fragmentation. We're at like boundary pushing on the platform. And Google's need for control is kind of like completely like

tangential to that. Right. Dom, like do you see like there's not a lot of Google influence it. MWC. They're there, but none of these devices depend on Google's innovation. No, you don't see a really big push for them on how Google their phones are. Like you said, all the UI's are very different to what you'll see on a pixel. Often, like you said, closer to an iPhone than a pixel phone, a lot of them will have, you know, they're Android and they've got Gemini and things like that, but they're not

talking about Gemini. They're talking about their own AI tools, their own AI assistance, all this stuff that's built on top of it and build around it. and no one's really no one's even comparing themselves to Google and to pixel phones and taking them as a yardstick of what counts as success in the industry or

an idealized version of an Android phone or what they should be aspiring to or building from whenever they talk about any other company it's just Apple or Samsung. Google is there. There's this bit called Android Avenue whether you can go and play the demos of new Android features

and that's kind of about the presence it has. Yeah. I don't know, we'll see I just like the idea that they're going to show up to a judge in the United States, you're like, don't you want to, you don't want the United States are different. And it's like, well,

even if you just look at the market, like, it already is so different. And then who cares? Anyway, Sean is deep in it. We're going to keep covering this quasi-settlement that's not a settlement. If you know what's going on with the secret $800 million deal

and whether or not Fortnite isn't Metaverse, Brad, you just let us know. We're in the game. I'm very curious with all that means. We've got to take a break. We'll be back with the Lightning Round. Support for the show comes from

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your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com. slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics.

But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse.

And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think, that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay.

I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third. Like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. We're back. It's the lightning round. sponsored for flavor. By the way, we keep, we keep saying that. We have some, like, wacky ideas

about all of this sponsoring and flavor in particular. You'll see. I'm just teasing that here. You'll see. I think you're going to, you're going to like some of these wacky. It has nothing with me. No one can ever pay to tell me what to do, but other people who don't work at the verge, you could pay to sell them what to do. You just think about that for one minute. Think about what that might mean. All right, let's start. We've got to start. Gentlemen, I apologize for this. We do this to start the lightning around every week. It's time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brennan Carr is a dummy.

Travis tells me we don't have theme music this week, and I'm looking at the note for why, and I just want to tell the audience, I'm very disappointed at you. And the note for why is that apparently we're being overrun with AI slot music for Brennan Carr's dummy. And we don't want to play the AI slot music. I'm sorry.

So if you can make really, really good AI music, which we have played in the past, I believe, Travis, correct? We'll play that. If you want to make your own Gregorian chant, which we ran last week, which I believe Travis, we should run again this week. We'll play that. But no mid-tier AI slop. That's the rules. Can we get some like Brendan Carr beatboxing? Yeah, some of that.

We've played some very avant-garde Brennan card themes. Travis, can we just run the Gregorian chant one more time to start this one for Brennan Car as a dummy? So this week, this is a very short Brennan Carr's a dummy because we've had too many gadgets. And quite frankly, Brendan's a dummy, but it waxes and wanes. This isn't true First Amendment Brendan Carr stuff. This is just the man is dumb and lives in the past. So this week, he proposed a rule. The FCC is going to vote on it this month, trying to incentivize United States companies to bring their call centers back to America.

And then further require the people. people who work in the call centers to be proficient in American standard English. I just pointing out, the reason the call centers are abroad is because the labor is cheaper in other countries. And so if you bring, if you force the American companies to bring the call centers over here, they're not going to pay the higher labor rates. They're just going to let AI answer the phone. I don't, I can't say it any clearer than that. They're already trying to do this because the AI is cheaper than the already cheap forward. labor. And so if you're like, you have to have your call centers in United States, they'll be like, yes, they're in data centers now. He's such a dummy. Like, I don't, this is such an obvious outcome of this rule. So the way he's doing this, he can't actually tell people where to put their call centers. He can put limits on call volume going to other countries, which would then force you to put your call centers in United States. This is the most incredible kind of rate regulation you could have in 2020.

on a global, like, telecom network. This is the exact sort of stuff that, like, when they argue against net neutrality, they're like, why would you regulate the networks and do right regulation? The free market should decide. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no. People don't like hearing foreign accents.

So I will do intense rate regulation on the phone network, which I have legislation over, which I have jurisdiction over. And I'll move the call center of the United States where all these companies will happily pay full freight American labor rates and not use AI. She's very dumb man. I've got to say, Neely, I don't know why you're so skeptical about this.

I mean, Trump Mobile managed to set up its call center in the U.S. quite successfully from what I understand. But that's the only thing they do. That's all they have. To just accept your money and send you nothing. That's a great business. Like, if you could set up a business where you employ a bunch of very kind people in Kansas to answer the phone, take your credit card, and then charge you $200,

like at scale like that is a but then do nothing else great business at some point you've collected enough you've collected enough pre-order payments

to just run your call center on the interest alone while you buy crypto which I'm confident is what Don Jr. is doing yeah anyway Don by the way do you have a Trump mobile update

for us this week? Only that it was not at MWC I did look I looked for I served Trump in the MWU database. I look for Liberty Mobile, which is the sort of MVNO that really feels like is Trump mobile behind a sort of gold sheen. But there was no sign of them whatsoever. I really tried. You know, I was hoping they'd be there with some sort of flag waving booth asserting American

exceptionalism abroad or something. When you said you were going to look for them there, I was like, I don't, why would Trump Mobile be in Europe? Like, they don't go there. That's not allowed. We don't acknowledge Europe. But I was kind of hoping you'd see them because they had rebranded it. stamp a US flag on Barcelona soil. I mean, while I was there, there was a lot of stuff in the news about Trump saying very angry things about Spain and Spanish politics for reasons I didn't fully understand. So we're doing the perfect excuse to go and, you know, lay down the law at MWC2. It does. All right.

That's been Brennan Carr's a dummy with a little side show into the Trump phone. Brendan, if you're listening and you would like to investigate Liberty Mobile, which is just collecting payments for a phone that doesn't exist. By all means, we would love to hear the results of your own. investigation. In the meantime, I'll remind you that it's 2026. No one's watching broadcast television. And if you move call centers to the United States, they will 100% be answered by chat GPT. It is

as much of a guarantee as I can give you, Brendan. You're always welcome to come on the show. I think you're a coward and a dummy. That's been Brennan Carves a dummy. American's favorite podcast for the podcast. I mean, that alone is so much more high quality thinking than anything Brendan has done for the past a year. I don't know how else to say it.

All right, we got a lightning round. Sean, what do you got? I have a 61-pound machine that eats plastic and spritz out bricks. I'm waiting for the return label. This is the clear drop, soft plastic compactor. We saw that this thing was going to be at CS. It pulls in all of your household plastic, all the thin household plastic, the bag that you took off your comforter, your snack wrappers, your Ziplux, all that kind of stuff.

You put it in the machine. Eventually, weeks later, it will compress it and then heat it. into a three-pound brick, 2.6, 3.3, it varies a little bit. And then you mail that off across the country to some guy's house, but properly, after they change the shipping labels, it won't be some guy's house anymore. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, to just pump the brakes. Whose house? Matt, Matt, it went to Matt Daly's house.

Matt Daly is an advisor and kind of a head of product and marketing for the company. He seems to be a very nice guy who gave us a great virtual tour. Also, on the website for this product, of which he is an advisor, there are two testimonials from him about how good the product is. And for some reason, the bricks were going to his house to make sure that they didn't have too much stuff. I don't want to heap too much criticism on Matt Daly. He gave us a great virtual tour and has been very patient with our questions at the entire process. But where the bricks should go and eventually did go in our case is to a facility,

Indiana, where they get ground up and turned into downcycled plastic products in the future. So, that might be in composite lumber for decking or lawn furniture. They might be in highway, the highway guardrails. The way they get connected to the poles that they're on is sometimes through a very cheap piece of plastic. It might be in those. This is what you can do to keep your plastics out of the landfill, assuming you want to pay $1,400 over two years. for the machine and for the mailers that let you send these bricks to them once a month. I read your review.

I watched your video. I have to say, I enjoyed the part of the video where you were like, what happens if I stick my hand in here? Seemed ill-advised. The answer is, Sean, remains intact, has not been turned into a brick. It's all good.

And then, you mean, it's essentially a negative review where you're like, this doesn't make any sense, and I went by this. And the company was like, thank you. And that happens so rarely that the company is like, Yes, you've pointed out a number of flaws in our idea. The best I've ever gotten before today from a PR representative

after a review vaguely like this is, you're tough, but you're fair. This one was like glowing. You verge does real journalism. You should read this site. By the way, we think we should fix these things. So this was wonderful. And from the guy who I accused of having to send the bricks to his house,

and writing those testimonials. He says he wrote them before he started working for the company. So it's all good. There's a number of products in this zone out here. There's a bunch of smart composters. It all feels like you can buy consumer goods to make you feel good about buying other consumer goods. And at the end, none of them ever math out. Like, that's just how that feels to me.

The idea and Justine, Justin, our senior science reporter, Justin Kalma, who co-wrote this piece with me and tackled like the plastics section of it. She is adamant, and she has the experts to back it up, that we cannot fix the plastics problem by getting rid of the plastics that are already out there. We need to make fewer things out of plastic in order to not have a tremendous amount of plastics overwhelming our world and our landfills. And so, you know, she came in this worried that this might actually be a project that the plastics industry might have funded to make it look. better to make the use of plastics look better because some of the advisors for this company have some ties to

the plastics company. We didn't really find that out. I don't I don't know that this is necessarily that. They put a lot of work into creating device and that actually seems to exist. But still it's this is not the solution right now and it may never be. Yeah. All right. Tom, what do you got? Okay. I have the infinix note 60 ultra, which is another stupid weird phone. But what I really have a. is the wireless charger that MFenix shipped to me with it, which is shaped like a racing car. It is an enormous cheat charger, which the actual cheat charger is just a small puck in the center, which you can kind of pop out. But it's in this enormous, quite like weighty, solid plastic base, fully shaped like a sort of chrome and carbon fiber racing car. It has really strong, like

Simpsons, I sleep in a racing car, do you, energy to it. It's incredibly now. The whole thing has happened because the phone, Infinix, Florida's worth, a company they're one of the Chinese manufacturers. They're owned by a bigger company called Tranchen, who also owns Techno, who we spoke about earlier with the modular phones. Infinix are very big in Africa, parts of South America, parts of Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, no presence at all in Europe, really. This phone, their first Ultra, is a partnership with the car design company,

Pinn and Farina. So the whole thing is ostensibly car theme. But what's funny is the actual phone itself has almost no car-theming whatsoever. There's like one RGB light on the back that they call the, I think it's the floating tail light. And it's just like, sure, there's a light. Cars have lights on the back too, that checks out.

Oh, this is like a tail light. Yeah, it just like a big red bar across the back of the phone. It's, I mean, maybe I'm doing it down. It is a bit like a taillight, but that's the only car-ish touch to the whole thing. There's like a dot matrix display on the back of the phone. That is not a car thing.

Cars don't tend to have dot matrix displays. they checked. But they just went all in on these accessories, which I don't even know if you can buy. You know, like, they sent this to me, but that must be some weird thing they sent to the press. It also, like, they sent me a SIM tool, which is shaped like a racing car. Like, I can just, like, pop out my SIM with my tiny little racing car SIM tool. And I love this. I'm going to treasure the SIM tool, at least. I don't know if I quite want to charge my phone on a racing car every night, but I do, I swap Sims a lot because I'm reviewing phones all the time. And so I do have a sense

of like the SIM tools I like, you know? I like some nothing ones because they have a kind of chunky plastic handle to them. But I think the racing car might be the pride of my collection now. Okay, two things. One, Pinn and Frinas is just a very funny company. I don't know if yours deep into carroll design. I am the

opposite of a car guy, so I know, like, less than zero. So PinnonFrina is famous for designing some of the most iconic Ferraris of all time. Like, you would, and like, part of other Italian brands. Testerosa. Give me a Testerosa. Yeah, just like hilariously, Pinnonfriena was like they were the ones. And a bunch of fiat's like, they're a car design company.

But now they make their own cars. They make their own weird EVs. So like they're constantly trading on this history that is long gone because you know who designs Ferraris now? Johnny Ive. So like that's gone. And then second, it's just like this picture you have of the lock screen where there's just a random quote on the lock screen. Let me just read you what the lock screen says. There is no chance, no destiny, no fate that can hinder the firm resolve of a determined soul.

And it just says that on the lock screen. I think it's beautiful. Those words to live like. Is that, can you change that? Or is that just what it always says on the lock screen? There are two to pick from. They're not really like fully on the lock screen. You kind of like swipe up into them.

And there's no explanation of what they are, why they're there. whether you can add more, change them, whether they're going to, you know, add more in an update or something. I don't know. I'd love to kind of keep getting more of these. I'm going to see if I can, no, I don't have the other one to hand, sadly. The other one is something about crying and about how, if you cry, it's because you're, you know, too strong or something.

Crying is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength, but in much more grandiose, kind of upsetting wording. That's true. By the way, Sean, they did design. Pinn in front of it did design a testosterone. I sure did. And now I think the crying is because Johnny Hyas designing the new Ferraris and they're doing weird TVs. That's incredible.

All right. My Lightning Round 1, I think this is the funniest little stat about our audience I can give you. So on Apple Bay, cover all the new Apple stuff, the iPhone 17E, the new MacBook Air, the MacBook Neo, which is a huge, everyone wants to see it, the iPad Air, which no one wants to see. So we're like, looking at the traffic. David and I were like in the car on the way back to the office to be like, what's everyone interested in? We're like prepping for the live stream. And it's the traffic.

I'm dead serious. The number one story on the site was the MacBook Neo. Guess what number two was? Go ahead. Go ahead. Guess what number two was. Cobo remote. It was the cobo remote,

which is not any of the other Apple products. The number two story on the site on Apple Day was the cobo remote. which is just a little clicker for Kobo e-readers, that you can just press the button and it turns the page. And it was the MacBook Neo, and then this like, I don't know how much it is. It's like $30. It's a $30.

It's so expensive. It has a horrible branding on it. It says Rakuten Kobo on it. The thing is incredibly ugly. It's a $30 clicker. It has two buttons on it and one is page forward and one is page back. We have a great headline. Andrew Lisholski wrote this headline.

He's like, I love this thing. I love clicking my e-reader in bed. And I'm just telling you, it was the number two traffic on our site on Apple Day. It is my, it is my faith. It's like everything I need to know about the verge audience right there. Like, what do you actually want? You want a remote for a reader that doesn't require a weird Bluetooth hack. Very good.

Secret is everybody wants to be bundled up in a blanket. Nobody wants to put their hands on a book. Books. That's the one. Sean, what's your other lighting around? I have the Lego Smart Brick. I have the Lego smart brick right here. You have it. You have the Lego smart brick.

I have two of them. I've got four of them, actually. So I heard that they were out, like people could buy them, and none of the software worked yet. Yeah. So the thing about them is they're not supposed to require any software. In fact, Lego, the Lego group just did like an hour-long live stream the other day, saying that these things work out of the box. You do not need to use the app.

Some of the designers said I've been working on this product for two years. I've never even seen the app. The app is just for downloading updates for future functionality and for turning down the volume if you are apparent. These are the only things that it is for. It is important that it has both of these functions, though, because, number one, they are loud and annoying. And they make the same sounds over and over again, which is not something I expect to go again. And two, they do not have all of their functionality out of the gate. The original sets, the original three sets that come with them, all of which I have here,

can lift if you want, X-Wing Tie Fighter and Throne Room Duel. All three of these, they use light sound, color sensor to make certain different sounds. They can detect like a figure nearby, but they don't have all the most fun stuff we saw at CES, like being able to tell precisely where two bricks are from one another, like how close and what their orientation is like. They don't have ambient light sensor functionality yet. They don't have any, they're not using their microphones to like detect sound yet. And there are very few, as far as I've seen, multi-brick interactions where you can actually see all kinds of cool stuff going on that isn't simply swoosh and blast and so on. So I have here, this is the X-Wing with a Lego smart brick inside. Pick this thing up. Is that one dead already?

By the way, they only have about 45 minutes of battery life. Lego recommends that you leave them on the charger when not in use, and I did not do that last night. So, okay, so now this is an X-wing. I don't know how well you can hear that. And so we got Luke in there, plays the Force themes, you know that Luke's in there. You can hear R2 occasionally.

If I spin the thing upside down, yeah, we got some sounds. He's going to a little scream. He's going upside down at some point. And so I can blast by pressing this button, maybe. Here we go. It does seem like what Lego has made here

is like one of those crazy sound effect boards for Morning Zoo Cruise radio shows. Do I mean? That's like the vibe I'm getting from this demo. that you're giving me right now. When we were at CES, they showed us all kinds of amazing things that it could do. Like, you could have a little police car, and you could have a thief

try to, like, commandeer that police guard. It would sound the alarm, wouldn't let him in. And then you brought the police guy over there, and then, come on, let me shake that thing again. You brought the police guy over there, and he would be allowed to be in his own thing. Let him in. And then the robber would scream when the police guy enters the car.

All this kind of fun stuff that's, like, multiple-figure interaction. But with these ones here, the best I've gotten is you can have the sets blast each other a little bit with the multiple bricks. Let me get this Millennium Falcon up here. There we go. I do feel like I need to remind you, Sean,

although we are on YouTube, this is primarily a radio show. Oh. This is some of the most tortured radio that has ever been made in the history of the world. I did ask you if you wanted to see them, and I did not wait for your answer.

I'm not going to launch into this thing right here. Okay. No, I feel like I understand what's going on here. It, it, when these things were announced and you wrote about them, I would say, I caught this from you and I 100% caught it from the audience that everyone wants this to be great. Everyone sees the potential and everyone is fully expecting to be disappointed. And I'm watching you disdainfully shake a millennium felon at me right now on its stream. And I would say the disappointment is high. Yeah.

Yeah. The, uh, the Lego, the smart prick, it deserves better. in these first Star Wars sets. And I'm worried, I'm a little worried that if this is what they've got for us out of the gate, maybe there are some hidden limitations that they did not discuss it. See as maybe some of the better functionality uses way more battery life. Somebody's already torn apart one of these bricks. The battery, the mill-amp hours in this battery can be measured in the tens.

I think it has like 42 mill-amp hours or something like that. So it's very small. They recommend that you always leave the thing on the charger when you're not using it. The batteries are not removable, not replaceable. The entire brick has disposal instructions for it when they eventually run out of charge and can't use it anymore. And it's all very expensive. You're paying, you know, 70, 80 for one of the starter sets. And it comes with a few things to do. Like you can have a little, a little stormtrooper turret blast at your X wing and you can have a scanning station scanner. My six-year-old,

loved scanning around for Darth Vader with the scanning station but after like a day or so of me leaving this stuff on my coffee room table for them to play with whenever they wanted to they were not playing with them whenever they wanted to they were watching screens

they were asking for Minecraft videos they were reading books they were playing with their dolls so I don't know yeah all right well we'll wait for that full review although I suspect I know what it's going to say all right Tom what else you got Okay, so first bit of context here. I've been in Spain for most of the past week.

The first thing I knew about the war in around was waking up one morning in my hotel room, opening blue skies, seeing, oh, a wall started half an hour ago. Cool, that's great. Very 2026 situation. I've got to go to a phone launch now, so, you know, I'm going to go see a robot phone, and I'll hope this war sorts itself out. I was then really busy all week. There were a lot of phones.

We'd gone over that. So the second thing I saw related to the Iran War was a minute-long video put out by the White House Twitter account, which was a call-of-duty highlight video, including video game footage and shots of missiles hitting Iranian targets. Oh, God. That's the most I know about what's actually happening in Iran right now. This is like a video, they tweeted it out saying, courtesy of the red, white, and blue. And it opens, we like a 10-second clip, which is genuinely from Korn. of Duty. It's a coat from Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, apparently. It's also the animation of when you call in a nuclear strike after you've got a kill streak sufficiently high. Oh, good. That's what you want. Very reassuring. And then there's 50 seconds of just clips of actual missile strikes that have been hitting actual targets over the past week, presumably some of which

have included casualties. The whole thing is set to music. And there's a couple bits with like voice barks, which I assume are also from Caller Duty. They sound very much. like those kind of like little NPC lines balked out by a character in Call the Duty. It's, I mean, there's been a lot of dystopian stuff, but this one really hit me.

I do feel like we, we've spent so much time on this show, on the site, on Dakota, talking about deep fakes and reality detection and cryptographic signatures and C2PA and, well,

any of this work. And like, we rarely contend with the fact that people are routinely confused by video game footage. Yes. All the time. and it's not weird AI stuff.

It's literally just screen caps of Call of Duty and Microsoft Flight Simulator and all this stuff. And I don't know that there's like a... You can't be like, we will do deep fake detection of Call of Duty. Yeah, it's real Call of Duty stuff. It's actually a weird existential crisis.

No, that's a real video game. Yeah. That did it, but it happened in the video game, but you're just using it to lie. You just need more video game journalists. You need more video game journalists everywhere on the staff of every newsroom to be like, That is not real. That's Call of TV. That is that is Halo. That is bad. That's horrible. We're doing a story, by the way, Tina Nguyen on our site has been trying to identify the people in the administration who post these things, where they come from. There's a pretty elaborate system that we can kind of like see the shape of in the world where there are like Discord servers or people like make these things and send them to administration. If you know, you'd,

You tip us. You just send us a note because we're reporting that out. Once you see a content farm, like once you've been in a media for long enough, you like you recognize a content farm from like 100 miles away. You're like, oh, the Trump administration is running a content form. It's just a very weird content form that posts call of duty clips in front of real war footage, but it's a content form. I know what that looks like.

So we're trying to find the shape of it. So if you know, if you have any insight, send us a note because we're chasing that one down. All right, my last one, I'll keep this very quick. We're just way over. This is what happens when David's not here, is they just let me off the leash. In the background of all of this, ticket master is on trial for being an illegal monopoly here in the United States. It's a very weird one because the Trump administration has to pick up a case that the Biden administration started.

Right. And this, you know, this all started with like Taylor Swift tickets and all this. In the background, there's a lot of history here. But the Trump DOJ is pursuing this case. There was a thought that it would get settled early because previous figures from Trump 1 were lobbying for Ticketmaster. There's just endless complexity of this one. But it's at trial right now.

Lauren Feiner is in that courtroom. It is wild stuff left and right. And the one she filed today, just as we were coming on, is basically a story in which the Barclays Center thought that it might leave its contract with Ticketmaster and go see. geek and in retaliation, Ticketmaster, which also manages a bunch of artists, pulled the Billy Isles show at the last minute. And you just see this stuff. Now it's just coming to light. Like the whole industry is I'm talking to stuff forever. But it's in the background of this. And the reason I'm bringing up here on the Vergecast is I keep pointing this out. Like our whole

world is run by databases that people control. And like ticket master is just a database of venues and artists and literally seats and who owns the seats. And like all that's sort of like up for grabs lately. And like some of the biggest monopolies in the world are just like weird databases and ticket master is one of them. And Lauren's in the courtroom right now is like maybe it's going to get torn down and like more people get more access to databases in a weird way. Once you start noticing this, you're like, oh, that's all AI is going to do to DoorDash.

Right. Like it's the dynamic of like who gets to access the database and how and in what terms. Woo, that's up for grabs. Right. Like just like fully up for. What is the Play Store? It is a database of apps. Like, who gets to access it on what terms and who has to pay whom for what?

All of that right now is up for grabs. And it's crazy to look at the Live Nation case and Ticketmaster case and see the same dynamic. So go read Lauren's coverage because it's all in there. And also it will make you very mad at Ticketmaster, which, from what I understand is a feeling people enjoy. Four o'clock, it's time for our two minutes hate it at Ticketmaster. It's like a thing people like. So that coverage on the site, it's very good. There's all kinds of other stuff on the site.

We had a wild week on The Verge this week. Go read it. As a reminder, you can subscribe to the Verge to support all that journalism to make it so that no one can tell us what to do, which is my favorite thing about working here at the Verge. And you get ad-free episodes of our podcast, including Decoder and Virgin history. You get a bunch of newsletters. You can email us at the Vergecast at Theverge.com. You can also call the hotline at 866 Verge 1-1.

The Vergecast is the production of the Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Eric Goves, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larcruck. We will be back next week. Rocking on.