Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Motorola's New Flagship & a Hands-On Review of the OnePlus 8 & iPhone SE

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

Now that we've had some quality time with the new OnePlus 8 and iPhone SE, we recorded a special bonus episode to tell you a little more about each phone and see if our first impressions were accurate. Then, we take a look at NVIDIA's new RTX Voice feature to see if it lives up to the hype, as well as Motorola's new flagship phone: the Motorola Edge Plus. Stay informed, stay healthy, and stay safe out there, folks! Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ Zach King: https://www.instagram.com/zachking RTX Verge Article: https://bit.ly/3cIwBEq RTX Voice Vacuum Test: https://bit.ly/2VPUnrf Mark Gurman: https://bit.ly/3bK7zEV Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home. Out Indecision, overthinking, second guessing every choice you make. In Plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done. Out Beige on beige on beige. In Knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire. Start caring for your home with confidence. Download Thumbtack today. Hey, what's up guys? Welcome back to the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques Brownlee.

And I'm Andrew Manganielli. And how about that? A bonus episode. So we came at you last week with an episode. Promised we'd be back this week and we are and we'll be back again next week. So figured while we're in quarantine and we're, you know, pumping out that quarantine content quarantine content we have the videos but we also have more time to listen to stuff too so we might as well do some more podcasting and talk about the tech and there's there's enough news to do that yeah and i'm also kind of like losing it here so editing an extra podcast is it's totally fine by me so you don't mind hearing your own voice yet uh I still mind it, but it's still better than hearing no voice and just sitting around all day. Fair, fair.

Okay, well, so I guess I'll start with like, what have we been up to? Because that's typically how we begin these things. You said you're editing a podcast. Have you found any other busy, time-wasting, time-taking activities? I still haven't drawn anything walking yet i'm trying to find like remember i mentioned last week oh yeah you're supposed to write some text or something i haven't done that yet the weather's been kind of not great here um i think my my one thing i'm really hoping for is there's a new game out called valorant by a company called riot um you need to

get into the beta right now which i haven't gotten, but it's just a new first person shooter that I'm really excited to try. I've had people ask me if I'm going to ever start streaming again because I and by people, I mean I had like five viewers before when I used to do it with PUBG. But if I get the key, I think I might start streaming again. That sounds like something fun and entertaining to do and keep the whole streaming economy is up i from what i can tell like there there's tons of people streaming not only on youtube but on instagram live all the time i'll give a shout out to uh i've seen so zach king uh aka final cut king he's been a youtuber for just as long as me probably longer with these awesome like video editing trick kind of videos. But he's also done on his Instagram Live,

he's done a sort of a lunchtime interview style, like 45-minute live with various guests. I was on, I think, last week in between, I think it was Meghan Trainor and another another youtuber i think like he's he's got oh terry cruz is right before me so it was it was pretty wild like he's got he's got the charisma to pull it off and it's like a sort of a lunchtime sit down chat on instagram yeah so i'll give that shout out i'll link his instagram in the show notes if you want to check it out. But I'll say, as far as things keeping me busy, I got a notification. This doesn't happen very often. Usually when I get a software

update for Tesla, I got to bring it up. Whenever I get a software update for my car, it just says, hey, you have a software update from the Tesla app. Would you like to install it now? Yes. And then you get it. And then once you install it, you can go down to your car and check out the change log and play with the new features if there are any. And you guys have heard about these new features where they maybe make the car a little bit faster, maybe make it a little bit longer range. I got a notification about an incoming software update. And I'll just read it to you because I didn't actually get the update. I just got a notification that I should expect an update. So let me go in my inbox here in the update. So you haven't gotten the update.

What you're saying is you've been keeping busy by just reading the update over and over again. Yesterday, yeah, they promised this update. You asked for it. With our latest over-the-air software update to the Model S performance, we've improved 0 to 60 acceleration to 2.4 seconds and quarter mile time to 10.4 seconds go for more back-to-back runs with improved thermal endurance and activate launch mode with the press of the pedals launch modes new cheetah stance lowers the front axle and adjusts damping before entry for better traction and faster acceleration off the

line you'll automatically receive this update based on your location and vehicle configuration. You can't request it. Whoa. So basically, I tweeted this maybe once or twice before, but yeah, they're still pushing software updates to make these cars faster. I don't use launch control that much in my daily driving, but if I ever do have,

you have to have Ludicrous plus turned on which is like the highest end performance warms up the battery temperature all that and then you enable launch control by like putting down the brake pedal then pumping the the go pedal i call it since it's not the gas pedal pump the go pedal that enables it and then let go of the brakes and you're you're taken off uh that will now literally lower the car i think that's the coolest name the cheetah stance it's like pouncing yeah yeah it lowers it lower to the ground to give you better traction and it'll leap off the line at 2.3 seconds now now that's that's lower than like average in the front or or how's it yeah that it does already have like some sort of variant level, right? Yeah, the Raven Model S is the new suspension.

It's had air suspension for a while. So all the Model S's with air suspension have that automatic adjustment where if you get up to highway speed, it's lowering the suspension for better aerodynamics, better efficiency, better range. And then you get back around like regular streets and it'll raise it back up for comfort um so in general it's pretty well known lower performance is better or lower lower stance is better for performance but now with the raven uh suspension i guess you're able to lower it faster and a little bit more so it's really lowering it all the way down to sort of jump off the line which is like springy it's kind of sick i'm i want to try i haven't gotten the update yet but yeah i'm ready for that yeah if you ever pull

up to a tesla and you see they're they're starting to lower down you know they're they're ready to go man you're not gonna win don't condone street racing but yeah that's how you know they're ready to rock it's funny how many people i notice like not race me but like accelerate off of a green light like faster than normal i mean i think it's probably like if you think about the like car enthusiasts who are very into to actual fuel combustion like motors and they they might not have seen a tesla and they know it's fast but they don't know how fast it is i'm sure some of them just want to see one really go yeah and like they know it's fast, but they don't know how fast it is. I'm sure some of them just want to see one really go. Yeah. And like, they know what they're looking at. They're just like, how, how fast is it? They want to see it. Yeah. Um, yeah, that's cool.

Still don't race, but yeah, don't, don't everybody out there. Yeah. Don't race. Um, all right. Moving on to some news. We, I think a lot of this episode is going to be recapping almost everything we covered last week because last week we only had the OnePlus 8 Pro full review but we didn't have a full review on the 8. We didn't even have the SE in hand and you didn't have the magic keyboard in hand. One week later all of those are out on YouTube already so we're going to go a little more in depth into that and then later we're also going to talk about the Motorola Edge Plus their new flagship. And then later, we're also going to talk about the Motorola Edge Plus, their new flagship.

But before that, quick little article I saw that I think is relevant to how we're recording podcasts at home and could be interesting to anyone else. I think I read something that like new podcast creates create new created podcasts are at like an all time high because everyone's sitting at home and they just want to i believe talk to their friends and do stuff um so if i told you that nvidia's graphics card was helping people with podcasting oh would you be surprised i i saw this story i saw the headline about rtx voice uh improving audio quality but what is what does it exactly mean how is it improving quality all right i just know there's like a setting in it i linked a verge article in here that i think you should open up because it has a soundbite in it um the way i found this was i saw something on twitter of it was actually a video of a guy and i'll post the video in the show notes below a guy's at his streaming setup and he takes like a handheld vacuum and he like turns it on behind him and I was like what

are you doing and I just read the little caption that said uh like tired of your mom vacuuming behind you while you're trying to talk to your friends nvidia's rtx can now help it so I turned it on and it doesn't even sound like he's turning the vacuum on uh yeah so i guess with nvidia's new rtx cards they have something called rtx voice that helps eliminate background noise and i assumed that was just going to be like some some dull humming which we've had issues at even right like last week's episode we had to actually ask mark at studio 71 to clean it up for us. So thank you to him. But I thought it would eliminate some humming.

Then I saw, like I said, the video of the guy holding a vacuum behind him and it reduced it. And then in this Verge article, which I'm going to link in the show notes as well because it has an audio clip. It just shows the guy talking while he's typing and then he turns it on and it just sounds like he's talking. But he's swearing that he's continuing to type and you don't hear anything so I think you should give it a listen yeah I gotta hear it this is a quick test to show you exactly how well our TX voice works I'm just gonna start typing now and this is with the microphone input selected to the loose noble I'm recording this using zoom built-in call recording feature. You can just hear the mechanical keyboard in the background, cherry-mixed ground switches.

It's a little distracting. So if we switch the microphone over to NVIDIA RTX Voiced, which you just select as a microphone input after you've installed the app, I'm going to start typing now. I promise you, by and typing, exactly the same keyboard, NVIDIA's software has completely removed the sound of the keyboard. Okay, so that is super impressive. Basically, what I was expecting was, I know we have all this power on these graphics cards, so it's awesome that they're using some extra power for this good stuff uh i i wasn't actually shocked that it would be good with a vacuum because a vacuum is this really high

pitched line and it's like a really constant sound you can find the frequency of it yeah exactly so if you're on an airplane no matter how loud that airplane is your noise canceling headphones are probably going to be able to cancel most if not all of it and just let you hear the music because it's all in one basic big chunk of frequencies that most music isn't um so you know the vacuum it's impressive because it's loud but it didn't shock me but the keyboard typing is like not very consistent so it's really impressive that it was able to pick that up as not his voice so quickly like instantly basically yeah uh yeah i would love to test it with like one like regular things in the background that are just standard frequencies like we talked about

but even just like different types of keyboards like if this thing i think the the best way they could advertise this is somebody like playing a game slamming on their key their mechanical keyboard with like blue switches the the headache switch. And if it can take blue switches out of regular audio, like that might be one of the most impressive things I've seen this year, honestly. It's honestly, it makes me curious how much of it will it allow to go through? Like if it just learns your voice after a while,

will it get rid of birds chirping outside your window? You know, cars honking their horns, like basically anything that's not his voice is getting rid of birds chirping outside your window you know cars honking their horns like basically anything that's not his voice is getting rid of that if someone else with a really high pitched voice wanders into the room will it get rid of that voice too will it keep that i don't know just like this could solve because you can use it in like zoom calls and stuff i don't know about the voice thing but if it could get that far you might finally be able to have your kids running around screaming all day

during your work Zoom calls and not hear them at all. And not even worry about it. Yeah. Interesting. I don't know. All right. I would love to test that out. That would be really cool to try.

And, like, especially for streamers are already packing a great graphics card and stuff they do. So that little thing, as long as it doesn't – the other thing I'd like to test is if it like jacks up your cpu usage or anything or or your graphics card usage i don't know why it would do cpu usage because it's your graphics card but if it would like heat it a little too much or get it going a little too far but i'm assuming if you have like an rtx 2080 you're probably totally i get the feeling I get the feeling

this is one of those things that they just have so much headroom and so much extra power on these cards that you might as well throw these things at the graphics card to keep it off of your CPU so this is something that they've just been tweaking and I guess figured out well enough to push it uh do you know if it's a software update or it's just going to show up in your uh your NVIDIA software I guess I'll be able to turn it on i'm assuming if you're keeping your graphics cards up to date uh it's going to be in there like i said i mostly just saw that this is it's software i don't have an rtx graphics card to test it on i would kill to test it especially in the position we're in right now like i'm recording everything on a windows-based computer if i had an rtx card like

yeah hey nvidia what's up wink wink wink wink um i would love to tell but like for anybody who's doing a podcast at home there's probably a good chance people have rtx cards so maybe give it a shot it might really clean up your audio it's not just i feel like everyone probably assumes it's mostly for streaming but if you have a podcast i feel like that that's a really easy simple way of really cleaning everything up quick hack sweet all right well let's let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and we'll talk a lot of hardware we got one plus eight we got iphone se we got the magic keyboard we got the uh moto edge plus like you mentioned so all this stuff coming right up. Be right back.

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over our first impressions of one plus eight uh because we already had the eight pro and the eight was the next video yeah the 699 one plus not quite flagship phone um and we are still waiting on seeing the iphone se and the magic keyboard and andrew you still haven't seen any of these things in person yet technically no i haven't seen anything in person so i guess we'll take a look we'll start with the one plus eight since we we fully covered it it's reviewed now um and basically the theme of actually the title of the review is it's no longer special and that's a fun fact is i was actually working on a review of the poco x2 a little bit earlier and the working title for that video was special is

the new normal so it's like this, this super budget and I'll go more into that in the full review. But this super budget phone, super low price 120 hertz display. Typically, this would be like pretty special, pretty incredible for this price. But when you look around at the rest of the landscape, like there are others, there are the pixel three, there are the Moto G power and the Moto G Stylus and the Moto G Hyper. Like, there's all these other phones that also have special features at this low price. So anyway, OnePlus 8, $699. It's got a lot of nice features. We talked about it. Snapdragon 865, a lot of RAM, UFS 3.0 storage, high-end performance, 90 hertz um and you know a pretty decent set of cameras not really

quite up to flagship quality it's just not as special anymore yeah it's like it's there i all the things that oneplus used to do that made everything like their brand i feel like it's just being adapted by everybody else now so So it's not, like you said, it's not quite as special in this smaller one. And it, I think it looks also not as special when you have the pro next to it, which is just like, has everything.

And like, you're so excited about all their new stuff. You're like, Oh, I'm just not as excited about this anymore. Right. But it is still a really good phone. Yeah.

Like we, we, we see the eight pro and we're like, Oh, that's a really good phone. Yeah. Like we we see the 8 Pro and we're like, oh, that's a really great phone. They finally made a flagship. If they never made the 8 Pro, let's say they just came out with this phone. I'd probably be kind of impressed still like, oh, OK, they put a Snapdragon 865 and 12 gigs of RAM and all this stuff in a phone for 700 bucks. Like it's it's pretty good good it's not special because we still have other high-end performers we still have iphone 11 for that matter but it's if you buy this phone and you get it you just got a pretty great phone with a 90 hertz oled and all this nice stuff this oxygen

os software like it's a good phone um the one thing we were talking about was the camera uh not quite as good they have a two megapixel macro camera when i like watched that part of the video i think i rewound it because you're like it has a two megapixel macro and no telephoto i was like yeah what like at 700 macro is just not the thing that i'm like i'm not going and buying a cheaper phone and being like but i needed to have a macro a two megapixel macro. It kind of feels like they're trying to make macro a thing. Like OnePlus, why are you trying to make macro a thing?

We got the, yeah, we got the ultra wide stuff, right? And everyone went, oh, ultra wide, that's sweet. I like this. Let's get those ultra wides to be as good as quality as the main cameras. These macro cameras, they've done well. The OnePlus 7T had a pretty cool macro camera. It got some attention. People liked it.

They could have saved money and just not put a macro camera in this phone and no one would have been mad. But they really felt the need to toss a two megapixel macro camera into this phone as if it's one of the things they need. Again, they left out wireless charging. they left out official ip68 certification yeah they left out 120 hertz display while you're at it cut out the other couple weird things and maybe drop the price even more um anyway so that

was just kind of weird yeah i think like there is such a small handful of people who like would first of all use a macro camera to actually take nice photos um and that's so few it's not worth putting it in there and if i would so much rather grab like the moment macro lens and put it on the actual shooter that has a way better quality and then if i really really wanted to take macros shoot it with the the moment lens for it. Which even like when you're thinking of, OnePlus should have went to Moment and checked out their sales. Because I bet you the macro lens from Moment is probably like the least sold out of the wide, the ultra wide, the two times and everything. It just seems like such a ridiculous.

Yeah, it's a weird inclusion. The one excuse i could maybe give them is maybe this this macro camera is this incredibly cheap part that they could just toss in there and it's because when they were saving off on yeah they were saving money in the cameras already they already don't have a telephoto and i'd argue telephotos are while they're not very commonly used they are at least a little bit used more often than macros, I think, ever have been. So if you're going to cut out cameras and save money, cutting out a telephoto was a conscious move because, hey, you know, we'll save money and the quality will be probably just as good with cropping the main camera as a bad telephoto. Yeah, so maybe the macro is super cheap.

I kind of want to get more into finding out how much these parts of phones cost going back to the last podcast that would be a super fun podcast episode if somebody had like knew all that like a parts breakdown yeah i mean every every company is gonna have different answers apple supply chain is incredible they probably have different answers but what if what if we could just see a chart of like all right snapdragon 865 boom cost this much yeah uh and we'll actually talk a little more about that later um but you know how much does the ram cost how much does the body and the design cost and if we put a new display and how much does that cost um all that stuff is fascinating but one thing i will say about one plus eight is that 699 with the snapdragon 865 it is one of the cheapest 5g phones that you can buy right now

yeah so 700 bucks if you're if you're trying to actually use this phone for a couple years you don't see yourself upgrading to another 5g phone soon this one with that chipset is compatible that's assuming you also believe that 5g is going to be a mainstream thing in the lifetime of when you buy this phone. Yeah, that's debatable. Which I honestly think four to five years is like a pretty long lifetime for a phone. I still don't know if I fully believe 5G is going to be like a totally mainstream worth it thing. Yeah. In four to five years.

But I think people are kind of all over the place when they think that's going to be mainstream and important. I think the long story short, what we place when they think that's going to be mainstream and important. I think the long story short, what we're learning with OnePlus 8 is it would have been special if it was like $100 cheaper or if the OnePlus 8 Pro was either a little bit better or a little bit cheaper. It's in like this awkward middle like $900. Okay, technically you're a little bit less expensive than some of the other flagship options like if galaxy s20 plus is your equivalent you're undercutting it you know 200 bucks cheaper but again people might like the cameras better in in samsung they might like the the software update history of one plus there's there's debates there um but if one plus eight

was uh 5.99 yeah that that i think would that would start to raise eyebrows again might be a little more special so i think that's what we're learning that's what one plus is learning so we talked about like how maybe taking out the macro lens could even bring the price down do you think there's anything else that that you wouldn't mind missing in the one plus eight to get it into that like five to six hundred dollar like category because i really feel like if it was if the number if the price number started with a five for one plus eight whether that's 500 or even 599 i think that's a much better sell that is a that's a good question i really didn't like the back of the phone as i mentioned in the review it's just crazy reflective like aura interstellar glows what they called it um

that could have easily just been toned down imagine no macro and imagine like the the kind of plastic backing that the poco phone f1 had honestly i don't mind the matte uh matte like hard rubberized plastics as much as some people i think plastic gets a bad rap because hey plastic's cheap you don't want to put plastic in a phone but yeah i could see if they went away from that glass because they're not doing wireless charging anyway so i might as well not have as breakable of a phone so give me that like hard plastic back matte red matte black whatever you want to do get rid of the macro lens too um and yeah that's i mean right there probably could knock off 100 bucks once again we don't know exact pricing but

i can't imagine glass back is like a super cheap thing to do especially compared to a plastic that can probably just be stamped super easily and thrown on the back of it i don't it's it's possible i don't know because a lot of it comes from volume. So if they're already making a ton of glass backs, they just have a different mold and they just keep using that same machine. I don't know exactly how it works. But yeah, you know, we saw a lot of great phones with plastic backs. So that's what came to mind. Yeah. There you go. Make a plastic back. I don't know why more companies don't do that. Make a plastic back. Pocophone F2 more companies don't do that make a plastic back

pocahontas f2 is the only one i can really think of lately that hasn't had a glass back and so many of them don't have wireless charging and you can still wireless charge or would it get too hot um i don't think you can do wireless charging through plastic i think it's the you can't do it through metal and that makes sense but would it just be a heat issue in terms of plastic that it could be affecting the plastic or it's a conductivity issue i think it's a physical a physics issue okay i would like to know that if anyone knows that answer please tweet at us or something i i'd be very interested in that i feel like no phones that are cheap enough that are putting plastic on the back of it are ever using wireless charging.

So yeah, I can't believe this is the first time I've thought about that. But anyways, I got tweeted at a ton last week. We asked you guys to send us questions or anything you were interested in to talk about. And I think this is cool because it talks about the OnePlus 8, but it is actually

cheaper to buy a oneplus 8 in india right now if you can if you consider the conversion rate from rupees to us dollars um and it is cheaper also is actually cheaper than an iphone se to buy in india what yeah um the the oneplus 8 is cheaper than the iphone s okay so does that mean the se is like way more expensive i think there are a lot of things to do with it um first of all like people ask us about different currencies all the time and it's really hard for us to talk about it because we live in the u.s and we just don't experience any of that um but when somebody a bunch of people sent this to me i just did a little bit of research and found a pretty cool article. I'll link it in the show notes, but I pulled it up for

Marques. So there's a couple of different reasons. The first one is that there's actually an India specific version of the OnePlus 8 that has six gigs of RAM. So they have a less specced out base version. Do they still have a macro camera? I'm sure it does. So let's see. The 6GB 128 storage comes out at 42,000 rupees, which is around $550, which is super interesting because we were just talking about a $500 OnePlus phone.

That feels like 6GB of ram is still plenty especially in a 500 phone that is it's pretty good yeah yeah what is one or uh pixel four is sit is it six right six i believe it's six gigs of ram yeah it's funny because i mean the phone still has a snapdragon 865 and when you have those high-end specs you're hoping it'll last a little longer obviously it's that's the best chips that we have in android right now um but you know you start to knock down the ram and that's one of the first things that you'll notice in like year three of owning a phone is man it just keeps kicking apps out the ram like it's not lasting as long as i thought it would so that's an interesting uh chop down there but yeah i mean getting the phone under under 600 bucks is

important also i i we hear about pricing all the time maybe you don't read the comments as much as i do especially in like videos about the iphone se where i put 399 us dollars in the thumbnail like that's the whole focus of the phone yeah is this cost 399 us dollars before price and tax and shipping of course um but yeah of course whenever that's the main story and i was talking about how i don't really talk about price that much but i'm gonna have to do it more yeah whenever that's the main story immediately there's a ton of comments this is actually 600 in this country oh this is actually 500 in this country oh this is 550 in canada this is actually $600 in this country. Oh, this is actually $500 in this country. Oh, this is $550 in Canada. This is $500 in Australia.

This is $600 in Iraq. Like there's a ton of comments all about all these different countries where the prices are different. I think I've just learned how to kind of skip over most of those when I'm reading the comments. I mean, I'm so tuned in to this market that they're specifically trying to attack.

And obviously an iPhone in the US market is, I mean, it's huge. This is a and obviously an iphone in the u.s market is i mean it's huge this this is a big deal for the iphone in the u.s um and i'd be curious if there's others who are you know focusing on how this price fits into other markets there are definitely other videos about it but yeah just if those are curious that's we're based in the u.s so that's why in u.s dollars uh so but what also it seems like the reason that it is cheaper in india is they have it seems like they have some sort of manufacturing plant in the country because even if you get the eight gig version it's still it's 45 000 rupees which is around 590 us so it's still under 600 like 100 bucks cheaper than the U S. So you really take out those like import duty fees and you can save quite a bit

of money. Um, which then on the other spectrum of it, you bring in an iPhone that's not manufactured there and it goes to 40, 42,500. So it's 500 rupees more than the six gig version. So it's like the iPhone SE is a little tiny bit more expensive than the 6 gig version. So it's like the iPhone SE is a little tiny bit more expensive than the India-specific variant of the OnePlus 8. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's going to factor in.

It's a total lie, and there is not only a cheaper iPhone than OnePlus. They didn't undercut them after all no yeah it's that i that actually matters a lot where you manufacture something that's why uh also people talk about a lot about how teslas are more expensive in other countries and why they have to make a gigafactory in every continent so they can make these cars and ship them for cheaper uh because right now in europe a Model S costs 20 grand more. Okay, let's take a quick ad break and we'll come back. We'll talk iPhone SE and all the other stories we had this week, plus some come to those who plan ahead. Family vacay? Reserve your ride as soon as you book your flights.

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All right, welcome back. And we might as well just jump right in. iPhone SE review dropped this week. I had the product red edition, Apple's new $399 iPhone. I think I said in the review the price maybe like 35 times. But it's the story. It's the story. So there were rumors about this cheaper iPhone coming.

It shows up. It's an iPhone 8 body with the A13 and a single camera on the back and it's good it's really good there's a lot of things about it that people like and when it comes to basically the end of the video i talked about why this phone is so important and why it's going to sell like hotcakes i think is basically there are a ton of budget phones right 300 400 500 600 phones and now we talked about what is budget but hey there's a bunch of budget phones and each one of them has like one maybe two like big selling points so that the pokephone x2 this is the one with the 120 hertz display right the pixel 3a this is the budget phone with an incredible camera. Wow. Super great. The Moto G stylus. Wow. This is the budget phone with a camera. I don't have to buy a

Galaxy, or sorry, with a stylus. I don't have to buy a Galaxy Note to get a stylus. I can spend 300 bucks. This is the budget phone that's an iPhone. And that's the selling point. And that's good enough for a lot of people. And it doesn't really have too many of the trade-offs of those other phones I talked about. You know, Pixel 3a, I talk about how much I love that camera all the time, but it was also not a very good performer and not a very good screen. The Pocophone, I'll get into that review later, but it's not a very good screen. It's not the best build. It's acceptable, but it's kind of big. And we also have Moto G Stylus. You're probably not going to have the

best camera on that phone. When you look at the iPhone SE, you're thinking, all right, it's an iPhone camera. And sure enough, it turned out to be a pretty good camera. Best videos on any budget phone. Pretty great battery life. It's the iPhone 8's build, which let's not forget was a $700 flagship phone a couple years ago. That's the thing is iPhone 8 makes it sound

like four or five years ago, but we forget that iPhone 8 came out with the iPhone 10. They skipped a year and it came out as the same year as the 10, so it's two years newer

than it really sounds like. Yeah. So 2017, this was a flagship. This is an aluminum and glass back. It's a well-built phone. No headphone jack, years the 10 so it's two years three years and then it really sounds like yeah yeah so 2017 this was a flagship this is an aluminum and glass back it's a well-built phone no headphone jack but it's a well-built phone you know you have a pretty good screen and you have ios and all the features of the iphone that people love and that's good enough for most people so this phone's gonna sell a lot as i think what we landed on yeah for sure i mean for one we say this all the time so many people that are buying phones know the name of a phone i the amount of people that i

say what phone do you have they say i have an iphone or i have a galaxy is like if you're talking to someone that's not a tech person those that is probably what they say um or they say it used to be i have a droid droid no people still say that i feel like a lot of people with like motorola and lg who don't have like really uh like snappy catchy names when they go to a carrier service and they're getting an android phone that's cheap they still say droid i know plenty of people who still say i have a droid that's so funny a lot of people in my in my worlds just say the name brand of their phone so i have an lg i've got a i've got a motorola i've got a samsung and maybe a samsung

galaxy but that's usually as far as they go as far as like what they know their phone is i have an iphone is just like oh it's one of the iphones yeah it's very um but the fact that somebody can go into a carrier right now and say i want an iphone and they're just going to pick the cheapest model that thing is going to fly off the shelves i'd say you could probably say some cheap androids got better sales because somebody went in and wanted an iphone because they'd heard about it and then they saw the price of it and they're like yeah that's i was thinking yeah i was thinking a lot about that this changes the landscape of like making a purchase decision i think every single phone we have to think about now at like anywhere near this price this is

always going to come up now like oh you could just get an iphone se for 400 bucks like that's every time every 400 phone that comes out now has to compete against that iphone um right before that when we didn't have that it was like every phone at like six or seven hundred dollars ran up against the iphone 11 which was 799 yeah but it dropped a little bit so like are you really competing against an iphone now it's like everything everything has literally basically everything it's it's crazy that's yeah i would say even so we we've like talked so much about how you were just talking before about how there it's like a cheaper version and now it's the cheaper version with this like this is the thing you're going for if you are somebody who doesn't

care about ios or android and are comfortable on either, I find it really hard to pick the 3a over the SE because I think the cameras are completely comparable and you're getting so much better performance and probably longevity. Yeah, longevity just because of the chip. Oh, yeah. Out of the iPhone. 100%. So if you're not super stuck in Android and you're willing to switch between the other,

I can't see how anyone would pick the budget Google phone over the iPhone. Yeah, right now. And we expect Pixel 4a is coming. But if we just look at 3a, that phone doesn't have the highest end chipset. It's going to get promised a couple years of updates just because it's a Pixel, but it's not going to perform very well on later and later versions because of this and if i'm being honest yes i do prefer the still photo camera quality from the pixel 3a but that's a

pretty narrow thing to prefer the still photo camera quality even the still photo camera performance as far as how fast it takes the pictures is not as fast as the iphone um you start to add up the other things like when i put those photos side by side you can sort of manipulate the iphone photo to to get closer to the pixel but people who are just pointing and shooting which is let's be real most people buying 400 phones um going to love the quality from the iPhone. They're going to take videos. They're going to love the video quality way more from the iPhone. The audio quality, they're going to love way more from the iPhone. They're going to be able to share it more easily from the iPhone with other iPhone users. Like it's just a whole

world. So now what do you do? Even that, like, if you're thinking of just, you know, if for whatever reason, you're like, I want a $400 phone and the thing I love the most is still photography. The iPhone is still so close to the Pixel that it would be really hard to be like, the only thing you would have to care about is still image photography to pick the Pixel over the iPhone. Because of how much better the overall experience is when you finally do use it as a phone right and not to not to keep gushing on the iphone but on top of all of that if this was a budget android phone let's say for a 399 price it kind of still does have some killer features it has that that high quality build but it also has It has that high quality build, but it also has a more powerful chip set than any Android phone. Actually, in fact, that's the headline I just saw yesterday was the cheapest iPhone has a more powerful chip set than the most expensive Android phone.

And guess what? It's true. It's going to last longer. Yeah. So it's got that and has a pretty solid video camera so if you're if you're really looking for killer features you can find them in the iphone se um that brought me to my fun twitter question prompt which was like what would and maybe you guys can tweet at me if you can think of a better one but what would the android equivalent of the iphone se be today if they

tried to make one and the one i tossed out on twitter was what if they made what if they made a nexus 5 with they tossed a snapdragon 865 and eight gigs of ram in there and they just spit that out call it the uh nexus se and charge 399 bucks for it would people like that i mean I think people would like it. I think the really funny thing, though, is that you need to specify how much RAM it has just to be equivalent to the A13. Yeah, just to iOS, yeah.

Yeah, that's just like showing how great... You just mentioned how we feel like we're gushing. I've never used an iPhone as an actual phone, and I still understand how incredible their ecosystem is inside a phone and how powerful it is and how great it just works together and how long it works so like just tossing in a Snapdragon 855 until like if you took the 3a and put an 865 into it it's still not anywhere near as good yeah as the vertical integration they have does wonders um a lot of the responses i got to this twitter prompt were were either like yeah i would totally buy

that the nexus 5 was one of my favorite phones or um the nexus 5 had a not that great battery life or not that great screen it was also plastic but that wasn't a huge deal to me thinking about this and they were like nah i would never buy this phone. But the most interesting one was this wouldn't even be possible. And when you think about it, the reason it's not possible, I told you I would come back to this. The Snapdragon 865 from Qualcomm, when you buy it, you get looped into also buying their 5G modem with it. It's a system on a chip. There's a whole lot going on there.

And just the price of that by itself puts you up so high, you can't finish off the phone for 400 bucks. So even if Google or LG actually was still making Nexus 5, churning them out for dirt cheap, putting a Snapdragon 865 and eight gigs of RAM in this phone and just keeping the original camera,

the original screen and all that, you have to charge like more than 400 bucks for this phone which is kind of rough that's what i was going to say earlier how do you compete against a 400 iphone other than just going lower than 400 bucks yeah sacrifice more but make sure it's the right sacrifices and hit a lower price point um or or just under like hope you have enough brand loyalty to stick with an android device pretty much good luck with that because you're sticking to brand loyalty i mean against the iphone that's tough but also you could you could try to go super super hard into like one feature that you know people will want over the iphone and you know maybe that's higher fresh rate i don't know maybe that's an incredible camera yeah what does the

iphone missing right now and oled how bad do people want oleds how bad do people who buy 400 phones want oleds was that john morrison who did the um he when the iPhone, what was the first? Oh, he put the screens behind. Yeah, yeah, he covered it and had the screens. And, like, it was, like, equal as to who picked whichever one because it's really not that bad. Right, like a high-res OLED versus the iPhone's supposedly terrible 720p LCD. Yeah, like, I don't think i don't think a screen would be so you're saying like if a if a 300 a 399 phone had like a crazy good

resolution slash high refresh rate screen and that was its like big selling point and then i don't know right processor and like a yeah and like a not good camera i don't think that oh unless you like play game gaming maybe but i don't think it would be able to handle it with the chip so yeah and the battery yeah it's hard it's tough apple has a fair advantage here it's true lou uh lou from unbox therapy he tossed out another one i'm gonna go to twitter right now question for tech enthusiasts he put a picture of what's this uh galaxy s7 edge uh if they put if samsung kept making the galaxy s7 edge put a snapdragon 865 in there again assuming it's even possible uh would you want this phone now this is this is another tough one because now you're down on software updates a

little bit you have that edge display which is is, you know, it's fine. I'm not the biggest fan. Was S7 Edge the one coming out around? I think we should pick a phone that's the same year the iPhone 8 came out in terms of. Yeah, it's three years ago. The S7 Edge was three years ago. Wouldn't it have been? Yeah, because we're on S20 now and then S9 and S8 and S7.

So this is four years ago. So it's like a year before 10 9 8 though so wouldn't it be 8 because i feel like the jump from 7 to 8 is huge oh 7 8 9 10 20 okay yeah so we're i think it would be i would i would have to think of like an s8 because man so an s7 edge was rough i would never yeah that phone like redone okay so let's say galaxy s8 uh newer chip that's all they do it's still got that camera it's still got that screen those bezels i think it still has a home button would you buy that phone for 400 bucks um the s8 actually had that i loved the s8 home button it was not a physical home button but it was like a physical under the screen home button like you still pressed it and got like a feedback it was great okay i don't know why they got rid of that but um that's how i take that's

their best design phone ever i loved that or i had the note 8 and i absolutely loved it but se 865 if it could keep with software updates as well as the SE, I think that would be like one of the best competitors to it. Especially just like also in terms of the demographic of I'm walking into a store with no knowledge and I want the cheapest Galaxy. You know, people hear Galaxy all the time. They know people have Galaxies that aren't iPhones and they go in, I want the cheapest Galaxy. You know, people hear Galaxy all the time. They know people have Galaxies that aren't iPhones and they go in, I want the cheapest Galaxy. And they saw it's yeah. Yeah. 400 bucks. Here's what I'll say. I would still pick the iPhone, but I think that could

actually, that would be its best competitor. That's the thing. Yeah. You'd still pick the iPhone. I'll say, uh, that phone would either tie with or lose in every major spec or feature against the iphone se battery life it might tie software updates software updates it would lose uh camera quality it would lose it might tie in photos but lose in video display is is maybe the one thing you could see the build of it looks more new age than the iPhone SE or the iPhone 8. Definitely, definitely. Okay, that's where it would win. That's where it would win.

Galaxy S8. Straight hardware design. You get that fingerprint reader on the back, which is, you know, it's not Touch ID, but it's good enough. The single camera system, it's not an iPhone camera, but it's all right.

But, you know, you're not to trounce it in pretty much any other way. I don't know. It's tough. It's going to be real interesting to see how budget phones respond over the next couple of years and how they, the companies that are traditionally doing really good budget phones, how they react, how they pivot. Do they keep going full steam ahead with their strategies or do they change? That's why I i'm so happy about iphone se is we're gonna get some really good budget phones yeah um all right let's let's pivot wildly to a 350 accessory um because the same company that sells the 400 iphone sells very expensive things um i reviewed the ipad Keyboard Case, Trackpad. What do I call this?

It's just a Magic Keyboard Case, I guess. It's something I'm wildly excited about that I will never use because I don't have an iPad or have never used an iPad as my own. I just thought it looked really cool. As much as I love it, as much as I really liked using it and as as I concluded in the video it gets the closest to bringing the iPad to a laptop I'm talking to you right now on a MacBook Air and I bought myself an iPad just threefold folio case because I'm the type of person that leaves my iPad in the case all the time and I just don't want to carry around all that extra weight

for the keyboard that I don't use. Yeah, it's heavier. In the video, you show that it's heavier than the actual iPad itself. So therefore, twice as heavy. The top heaviness of it seems like a real issue. It's close. If you're not just on a solid surface

and it's solidly on on there it seems like it would be a problem with top it's so it's it's perfectly fine on a desk and i use it on a table all the time but it's as soon as you get to your lap which is where you use a laptop you know you get on your lap all the time in fact it's called a laptop um the weight of it is always in the bottom so that it's the top heaviness of the ipad you kind of feel that more and as soon as you you tilt your legs below 90 degrees then it feels like it's going to topple over and you don't have to tilt very far until it does topple over so that was kind of annoying i think the one thing is really good the one thing in the video that just totally sold me as like this did not succeed at what it wanted to do was how often you

had to leave the keyboard and touch something on the screen of the iPad in order to do something. No escape key would drive me crazy. Yeah, no escape key. And you know, I tried to stick with the trackpad a lot for that stuff. But I just found myself just reaching up and touching the screen. But yeah, like just to change like,, you know, backlight brightness or just to, just to command Q or quit some apps or go to multitasking and not deal with the gestures on the trackpad. There's a, there's a lot of different ways you can use this thing. Some of them are closer to a laptop than others. Um, but I, I find that I, I, I am still the type of person that uses the iPad as an iPad more often. So I'm sticking to the MacBook Air

as my laptop right now. So that's just that's just me. Do you think like, because if you think about it, there are a lot of laptops that also still have touchscreens involved into it. And I can't tell if it's one of those like weird gimmicks where people are like just looking for a laptop and see that as a touchscreen and buy it and then realize they never use it. But am I just being like too picky and too old? I don't even know if you'd call it old school, but like I would never use a touchscreen on a laptop. Therefore, if I had this magic keyboard, I would hate that I have to touch the screen all the time because it would remind me of that. Is that just like a new way you think people are going to do things?

I'm with you. I never, ever really wanted a touchscreen laptop. Is that just like a new way you think people are going to do things? I'm with you. I never ever really wanted a touchscreen laptop. I've had touchscreen laptops and I never touched the screen anyway. I just keep using the mouse and the keyboard like usual. So the iPad as a laptop never really appealed to me. But there is a market of two-in-one users, surface users, all kinds of two-in-ones where people love it. And there are touchscreens and they're flipping them over in the yoga books and they flip them over backwards and draw on them with styluses.

Like that's a, it is a whole thing that people get really into. I happen to not be a huge, like I have an Apple pencil, but I don't really use it for anything other than occasional Lightroom. Uh, I am not in that group of people. So I, it's hard for me to say how close the iPad gets to a two-in-one workflow, but, uh, I was never a touchscreen on a laptop person. Yeah. I'm trying to think like, I don't know why I didn't think of drawing. Cause like the, the iPad and the Apple pencil and for artists, I feel like must be incredible um so i could see that being as like if you are an artist who really likes drawing on a tablet and you like to answer some emails with a real keyboard every once in a while that seems like a pretty good deal i also saw people did you see everyone who was like flipping the keyboard over

and it turned into like a drawing pad with like the keyboard raised up in the air which is obviously i'm sure you can get a little upside down set up yeah yeah there you go yeah no unintended feature it's 350 bucks you better have some extra features um i guess we'll wrap it up with the moto edge plus motorola is back in the flagship space um this one i i just got mine but we i first saw it in chicago a couple months ago now and this you know obviously the world's changed and things were delayed um but they've revealed their moto edge plus finally it's a 5g verizon exclusive for life which is dude i just read that on the script and i had to like lean back and laugh so it wasn't right in the microphone it's rough i think they're it might be

unlocked in some markets but yeah in the us it's verizon exclusive for life which is pretty rough but here's what they're dropping it's a snapdragon 865 12 gigs of ram ufs 3.0 6.7 inch full hd plus oled so it's not it's not 1440p but it's it's a pretty big screen and it's a full-on 90 degree like melting over the sides waterfall display it's literally called the edge plus because the screen so dramatically curves over like think huawei p30 pro i think it was it's just as it's just as bad i'll say bad but some people might think that's good yeah it's just as bad looks great looks great when you're not looks super cool yeah i mean i i tweeted my my pictures of it you know it got a ton of attention for how good it looks but you know i'm i'll i'll i'll review it i'll give you my thoughts on it

when i use it um it is a 90 hertz display they didn't go full 120 yeah it's good 108 megapixel main camera and you know i'm curious again how close they get to the galaxy s20 ultra's issues or qualities um but it appears to be at least that same sensor also with an 8 megapixel 3x telephoto and a 16 megapixel ultra wide with macro. It also has a 5000 milliamp hour battery and decently fast, not super fast charging. I think it's either 25 or 15 watt fast charging, not notable fast charging, but pretty big battery, $999. So it's undercutting some of those ultra phones in price by getting to $999. But it's definitely, it's more interesting to me that Motorola is back with a flagship

and thinks that this is the way to do it. Notably going dramatic with the screen waterfall curve over. Yeah, the screen thing is funny because two years ago, we were all obsessed with those screens because they look so cool and they seem so good. And then I think we've, do you think it was a little bit of when it was first coming up with accidental touches, we were all like, they'll fix that eventually. Yeah, I really want to chart like the inflection point of when we went from hell yes to hell no on waterfall screens the no was pretty recent and i almost feel bad because it's like the tech community and tech enthusiasts for so long we're basically screaming at companies being like we love waterfall edges they look so cool and i'm sure they're all like all right we're

gonna get on this and then all of a sudden they create all these phones and we're like we don't like it anymore stop and then they just have to like 180 and try and cater to our ever-changing it's really so yeah it's partially you say it's recent oh definitely you say it's recent and i think it is probably within like the last two years but like i when i go back to the beginning of this like because we had we were talking about the galaxy s7 edge a little bit earlier we had a bunch of samsung phones where they had a normal chin and forehead and we started thinking like hey let's shrink the bezels let's see how close to the edge we can feel like we get and then i don't know if you know what number it was but there was a galaxy note like the note four or something like really old where one of the edges spilled over and not the other i believe the s7 edge was that as well that's what the s7 edge was it was only

one side of it that oh no no that was the note so the s7 edge had both both edges because they were super yeah it was okay but there was a note edge where for the first time Samsung was like, let's just curve this like right over the side and like put some software features in that side. I do remember that. I remember being at work and somebody having in literally a crowd of people around him looking at it. It was really interesting. This looks so cool. And then you like, you're like, this makes no sense at all. I mean, it was the classic like early feature thing where it was like oh we put a pedometer in there we put a we put a news ticker in there so your stock prices will slide

across that edge like they were like whatever i don't know what's gonna work here but we'll we're samsung we'll throw it out the wall if it sticks great and it stuck and it had that like holy crap what is that moment where people were gathering and were like i really like this next phone they came out with both sides rolled over the edges whoa samsung's killing it we love this waterfall screen thing look at what they're doing with this immersion all their commercials too about it were always all about how it you know was fully immersive edgeless i feel like i would say the the peak of samsung's like edge that we were the most hyped about it was probably the phone we were talking about before which is the s8 that was like the cleanest it looked having this like this nice edge it was like just enough of a roll off to where when you looked at it head on it looked like it had no side bezels at all

and that just like looked beautiful and everyone was all on the hype train and then they kept doing it and then other companies started doing it and then i think all of us realized like this yeah the murmurs started coming up like well i do still get some accidental touches but like it's early they'll fix that um and you know of course apple never did it so we never got to see apple's version of like doing it well whatever they would have done but you know you know another year comes by and we're still getting accidental touches another Another year goes by, we're getting like bezels getting pushed closer to the top and bottom edges, but still not really fixing these awkward accidental touches.

And the other thing that's, I think a little underrated that I don't really talk about much, but as a video maker, I notice it every time is the reflection of light. If you're just trying to watch a video or something, you're gonna get this big mean glare across either the top or the bottom edge, depending on where the light's coming from with that curved screen.

So these things never went away. And eventually the tone kind of changed in like the last two years where I started going, you know, I kind of like that this one has a flat screen. And some of them started backpedaling a little bit um and eventually we started going in the other direction samsung even on the new galaxy s20 flattened out that screen and now we're seeing you know i think oppo and huawei and motorola going like look how curved our screens are this is so sick and everyone's like uh guys we're kind of done with the the curved screen thing so maybe we'll see that walked back over the next couple years we'll see everyone go back to flat tiny bezels on the sides yeah i i think that's that's my favorite right now and

like i i guess it kind of shows like which companies are the most up to date with kind of i guess it's hard to say because I don't know how long a phone is in production for. Did Samsung somehow catch the early murmurings of waterfall edges and think like, oh, we should start trying to not do that anymore and just hit it at the perfect timing? Or are all of these other smartphone manufacturers just like completely ignoring it and just trying to go further and further into what they what was really popular three or four years ago well i think it's a little bit of both i think it's number one um samsung can do whatever they want and try things um but the other thing is a lot of these guys buy displays from samsung so they're not necessarily deciding um what's you

know what's in with displays they're like oh we want this nice screen samsung selling here with the curved edges i saw samsung do it well i think we can do it too this just like sent me off on some conspiracy theory of that like samsung created this i don't know if motorola does a samsung screen but this was the screen samsung was going to use and then they caught wind of people not liking it anymore and they're like damn we need to make a new screen sell that one for cheaper let's sell it to another company destroy them and oh my god there will always be some good conspiracies about samsung's displays but hey you know now we have our choices we have some curved ones we have some some double curved ones

thanks to huawei we've got the Edge Plus coming out. That review will be coming up soon. And of course, we have our flat iPhones and our semi-flat 2.5D glass is what they're still calling it on Samsung, where they just curve over the edge just a little bit. But yeah, that's basically it for what we had this week. Hey, next week, we're going to have Mark Gurman on. We didn't get to touch on it during this episode, but Mark Gurman is a notable, very accurate Apple leaker and now Bloomberg reporter. But if you've ever seen the big stories about what to expect in the next iPhone, you can pretty much count on the most reliable information coming from him. We're going to have him on just to talk about not just the upcoming iPhone 12, of course,

and see how much I can get him to say, but just like league culture in general. Like what's it like having this information? Do you feel like you're ruining the news cycle? Are you spoiling the great moment on stage where they reveal the design? We'll talk about all that stuff. If you have questions for Mark, here's what I want you to do.

Head over to WVFRM on Twitter and just ask the question you want us to ask mark um we'll link mark in the show notes he's great on twitter but again that's who we're having on as guests for the next episode next week so stay tuned for that and uh that's been it for waveform this week thanks for listening waveform is brought to you in part with studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by Cameron Barlow.