Gadgetory

and we are live top stories this week Apple is looking to design their own processors for the next generation of Macs starting as early as 2020 so sorry about that loss Intel Microsoft hololens - could arrive by the end of this year sporting a custom qualcomm chipset so sorry about your loss Intel there and the Nation magazine dropped a monster report on the business of studying cell phone use and cancer and there's a lot for us to unravel there so we've got a lot to talk about make sure you're charged and ready for episode 2 9 9 of the PocketNow weekly recorded April 6th at noon pacific this weekly podcast is where we dissect and discuss those gadgets that make our lives mobile smartphones tablets and wearables it's all the stuff you wished existed when you were a kid and you probably weren't as concerned with medical science surrounding your toys as you probably should have i'm juan carlos bag now senior editor contributing editor at pocketnow.com joined as always by plucky podcast producer mr. jules wong on the east coast how's it going buddy boy that's good well how about you today I am froggy as heck we were talking off air I I think I've been good for almost 10 hours of talking this week and so wrapping up a podcast at the end of the week I don't know that I fully recovered so I'm gonna have cool guy Mick scratchy voice going on for for most of this show or if you're froggy enough then you can do your best was a Paul McCartney impression oh I don't yeah I don't think well you know what I could realize is look you know when they would end a end a show when the Beatles would end the show that's when they would sing twist and shout because their voices were already blown so if I were gonna sing anything right now I would just be the screaming and that's already enough of the song to get us a copyright strike so either that or like all the other kinds of stuff that has come out of a Paul McCartney's mouth in the past 30 years or so I really feel like that's a different podcast we need to have Jules is a different came out of home the curtain brought to you by pocket now oh boy this is a well we've been looking to have a second podcast on your network so let's have that why not indeed yeah and if you don't prefer to talk about that topic then you can talk about these smartphones tablets smartwatches whatever the heck that were talking about this week and you can do so via Twitter you can talk with us as we're broadcasting live with the hashtag P and weekly if you have any thoughts questions or whatever or just said along that tweet and we'll be able to read that throughout the show and if you can't make it to this channel if you want to still get in on the questions and answers and whatnot then head on over to your email client and type in podcast at pocketnow.com along with your message and we'll be able to read that at the end of each month in our mailbag episode so definitely get involved join us we wouldn't be here without you yeah and we already have a few tweets coming in we got a great question from renato Laporte on twitter which we're gonna cover when we get to one of our stories about motorola this week so yeah definitely looking for you guys to join that conversation the livestream the Twitter's the the emails all that fun stuff and we'll make sure we have a nice fun chat especially this week is we've got some news which is I think gonna be a little tough for us to to chew through a little a little tough for us to unravel later in the show for those of us who are enthusiasts and fans of mobile technology these types of stories which I think give us pause into our own consumer behavior so I really hope that we can have a good dialogue to get back and forth with those of you who are watching our stream indeed and there's plenty of outside material as well in regarding today if you'd ideally suggest that if you're watching live right now just head into the rundown it should be in the description on the YouTube page and like actually go scroll down to the link for the nation and the Nation magazine did this huge article titled how big Wireless excuse me how big Wireless made us think that cellphones are spayed safe a special investigation and we'll be doing that at the second half of our show but in the meantime we've got plenty of news still to talk about so for the week of April 2nd 2018 this is all the news that has for the podcast bloomed I was about ready to talk to already bounce come on yeah for the week of April 2nd 2016 bloomberg reports that ape Apple is looking to replace Intel processors on its max with its own design though it's not clear if it will continue to reference arm blueprints as it has done for the iPhone and iPad market analysts say that Intel will likely see limited impact with one of its biggest business relationships if Apple is to wean in these new chips especially on the lower end where they make up less of the Intel share in max in related news Intel may be falling out of favor at Microsoft for the next hololens device instead of a chae trail core processor for the hololens - we could be seeing an ARM chip as well along with custom a tie-in holographic processors this could allow a standalone unit to survive longer on battery power coming up to Xiaomi here and it's the Chinese company is looking forward to officially debuting its new sub brand focusing on gaming April 13th at least in China black shark is also set to release snapdragon 845 phone with liquid cooling among other features that give me enthusiasts should be looking forward to Motorola's setting itself up for an April 19 event in Brazil it could possibly launch the Moto G 6 with Snapdragon 600 chips and extra tall displays at this event a longer shot would be the entry-level Maru five coming out it has been a year on since the Moto e series got an updates so possibility is there Japan display is looking too straight together five hundred million dollars to patch up its lackluster LCD business doing sir it will involve the sale of one of its newer OLED plants the iPhone tens poor sales performance seems to have a chilling effect on OLED a production at this moment JDI hopes to get a piece of the LCD pie back with a Apple's iPad business Google has rolled out rolling steady hauls in three rural school districts in North Carolina South Carolina and near this year in Colorado the pilot program started in 2016 Wi-Fi is being equipped on two school buses that make long treks to shadow kids to and from school in places where home Internet services or Google has been able to increase student engagement with its program and encourage teachers to implement more digital elements to lesson plans ZTE has partnered with tabouleh to show its so-called news feed off on its phones when it relies on for the most part is paid content from grains the integration will allow a widget to be shown and for the Google feed at the far left side of the home screen to be replaced with this new pane showing our stories and such ZTE had promised to revert its Android experience to a more stock look with its rollout of goryeo it's not clear how this integration will take place going forward and finally there's went from Evan blasts top leaks and journalists that LG has decided on naming what's supposed to be the g7 the g7 thank you like it did the V 30s thank you thank you being the brand for LG's artificial intelligence enriched products so there you go thank you very much LG cool yeah all right is that the the savior the g7 is dead long-lived the seven is that what we're expecting oh yeah that that's supposed to be the phone that saves us from our dumb smartphone troubles and how dumb the g6 was I guess how dumb the v30 is it's just dumb they're all stupid I I just I don't know I'm having a hard time with this this sort of philosophy again the same way that Bixby on Samsung can do some really cool things and I think there's some interesting consumer benefit I'm not sure that this is the killer solution for getting people excited about smart phones again my v30 just got the Oreo update and I've been playing around with the camera and the auto mode got a nice little touch I actually posted a photo on my Instagram this morning just you know full auto I'm liking the output a little bit better than when I first got the V 30 but I can't say I'm I'm really I I can't say I'm super impressed by the AI camera modes the way that it alters exposure and it alters post-processing you know I think there are some interesting ideas there I think Huawei is kind of in the same boat we've got this whole neural processing unit on the chipset just to chew up and and figure out what it is that you're pointing the camera at and while that's cool I mean there's some cool technology on display I'm still not sure that it's it's really improving my photography that much when I'm trying to when I'm trying to shoot just like a general consumer full-auto let me just point my camera at something and hit the shutter button it doesn't really feel that much different than most other phones normal auto or HDR modes well what we seem to know is that the LG G 7 in render leaks and whatnot is that there will be four buttons they I mean they're taking the Samsung strategy here wholesale because you got the two volume rockers on the side and then you getting you know two more buttons so one of them has to be a power button and if that's the case that would take the power point off of the fingerprint sensor in the back for the first time in a while so what's that extra button could it be a think you Bixby button thing like and like that's it doesn't have people enthusiastic I'm gonna tell a I is gonna be shoved into our faces we don't want it to be you know it's it's right there at the at the top of the finger but really you're just it's like we're gonna accidentally tap on it and it's gonna be clapping let's get out of that for a second cuz even I'm even though I really do like some of the the individual features that Bixby brings to the table and it has improved I still disabled the Bigsby buttons on my note and my Galaxy s8 I'm not looking forward to having that same extraneous piece of hardware on an LG and if they do move the the fingerprint sensor or me if that the home button off the back of the phone I'll be really sad because this is something I've enjoyed about LG design since the since the GU - I've really enjoyed that that'd be Homer that would be a bummer for me as well and like how much more ham-fisted can again with the name that because I'll admit they they started off last year I think with smart think you like that that's all one word SME Smar thi NQ and which is not supposed to be a word in any human language ever so I don't know why this is a good idea why the V 30s + thank you was allowed to be a phrase used in marketing like yeah that's that's not really cuz I agree with you it's just it's just clumsy we want something that consumers can identify you know galaxy branding for Samsung works really well they've got a huge portfolio of products under that galaxy umbrella but it's an abbreviated way of getting the consumer immediately into thinking about one particular class of products and LG has struggled with that the aesthetics on their devices what they want a G Series phone to look like versus what they want a V Series phone to look like and now that they've kind of figured out design language they're still struggling IMO with things like branding think think you isn't gonna mean anything to consumers and it's barely enough of a feel-good word that will resonate emotionally and it sounds a lot like thank you I don't like here we are eternally grateful for this artificial intelligence service I'm really I'm well I I mean we're it's for me it was more the you know the LG's the grantor eternally grateful for those of you who buy our products I mean there's something it has to be some form of ingratiate given that if retained mobile division has been cutting you know that's been losing for about a year straight now I mean there's a good idea in there somewhere but it doesn't feel like it's fully baked or there's there's a there's an interesting thought in showing gratitude to a consumer base and trying to bring people into the fold and like you were saying ingratiating but the this is this is a a stage one on the blackboard idea not a let's go to market idea yet it this has not been refined enough and I think we're seeing just a little too much of how the sausage is made that it'll be tough to unravel or it'll be tough to come back to this brand and say like oh well this is their flagship premiere product with one of their flagship features and this is why consumers should be interested in it and consumers are going but what is thank you or what is that think think queue or think think you or think thin queue like it's a very thin letter in the alphabet yeah if the two-dimensional queue it's that thin yeah uh I don't know that this is this is the killer find it really I mean whatever additional fun or AI features they put on this phone I just hope they they deliver a solid device the g6 was such a big step in the right direction evolving off of that would be great and trying to continue pushing out the messaging on what makes an lg device unique you're not gonna get there by copying a Bigsby like feature you're not going to get there by copying apples not there has to be a differentiator and if they continue to use like the best audio processing in a phone just give us a commercial on that give us that Apple style commercial on you you want to have the best this is the best and there isn't really much room for debate there yeah you talk about Apple stylings here I want to move on to the Intel story here now they've been work a police a has been working on a sort of merger between Mac OS and iOS in terms of the app ecosystem there and their interoperability and that could be one sign of this whole arm-based infrastructure going over to son max perhaps the low end maybe the MacBook Air and like 2020 or something like that it's plausible I think it's I think it's more than plausible I think it's necessary because this Qualcomm story this Intel story happens on two fronts Apple considering redesigning the chipset for say a MacBook Air let's keep it simple we're gonna say a MacBook Air as as my my futuristic hypothesis at the same time we've been seeing Microsoft making big strides on getting Windows 10 on arm so this news of hololens isn't particularly disruptive to the industry there's very little movement happening on hololens but it's another data point to show that intel's domination on chipsets is is has the potential to be rocked substantially by a newer class of lower power and portable devices and i think it's another data point to show consumers may you're spending a thousand dollars on a phone are you potentially over buying for some of this high-end hardware which you might not be really utilizing to its fullest you know a Qualcomm 845 is a substantially powerful mobile chipset what are you doing with it and might you have been just as well served by a lower a lower power product so I would be very concerned at Intel there their current strategy like I got to play with the new the new Nook again this tiny little box which is surprisingly powerful from Intel but the entire industry right now is diversifying around different implementations of arm and different implementations of low-power x86 so this is a very sensitive transition for Intel to manage and it's not great for them if Apple is looking at taking one of their product lines away I only makes up what did--what did do you guys put any article Apple makes up about 5% the 5% that some of the market analysis says that the lower and the lower end max make up about 2% so that the higher end makes 3 so so we probably IME like and if I'm putting on my prognosticator cap I would say that any shift in this strategy would probably start with a single Apple Mac product line something like the MacBook Air and likely won't disrupt the overall Core i5 or ultra low power ultra-low voltage chipset strategy that Apple's employed on other things you're definitely not gonna switch over to arm for a mac pro which we hopefully will see a proper redesign on that in the next year or two so Intel's safe there but it does set up sort of a new conversation in what consumers need versus what they want Apple pushing into arm territory for a MacBook makes a lot of sense Windows 10 operating on arm makes a lot of sense and if you're not doing anything that requires the heavy lifting of a core i5 or a core i7 you'll be well served on an ARM chip set not to mention all of the education market that's looking at these products to Chromebook and what Google can do in this space is going to be in extremely formidable and Intel doesn't really have much of a say in that market at all they don't have much of a presence in that ultra low-cost laptop market from from Google's so this this is the beginning of what could potentially be a very disruptive change for how we look at is Intel as a chipset supplier agreed and I think a lot of that has to also do with the form factor here because there's still war going on in between traditional laptop and that the convertible tune one you know you have the optional stylus people manufacturers are trying to still figure out what to do with that and whether the arm infrastructure makes sense go more or less convertibles yeah and and this also opens up this also opens up a huge potential for Intel like I said on the Nook it's this tiny little box it's got tons of i/o it is ridiculously powerful just on its own and it can come in a fanless design this is a huge opportunity for Intel to really start pioneering the connection and protocols for a more modular system like say you've got an operating system which follows you around and you've got an arm powered phone that you can cradle into a dock that has like a core i7 and it you know it a discreet graphics card all connected through thunderbolt and you can connect that with you know big mass storage and really fast solid-state drives to then move your portable life immediately into a more desktop grade environment and that that can be a seamless transition there's the potential to really lead in in a market segment like that where I don't need to have a phone a tablet a laptop a desktop you know I can just have one computing operating system source that follows me to whatever display and whatever infrastructure that I really need if Intel can get ahead of the conversation on that then I think they set the stage for the next generation of data and services how services follow you from screen to screen that's a really big get though and you know that Qualcomm is gonna be aggressively fighting in exactly the same space Apple now taking its chips and looking at how it can control more of its hardware Microsoft same this this is a really shaky market right now and I wouldn't discount a resurgent AMD also joining the conversations well well now with that soft banks a because at this point and they're pouring good winning into it so you look worth of that going forward one switch gears into black shark or chamois for the sake of a conversation here because I don't want I don't necessarily see black shark being a direct competitor to razor at this moment if xiaomi is continued campaign into the Western world goes on perhaps this could be an interesting thing so I will have to keep tabs on this but already we're talking about this phone for April 13th with a the liquid cooling system according to this article at least that's from the China mobile or what will China not try to mobile that's a telecom mobile China and so look at cooling and perhaps a discrete GPU so that suggests not using the snap targeting 45s Adreno 630 now what could take take its place is would be an interesting factor here but yeah what do you think of this kind of upstarts within an upstart formerly known as an upstart no III think this is a great play this is the right time to be looking at specialist flavours enthusiast flavors of devices and if you think you can make a premium argument for a very specific demographic then now's the right time to make that player to take that chance I think a lot of consumers feel like they're well served by all rounder gadgets but if you're really into a particular brand like the razor lifestyle razor consumers are super into their razor hardware their razor look their razor aesthetic and having a phone that matches their laptop is is part of a conversation which makes sense aesthetically for that that kind of consumer so Xiaomi has been mmm Xiaomi has been pulling off some really interesting and some really exciting design conversations with mobile devices and throw-in their weight behind a niche like gaming I think they could do very well as think that they have enough critical mass in terms of of users and fanbase that they could be disruptive in that kind of a conversation you're right I don't think they're directly going to compete against Razer because I think Razer is best served by Razer fans so as Yami isn't gonna be able to pull a Razer fan away that that just doesn't work psychologically but that that also means that there's a huge number of other people out there that might be looking for something specific in how they use their phones and just like red might be able to make an enthusiast argument for people who are cinematographers and having a phone which complements their camera lifestyle I think Xiaomi can also make a similar argument and they have the resources to back it out and release fat produce on Twitter hashtag P and weekly I hope that mystery but another new LG g7 is a two-stage shutter button and we all know that the two-stage Sirte button died with Sony well it hasn't died I mean we're gonna be putting out a video on the XA to ultra which I've been spending the last week reviewing but it's gone if Chloe doesn't far we didn't put it on its freakin preet p20 with its three cameras but III think you know any other manufacturer that wanted to treat us well and look at that could make an argument for it that's what's that's what's so frustrating is we see so many manufacturers try like dip their toe into some really interest in ideas and then just not back it up with any consumer conversation or consumer education and that's where a lot of these good ideas just go to die you know water resistance on phones was sort of a niche feature for years and then Apple finally got on board with better lifestyle resistance and now we expect and we demand that a premium phone is gonna have some kind of high P rating from the same thing with camera tech same thing with audio tech there are all of these opportunities for razor with screen tech I think they did a good job of saying like there's a reason why we went with this display there's a reason why it's gonna be a benefit to you and this is a reason why it's different from our competition it's just that there are first generation phone brand as far as many consumers are concerned so yeah and they don't have that character that a razor has built among its fans because I mean one of the other tweets that we got one outlet port at underscore Reina and just scorch an underscore to many underscores ma'am why raiser in two hashtags hashtag RGB hashtag chroma and there's a jiff too with all the LEDs behind that keyboard just swirling around and that rainbow marquee Ness and that's one of the things that raised their fans point to right from the get-go if you can't make that freaking snake glow green then what's the point man like so I mean in terms of being able to carve out a personality in a place where personality is well appreciated where there's much of it to go around with streamers and other fans just being all excited about gaming franchises and with a partnership here with a ten-cent major games publisher and in addition to being the ubiquitous Chinese internet company even being around this should be an interesting launch to say the least um and and now's the right time again just to focus on gaming for that one extra step eSports are starting to take off in western communities we're seeing more collaborative play and we're seeing those pushes the experimental builds and alpha builds on fortnight and pub G now is the right time to try and lock a good chunk of the market and build that brand loyalty with gamers who are looking for a premiere experience and a mobile device on some of these titles he has the right kit and johnny has the right infrastructure to make an argument for why someone should consider one of their products and they're getting there all around the world these days Russia lots of Western Europe one of our YouTube channel are says Xiaomi is officially in Portugal now thank you for that and again us in maybe late this year early next year so lots to evaluate right there meanwhile in Brazil we got moto g6 fever going on here especially if this color of the invite being green and all the wallpapers and the Moto g6 renders being green oh my god that's something happening - that's that's that's great I'm wondering in 2018 how you feel the Moto G which is supposed to be the the one and only mid-range er like this is you know great value for buck um how it's evolved over the past five years now yeah no moto Motorola's strategy here is a little concerning I I really hope over this next year they take some time to clean up these product divisions the G Series is the perfect example of brand bloat where I think for the g5 we had four different flavors if I'm not mistaken of the g5 - the g5 s the g5 s + etc etc etc and it starts to feel a little like you know like a bad revisit of the early days of Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter 2 turbo and Street Fighter 2 the new challengers and Street Fighter 2 tournament Edition and Street Fighter 2 ultra we don't want that it's really hard to communicate what the granular differences are between those various devices but I think Motorola could do well really well with a four gadget strategy entry-level with the e super low power hardware big battery done that part of the conversation has been managed entry entry mid with the G Series every kind of lifestyle daily feature well serviced well taken care of this this phone is going to have no problems getting you through the day stepping up to the X where we start incorporating more premium options and then Z is their flagship line I sort of like how Samsung is treating their deal with like the A's and the J's and whatnot although like why should we mention that Lenovo is even is cutting Motorola down to the bone and even that like they're they're cutting down into the portfolio as well I mean we heard that the Moto X series at least for this year got cancelled so you know if you have to resort yeah and we look at some some huge opportunities that I think Motorola might have missed out on when we're talking about the potential of something like an entry-level pixel device next year and the relationship that they had with Google and the manufacturing partnership that they had with Google and how the Moto X became the project finder phone you know moto still had the right DNA but I feel the the move that we saw last year was so with such product variation such products tritation seemed like a panic response we've got to put out a phone for this market we've got to put out a phone for this demographic we got to do this we've got a slightly better technology over here we've got you know super cheap you know dual camera sensors that we can incorporate over there and instead of just buttoning down the battening down the hatches and saying this is our course these are our product lines and being able to efficiently communicate that to consumers I think they kind of went a little nuts if Motorola gets gets stripped and it causes them to refocus and to you know come back to some kind of sense in product strategy that could be a good thing unfortunately it's just all too often we see we're gutting gutting a brand like this often leads to you know products that don't really seem to inspire much consumer affection so it's it's sticky but I'm always going to be excited to see a new Moto G launch i from the g4 I've been very impressed with how they they talk in that 2 to $300 price segment and how increasingly it's one of the flagship devices that you can point to you to say this is an uncompromised experience for the price point and ended there well joined by honor like I don't think we'd have the honor 7 that we do today if it hadn't been for the Moto G 4 and g5 so those types of companies competing in that entry-level to mid range er space is is always exciting to me to see what they can offer consumers I'll just be curious to see how the g6 joins that conversation or if we're going to see five different versions of the g6 that's going to be a major fail for Motorola Tiger came on the youtubes streetfighter to you ultra X thank you is the best game of all time I personally like to refer to a long time la sportscaster Keith Olbermann's references to you ESPN tartar control well this is also coming in from Renato Laporte using the pn weekly hashtag do you think Willman hello sorry well moto novo I don't like moto novo I like Lenovo moto will moto novo use the like a g6 song for its moto g6 promotion sweet its kill that song already like that's Oh see I was mad that LG didn't do it I actually asked an LG rep point-blank like why why did you know that you like say like the verge like the guys there whoever it was like asked and they said oh we never really thought of that we're going to take that into consideration it sounded like they were kind of yeah we're just gonna leave now bye I got from the one LG rep that I talked to you was like oh well you know we don't we don't do anything like what's expected so that would have been expected so that's why we didn't do it it was like I know you're just you know covering but it it's just such an you know what you can't afford to ask at these you know I was gonna say there's definitely a licensing issue there and maybe Motorola won't have the cash reserves to have an advertising campaign with that song in it but just because it's an obvious get doesn't mean that that wouldn't have been been a fun branding exercise a fun commercial to put out there fine advertisement to put out there we're to drive off all the older people that want or the people over 35 but even then I mean you make it a punchy fun playful kind of you know satirical maybe even commercial utilizing that because it's so obvious the thing is a g6 motorola isn't the right you know you don't want an energy levels of ice you know pimping out your g6 plane you know like it's the wrong fit but I see this look kind of hopes that Lenovo will say like yeah let's just license that song and maybe like the g6 is that's all it takes these days a good and rounded processor and just like the basics it's even faster than the genes explain that used to fly in our ears I don't even know what the g6 is aspects yeah I don't know one way that I would want to know if I were living out somewhere in like maybe Four Corners area of New Mexico Colorado Arizona and Utah or somewhere that doesn't have Internet's that is good at all would be on a rolling study hall and I just you know given that there is there some of uncertainty that I've included it into I run now this week I just want to end on a positive note by saying hey get on you for just making sure that kids are connected in they're able to learn especially with more lesson plans being digital and having these teachers being able to take advantage of that this is this is I think a wonderful initiative and it's one of those things that we can point to as a data point which expands beyond just education we start talking about things like self-driving cars one of the things that we can talk about is just how much wasted time you have in major metropolitan areas because of because of commuting especially with the current housing situation the way it is I mean not even just for being productive but stress and the effects of health on sitting in a car at your redzone peak of agitation because of traffic buzzing all around you this is this is not a good environment for evolved primates to be and regularly let alone every single day and the effects that it has on family life on like I said on on health on productivity you know even being able to take that off of your plate and just have some downtime or you know being able to engage in a video call with family and friends and not have to worry about you know operating your motor vehicle would be a huge get so this this to me is is both encouraging because of the actual educational Bennett it's to giving students time to prep into their day on their bus ride then also time to unwind out of their day on their bus ride is extremely compelling and then hopefully we can expand that I mean if we're raising if we're if we're training kids the next generation of consumers for this type of connected lifestyle hopefully that generational push in to things like better better public transit better commuting and better self-driving cars will just carry over you know I used to be able to surf the internet on the bus when the bus would just drive me I don't need someone to drive me but I don't want to have to ride in a car focused on operating that motor vehicle when I could be more productive or I could be healthier or I could be able to keep up with my family and friends better that to me would be a huge benefit for our society indeed indeed and with that out of the way all that news done it's done it's finished over it's over and it's uh it's now time to record brains a bit here because we're now transitioning into the big discussion that we're gonna have here with this piece from the Nation magazine done by Marc Hart's guard and Mark Talley by the way the Marc Hertz guard appeared on the NPR program produced here in Boston actually on points for like 30 minutes talking about his piece here definitely an interesting take and on to some of the questions that were raised with the callers there will probably link to that after the show but I want to just them I want to just start off here with the start the basis of this piece here because this is a political politically progressive outlet here but that doesn't mean that you should you know great journalism comes from both sides of the aisle or multiple sides of the aisle should say and the the basis here is you know not just that cellphones are our cancerous and you should stop using them it's not that at all it's that the money that firms like the CTIA or the GSMA or you know the whole industry of the wireless industry has put into the obfuscation of research that links increased cancer risk with wireless radiation it is astounding you know the standing to the point of even Big Tobacco trying to conceal to the harmful effects of smoking which they've spent billions of dollars on hold back research but in trying to confuse the discussion with contradictory research it took us generations of people to unravel just how bad smoking really was for you because there was a concerted effort by the tobacco industry to muddy the waters on certain pieces of research so for every study that came out that said snow smoking was terrible for you the same time they were putting out their own research in their own studies just to keep consumers confused or divided and this is something that we've seen happen a play out in numerous industries in numerous conversations you don't have to prove the counterpoint you don't have to lie or try and convince consumers that you know this research is false or faulty or anything like that all you have to do is just keep raising the question and all you have to do is just keep the the the conversation you know there are people on both sides and as long as you can you can engage in that kind of an information campaign what's the quote from the tobacco industry no I wouldn't know actually product yeah well I mean just not not going into the subject at all but with the global warming that the common Authority a number that they throw around is that 97% of scientists agree that there is man-made effects to accelerating climate change and yeah and me you know the this course sounds like it's more like even though half-and-half well so because the thing is they won't ever say that there's a percentage of scientists who disagree it's just that there are scientists on both sides of the debate and then that makes it feel like if there's some sort of parity in the disagreement or that there's some kind of bigger debate happening in the scientific community when a majority of scientists and this is also one of the things that companies and corporations can always leverage against the scientific community in that there's never a proper 100 percent agreed upon fact lock it in rule when it comes to the scientific process the the way that science should work at its best is everything should be an evolving conversation based on the information we have today and based on the research that takes place tomorrow there should always be a moving target and there should always be uncertainty that's why the the top order of trying to predict the outcome of a situation in the scientific community is called the theory and that means something very different to scientists than it means to colloquial consumers you know we're theory means guess too many people in the scientific community a theory is the highest order of trying to predict the behavior of a system that's why we don't call it the fact of gravity we call it the theory of gravity we call it the theory of relativity that isn't to say that someone just guessed about gravity one day and we just kind of all went along with that guessed it's because we have a very good working model of how gravity operates in in our universe and we can predict how things will happen to a point where we can send rockets to Mars and land rovers on the surface of another planet because we have a pretty good understanding of how that goes down we can predict how planets will align themselves over vast stretches of area of distance and significant periods of time so that we can we can shoot these tiny little Rockets across our solar system so I when we get into some of the business practices because we'll dig into this article in a little bit more depth and it's a long article so we're barely going to be able to scratch this surface of what the nation is reporting on here we're really just hoping to raise this conversation with the people who follow our show I we're seeing similar practices which make me feel that there's more there they're like in the way that we would find in the food industry in the tobacco industry and in discussions on things like climate science that makes me that that's very unsettling and it's very concerning to me as I've been a longtime advocate of mobile technology I've been a longtime proponent of the benefits of having supercomputers in your pocket and I've been one who's only casually read up on the science and I haven't found anything that I really found to be particularly compelling while at the same time there's been an obvious effort to manipulate the kind of information that I would have had access to and that makes me more than just a little bit upset well you brought up the the big tobacco phrase the confusion is our product there is an analog to that and that was found in a 1994 paper from Motorola that said you know that they were trying to war game or they are war gaming the narrative here are as markers guard has put in multiple times an untested public health factor here didn't like when what was that like 1978 1983 like the first mobile networks this is this Wireless radiation was not really tested for its health effects yeah and it took an up until a decade until we had like the first real lawsuits and the first real signs of things raynard versus NEC NEC produced phones at the time and David Reynard was stealing on behalf of his wife who died from brain tumors a Lynx and the lodge is linked to her mobile phone usage and like the the test like the what's the x-rays showed lots of site activity from the play the way that she held her phone so there was and from that stemmed a whole bunch of activity Congress was going to investigate but more importantly the CTIA the the cellular telecommunications and internet Association was gonna say okay let's fund a huge research project the dangled the most money in that research field to date in nineteen ninety five twenty eight million dollars and they assigned one of these uh you know corps leaders these corporate things Jorge Carlo he had led research studies into Agent Orange dioxins and breast implants and he was doing it with industry backed money so we you know they feel he found that there was little impact but somehow through quite a few theatrics here in 1999 now part of this too was long playing the game because you know if you're able to exploit like grow the economy of mobile phones then already people are already dependent on mobile phones and there's not much de you know the win here isn't whether or not you can instantly disprove the hypothesis that cell phones cause cancer it's can you delay the verdict on that for decades and if you can delay for a substantial amount of time then the industry is still operating is still growing and is still finding a consumer base becoming hooked on these products before you can get out whatever negative effects there might be and at the same time you can also be investing in multiple other studies and multiple other scientists and multiple other research firms to try and have counter information to when those initial studies are produced so finding in 1999 that you know there was a positive correlation with cell phone use and increases in neural epithelial tumors that's there was an emphasis on children's health because they're still developing grains are more susceptible to this kind of radiation they like Carlos circulated a carlo circulated a letter to the CTI a member organizations you know Atlantic Bell and Sprint at the time others included that and they should do the right thing and then CTIA chairman tom wheeler who would later become FCC chairman later in the Obama years he basically just shut it down you know like he tries to discredit Carlo in the media to great success and back when the CTIA held its 2000 convention basically he he like sent two bouncers to whisk Carlo in and out of the convention to deliver like a 12-minute speech and he you know not much was done like he made sure that Carlo couldn't talk to journalists before or after the event so there was a lot of it's like that it's just one of the like the tiny moments of drama but it really you know encapsulate what measures were being taken to protect the you know the mobile industry's interest at the time and so part of part of the issue with this is we don't have an infrastructure that's been around for very long at the scale that we would be fearful of I think a public health crisis now we have a saturation point of wireless technologies in in in first world nations and we're seeing tremendous ground being made up in developing and emerging 3G and 4G areas of the world - so the numbers on this start to look a little scary because none of them can really point to a direct causation but we're seeing data points that correlate with changes in our industry we just haven't had enough time when I had a sit-down I recently interviewed an audiologist about hearing loss and over the last 10 years you would think ten years is is a significant amount of time to study a trend but we're barely scratching the surface on how consumer takes lifetimes it takes lifetimes consumer media habits over ten years is not enough data to determine what the potential cause and the potential effects of a new technology might be and at the same time technology is rapidly changing so by the time you've even got like a testing protocol lined up the what you're testing for might not even exist for the consumer sphere anymore so we got a tweet from Renato Laporte how to be honest how do you study something like that you need a control group a group that was never exposed to electromagnetic radiation produced by our devices antennas it really is impossible to study this and if you're doing that kind of a control sample survey then yes that's true but that means we need to come up with some other methodology of testing this and some other way of surveying this because the answer well I guess we can't do anything isn't good enough if the answer is well we'll just wait for three generations of people to come down with potentially come down with terrible cancer in their head that's not an acceptable solution and from what the industry has been able to enroll and Jules I'm sorry I've got the article up but I can't find the section on this when we look at the division between studies backed by independent research and independent funding and studies backed by funding that came from the telecommunications industry what are the numbers or something likes yeah yeah so Henry lie was the I believe the University of Washington professor that was looking into some studies here 1990 through 2005 56% of the studies found an effects between cellphone radiation and cancer causing 44% not but when accounting the funding source a 67 percent of independently funded studies found a biological effect 28% from industry funded studies found a biological effect so the majority of the industry funded research found no link right and and when we normalize for where funding came from a significantly higher number of studies are finding some link to this type of concentrated radiation source affecting DNA affecting the structures in the ear and affecting the the the blood-brain barrier which acts as a buffer as opposed to studies funded by the industry which find significantly less causal or correlation between those behaviors and those MEK yeah and I got ad like the specific absorption rate of that sort of radiation those standards are pretty much a self reporting exercise again with FCC SAR SAR is there is not a testing protocol that is implemented by a neutral party for SAR so the specific absorption rate the what we use to try and put a number on the amount of exposure exposure risk a consumer might encounter is is only a self-reported metric so that's like saying you know going to Volkswagen and saying how much how much toxic gas comes out of your diesel cars and Volkswagen gets to tell you oh it's fine is a problem that we've also run into recently and how an industry might self-report on its own behavior and this is also another example of if we're going to really investigate the situation here we need good good data and good metrics on what the potential causes are and I don't feel as self-reported SAR is sufficient given the current climate that were that we're in and where we're going to go with the future of things like 5g technologies yeah especially when you're going up there into the high like the multi gig double digits gigahertz and you need multiple transmitters to cover city block that's more that's more of that those waves going around in the air so and considering that SAR like they've been able to find that phone to skin contact the SAR actually increases like it's like it's like 20 times the the limit in Europe maybe it's like 2 watts you're getting 2040 actually when you actually put contact into it so that's you know that's one of the odd things does this is something that we can draw we can draw metaphors to other types of exposure in sitting down with an audiologist its duration and intensity so it probably doesn't matter what wireless technology you're utilizing if it's 2g 3G HSPA LTE 5g that probably it would be my guess and not a very educated guess but it would be my guess that the type of signal matters less than the intensity the focus the duration and the proximity and that proximity and intensity are probably linked logarithmically but the closer you get the higher the intensity is going to be and it's not going to be directly a linear relationship between distance and intensity just like with audio if you've crammed in a driver into your ear and you blast that sound with a focus and with a seal directly into your skull you're going to do more damage in a shorter period of time than if you listened on speakers that are well balanced for your environment and you don't have a lot of noise to overcome I think we can we can point to a number of those I take photo therapy for my psoriasis so I have these targeted UVB rays that if I get too close to my skin with one of these mobile units I can very quickly deep tissue burn my my skin you know and so the the proximity matters significantly in the amount of exposure and the intensity to that exposure and if I back off like more a foot I have it's almost a negligible impact on my ability to treat my my skin problems I feel that there is probably a working metaphor for how data and communications interact with the human organism and what we need is an actual grown up consumer health examination of what that potential might be and we need to start looking at those trends over time and how those trends relate to changes in consumer behavior because I don't want to get to you know my daughter's generation finding out that the reason they all have cancer is because we weren't diligent enough beforehand and let's say that we spend this money we spend this time and we examine this infrastructure and the cancer risk is very very low that's still phenomenal data to help us build on to the next generation of services will be so much better prepared for the next rollout the next implementation and the next category of devices as we enter into an age of personal area networks full-body implementation of sensors and smart trackers and smart diapers like right we have smart typers now and clip-on a clip-on sensors for babies we should we should probably have a conversation and I'm not saying that the industry absolutely needs to halt all progress until we come up with a definitive answer because that's never gonna happen but we could still be creating guidelines and trends now which will be better behavioral exercises for us later on and speaking of those guideline and said again the wireless industry has had its hand in creating those guidelines or at least tried to urge you know organizations like the World Health Organization in doing so one of its former heads like it was the couple of trade associates actually paid his former employer and then the former employer transferred that donation over to at the whu-oh and there's you know there's a lot of conflict going on but when they met to discuss a study concerning it was the Interphone study concerning the type of research there the industry was able to secure a couple of firms for observer status it had two experts on the panel and more more professionals just looking into the case and while they weren't able to prevent it from being classified as as a carcinogenic potential or at least some sort of a classification isn't the classification in the division of 280 to be from probable to possible so the visible carcinogen as opposed to be as a probable which you know the ups of the stakes a little bit so and there's word you know now that's from scientists inside the circle that the w-h-o could be looking at this classification in reevaluating it this year so that's and that's after research coming out of the u.s. is a national toxicology program as well as recent necessary measures in France I believe that discouraged use that discouraged devices being on in classrooms and for kids so there's more on this subject that is being moved on in terms of being more cautious towards the potential impacts of wireless radiation so that that could be something we've had a number of different types of study and cancer studies on things like types of radiation non-ionizing radiation etc etc none of this I really feel rises to the level of you know lock your phone in a Faraday cage and only use it in tiny sparing you know usage but when we look at an entire philosophy of mobile data-driven lifestyle there are some trends that I think consumers are are starting to take a look that in the health of a society in the health of an individual and in the health of an economy and I think this just plays a small part in a larger conversation about what is it that we're trying to get out of our technology how is that affecting our relationships how is that affecting our physical and mental health and how how best to go about creating a community where we can have conversations about best practices and the behavior of the wireless industry in regards to these types of scientific studies which in the 90s were trying to get a toehold on starting off a conversation as to the potential public health impact makes me nervous when they're following the same kind of information campaigns that we've seen from the tobacco industry that does not mean that cell phones are like cigarettes I provided they provided side at society with many goods that into the permeation of the internet in especially in places where again home internet you know is not is not very good at all so it's done so much good it's a lot itself to cement you know that sort of goodwill and I still feel that there there are significant benefits to our ability to reach out and find digital communities and to find friendships online and to engage in commerce and to solve problems that we have with things like health care and education through the usage and the utilization of this technology but at the same time I feel that there are a number of people who are like are likely to complain about the etiquette impacts the the distracted driving impacts the the sleep impacts they have a whole society of people that are finding it more difficult to wean themselves off of the more addictive aspects of this type of technology and I do not feel that it is sufficient to say you know we'll just pick yourself up by your bootstraps just get good or just don't be addicted to it there there is a chemical process which happens in the brain with pleasing events that you know is very similar to things like gambling mechanics you can't just unwire the human brains stimulus-response reward system for people who are more susceptible to this kind of behavior we need to have a larger conversation about about how we protect those of us who are more vulnerable to this kind of this kind of impact and we also at the same time need to acknowledge like it's not going away so how do we make it better um that that's what I feel is most upsetting about a lot of these conversations is you know the cellphone isn't going away we could prove definitively that it absolutely will 100% cause cancer that's obviously a specious argument that I'm making right now obviously there's no data or research to suggest that but let's say we had it let's say we had the smoking gun just like smoking cigarettes didn't just go away cellphones will absolutely not they're just too useful but that would encourage us to have that conversation on how do we make them safer I mean physically how do we build them to be safer and how do we also just have that conversation about human behavior so that we're creating good habits around their use maybe you don't need to have a glowing rectangles shoved into your face seconds before you turn off the light and try and go to sleep we're already having that conversation you know maybe maybe it's not a good idea to put kids in headphones at a young age because it has a significant impact to their speech and social development III had a wonderful conversation with my audiologist talking about that kind of you know pediatric behavior and learning that cognitive experience is woefully impacted by locking someone up in headphones maybe we need to have a conversation about that it doesn't even have to be a you know there is a smoking gun doom and gloom 100 percent predictor on a cancer recognized ohm or an ear health mechanism or a heart health mechanism it even just impacts the the daily etiquette and society that we're all a part of you know put your phone down and experience this thing that's in front of you right now and then get back to your phone and figure out what you're gonna do in your digital life to those little moments those little breaks I think have a huge contributing effect to how we interact with each other and then the focus that we have for interacting with each other online indeed I think that is a good place to at least pause this conversation for now because definitely more could be said on it and and this is a the the last thing just to wrap up because we got a number of tweets coming in but this is from the p-n weekly hash tag from Andrew says slack a while ago I was considering getting radiation shield for my phone for when it's in my pocket after not finding any conclusive evidence I forgot about the whole idea I wish the industry would dedicate some of their research efforts to look at these important issues and and I think this is one of the things that makes me most upset because I've been joining the conversation and saying like hey I don't see conclusive evidence to suggest that there's a problem we're never gonna get to a conclusion I feel like especially in reading this this article from the nation and again I'm taking it with a little grain of salt because it has a very obvious perspective I'm not going to say bias but the nation is trying to accomplish something with their editorial structure and style in collecting all this information but in looking through the information they've collected I don't find anything I don't find anything wrong with the data that they have it's just they're coming to a conclusion on that data as to how it pertains to the wireless industry but for those of us that have been advocates of mobile technology who have been fans and enthusiasts of mobile technology I feel like my conversations and contributions have probably helped the proliferation of mobile technology it makes me upset to see the wireless industry engaged in similar mechanics to the tobacco industry in how this conversation has evolved we will not reach a conclusion on this for for many years probably generations before we'll have a conclusive data set that we can point to to say yay or nay wireless protocols can influence cancer that doesn't mean that we should wait for that you know if you're concerned and you're looking at just changing your behavior maybe you just don't keep your phone in your pocket all the time and you give it a little distance from you you wear a headset or you know like you just put in earphones and you don't have the phone up to your skull all the time if you're concerned those little steps or probably have some kind of influence or impact without terribly disrupting your digital lifestyle III don't know about like radiation shields or like can I make a Faraday pocket like is something that will perfectly contain of the electromagnetic radiation and I'll just have like a tinfoil sleeve in my pants like a cargo pocket I don't know about any of that but just create like antenna extenders that go away from your like very far out of your body like well I'll have like backpacks with like those CB radio like prongs just flapping in the breeze behind us that that's that's not what I feel this is but to this to that same sentiment we as consumers should be able to have conversations with our elected officials these are things were concerned about these are things that we hope will be examined but then also it can also be up to us to start conversations about changing behavior of not picking up the glowing rectangle every single little time we want that dopamine hit might be all we need maybe that's just it in terms of exposure is just a more reasonable or a more managed approach to how we utilize these products and maybe that's where we start but to say I'm we're not going to change our behavior as consumers or as an industry until there's a conclusion means that we risk generations of people with significant health problems to get to that point it's a risk there's it's not a guarantee that we'll see that but I'm of the mindset that if you are proactive in trying to protect a population of people against a situation like that that's not wasted effort if it turns out to not be true that is actually still a benefit because we will have more and better information on how to make these products and services if we are proactive in our approach if we are reactive in our approach then there's the coin flip either it is a contributing factor and we were reactive and now we have to figure out what to do with all this cancer or we were proactive and oh there's no real big of cancer but now we know and we also know a lot more about how to make these products and how to make them and continue making them safely I feel there is the for me the argument for being proactive greatly outweighs the risk of being reactive and and I hope you will all join us in this conversation and share your thoughts share your feelings as to what what will make this situation easier to share with consumers because I think one of the things that's going to be a negative with this nation piece is the way that traditional media is gonna cover it I feel there's gonna be if they even cover it at all it's gonna be the doom and gloom because your cell phone and cause cancer find out news at 11:00 and you're like that's the wrong platform that's the wrong way to have a nuanced grown-up conversation about potential health risks yeah indeed and so with that we've come to the conclusion of this episode number 299 of the PocketNow weekly hopefully we have something pretty special for you planned for next week given that there's a special number that we're coming up to you but indeed so there's that I don't have any other scripts don't worry Jules thank you I'm just gonna look at the snow that's beginning to look a lot like April but not where Jules is folks this episode of the pocket net weekly has come and gone but the conversation continues on Twitter and please we hope that you will join this conversation where Jules is at point Jules I'm humbly at some gadget guy and you can always drop us an email podcast at pocketnow.com where this podcast and pocket now is around the internet Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and Google Plus and YouTube and don't forget our home site pocketnow.com for Spanish speakers definitely hit up es pocketnow.com shells like this cannot exist without your support sharing this podcast with your friends who love mobile technology and dropping reviews so that people can find this podcast is always greatly appreciated because ultimately there would not be a show if it weren't for our listeners and subscribers who have kept us on the air since 2012 the PocketNow weekly we'll be back next week with some exciting discussion so make sure you tune back in