Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Microsoft Surface Duo, Samsung "Nope" 20, & an Airpower Competitor

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

In this week's episode we announce some exciting upcoming schedule additions for Waveform. We then move on to cover a multitude of new products including the RED Komodo, Samsung Galaxy Note 20, Microsoft Surface Duo, and Nomad's much-anticipated Airpower competitor! Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com Music by KamrenB: https://spoti.fi/2WRJOFh David Blaine Ascension: https://bit.ly/3gwksUB David Blaine Joe Rogan: https://bit.ly/3b9V4D2 Original Surface Duo Video: https://bit.ly/3gAifHE Nomad Basestation Pro: https://bit.ly/2FUdVGr Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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final buzzer. You're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager.

Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques Brownlee. And I'm Andrew Manganielli. And maybe you weren't expecting us

back today, but we're back. So we got a little Waveform update. Typically, you've heard us roughly twice a month, every two weeks, right? We're planning on upping the schedule a little bit to about three times a month. That's the new plan. And we'll see how it goes. But I think basically the plan is we want to have a couple more interview type discussion type episodes with guests. They've been really good. Yeah. And they've been fun. And we've done some of them like inside of our main episodes, which is is cool but breaking them out into their own episodes so we can we can shoot them we can record them whenever we want and then have them on their own episode yeah fun we've had a lot of requests for an episode every week and you know this was

our first year doing it that was a little much for us we're we'd like to plan the episodes out a little longer so this is kind of one step closer to that not quite yet but we realized with interviews we could potentially record them ahead of time and have kind of a backlog of them so i think that'll help us get you guys more content i have so much respect for those who do like a regular weekly podcast it's crazy and i know joe rogan like that's mainly all he does but his frequency of podcasts when you look at it is insane so that especially considering how long they are yeah it's not like we're trying to get to that level that is the ace of of podcasts but you know if we can if we can do a little bit more uh guest stuff i think that'll be fun and we can

do more of it for sure so that's what's happening so yeah this is just uh us getting used to the more regular schedule so i hope you don't mind a little extra waveform for you this week. In this episode, we will do the typical recap stuff. So we'll talk about Surface Duo, Nope20, a little Red Komodo, but we also have some other stuff that came out this week. But I want to start with content we liked, actually. And I think the thing I'm looking at is, so you've heard of David Blaine, right? Of course. thing i'm looking at is so you've heard of david blaine right of course david blaine is sort of in the the hall of fame of illusionists and magicians and stunt people alongside let me see i'd say

harry houdini but you probably also put like the chris angels in there chris angels the closest to compare them to of like today's right it's like that weird magician is slash illusion performer yeah performer i think it's the best way because not everything he's doing is yeah penn and teller is like all magic though david blaine some it's just like pure endurance stuff that you just don't think is humanly possible well that's that's the theme is he does he does a pretty regular cycle of like these crazy stunts he was buried alive in a clear coffin under like hundreds of gallons of water in new york city for like a couple days straight with no food and water he had water he had water oh he had a little bit of water no food he was uh let's see he spent

more than a day straight like something like 40 hours straight on the top of a hundred foot pole to the point where he was hallucinating trying not to fall off and then when he finally did jump off he jumped into a like a net cardboard boxes a bunch of cardboard boxes like a stuntman i think he like broke a rib or something or it's just the stuff that he pulls off is crazy pretty wild his new stunt you might have seen it's a youtube original show now so it's going to be hosted by youtube it's called ascension and it's maybe the only one that looks like it isn't going to be terrible well maybe it will be but i mean there's it's the terrible aspects of it yeah it's the one that looks like you'd want to actually try and that is he's going to be holding on to a bunch of balloons

like so many helium balloons that he actually floats up into the sky and then he'll be uh parachuting down but there are so many other little twists that it's uh it's still you know when you when you get up to a certain height suddenly the air gets thinner and it gets colder and there's all these other things to consider but if you if you look at these these tests he's doing and the training he's doing for it it is really interesting it looks really cool i mean imagine like the poster for up but instead of a house there's a person hanging from the bottom of it it's pretty exactly it's pretty beautiful to like see the what it looks like and how it's extremely photogenic exactly it's a bunch of colorful balloons it's a guy with one arm holding on to it like you're

like oh that silhouette is so cool much nicer to look at rather than him being like encased in ice for 60 hours or whatever or holding his breath until he's blacking out and convulsing underwater yeah it's it's pretty crazy so that's uh it's all on his youtube channel so if you want to check it out he's doing not only as the teaser for the whole stunt live but he's doing these like behind the scenes videos leading up to it where he's like demoing the balloons and demoing the tech and demoing like he has to go up to a certain altitude without an oxygen mask that's a weird thing it's david blaine he's he's kind of really into pushing his body to the limit of like if he wants to go up there and be the silhouette of a boy holding

balloons he can't have like a parachute and an oxygen mask yeah so he's not going to have a parachute or an oxygen mask he's going to have those up in the balloon with him but he's gonna not use them until he needs them so he's gonna be floating up there trying not to black out while the air gets thinner i like my palms are sweating like thinking about just the beginning of that um or the whole thing yeah yeah um he also if you want to learn more about that and more about just david blaine in general because i i think while all of his stunts are really crazy when you get to hear the backstory behind stuff and how much he trains for them is wild so his uh he was on joe rogan recently right promoting this and it's a great podcast it is wild to listen to and probably one of the most entertaining joe rogan podcasts i've ever listened

to that that's got to be top 10 for me. I feel like I have like a power rankings in my head of like Hot Ones episodes and Joe Rogan podcasts. And I think Neil deGrasse Tyson is in my top five for both of those, which is amazing. But yeah, that was a great podcast. So definitely we'll put that in the show notes and give that a listen. So Ascension, that's content I liked. But did you have anything you wanted to shout out? I don't think I have it. I guess we're going right into it. Yeah,

let's just go straight into it. All right, perfect. Okay. Well, first a waveform recap. So this is actually something super, I guess we didn't necessarily expect to give this a shout out, but in a previous waveform episode we had Craig Federighi on and we made a video about it too but we sort of talked about iPad OS for a bit and one of the random feature suggestions I brought up was you know how you can't interact with Siri and then the content behind Siri while Siri stays up in iPad OS 14 or just iOS 14 at all they changed that in the newest beta of iOS specifically specifically iPadOS 14,

when Siri comes up in the corner, you can keep scrolling behind Siri. And just like we suggested in that podcast, to dismiss Siri, you just swipe it away. And so that, you know, Craig did say they built it both ways. And they were thinking about like whether you want to just have Siri disappear on its own or have you manually dismiss Siri. But they did make that change, and a lot of people seem to be enjoying it already. Yeah, I think even when we first did the interview, that was probably one of the most talked about things. Like, oh, yeah, that does seem like a pretty simple thing that Marques is asking.

And while I'm sure Apple's thought about it, like just seeing that somebody who's kind of a voice of the people, the consumer, is bringing it up to somebody that large. People were really hyped about that. And now it coming out seems like they're listening. It was funny. My quote tweet about it was like, look, Apple's listening. But it's like, yeah, of course they're listening. And they always have been listening. But that doesn't mean they react ever to what people suggest. Well, and it also is like one person thinks that X company should do this and they don't.

And then their first thing is they don't listen to the people. It's like so many people are going to use that excuse as why something they want doesn't come into a phone. But like all these companies are listening. And just because you and maybe a group of your like friends all think something happens doesn't mean that's the majority of people but yeah you do see the little things here and there that that definitely prove that they are listening and this is a pretty prime example for sure and there's other there's other examples of apple listening and reacting and there's also a million examples of Apple clearly listening and not reacting,

and that's very normal for Apple. But yeah, the fact is people who work for these companies see a lot of stuff that you might not think they do, so it's always fun to see them listen. So that's a little waveform update. But we did have some videos on the channel. I think we'll go back to Red Komodo. So that was the first video.

Ooh, this is an interesting one. So Red is a company that I've notoriously had a lot of love for. I really love one product that they make, and that is their cinema cameras. And actually, I have a little bit of an update about Red Codex and Final Cut Pro, but I just love Red cameras, right? And most other people either can't relate or have no reason to like red because they don't use red cameras. So I just have this weird soft spot in my heart

for things red does in cinema. Yeah, they're definitely, they're priced at a point that's not for the typical consumer. I can say- That's one way of putting it. Yeah, when I was in film school, it was like,

you really cared about film school if you went out and rented a red and shot on it. And most of the people there, it was probably a fun experience, but it was just total overkill for what they were doing and i remember my first day kind of like trying out for this job you brought me on a shoot in hoboken for drones and just like handed it to me and i was like oh no it was on a monopod like and it was bulky it had its big cine lens on it and everything and i was terrified and those were harder to use than today's red cameras but yeah they they've come a

long way but they've always had this sort of allure in the in the space but that to be honest has had nothing to do with why i use it i really just rented one one day used it shot the footage imported it and i was like damn i need this like that's really how it started so anyway red komodo is red's newest camera and it's uh they've had you know dsmc1 which i think is what does that stand for digital stills and media camera that might not be it i've never really thought about it they sort of name their form factors and there's like a first generation and a second generation this is not a third generation. It's an entirely new form factor for them. So Komodo is a small, like cube baseball size, four inch by four inch portable camera that's

supposed to give you a lot of the benefits of RED's bigger cinema cameras from their tech, but still fuses a lot of the hybrid from the world of like last week we talked a7s and r5 a lot of those mirrorless cameras into this camera so it's a weird like frankenstein camera but because of that hybrid it does have some unique things you don't usually find at this form factor and it's coming in at 6k 6 rand for the price yeah so the big things are it shoots 6k it's a super 35 sensor and you get reds color science and red raw it's uh you can shoot 4k pro res that's sweet it's global shutter which you pretty much never find in mirrorless cameras you only really find that in cinema cameras so that's a big advantage and then bringing in from the small mirrorless world,

you have it's SDI, no HDMI, which is, yeah, I would have liked to see HDMI. That's kind of a bummer, yeah. Yeah, but you're going to get Canon batteries it shoots to and CFast 2.0 cards. So you don't have to buy red mini mags or red monitors. We all know how much people love red mini mags. Red batteries. Obviously, mini mags got a bad rap, red monitors we all know how much people love red mini red batteries but like the obviously

mini mags got a bad rap but like it's the whole red ecosystem that is notoriously expensive and yeah it doesn't have as much choice as you might like so now you can use a bunch of different size canon batteries or you can hot swap or you can buy modules or you can you know use whatever c fast cards you already have or you want to buy more. We used a small HD monitor on top. We have like three different small HD monitors we could use on top. Yeah, and it does have its own little monitor on top already.

Tiny one, yeah. Tiny and not in the best spot in the world. But I really do think though the form factor is one of the things we're very excited for because I remember getting Raven and thinking, this is smaller smaller this is going to be really cool we can throw it on a gimbal we can put it on a car stuff like that and while the body was a little smaller by the time you put a monitor a lens a handle the battery on it it was

it's almost just as big yeah so the fact that this has different like you can put those Canon batteries on it and hot swap them so you can put very small batteries on it yeah and since you can hot swap it doesn't matter as much as long as you have a backup of it you can put a nice smaller lens on it like this was we've had this or i've seen it on a ronin s which is which is a small handheld gimbal did you ever think you were going to put a red on a ronin s no exactly so i think there's two main reasons to get excited for komodo one is when you might have gotten excited for raven where you're like oh this is a less expensive red camera that's like the main number one reason six grand for a red camera is a lot less than you typically spend yeah and that's like your intro into the red workflow r3d all that fun stuff shooting raw

with video and global shutter it's a cinema camera the other is the smaller form factor which is like we've been shooting with these much bigger cameras plus all the modules and batteries and big lenses and all that and when i want to shoot like inside of a car or like in just a handheld situation or on a Ronin-S like you mentioned I just have to switch to like a mirrorless camera and I lose a lot of the the global shutter and the R3D and all the fun stuff I love about shooting video to a very capable mirrorless camera but now I can just keep it all red and that's that's exciting for me it's awesome do you think with this form factor you'll finally feel comfortable putting it on like a suction cup on a car i think i do actually yeah yeah i think we can definitely

i've seen we have friends that i've seen put their raven on like a gimbal on a car i think we can get it with a good enough suction cup just by itself on a car i think it's not too hard with a with a single battery and like an 18 to 35 i think it weighs just barely more than the a7s that i was shooting with inside the car for model y so i think we could do it um i think another thing that's well first of all is raven completely raven's done now right i can't imagine uh if it's not officially done it should be because there's no reason to get one i can't imagine why you would ever get one um so i we talked about this a little bit um and it kind of goes back to raven being this like entry-level red i think it's also very interesting for

filmmakers who are doing freelance stuff or like trying to get into this business there's this weird thing where people are obsessed where like i shoot red and i have a better chance of getting hired because i shoot red because that is just a term people hear they don't understand that just because you shoot red doesn't mean you're a better filmmaker or a better cinematographer because of it but it's huge we we had austin and tyson used to live uh work next to us in the studio and they bought a raven because at for marketing for their business saying they could shoot red helped them out yeah it is a big deal and and in the freelance world that has a pretty big impact where you're

able to say like and certain clients don't even maybe not maybe they know but maybe they don't necessarily know what they're requesting when they're asking for something to be shot 4k or shot on red but when you're able to offer that you can satisfy more clients needs and charge better rates exactly charging better rates so then you're getting and the fact that now entry level for komodo is what half the price of what raven was raven was like 15 uh after the whole package yeah so it's 6k for just the just the komodo and the adapter but not half but like two thirds of the price yeah you're getting cheaper and now you can charge more it's yeah it's very interesting for a lot of different people i think so you know that's maybe the most niche thing that we talked about on the channel but for me one of the most exciting and i think

a lot of creators probably were into that too so we shot that whole video on komodo if you want to see test footage that was that then i guess we go galaxy nope 20 that's what it is and you're not hearing that wrong by the way this not poor audio that's not it wasn't a typo it wasn't yeah we didn't really confuse that. So I really, I just faded a tweet, or I think it was actually a top comment on the video, but there is something called, let me pull it up exactly, because it had a name. So in the video, I talked about how

it seemed like Samsung was confused about whether they wanted to make a high-end phone or a low-end phone. And we'll get into that. But the top comment that I liked says, Samsung wasn't confused. They're using what economists call the decoy effect. People's perception of value is always relative to something. So when you have a similar phone with way less features, but only a slightly smaller price, the more expensive phone suddenly

looks like a way better deal. So yeah, Samsung, what he's saying is basically Samsung didn't really expect to sell a lot of Note 20s, but that common perception is they just made this to sell more Note 20 Ultras. Yeah, I think even, like, you're not the only reviewer who's talked poorly about this device. I think almost everyone's come to the same conclusion that, like, this is way too expensive for such a cut down on uh specs and hardware and

everything like that right and but if you really think about it samsung's not risking a lot here they're going to sell more of the higher priced phone if they sell the lower priced phone the margins on it are probably even better so they're still going to make a lot of money on that and then honestly everyone who's reviewing this if you look up note 20 reviews the first things that are probably going to come up are the note 20 ultras and you're going to see really good reviews on it because it's a great phone fact so like they're not risking a lot here the note 20 is still a great phone it is just too expensive and when samsung inevitably drops it 250 dollars in like three months or there's a BOGO deal on mobile or Verizon, it's going to be a good phone. And, but just, we have to take it as a thousand dollar phone and it feels way too

expensive for what it is. Yeah. So my suggestion was like, so when I reviewed it, it was like, you know, is it a high end phone? Well, it's a Samsung galaxy note. So yeah, it's high end and it's got a Snapdragon 865 plus. So yeah, it's high end. But then as you get on the rest of the list, you're like, it's plastic. So I guess it can't be high end, right? It's 1080p, 60 Hertz. Oh, it's definitely not high end. And then it has less RAM and it has less storage and it's no longer expandable storage and it doesn't have reverse wireless charging and it doesn't have the same latency improvement as, you know, the more you go down the line, the more it gets cut down and you realize, oh, this is not really a premium high end phone. And so my suggestion was either don't charge that premium price, which, you know, it's easy to tell any company it's too expensive,

but, or just commit to a cut down phone for less money and make, I said, go for the Snapdragon 765G and just make it a $700 note. Just attack that whole $700 price point by offering a Samsung Galaxy Note at that lower price. I think that would have actually been probably the better move. I think so too, because we've mentioned before that as much as a lot of us think the S Pen's a gimmick, there are people out there who live and die on that S Pen and they use it for work. And I don't, if the S Pen's the main feature, I don't think they mind as much about all the other stuff. Like they want that

instant gratification of being able to be in front of a client, take a picture of something, and then instantly show them the changes they can make to that. And that's very important for their work. So a Note 20 Lite would be awesome because they don't need all the power and 120 hertz screen and whatever. I almost wonder, do you remember the, was it like the S8 rugged edition where it like came with a. Active. Active. Yeah. Imagine, I mean, I think that would start bumping the price up again and kind of be pointless but like yeah i don't know why they're not aiming this towards

the people who don't care about specs but just really really want a pen yeah it's weird because when you cut down so many other specs it becomes clear that this is for a person who doesn't care about specs and then you put the snapdragon 865 plus in it yeah like you could you could easily put not the highest end chip and people who don't care about specs would be fine and i like what you said earlier i think before the podcast which is you still get big screen stylus yeah you still get like what you're really here for so yeah i think that would have been i think that would have killed i. I think a $700 765G Note 20 Lite, Note 20E, whatever you want to call it. You could even just call it the Note 20, whatever, just, but 700 bucks, I think that would have killed. But instead what we got was a little bit of a confused $1,000 Note

20. I'm very curious to see how fast this one gets discounted because there's always a path towards like Samsung lowering prices over time. That's a thing that like i really think if you're looking at the note 20 right now and you think it's great you want a big you're looking for a new phone with a big screen and an s pen if you don't want to go back to note 10 like buy discounted now just wait like three months it will get discounted yeah or look for a carrier deal or something like that you'll You'll definitely find one. Trade one in. I think Samsung actually has a really good trade-in program.

So yeah. And I also have one correction from the video. So at the end, I mentioned like, all right, I will recommend this phone to people who want to get a phone with a stylus right now and just have the $1,000 and don't want to get a Note 10 because Samsung's just promised that they're going to give three major Android updates to their new flagships. And when I read that, I didn't see it included Note 10 and I assumed it began with S series. It does actually include Note 10. So I think now

there's even less of a reason to get this Note 20 because you still get those promised three major software updates with a Note 10 with a lower price, big screen stylus, you still get those promised three major software updates with a Note 10. With the lower price, big screen stylus, you still get all that. It's not the 865 plus, but hey, we're talking to people who don't care as much about specs. Grab the Note 10. Grab that Note 10. So that's where we're at. I also wonder, they have like the A series and the J series, right? Have they ever, like, why don't they just put an S pen in one of those? I think. Can they have like a cheap, cheap S pen model? I mean, it's still going to be more expensive than, I don't know what, where I like A21. Is that the? Yeah. There's been a lot of

conversation about whether the note or whether the S pen should be exclusive to the note. Cause we have the galaxy tab and that's got the S pen. And then the only phone that they put the S Pen should be exclusive to the Note. Because we have the Galaxy Tab, and that's got the S Pen, and then the only phone that they put the S Pen with is the Galaxy Note. But then there's rumors that the Galaxy S21 might have an S Pen or S Pen support or something like that. If that happens, then the Note just has to go. As soon as that happens, the Note is no longer that special for having the S Pen, and I don't necessarily see Samsung doing that but it's definitely rumored and

if that happens yeah it's weird because that opens the door for like well I guess I don't really need a Note anymore I can just take you know take notes on an S21 so I don't know. If they're doing S Pen exclusive to Note they have to just make a cheaper version and it's weird because they did that Note 10 Lite that I believe wasn't available in the u.s and was released like four or five months after so why not just add that to your lineup right the bat the exclusivity of the s pen to the note is the main reason you can go you know hard with note stuff and people will still pay for it because if you had you know an s pen available for the galaxy s series note 20 would be a pointless phone yeah it would be completely pointless really really have to like boxy phones

i just want a boxier version that's more expensive in plastic yeah that would that would be a and 60 hertz because you know all the s series is 120 that would be truly amazing but i don't think that's happening so we'll keep an eye on it. Uh, but that is the note 20 and the nope 20 title that we of course had some fun with the thumbnail with, uh, that was fun. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk all about the surface duo and some other stuff that came up this week. We'll be right back. This holiday season, the center for addiction and Mental Health is counting on your support. CAMH is on a mission to make better mental health care for all a reality.

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And I brought back with me a piece of hardware. Did you hear that? That's some... I think the closing on that is fascinating. That, it sounds so soft. Like, I don't know. Is it weird that, is it bad that you're just like semi-slamming two pieces of glass together?

It is a, okay, I'll just back up. This is the Surface Duo. I'm holding a Microsoft Surface Duo. And that was our last video pre-podcast. And it's really just all about the hardware. And I focused intensely on the hinge because I think it's the most important part of this device. And yeah, it's got this soft close close i don't know how to describe it sounds like

really nice closing like two pieces of felt onto each other right something even though i'm slamming two pieces of gorilla glass together yeah it is it is a great hinge let me just start with that it is an amazing hinge now there is there's you know future embargoes and we'll have the full review when we're allowed to talk about all the software stuff. But what I addressed in my video, which is just an unboxing and an initial hands-on is I think Microsoft knows that this hardware is amazing. And when you get all those initial videos out of people gushing over and loving the hardware, that's a great way to sort of quiet the eventual realization that this is not a great software experience. I feel like it might be tough. So they've also really

talked about how much they like the software experience. So I guess in terms of speed and all the specs on it more so, there's a chance that they could really pull through this and show the software is optimized really well to fix it but i right i guess talk about more what yeah yeah i just mean there's a lot more to the story like when you so the embargo specifically is it's a hardware impressions you're allowed to do and you can't even turn it on on camera so it's just going to be about hardware and the second you turn it on i'm thinking okay what's going to happen you're going to see the bezels you're going to realize there's no camera on the second you turn it on, I'm thinking, okay, what's going to happen? You're going to see the bezels. You're going to realize there's no camera on the back. You're going to have the last year specs. All this stuff is going to suddenly be remembered about it. But when you

just focus on this incredible hardware, it is so fun. It's so cool. I love this. When you just cover the surface of it, it's pretty. I see what you did there. But that's really where we're at so right off the bat i my in my interesting like future plan prediction for surface is that it eventually does become a folding screen foldable but right now they don't want to spend all that extra money on this sort of first gen second gen tech of a folding display so they they focus on, this is a dual-display, dual-screen tablet. There's a bezel in the middle. They're fully embracing that, and they're leaning into it.

Look at all this dual-screen stuff you can do, this multitasking, pane left, pane right, one or the other, like all this stuff is, you know, they're leaning into that. And then you end up with this much thinner sleeker more impressive form factor and combine that with an incredible hinge and this has like its own selling point now there's like a reason to go for this over like a galaxy fold or a xiaomi folding phone that's potentially better suited than this would be yeah it and it's also it's like hard to compare them but you have to

just understand that like this is still a crazy form factor and should be in that just kind of like wild first gen ish like quote-unquote revolutionary like form factor for a cell phone it might not have the screen that physically folds but it is still bringing you things that no other folds bringing you um i had a big problem with people saying well just look at the lg like second screen case this is the same thing but it is not it is far yes you got two screens on lg and i also think lg is great because it gives you two screens for almost no money comparatively it's also an optional accessory that you can remove at any time which is a big difference so if you want the possibility of sometimes getting a lot more done with tools with dual screens then you would go for something like that but if you want to always have dual

screens and have to work around that sometimes then you look at something like a foldable yeah and you're adding a ton of extra bulk onto it from that like if you're looking at this as just two screens next to each other and not really like thinking about the form factor and how they're doing the hinge and how they're doing the hardware and how thin they have made this i think the thinness is something people just do not understand and it is extremely. I think someone said it's one millimeter bigger than a regular S20 laying down. Yeah. So if you have a, if you have a USB-C port in your life somewhere, which, you know, if you're listening to waveform, I hope you do. I hope you

have USB-C port. Take a look at the USB-C port and that actual port is about the thickness, maybe a millimeter less than the thickness of the actual tablet on one side. So fold it in half. You get two times the USB port. That's the whole thing folded up. And that is an awesome thinness. You're talking about the metal part of the USB. Yeah.

Because of the port. I have a USB-C plugged in right now. And the plastic that you grip to pull it out is literally going over both edges it's thicker than the actual it is each side of this phone is thinner than the outside of a usbc all of that it's so sick and that's that's only possible because they've gone with two screens instead of one folding screen you can fold it flat and you have a 360 hinge now so a couple other like initial impressions i've talked about all these in the video it is glass and i think a lot of people when they look at a surface that is like white like this they think of all the surface laptops

and the magnesium yeah the metal chassis this is uh is glass gorilla glass on the front and the back uh this hinge on the back looks pretty dark in some angles of the video, almost like it's dark gray, but really it's just like a silver type of look. I would kill for it to be black. It would be sweet. It looks so good in those shots where it's hitting a shadow and just looks, when that and the logo look black and it just looks like white and black, it looks super, super clean. Yo, lowkey with a d-brand skin on this this might this this is like perfectly flat like this is the perfect device probably

be there like easiest like easiest skin right so this is that's gonna be fun um you have all the buttons on the right hand side you have your power volume rocker you have a actually i think this is kind of sweet you have the thumb the fingerprint scanner you have the fingerprint scanner but it's also like a little bit indented and that actually serves as like a little bit of a little indention to like open it yes so you can like dig your hand in there if you can imagine like every single laptop has that very small yeah uh like crevice so that you can fit a fingernail in and lift the screen up this has that and it's the fingerprint scanner as well so i think that's well thought out um there's a couple other things there is only one camera this is maybe the the the part we're most concerned about when we start using it there's only one camera it's the selfie camera on the inside and there

is no main camera on the back now i i think they thought a long time about this i do you remember when we were first seeing the surface duo with panos and he was explaining it to us and he pulled one out of his pocket it was matt black and i remember it had a camera bump on the back it might even be in our video i don't remember that part exactly i remember pulling it out i don't remember the camera on it i but i can we can see why camera bump yeah it's not it might even be in some other places on the internet, but you can definitely find old Surface Duo prototypes with a camera bump on the back.

I think they really thought about the fact that people are going to put this down on a table and use it flat because the hinge will let you do that. That's a whole mode that they have a lot of people typing in and interacting with it like a mini laptop. And that would be terrible if you had a camera bump. It would just rock back and forth and it would be awful. And that's the number one thing we'd complain about.

So Microsoft clearly thought about that. No camera bump on the back. So that just means if you want to take photos now, you have to swivel it out and use the selfie camera on one side and the screen on the other side as a viewfinder. So now it's the opposite of the Zenf that just came out the Zen phone 7 Pro if you guys haven't seen it's a new Zen phone where they double down on that swiveling camera where the main camera on the back swivels over and becomes your selfie camera wow look at those amazing selfies yeah this is the opposite where your

selfie camera swivels out and becomes your main camera wow look at those garbage photos that that comparison this morning when you first said it had me dying it was so funny and it's just so funny because everything we praised we were like wow the zenfone might taste take the best selfie pictures because it's using its main shooters for it right and it's like imagine if any other phone came out and said, oh, we're going to take the selfie camera, and when you want to take a normal picture, it's going to flip over and be your main shooter.

It would be crucified. It's rough. The thing is, it's so thin, there's almost no way for them to put a full-size, big, optically stabilized, good camera in this form factor. Yeah. I think even in the next gen, if they keep it this thin, they have to do the same thing. Selfie camera swiveling out.

And that's something we'll have to think about. Like, are people who are buying this going to care about that bad camera experience? I don't know. We'll see. Do you know what that, so I kind of wanted to do something a little different here. And that, I think that brings up one of the comments i saved but uh i've mentioned a lot of times of how reddit is one of my favorite and one of my least favorite places on the internet because it can be really great or it can be really terrible sometimes but every time a new kind of like

revolutionary device comes out that people haven't seen before reddit is a great place for conversation about it so can i just say some of my favorite comments on the internet because i've seen so many tweets and so many instagram bot comments and so many youtube comments some of my favorite comments on videos are like someone on reddit stumbling across a video for the first time and he's never seen an mBHD video and you can tell those are some of the most insightful comments I think I ever read on a regular basis so thanks to those people yeah we I mean we I read religiously every single comment thread of every one of our videos oh nice okay sometimes the worst but most of the time there's a lot of really really good feedback but people are very open to new concepts on Reddit,

at least, or to talk about them relatively nicely. So this was something I'm like, let's pull some Reddit comments, see what other people are thinking other than us. So I saved a couple, and I think this one actually... Should we respond to them? Yeah, let's respond to them. I'm going to read it, and we're going to respond to it, but I think this one's relevant to what we just talked about.

And you saying how many people are going to use the camera. Is this what people are looking for? And someone wrote, this seems like the next iteration of the BlackBerry. Much more of a business oriented phone. Less of a casual use. You can already do so much with phone sized apps. Just imagine what you could do with all that. Plus more real estate without sacrificing portability.

So I think that's like, i think that's really interesting oh we are seeing blackberry potentially coming back but yeah you could even other than that i think this is so this is microsoft right yes and every time you watch a microsoft presentation or see a new microsoft product it's it's targeted towards a slightly different demographic than like your everyday regular user. Meaning when you see them demo their Surface earbuds, they talk about how you can swipe forward not to adjust to the next song, but to go to the next slide in your PowerPoint presentation. Like when you see that, that's how they're thinking when they're making these products.

So when I see, you know, a new Surface laptop or a new Surface Duo like this, I'm thinking of that same customer who is a productivity machine. Yeah. And I'm not thinking so much about the dude who has an iPhone right now or the girl who has a BlackBerry, not BlackBerry, the girl who has an LG Velvet, whatever, and is looking for the next like everyday phone. So it's a different, it's a different customer base. And I think BlackBerry is actually a, probably from this comment, a pretty apt comparison because BlackBerry also is very specific in who they're targeting, which is people who type a lot on their phone and need to want a physical keyboard at the expense of all the other good things about a phone.

Yeah. You will add that thing because that's your your niche so yeah i'd say that's a good observation to whoever wrote that comment i i just think it's uh it's still yet to be seen what this whole portable or foldable world becomes and maybe maybe this ends up being a i think it has like more potential than blackberry was like hey you type a lot because you're on your phone all the time for business this has a lot more potential for doing things. I think it has more potential for like going to a like door to door kind of stuff where you're going to a client's office and you have to show them different things. And maybe like this is a way you can quickly show someone or out in the field you can show someone something.

Yeah. Productivity on this like has potential to be really great if you flip it up kind of like laptop mode and can type way quicker. It has a lot of things and I can totally see this being like, oh, there's someone with a Surface Duo. That guy works a lot, that girl works a lot. Like they're full business 90% of the time. That camera is probably being used for reference photos

or maybe like a Skype call or some sort of business video call so yeah honestly this camera is going to be used more for for video calls stuff like that i still though one one thing that i it has that i don't agree with in that is i'm assuming if you're out all the time you probably need a good battery life and we haven't been able to test it but looking at the numbers what 36 35 77 milliamp hour battery eight inch screen not what you want to hear if you're yeah on the go all the time so we'll see how that goes and there's no wireless charging so you can't exactly top up quickly unless you have the plug

but yeah that's a good comment i like that one yeah uh all right another one uh it is remarkable how inelegant the galaxy fold looked in comparison to the Duo in the video. Almost three times as thick and the plastic screen with a bump in the middle. I did. Yeah. And that's why I think, yes. Okay. Very good comment.

That's why I think Microsoft can lean into this for a while. Is because Samsung and everyone who's building around this foldable screen thing is taking this one awesome idea of a folding screen and then building a phone around it. Which means you've got to engineer the hinge around it. You've got to engineer the IP, some sort of durability around it. You have to engineer the body around it. And you just have this, at the end of the day, this thick thing with a crease in the middle. But it's like you open it and you're like, oh, well, it does have the screen that folds. Microsoft is doing it a little different

where they're focused on folding, but not folding screen. So they have dual screens, 360 hinge, and when the tech eventually matures down the road, see, now that they don't have that crazy thing to work around, they can make this thin, sleek thing, and I agree, it looks a thousand times more elegant the hinge is way better it stops at any angle you want but eventually when the tech however many years it takes gets good enough then you will see galaxy

fold approach sleekness levels of this and you will see this approach you know slowly slightly bigger slightly more functional levels of galaxy fold so i mean that kind of knocks into the next comment that i have and she says i'm impressed with how thin it is only 1.1 millimeter thicker than the s20 ultra when closed if they knock down those bezels and put the same modern hardware in the next iteration this is almost a guaranteed buy for me that's i think what they want you to think when you just look at the hardware yeah now like when you see all these first impressions and all of us are i think we're all pretty much unanimously gushing about how awesome the hardware is and we're thinking oh

well at least you know the specs are a little old and maybe they bump those specs up and what do you say if they knock the bezels down i think that is a huge the bezels are pretty big yeah yeah um and i think you would you would think if they fix those few things then it's it's a guaranteed win but i don't think that's the full story i still think you have to think about the you know maybe this person already knows they don't take that many photos and they're cool with the selfie camera being the only camera it might not be a something there that's number one on their list of things needed in a phone okay um yeah but i really do think if the bezels were smaller it would make this phone look automatically 10 times more futuristic i mean i'm looking at it now i didn't notice at first that some of the speakers there are speakers on the other side kind of on the top right yep yeah so it has the potential to move those bezels way up if it just had like a hole

punch uh camera on one side and it could do the speakers as like that razor thin kind of hole on the top yeah it would look amazing um i do think one other thing for me is I would want the width to be maybe 20% thinner because when you are folding it, it is wide. Holding it to your ear. That's a big one. Is a lot. And putting it in your pocket is still a lot, even though it's so thin. Yeah.

So I'm going to try to speak to that without talking about my software experience so far, because that's what I'm allowed to say. This is a wide phone. Now, Galaxy Fold, when you think about like opening it up as a square and that's fun to use when you close it it is this really tall narrow like candy bar screen and that seems kind of weird at first but when you consider the alternate which is like this passport sized you know dimension it is kind of nice if you had a screen on the outside that would be a pretty good size but when you when you open it, you get a much wider screen. Yeah. I think when you close this,

the surface is very wide and holding in the hand, holding up to your ear, making a phone call with this wide thing. You know, maybe you don't do too many phone calls nowadays, but I think it's just a little bit wide to be a one handed thing. So I think Samsung obviously just a little bit wide to be a one-handed thing. So I think Samsung obviously thought a lot about that and went a little narrower, but yeah. I think there's an in-between. There's got to be somewhere. I think Samsung's too narrow,

although the Z Fold 2 now looks like it might be, at least with the screen, might be a little more on the front, but I think there's an in-between. I guess thinking about it, the width, though, when you put it into tent mode or laptop mode, it feels right. It feels like a perfect size. Yeah.

So maybe this one screen, this one hand mode is maybe the least often you'll use it. You'll use it mostly as an open thing. And then this brings me to my last comment I saved, which fits perfectly in this. I don't know how we got all the comments to fit so perfectly in this conversation but um last person says it looks like a watch is an essential for this phone and can solve most of its issues if you pair this with a watch think about NFC for pay don't have to

pull it out think about quick checking like messages emails stuff like that it could turn it into something you don't have to necessarily keep in your pocket this could be in a bag this could be in a purse it could be in anything because if you're just checking your messages on the train checking to see if someone's calling you okay if you have a watch that solves problems like that it could knock out i mean battery life if you're not holding it up as much constantly on your phone. Maybe not every problem, but I think it could solve. People are very upset about NFC, for one. So you take away pay, types of paying like that. I like that.

That's an interesting possibility. I think it does solve a lot of this. So there's no outside screen for glanceable info. So that's the main one. So you get the notification on your watch. You decide if you want to dig in your pocket and open this huge thing or not. That's fair. The battery life one, we'll see.

I don't know. I still don't know how good or bad the battery life is, so we'll figure that one out. I don't know about the camera. You know what's funny? You can open a viewfinder of the iPhone's camera on the Apple Watch. camera you know what's funny is you can you can open uh a viewfinder of the iphone's camera on the apple watch did you know that i i feel like i heard someone tweet that's a recent update right no no long time long time you've been able to open up and like use it to

snap photos so if you have your phone across the room you can line things up and take photos on your watch that would be kind of funny to see that happen on the surface but I still think that's gonna be a weakness of this I think cameras forever will be yes but yeah generally that seems like it would be a good pairing and I think you can already pair it with some Android watches yeah there's the problem though what Android watches right now are good enough to really compare if I got to break out that Moto 360 again. I guess. See how that goes, yeah.

Yeah, it would be interesting. Maybe if Microsoft is making hardware like this for this phone, I would love to see them make a smartwatch. Yeah. Well, I mean, they'd probably have to find some enterprise angle as like a reason.

Like, yo, check out this swiping through your keynote. I would, it would make way more sense to swipe through your PowerPoint on your watch than have a giant cd in your ear and swipe with that but uh yeah i think that's pretty much all we have listed for this i i think my my main thoughts on this are i think we need to look at this and we need to look at the z fold and think how are these two things going to shape foldables in the future? These are like, these are future shaping products right now.

I don't think they're for everyone as a first gen, but definitely really exciting to see what we're going to see soon. Yeah. I think that's reflected by the price. They're both well over a thousand dollars, but they're both, uh, they're going to have the,

the early adopters giving lots of valuable feedback and people using these things we'll have much more thoughts on this when we actually review it which is going to be a little bit later you guys will get all our software thoughts all that fun stuff but that's uh that's our little surface duo hardware rant and and question response to to reddit comments you know what else came out in the last week? What's that? The Nomad Base Station Pro. Yeah. This to me, I kind of want to do a whole video on just wireless charging in general. So let me just explain what the Base Station Pro is. So throwback to a long time, I don't know how many years ago but a company goes on shark tank and they have this multi-device wireless charging technology where you put a device down on a large pad and the

device finds your finds your phone or whatever you put down and can direct voltage to wherever that coil is for maximum efficiency so it's like It's like the Xiaomi charger without physically moving. It is a high-tech version of the Xiaomi motorizing the coil to be under your device because the coils, there's already 18 coils on there. Fast forward. Okay, now Nomad Base Station Pro has this technology in it. This, to me, is a pretty big step in the direction we need to see wireless charging go to really be worth it but it's also still not the final step it's like a big forward

step to being past halfway there i think uh yeah i think it's worth a whole video but it is pretty cool now so they made a three device wireless charger basically you put a device down anywhere on that leather pad it finds it and it'll charge it it's up to seven and a half watts for the iphone and five watts for anything else but if you put down some headphones it'll it'll know its headphones and give it the two watts it needs and uh yeah i put three phones on it charged them all three yeah it's pretty awesome it's kind of almost what air power was trying to do which i also find hilarious that air era is area era aira yeah it's called era power power which is hilarious because it's basically the exact same thing um beautiful but anyways like it makes me wonder though is if they can pull this off is the big difference right now so it cannot charge an apple watch

right because it's proprietary apple watches are not chi wireless charging so it does not charge an apple watch still is that what's really messing up air power yes because i think you have to assume apple could figure this out or just buy this from this company. So like, yeah, it's gotta be whatever the Apple watch thing is for them to want Apple watch to go anywhere. Putting those types of coils on top of the other types of coils is what's completely ruining air power. Hot take super hot, spicy take. And maybe this will be in the video.

I think air power can come back and actually exist. I think AirPower can come back and actually exist. And I think to do that, Apple can switch the Apple Watch from their proprietary charger. Exactly what I was going to say. To cheat charging, right? Because basically, Apple, I think, could have made this Space Station Pro. They could. I think they have the trillions of dollars needed to develop.

Or just buy this company. Or buy Nomad and buy AeroPower. But yeah, I think Apple could have made a multi-device wireless charger that charges your iPhone and your AirPods in the wireless charging case and been just fine. And they would have had the voltage and they would have been magic and they would have put it on stage, like literally put it anywhere on the mat and it'll charge. But because they also wanted to be able to put the Apple Watch anywhere on the same mat with a different charging technology, that's suddenly a bunch more coils that weren't the same as the cheap. So now you have like a double layer. I don't even know what kind of PCB you need to do that, but clearly neither did Apple and it never happened. I think if you still want to be able

to offer that magic wireless charging experience, you can say, hey, look, the tech wasn't up to our standards back then, but now we've switched the Apple Watch and it will actually do it. Here's the big downside. And I think there's a way to pull this off the Apple way. The downside is every single person who has an Apple Watch with their wireless charging accessories, none of those will work for the new Apple Watch.

But I think the Apple way around that is, this is our first big redesign of the Apple Watch since the beginning. It's got these thinner bezels. It's got this new whatever. We made all these other big changes you guys have been asking for. And by the way, it's Qi wireless charging now, so it'll work with our new wireless charging mat,

AirPower. Like that's the whole swirl of things that needs to happen. So new Apple Watch design. This is why it's such a hot take because that needs to happen so new apple watch design this is why it's such a hot take because who knows if they're going to do all this but new apple watch design alongside switching it to g wireless charging alongside bringing back air power and all these things working flawlessly by october i think apple channels are drooling over that potential um the amount of videos.

But I've seen there's some renders, which I think are total mock-ups and not actually. But seeing an Apple Watch look like the new kind of iPad, the new iPhone design with the sleek bezels, the flat bezels, and having no bezels on the actual screen. The rails are like kind of uh ipad new iphone rails okay looks really nice is it like circular i feel like it was like square with rounded edges which was the mock-up this is not anything that's like actually rumored these are just really really cool mock-ups that i really liked and then imagine now a white air power mat that looked like that yeah everything would just look so unison together and so nice and i would maybe switch to apple whoa oh okay yeah i mean

listen i the the oppo watch that came out earlier this year is actually a really good looking like they copied a lot of things from the apple, but then also made it a better looking, bigger screen, thinner bezels, nice looking watch. I wonder what effect a redesign of the Apple Watch, what ripple effect that has on all the other smartwatches out there. Do watch people continue to hate on it? You remember Kevin O'Leary. I mean, that's a different type of watch people. But we know people like that too i don't i don't think quinn is big on any smart watches as maybe i mean he's a big apple fan but i know he's into just good looking watches and is very

interested in real watches and yeah and i don't think you're ever going to sell those people really interesting um i think your best bet is like fossil or someone like that making pretty much real watches that also have like a heart rate monitor and stuff like that. Right. I think that's a real thing. The Fitbits and the Pebbles. Well, hold on. I don't think any watch people are going to buy a Fitbit.

Yeah. But yeah, it's interesting. I think the watch category is still one that's kind of wild and and android still hasn't found its stride yet but yeah seeing knowing what apple watch can do i think if it looked nicer i would be very into it and i think it would make me okay with a million icons on my home screen and switching to an iphone well you know ios 14 you can hide some of those icons now so yeah it's getting we're we're pretty far off pretty far off our original topic here. Well, yeah, the original topic was wireless charging and multi-device wireless charger. I think this will make a fun video because I can now sort of clearly see the arc of what...

If I was working in this industry, I'm sure I would have seen this a long time ago. But the arc right now is what did wireless charging used to be one device one coil there's a coil in in your phone and a coil in the charger you line them up boom technically that's wireless charging but also that coil is like attached to a wire and that's like the idea was cool but as soon as you like bumped it off of the coil it would charge way slower or just stop and you'd have to find it and line it up again just right this is like the beginnings of wireless charging then suddenly you have bigger mats bigger coils two device wireless chargers but still it's two coils and you have to line up both of those coils and if you put your device right in the

middle between those two coils it's not going to charge at all so it's still you know it's it's smart but the the advance we get is we start to see much faster wireless charging and this coil can get like the the magnetic field that's changing i should probably just literally do an explainer but like when the magnetic field is that direct you can get what are we seeing 20 30 watt wireless chargers now yeah and that's amazing that's really fast wireless charging not a ton of heat dissipation because of those coils but you still have the disadvantage of like if you bump it you're going two watts you got to go line it up perfectly so now along comes the multi-device wireless charger it's it's clearly much bigger and it's clearly much more freedom about where you put it,

but it's only going to push five, maybe seven and a half watts if it's compatible because it's, again, 18 coils and it's a heat thing. So now the formula is inverted. It's much less power but much more freedom. Instead of having to put it exactly on the coil to get your 45 watts, you can just toss it down anywhere and get your five watts.

And I think the future, which is now much more obvious when you see all of it, is just a huge surface, a whole table, a whole desk, a whole mouse pad, whatever it's gonna be. You just plop it down anywhere and you get 10 watts if my desk was like that i would be so pumped just every time i put my phone how sweet would that be or nightstand it would be amazing in starbucks like the tables suddenly like isn't it

isn't just a little tiny pad it's just wherever just put your phone down if it supports it boom you wireless charge like i think yeah that arc we're we're in the middle of that arc right now where we have this this nomad base station pro where it's technically up to three devices tops but like it's a big surface you get that total freedom there's software controllers deciding where to send the wattage i think we're halfway there so yeah yeah i'm already imagining the conspiracy theories of when whole tables at Starbucks have wireless chargers and the amount of tracking they're going to think people are doing. So, oh, I was thinking, I thought you were going to go towards like the, the radiation

of like that too. But here's the thing actually is these smart wireless chargers don't have as much passive radiation as the coils because the coils aren't smart. The coils are just constantly pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse. As soon as they see the magnetic field, boom, locked. But that's just emitting a bunch of just spare energy all the time as it looks for something. These smart wireless chargers,

and I think this will also be in the video because there's a great animation for it, a bunch of small pulses, very, very, very small, hundreds of times per second, but like a 10th of the size of energy. And just checking, checking, checking, very, very, very small, hundreds of times per second, but like a tenth of the size of energy. And it's just checking, checking, checking, checking, checking, checking, sipping power, not really checking. And as soon as it sees something like a magnetic field, it's going, oh, okay, we got a device

here. What is it? Lock on, charge just that. So you could slide out on that table and it wouldn't actually be putting any sort of radiation, I'm using air quotes, like through you because it's a high-tech system. It doesn't need to. Yeah, you're assuming people have common sense though.

I think if there's any, here's the thing about Apple is this company can deliver messages to people unlike anyone else. And if Apple is giving you like the, this is magic talk on stage, they can also include a little bit of the this is not harmful talk by saying old wireless chargers harmful our new magic wireless charger with blah blah blah technology magic not harmful and i'm sure they explain it a little bit more to press and probably

get the message out but i think i think i guess where i'm landing is air power is coming back there it is i like it and i think that's a good place to end is air power is coming back. There it is. I like it. And I think that's a good place to end it. That is a good place. Air power is coming back. Quote him. Wow. So thanks for tuning into this episode of Wave Forum.

Listen, we got a whole bunch of feedback about all sorts of stuff for past episodes, and it's been super helpful. So if you guys do want to continue to leave us feedback on Twitter at wvfrm that's where the q a questions come from but uh yeah as we do more episodes we'd love to hear what you guys think and uh hopefully we can make these better every time so thanks for listening and we'll catch you guys in the next one waveform is brought to you in part with studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by Cameron Barlow.