Gadgetory

what's up Brian Tong here and welcome to Google issues for everything Google you can think of and with so much stuff rolling out of Mobile World Congress 2018 from Barcelona Spain now we told you everything you could expect from the Samsung Galaxy S 9 last week so you know we're not gonna do a review the s9 is going to be a nice incremental upgrade for a long time Samsung users nothing really groundbreaking here and if you have an s8 you're probably still good to go with your s8 unless you got to have the latest thing now the biggest change here is the camera its dual sensors on the s9 plus and it's variable aperture the layout of the fingerprint sensor below the lens is a big improvement as well it's subtle but you know what it makes a difference now during the keynote I was more disappointed they didn't really show a real heads up comparison to feature the difference in the results of their new camera versus competition like the pixel 2 or iPhone 10 something they've done before so maybe it didn't work in their favor and slo-mo is cool but we didn't need a 5 minute demo of that also if you're gonna make digs at the competition you've got to do better than this and as always you know there's no knotch come on some at least have your employees do like fake reactions or clap real loud like Apple does it was weak now a are emojis and these are creepy and kind of cool at the same time like bitmoji is on steroids but maybe not in a good way but I still wouldn't use them now the s9 and s 9 plus will be released on March 16th pre-orders open March the 2nd with pricing for the s9 starting at seven hundred and twenty dollars and the s9 + at 840 it's going to be different depending on the carrier you go to and there's trade-in value with your older phone that can help out as well but the Samsung Galaxy S 9 wasn't the best phone showing off at Mobile World Congress that title easily goes to the vivo apex concept with innovation that come on will blow your mind yes it's a concept but you want a true bezel this phone it's right here that just makes you want to dive in the media content but we're - the front-facing camera go guess what switch the camera to selfie mode and it slides up from the top of the phone it looks cool could it break possibly but you're also a true bezel this phone now there's no room for speakers so the OLED display itself vibrates to produce sound for phone calls music and is loud enough on speaker mode we've seen this tech on TVs already and if you weren't familiar with vivo before they're the company behind the first in screen fingerprint scanner and the vivo apex concept takes that up a notch to support up to two finger prints now there's a dual camera on the rear side but no specs have been actually confirmed for this phone there's no timetable when we'll actually see this in yet it's easier to show off stuff like this when it's a concept but damn that's the coolest thing I saw a Mobile World Congress alright other phones at MWC Sony announced its new flagship phones the XZ 2 and the XZ 2 compact with a curved design on the rear an HD plus HDR screen with an 18 by 9 resolution and screen sizes of 5.7 inches and 5 inches for the compact now there are front-facing speakers but the larger XZ 2 creates synchronized sound vibrations that allow you to feel the sound through the phone while you're watching it you'll get a snapdragon 845 four gigs of ram and a single 19 megapixel camera with 4k HDR video and 960 frames per second slo-mo that captures that 1080p besting the 720p of the galaxy s 9s and we won't forget about LG and their LG v 30s that gets updated with new AI features that we've talked about now there's not much new here not even an updated snapdragon 845 and really I'm only mentioning it to be nice like a solid phone don't get me wrong but we'll just wait for something new in 2019 alright let's jump into what's happening in the Google world the Google clips companion app has arrived on the Play Store ahead of its launch this week on February the 27th it's their 12 megapixel always on camera that uses AI to capture pictures and videos from candid moments and then saves them now it's probably best for people with children or pets that can't get enough of themselves and feel the need to post more of them to annoy their friends and family on social media we know who those people are now I still don't see the general consumer getting on board with this especially for 249 yeah 2 for 9 I'll write the pixel 2 and 2 XL are getting an update to the pic so visual core service that will bring more efficient hdr+ processing and other machine learning tests that you can get right now it improves what's already the best camera on a phone right now until we see how it matches up with the new phones from MWC it also reveals Google's first custom system on the chip is codenamed ezel see that's cute now seven new languages have been added for developers to build actions for the Google assistant Hindi Thai Indonesian Danish Norwegian Swedish and Dutch they've also added changes to make google actions faster for regular app users so you don't have to deal with these longer introductory prompts and over the weekend Google released a our core 1.0 to the public opening up to over 100 million Android devices now if you played the Google's a are stickers developers will now be able to put their own creations into the Play Store for you to use it will also allow them to work to create new AR experiences of their own on Android phones and finally Google lens will also be officially rolling out in the next few weeks and will be made available on the Google Photos app for iOS and Android now this is a feature that allows you to search what you've captured through the camera it identifies what you're looking at and offers suggestions the Google assistant will also get google lens capability for english-speaking users if they are using a compatible phone as well whew alright that's it for this week you can email me at Google issues at sea Netcom or to me at Brian Tom thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time for some more of that Google issues