Gadgetory

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if HTC makes a phone we're interested in next year if it's still making smartphones next year look into it all of the mobile tech news plus an overview of and drapy because there's a better chance you'll be getting into it quicker than you might think for crossing wires and getting started on the anniversary episode of the pocket now weekly episode three one two recorded live at 102 p.m. eastern archer licenses this is the podcast that talks about everything you can fancy in mobile technology from smartphones to smart watches tablets all the other things that make this life so wonderful and so possible my name is Jules Wong news editor or PocketNow good day to you joining us in just a few minutes will be hard multimedia Manager Jaime Rivera but in the meantime we are glad to have on from xda-developers creative director Mario Sara Farrow hello team sir hello thanks for having me glad to have you on and it's definitely a nice day to have you on as we delve into some of the things that we might not have done in the past several episodes especially with Android be it's kind of I feel like every time that we go into developer beta phase it's kind of it just it's always lurking around but there's never really like you have a whole bunch of sites that do you like the little tiny feature mentions that pop up as they tend to explore them but I feel like we need to have something more in aggregate as we go along here that's right that's right I mean this is a there's an important release I think for Android it it it's coming at a time where there are some major kind of architectural revisions under the hood with project travel and ways to speed up updates we already see some of that kind of come to fruition with the way in which she and rupee beta is actually being developed and rolled out to other OEMs in a way that we haven't seen before it's always been limited to Nexus and pixel phones and now you can actually try it on a phone like the 1 plus 6 which is great on top of that it does bring some nifty features it does bring some optimizations using bus words like AI and so on and so forth so it's an exciting release our favorite buzzwords of course so definitely keep that in mind we're gonna be talking about that in the next maybe 15 20 minutes or so and we would certainly like you to listener the viewers participating and in this topic if you can go onto your Twitter account and post a few tweets with the hashtag P and weekly maybe contribute your thoughts to what might be going on with you and your personal experience what device that you're using it on and if you have any questions or our expert here Mario surf oh definitely chimed in on the comments on Twitter hashtag P and weekly otherwise if you're listening on this podcast and we'd like to just submit a question or thought or just anything go on to your email client and type in podcast at pocketnow.com and then just say what you need to press the send button and we'll certainly get around to it if we get into another mailbag episode for the time being and now we will head straight into the news and we start off with another kind of sad story that we tweet I don't know really if I really want to get into this without like weeping a little bit because I have a little Taiwanese blood in my system and HTC has been a favorite song for so long in that country but it's well I guess the latest news that we could say is that it posted a monthly revenues for the month of June and a year-on-year basis that is a 68 percent decline and it's the worst that has happened in two years with I think it was like April of 2016 that it declined like a 79 or 80 percent so and when we're given the raw numbers here this is only 2 billion new Taiwanese dollars which is about 73 million dollars in the US and even back then they were making well it was what was the number like 20 million a twenty billion and yeah so definitely just a shrinking of scale here they reported that they were going to cut 1,500 jobs from their Taiwanese Factory and it's just been this heavy kind of slide ever since then I wonder what your take is on this will we see HTC continue on as it is in terms of just producing ass flesh of smartphone and maybe even being able to maintain mid-range or entry level offerings through the next maybe year well you know there's been a lot of changes in the company they also had a bunch of layoffs in their United States division I think they're only keeping the htc global employees say they merge their VR and smartphone teams as well they had a a change in impression see in the smartphone division it's just a lot of volatility in the company right now their their recent releases have been good they just haven't been spectacular and with such heavy competition and with such dominance from the likes of Samsung and Huawei it's very difficult to see them kind of put up a fight at this top-end this premium segment that they've been known for that in many ways they innovated and pioneered with their aluminum designs and things that other OEMs hadn't done at the time now they're kind of falling behind in a way that's kind of sad because like you said they were a giant they were a favorite not just in their home country but also throughout the world and and they really helped kickstart Android as a whole and even smartphones before the iPhone so it is kind of sad I think that they could do better there's I think they need a fundamental focus change that I'm not sure they're undertaking they're getting cash infusions from the sale of Engineers to Google and so on and that I think should keep them a flow for another smartphone generation beyond smartphones they don't have much they have their survive and that's pretty much it very more yeah even then it's still kind of we're still trying to feel out what VR could actually do the markets in sort of a stasis mode right now until you figure out maybe Wireless is the way maybe Wireless can actually get people more motivated to buy headsets but until then there have also been a couple of these kind of niche projects that have been suggested one of course is the blockchain item that they released or are not released but have announced in you know talking about that and also a potential vibe phone which I don't know what exactly that would entail but it's a phone it's at an actual smartphone device and maybe that would be powering something again the potentials on that would be uncertain at this point I don't know whether is this kind of another way that they could go and just finding as many niche audiences and super serving them because with the blockchain and remember them talking about how they'll want to aim for because each phone would be a node and they say they're going to achieve probably twice as many nodes as aetherium currently has and by that count I think that was that would be about 40,000 50,000 sales is that even kind of a feasible or at least something that they can grab on to for now I really not sure like you said kind of super serving a specifical specific niche is something that they could do to move forward we would kind of these new ventures I'm not sure whether they'll find success they found they found success with the vibe because there is clearly some kind of demand and some kind of established or establishing competition with oculus and what was happening would be ours not just in desktop but in smartphones so they found an issue there with this whole block change thing well I think that they're they're perhaps getting undue attention on their efforts because of the mere word blockchain which is another one of these buzz words you can use to prop up a project even if it seems kind of unfeasible it doesn't have kind of concrete outcomes laid out I'm not sure whether that's the way forward I I do think that a smart phone company like HTC I think I think the media often kind of uh underestimates how hard it really is to kill a company like this or for a company like this to just die and disappear they we've been saying that she has been dying for so long that I've lost track it's been since dm9 that people have been you know saying okay so are they gonna be in business next year so they somehow managed to find a way even if they keep posting double-digit revenue losses and if they keep bleeding money and they keep putting off also just people are not really enthused about if it's only a matter of perseverance I guess you could say one of our regular listeners here Andrew Wallace on Twitter has made his thoughts clear for quite a while and he has this whole long kind of I wouldn't say post mortem but definitely a lot of the factors here for one I believe that HTC's are in deep hasn't been directed towards any worthwhile features in the past couple of years the squeeze feature is a flop for the most part that audio solution is proprietary talking about us PC and speaker quality is less than original boom sound HTC is manufacturing quality control has gone down measurably the to your point they've shut down of other domestic factories that they had direct control over last few tear downs from the Zack Jerry wigs new ultra u11 u12 plus have had several issues and some of this could be with Google's deal to get 2000 hardware engineers over so lots of questions going on here especially as they've declined from carrier partnerships in the u.s. um I don't I don't feel comfortable with this being a post-mortem add-on like it sounds like it it feels like it but it just it's like there's always that last hope that last little bit of hey remember what this company used to do and and how yeah and you know that fuzzy feeling inside and I don't know how we can convert that towards forward momentum right yeah I think actually that post mortem is quite accurate specifically where it's said they haven't really directed there are in the doors kind of meaningful features they've toyed around with bus words he did toy around with sends in their sends assistant and all the stuff that was just terrible by pretty much every measured he was just not not good like it didn't help you really it was kind of a kind of a stain in the AI bus word to with the whole launcher widget thing that kind of predicted which app you would use it was it was really kind of a waste of bus where that ends companion who really wasn't anything worthwhile yeah a lot of stuff like that even like their key features like audio quality but they were known for and reverb for and they backtracked and backpedal on that front LG took the crown on that and they're kind of running with it at this point yeah so yeah definitely a lot of things especially prestige pricing they're kind of habits of just pricing perceivably over pricing phones that and keeping them at that price for an eternity before they start chopping down those prices it's just a whole bunch of it doesn't feel good it's like Apple done wrong so I mean again we cross their fingers hope that the future brings them brightness although when we are talking about June apples to apples comparison here because they launched the U 11 in late May towards June and the you told Plus also the same thing so and to see that kind of decline is kind of very very galling so again the phones aren't bad I mean they are just unspectacular no mark Alicia's saturated with good options at cheaper prices two good options you say kind of like the honorton GT with eight gigabytes of RAM and and GPU turbo technology yeah I understand that you have a few thoughts about how all this connects and how always doing things and I also understand that you have a disclosure to make as well yeah first of all honor sponsor sexy a specifically parts of the XV of Porto on XV TV and they also do engage a lot with our developer community that out of the way I think you'll find that I don't necessarily have extremely positive things to say about this it's it's a weird rerelease so they're upping the RAM which I don't think that people necessarily had too many complaints about certainly their their ROM has traditionally had issues with RAM management they've been a lot of reviews in the past would mention how they would be listening to music and it would just kill off their music player when they turn off the screen and so on it was needlessly aggressive you could be was needlessly aggressive exactly but it's got a much better to the point where current flagships do the pretty good job at just keeping the core apps you need in RAM I personally haven't heard any of our editors have any significant issues with it lately so adding two gigs of RAM would be a first for huawei slash honor flagships in a sense and it puts them on a more competitive footing with devices like the one plus six the GPU Tour both side of the equation is extremely weird to me I've asked for a white paper and what I've gotten is basically not much I in fact that I ended up more confused after reading it just because it didn't actually have technical specifics and it was just basically a rehearsal of the details that we already know and some fancy graphs possess that's it so I don't really actually know what they're doing and this is something that frustrates me a bit with hall in honor they introduce all these different changes that they'd never done a disclose what it actually does and how it actually helps and how it achieves performance gains to the point where sometimes especially with Huawei it's a bit misleading how they say that the MBU can help your regular UI experience which I don't quite see how they're doing that for example yeah apparently this was also featured on the honor 9i back the wealth just a month ago actually and cuz we go and see like the Kiran chef that they use it's the you know kind of an edited our reference design but I think they also take on the Molly she be any reference as well and I suspect it just could be just uh they stick characterize it as a mode so it just could be pure overclocking but what kind of complicated though because the so the tragedy would tiring GPUs and well it's the fact that they're kind of sourcing it from from from arm is the problem is that uh there's still a generation or two behind Snapdragon and Qualcomm Adreno but but that is just if we're looking at peak performance then the real story I think is in the fact that in terms of efficiency carrying the carrying this GPU of the malli the malli line still has a long way to go so yeah sure the peak performance difference can be 30% from at any current generation battle and but even that's misleading because the audrina is just so much more power efficient so yeah you can keep those peak performance numbers but you can't sustain them as well and it certainly you don't want to sustain or not just because of heat but because of battery drain so kind of st. calling a GPU Torgo on a GPU that's not only not as powerful but also a really power thirsty it doesn't kind of instill that confidence in me that I actually want to even use that mode I'm not sure because correct me if I'm wrong because Huawei also does a is very progressive in terms of the adapter based technologies for charging and I'm not sure if they're the ones that were marketing with your able the Charlie found very still very quickly even while you're gaming it could be that it could be Xiaomi or something but I don't know that's that's one plus dust that but Huawei cig knology so we tested this at XDA we are we did like this fast-charging test while running benchmarks and and you can see kind of okay how much does each charger throttle and the supercharged while a supercharged did perform really admirably in that test and since that it didn't like really slowed down as much as other standards so in that sense yeah that does kind of work that does kind of help and I guess to kind of wrap this all up what does this kind of show about the honor brand that I'm always able to or is willing to put up or just wants to put up something like this to have honor shine a little bit more or is it just just the part of the youth imaging catering towards maybe yeah India oriented teens or Korea oriented I think their own spec heavy kind of thing going on as opposed to loving like every second with fifteen lenses on their cameras yeah yeah one point they're just gonna say screw everything we're doing four cameras no I good it will happen in any case I think it's a really really really really solid product I mean my criticism of kind of GPU tool go and and all these kind of different tweaks that they do but they never really specify what it's doing or how it helps data sight it's a really really compelling package at a price that's really difficult to beat like if you look at the the spectrum of of phones that can compete at that price offering such heavy specs in such a premium design with that level of build quality and so on you have very few options you have phones like the one plus six I guess you could say the motive see free play but that phone is under spectin comparison and doesn't have as many of the niceties that honor can borrow from highway so I think it's a really compelling package I'm not just saying this because I've got them to play with the phones because of sponsorship and so on like it's it's objectively a very compelling Hardware package whether the user experience and the software they do try to kind of market it to our digital natives whether that's something for enthusiasts in particular I'm not 100 sure guess the media still criticizes anything that's not stock Android sometimes what merits sometimes just out of some irrational love for Google stuff oh yeah totally and there's also the practicalities of bringing over honor intent that it doesn't actually necessarily work with your carrier also just it's yeah I mean there's also the government that's kind of trying to squash them gently so yeah we're gonna talk a little bit more about all those products in just a second I guess well I'm just trying to make a transition over to something that I don't still quite understand but the a Samsung flip phone they've been doing this w series where they packing all the modern Android specs it runs Android it has two screens with a t9 keyboard but there's a Snapdragon 835 or a 45 or you know the latest one with all the RAM that you need and I believe it was the W 2018 last year that launched with the adjustable aperture feature that the Galaxy S nine had next with the f1 point 5 2 F 2.4 settings physically so dual cameras what do you expect so what do you what do you expect to see out of a flip phone and also do you want one hmm well I guess I can't allow myself to want one just because I know that I can't get one first of all it's prohibited ly if it's early yeah sure I only product to your right and then there's the fact that you would have to import it I know that my boss loves these phones for some reason that I can't comprehend I personally I'm ok if flip phones disappear forever that's just me there's some kind of old phone formats that I miss like I do like the new blackberry stuff with the physical keyboards but this flip from it's a hard marriage you know kind of getting the the the modern smartphone format into a flip phone but if anyone can engineer it its Samsung I think that the phone it's interesting it's really cool like it's a phone that it's a head turner and it's an interesting concept I just can't allow myself to want it you know what I'm yeah yeah totally especially as you know the software links towards those things are either just not being updated or abandoned completely so yeah more especially big problem nowadays so I mean you might just have to leave it to the likes of virtue and the audience that that would have had if it were still existing right now I would like to take the moment here to welcome in our multimedia manager Jaime Rivera hello to you sir hello how's everything hey dude hello pretty good I'm sad for Argentina man I'm sorry a lot of times I'm surfer Argentina man the team in may morning and now why is a we had promised his massacre stolen what Mexico still in oh my god Mexican lost a long time ago they did a great they did a great time great job though I think Mako had the strongest most difficult they had the most difficult group and they pull their strings man they did an amazing an amazing feat like I was really sad when when Mexico was out as well I mean I'm only in it for the consulate drinking with Mexicans outside the embassy no no no my funny story was right now that I was in Frankfurt I was in Frankfurt a few days ago I was drinking beer having the best fun at this beer garden in in Frankfurt obviously all these Germans just so happy with their team about the play and they lost so I was like oh my god how beautiful it is to watch World Cup game of Germany in Germany and it turns out they lose that was that was sad the most disappointing thing that you could ever experience well on a trip to catch some views with your club a p20 prayer know that you might have some some thoughts on that a little bit later I do want to transition though right now to our Android PE segment where we kind of catch up with what's been going on this week we just got the fourth Developer Preview in the third public beta stage going on and for the most parts in terms of my you know just top level perception of it because I've been using it on my pixel to hear it still kind of runs the same you still got the annoying gesture thing that they're still trying to do at the bottom navigation bar I still don't like the multitasking kind of dual paradigm that that bag has or if you're trying to like swipe up it's just it doesn't feel natural but I was wondering if like kind of the everyday experience that you guys either of you have had with Android P so far yeah okay um yeah III do like a lot of the micro optimizations that they're doing here and they're mostly in the UI I like for example the the fact that you've got the a bunch of menus to the side like the volume menu the power menu I like that you've got the screen shot the screenshot button in the power menu all those little things are cool you got the screenshot editor some of that is kind of playing catch-up because a lot of other phones have had screenshot editors it's just a really convenient feature you know they're doing some tweaks with like making Andrew always on display more convenient like putting the battery mom kind of redesigned notifications as well there's a lot it's a lot there you know they kind of moving away from that old material design now they got a new spec and it's interesting I just don't think it kind of fundamentally changes the user experience in a way such as new get kind of did for me at least it doesn't kind of introduce any of this features smaller changes up to my stations in the background and the architectural revision of project travel which it's being finalized which means that you can actually see it come to you know bring what it was promising to bring all those yeah definitely I will say that I have noticed the little improvements they have done to the ambient display functions and it's nice to see that kind of a basic Android feature that Samsung into like Motorola have done and get that brought in AOSP and then moved on to sort of a more mature state just didn't have everyone be able to take advantage of it so you know that's nice and also a project treble which has had the best start I mean we're talking about Android and fragmentation and kind of the the clinginess because this was originally an Oreo feature or at least something that was brought alongside with Oreo and I guess wait am i talking about the part no well the partitions do make it very helpful and useful to you know streamline the process quickly but it's just a being able to upload your kind of puzzle piece to an update package be it whether you're chip manufacturer or the phone manufacturer or the carrier and just have that you know boom done quickly so tell me more about the progress that trouble has made so far well so like you said travel is a really texturing of Android in the sense that and you know that om no longer need to wait for a lot of puzzle pieces in order to put together their ODS this makes it easier for them to kind of update and roll out updates but also it makes it easier for just about anyone to kind of flash a system image so something that we've been very proud of a texier something that our developers have been doing is making these uh there's global system images that you can flash undo any travel enable device which is great because you can basically grab one common ROM one common AOSP build and more or less painlessly flash it across a myriad of phones with different specifications and so on so that is actually pretty cool and that that I think is a testament of how powerful project treble is because if developers can do this and can do it so quickly and so painlessly despite all the kind of different hardware variations it still works across devices it kind of gives you a clue of just how meaningful it is I just don't think it was kind of finished and I don't think every develop every OEM was onboard last cycle so I think that now we're actually seeing it come to fruition especially now that we have this new Developer Preview you already see the Developer Preview arriving on Oleum devices and they even come with their small little tweaks their small little UI features and so on and so forth and really I think that's really powerful interest I have actually been oh my god so I need to visit the XDA forum again so I wasn't aware that you guys were building all this oh my god that is so cool it's exciting yeah yeah I mean you can you can even grab a Chiron chipset phone like you can grab a phone which traditionally have been really really hard to develop custom wrong sport just because the the sources were not there in full there was no documentation for developers to be able to bring AOSP roms just fully working on that and it doesn't matter anymore because you can just flash this one image in the developer doesn't need to concern himself with all the little changes that need to be made and and the user specifically doesn't need to concern himself with all the stuff you just flash it and it works and it's been working for a while now I think it was at CES we even had a the first I figure seemed a time Pro running AOSP and it pretty much worked I mean it performed really great some stuff was more or less not perfect but it's been being worked on and it works pretty well it's got a lot of potential nice nice tell me something how how have you seen for example the you know the progress of raw of of Android pee on other phones that are not the pixel because I've been reluctant to you to load Android pee on my pixel I've been meaning to do it on a one plus six but then I hear that that the J's you know just the build is just so early implemented on any other phone that's not the pixel yet yeah so I tried both one plus six beta build the first one was hot trash it's just it was really bad it had a lot of buzz a lot of app closes a lot of issues with notification rendering and you could tell that it was unfinished because they barely had any Wampus features the settings menu was just pretty much borrowed straight from the AOSP settings apk it was it was very unfinished in that sense move over to the D injury that the next beta on the Wampus six and you can already see not just that it's more finished but you can also even see hints of where oneplus is taking oxygen OS which is really interesting because it not only has changes that look a lot more different than Google's Android PA OSP kind of flavor it also looks different from the oxygen OS that you find on current oneplus devices on the stable branch which is really interesting they have kind of a new design language going on they implemented a few little design sign changes as well and more customization options that are now making their way to the beta branch so it's pretty cool in the sense that yeah they're they're adding their changes and they work with features the oneplus features work I think most of them work I'm not running that bill because it still has problems it blue just doesn't work at all I don't know that's a deal-breaker you know I can't really I don't have Bluetooth but what eighty is interesting you can see that they're bringing the update faster I think project travel in particular is probably one of the reasons why one plus is committing to software support in a way that they haven't before just this week they had announced that okay we're actually committing to two years of software support software updates oh okay and why they're bringing project travel to the 1 + 5 + 5 t it's already on the beta branch and and they had said that they wouldn't do it before I think that seeing they're seeing that it comes with some nifty benefits and I definitely see that the the it's shaping up it's not there yet lots bugs but it's nice and it kind of works it's definitely interesting developments happening there that may to make things more plug in play friendly even with the you know just being able to intercept the process for fans to do whatever they would like to do with that it sort of brings back kind of the days of when you wanted to mod Android and when you in some cases when you need it to mod Android to get things to operate how you want them to and you know as we've gone through the years and we kind of felt less of that need going on it certainly does feel like a refreshing new ability to have that back again and have it done easier than ever so definitely cheers to that I was wondering if I remembered my hashtag peeing weekly question over here from Renato Laporte or well just a couple of pinions here the navigation gestures are a joke on Android P compared with what you can achieve with the XDA navigation bar props to you guys also interesting I'm going to ask you about that just a second open the window is a pain in the ass and then there's also in terms of Farley open Kieran for the win it's only ashamed that many hearts are still proprietary it doesn't work on GSI so yeah services definitely kind of lacking still there wondering what XD on you should was sorry you were cutting out there well I was wondering what the navigation bar that what XDA has modded that to be like yeah so so it's it's an application people can find out in the Play Store you get a lot of features just from the the free app as well and it's basically kind of like the iPhone navigation pill which you can judge you can customize it to kind of swipe to the side and swipe up and so on hold and stuff and you can set whatever kind of shortcut you want to whatever actually you want you know you can also customize the the size of the pill the transparency of the pill so you can actually make missable in fact there's a bunch of settings that you can play with to make it basically identical to the one plus navigation system gesture navigation system you just have to find the right settings and that might be a mode as well but it's really cool in the sense that it does give you that ability we're always working on bugs so if you if you find an issue with it just hit us up and we'll we'll fix it we've been working diligently on addressing all the issues that people have had and expanding the feature set as well got great people working on it so it's been great it's gotten tons of ins tons of installs we've surprised that kind of the reception and it's nice because it allows people that won't perhaps get injured P won't get it at all won't get it in time it enables them to experience kind of the navigation gestures in a way that uh gives an even more customization two questions the first one is well you already answered so you don't need Android P pretty much it works on Ori oh yeah the second one is so one of the reasons why I don't use the navigation gestures on the six is because I hate that I can't call on the Google assistant with them yeah I mean I actually use the Google assistant and for me it's like okay like where's the gesture but then again I love the concept because it allows you to have a full display like a foolish buy for everything and so I've been like battling with that like is there a solution on your XDA app yeah yeah definitely you should be able to kind of link just about anything you want to it any shortcut I'm pretty sure that that's working if it's not it'll definitely be working in the near future but I'm pretty sure that that's the case just because of how customizable it is you can just have any kind of shortcut or to an activity or whatever and you can do that already on other kind of shortcuts as well so it should be working and I absolutely understand what you mean though like it's it's definitely kind of a problem I think would we've kind of the rise of convenience keys it won't be such an issue in the future but right now it is kind of a pain and yeah hashtag convenience key for the camera everyone thank you really these kids all over the place just have add more buttons please like an actual buttons not HTC buttons you know Oh My yes CJ I see Zak's video jerry-rigged everything about that so it's funny because I uh so III met with Zack in London I already had a review units AG hadn't seen it yet and some like dude you have no idea how much I'm waiting to see her video like and he's like huh you know you know Zacks voice and everything it just is demeanor he's like Oh interesting it's like okay and so he started looking at the foot and he's like I can already see where I'm gonna go with this now here's the thing I buttons are like my biggest phone pet peeve like if a phone has Wiggly buttons it just torments me to no end to the point where I can never I'll return phones just because the button was a little bit too loose for my taste but I'm right and and so when I saw this I she see concert I'm like okay I want stiff buttons but you've taken it way too far so I will be fixed it's a I have to admire the way Apple has done it with devices like the iPhone 8 iPhone 7 how they do it with the the force touch trackpad on on the macbook like you seriously like I remember the first time that I touched this forced to trackpad I'm currently using by the way I hate and I'm sorry about the webcam capabilities of this $3,000 MacBook Pro it's one of the things that I hate the most by the way but like the performance of the trackpad is legendary and you know in my review of the you 12 plus what I said was listen I don't really mind of the buttons are capacitive or not so long as the implementation doesn't mean that I'm pressing a button here and I'm feeling the vibration down here like it just it makes no sense like at all and then you have the problem that it was it was oh my god like you would press it and you you couldn't like you could control the sensitivity of that sense but you couldn't control the sensitivity of the buttons like really like I would rather switch at it sends off completely on you know and for me it's just God that is such a great camera on such a bad phone I think that I think that's my final verdict on the you 12 plus it is such a great camera but the phone is just like wowed so much of a step back compared to what HTC has done in the past yeah Oh anyways definitely and that just the follow-up thanks to Andrew Wallace for pointing this out Jerry also has a new video today following up with the you 12 pluses buttons seeing if they could be quote-unquote fixed he has a tear down of that go nuts now I'll update the post will link that in the thing the dooblydoo as people used to say I don't think anyone says that anymore let's talk quick second about the rare and one plus six it's out July 10th and I believe Jaime wants to have a little pedestal for it alright so a carbon fiber case well that ruins it entirely that's such a cool combination man Oh God so two things about oneplus we're working on a comparison I'm a whole thing to have it ready for this weekend it's kind of a complicated one but number one yes I do love the color and I love this implementation of red words not the glossy black that we had with the first the mirror black one plus six for me was just annoying I'm like please don't send me that unit I don't want to make a review of it because it's just gonna be a nightmare to film anyone and then and then they sent me the silk the the matte black one the midnight black which is my favorite so far it looks like if they were aluminum and I love that but I have been using this phone for a week and I've had a really hard time not using it because number one it's just it's in that it's in between like it's not as reflective and it's not as matte it's a lie somewhere in between I love the finish and a lot of people would say that you know it's just a different color on a phone it is I agree it's just a really cool color I love the companies are playing that that are there that game where we want to continue giving relevance to these products so we're gonna keep a couple of colors back and we're gonna be launching them over time just to get a little more buzz on the product the second thing about oneplus just to keep the short the recent software updates I would highly suggest you guys look at the camera performance there have been a lot of improvements since my review mm-hmm a lot of improvements I I'm very shocked so part of the comparison is gonna be literally this phone against a $1000 phone just to show you how much the camera has improved on this phone with a cat with comparison to a phone that's twice as expensive I am shocked like the word is shocked so stay tuned for that I mean well we already had the oneplus 6 review outright and this is going to be like the comparison will serve as somewhat of an update as an update because yes so the guy in my review of the oneplus thinks the camera was good like if you'd notice my comparison with the s9 plus I'm like alright it's not an s9 plus it's not but it's very close like there were a lot of shots that were very close and I guess it was just the the you know obviously you've got a wider aperture on the galaxy s 9 so the performance was better even though I would I would complain about the shutter speed on the s9 + like I feel that it doesn't it doesn't take the shot when it's supposed to and so it's really bad on moving subjects the oneplus 6 did a better job in that but then there are certain shots where nothing was moving that the s9 + would just you know it would win but not by a long shot but yeah like I feel that a lot has improved in the recent software update so look into that and I'll definitely let you let you know more about it in the comparison definitely an update definitely so alright we'll be looking forward to that in the meantime more news of the week and we're starting off with what galaxy s X s 10 s maybe the S 10 x sx something we'll try and see if we can get the names tangled untangled but in the meantime the foldable phone that we've been talking about for years now we are talking about for every driver yeah hmm it's every second for the past ten years I guess you could say we've seen a lot of those demos of the foldable or the flexible OLED screen technology since maybe 2009 well apparently we might be seeing the Galaxy X come to fruition in limited quantities of course during CES 2019 so perhaps you know around that maybe it's time Sun does its usual unpacked thing I personally think that they'll use the CES sanctioned platform to show it off because it's got a limited appeal in terms of actual consumers but it does make for a good show and piece so they want to have that at their booth so perhaps that's something to look forward to meanwhile galaxy s 10 the more conventional more traditional Android flagship gonna be happening around MWC it happened the s9 launch happened I don't know you see so I guess it's what we could expect reasonably and again things might change but um I want to know as we kind of have like a loose time um how you're feeling towards the foldable phone at this point we've seen pictures and art and all the stuff in the patents um are you kind of tired out are you kind of excited Mario I can guarantee you that it will be a better flexible phone than the LG G flex yeah I mean we've been we've been peace with this technology for so long like I every time there's an article on XDA oh my god do I have to use this picture from 2010 again you know there's not even that many pictures and the OL highlight is outdated ugly TouchWiz on it or whatever it we we need to see a come to fruition we've been seeing it in all kinds of patents we've been seeing it at all kinds of like there's also that cringey one with the tablet I'm not sure you guys remember yeah yeah I remember that one it was not as bad as the the Samsung gear one another gear watch one that was the worst but we won't follow up with you Mario but hi may your take um alright tablets are on decline they've been on the klein since the iPad for I guess and it doesn't matter what Apple has done like companies like Samsung barely does tablets now Huawei has done a few good ones so I feel that whatever companies can do to bring some limelight to the tablet space will make sense I love that Samsung is bold enough to use their R&D and try to make some money off of it I mean fab woods exists because of that so I I leave it to Samsung like my my opinion is show me what you got you know i some people don't know what they need until somebody shows it to them so I I want tablets to work like I am an avid iPad user like the party now daily and a lot of the videos that I do are are possible because of the versatility of certain things that iPads do and because I've had to do it better than certain other tablets even Windows tablets so I guess I really want some competition I really want a tablet like I I know friends that are like they're you know cartoon artists that that they will tell you like an iPad pro with an Apple pencil is just so good so for me it's always been like you know I love the note form factor I hate that the note is so small so if they gave me a foldable display with an S Pen I would love that so long as the implementation is great so we'll see it has an S Pen need bluetooth well I'll tell you this much like I hate having something more to charge but you know I I guess software just needs the the abilities of Bluetooth to provide certain other features like right now you don't have the tilt features that are available on the S Pen on the version of forgetting I'm trying to remember what what tablet Samsung launched with an S Pen and the Chromebook like there were tilt features but they depend on the saw on the apps and not the software itself and the implementation was just really bad so I guess I don't know if they're adding the features as long as they don't they figured out an easy way to charge it I'm all for it we'll see I mean unless like you know you're connecting your Galaxy Note 9000 index or two if it's like connected to a projector and you're using your pen to move slides I'm not sure of what practically what practicality that sort of thing has and if the engineering yeah in the if the engineering to make it rechargeable easily rechargeable maybe perhaps in the silo like there's a whole bunch of things it's ridiculous I'm not sure what will happen we're gonna be there you and I will be there Jaime when we get to Atlantic terminal on the Li double r on August 9 yeah and as for the follow-up I do want to get back to you just quickly Mario I know that we've dealt with software on the X on em and the Kyocera echo if we can remember all the way back there but it's you know those rigid foldable things which are kind of weird I I know this is going to be this is going to require like a blood rush into the head or something but if there's anything that we can expect or if there's one thing that we can expect from the first gen software of a foldable phone what would it be um well I think that uh CTE did a more or less good job with a recent foldable phone I think that would expect something like that I mean it's I mean they they worked within you can very much still that they work within the constraints of Android for this kind of thing I think that seems a bit more bold when it comes to just like saying okay kind of pushing the boundaries of what entry allows them to do even if it ends up a big clunky like look at the X right yeah I think I think that if if Samson's going all-in with this they are definitely not gonna do kind of a a you know halfway halfway measure kind of thing they I mean Samsung decks it's kind of inconvenient it's not very useful but it works pretty well like it's it's certainly polished to a degree where it's usable even if it's not useful I would expect more or less the same at the same time if I'm not sure if you guys follow also what's going on with surface and that they also kind of kind of playing with this format and stuff doing like the whole I guess yeah it's like they they're doing a little switch thing or something right oh so they're I think I think you know it might just be kind of this bigger untapped market then we're able to predict right now I mean obviously like Jaime I'm also a tablet user from a surface user it's it's more in surface to me it's fantastic so if Samsung can do something that gives me the surface tablet potential perhaps by modifying decks in some way and making it tablet friendly I don't know while also keeping in a phone format to me that would be invaluable just because I do actually use my note a lot I do use the s-pen a lot and I do use my surface tablet a lot because I got a pen yeah so if they can manage that I would like that oh I wish they came up with a concept like this one where you have a phone and it's got a modular connector and you can just add another screen to it if you want or something stupid like that I don't know it's just for me the unless unless this so what was my problem with the ax on them I'm like alright those borders are gonna rip my jeans man it was like with the it was like with the razor phone as well like shoot like I get that that design looks great on a laptop but it doesn't look good on a phone and it won't perform well on my dreams map and so if why would I need to carry a tablet yeah with in a phone if I will always use it I would rather they give me like a detachable keyboard on the surface they would give me a modular second screen like a second monitor that I could snap on and extend and make it a tablet when I need to and it's just an accessory that I buy for 200 bucks then for me to have something that I don't need to always be carrying so I love the concept of the switch because of that you can add the controls when you need them you don't add the control so you don't that's it you know yeah and it becomes portable when you want to do and it's not portable when you don't I love that concept yeah I think they're a little bit to invest it in through this foldable technology I mean it's been going on for so many years they gotta gotta put it out there at some point and as as much as I think that your solution would be more practical I think that same since just too far too deep into this to kind of go modular now yeah I mean there has to be a spectacle part to it I'm not sure if that kind of modular thing would be something that would capture the attention and keep it for you know the amount of time needs to convert a sale so I mean I definitely hope that you know someone out there is taking that seriously and we'll have to see we'll have to move on and just a quick topic on iPhones in terms of who's buying them so a CI RP which is a research firm does rolling surveys over the course of the year on who's buying which iPhone B it's an iOS native you could say who has been on iOS for a while and just a reach of recent Android switcher which CRP estimates that's around 15 to 20 percent of any given year's iPhone sales come from those Android switchers and it turns out to sum up the results here that iOS natives are more willing to go for the likes of the iPhone 10 and iPhone 8 more so than Android switchers which tend to start off you know with a I've owned se iPhone 7 older models are more affordable models and I guess I just want to relay it back to you guys in terms of I'm not you know I'm not saying in terms of you know your own personal personal personal experiences but maybe like you know people that you've talked with your family your friends whatnot like how do they feel if they've ever dealt with this kind of deal yeah I think it makes complete sense I mean if you think about it the people that really want to switch away from Android are usually people that have bad experiences with Android and the bad experiences with Android are usually found in the low to mid end of things so I would like to see whether it discriminates whether it's it's people switching from flagship Android devices to kind of lower and iPhones that will be surprising if it's just people switching from Android to lower and iPhone so it makes sense because if they have a pretty bad experience with a bad Android phone that just happens to be in the mid-range and they're in the market for a mid-range they can't really kind of say okay I've been I've been burned by the mid-range therefore I'm gonna go all out I'm gonna buy a muster up for the best iPhone most people can't do that and even if they're really really frustrated with their inner experience most people that have the vendor experience I would presume would also be the people that have kind of least expensive and/or phones so I think it makes sense to me I mean I always recommend iPhones to people who who really really just can't deal with Android even though I personally have never really used an iPhone for long expiry time at least yeah definitely in my case it's interesting I mean I feel I my response would be I love surveys because surveys depend on where you survey people like what it like it even depends on what state you live on I mean I will tell you this much like New York City is one of the most interesting cities in what pertains to the amount of wealth there is and just the disparity there is as well when it comes to poverty I have never seen a city with older cars in the United States and therefore in the same way I have never seen a city with older iPhones on subways so I think it has a lot to do it depends on where the survey was done man and the second thing is it like one of the things that I feel that Apple has played well that Android has not played well as long longitude I think that's the word I see people with iPhone fours man and because for some people a phone is just a tool it's a communications tool that they use for you know for making phone calls and I feel that that's the vast majority of the market where people are not really interested in coughing up 40 50 bucks a month for the latest flagship or the latest iPhone they just want a phone that makes good phone calls tastes good photos and ever since the iPhone 4 man that phone takes good photos so I feel that it you know it really depends like I I've noticed I remember when the galaxy s4 was launched so many people switched to iPhones after that because that pho was just so bad and so that gave like a really bad name to Android back in the day there was the time than most people switched to iPhones I remember those surveys and then the Galaxy s5 was such a flop so I don't know man I feel that again depends on where you are and and I have promised that you know kudos to Apple for for doing a good job and pertaining software updates to their phones way ahead of like right now iOS 12 is gonna support all the same phones that I was 11 supported you don't see that very often I mean we saw Apple's support the iPad 2 for like 7 years or something like that so no not 7 years but like 5 years I think it was the iPads are not that old but yeah I mean I feel that the more Android figures out how to fix their software update problems and just ensure that users get a reliable experience for a decent amount of years the more popular Android is gonna be for switchers that's my opinion perhaps and definitely want to hear your comments about that too you listener you viewer so type in and hashtag PN weekly podcast at pocketnow.com I think that you want to give in through insights on this we'll talk about it a little bit more as well as these things typically just keep happening they become up in cycles and finally this week we want to go and talk about the me mix 3 from Xiaomi we haven't had anything teased out yet but we've seen Weibo go all crazy with this new leaked photo of the new mix 3 perhaps with a uniform bezel around this huge display and no chin whatsoever it's kind of this me mix crusade against bezels that start out with the top end and then there's still been this chin that has kept on stubbornly so I don't know does this leak picture do anything for its veracity not sure there's also something that's less kind of a verifiable at this point which is a teaser that's kind of half-baked but apparently we might see the light of me come out in September and the the little silhouette that it's showing infers our implies excuse me that we are seeing a pop up camera and I think I'd this not because I'm not really a fan of what the Oppo find X did in terms of you know moving parts servos and whatnot like this is it's just a spring-loaded part and well you get very little compromise in terms of service a service life for the device and well I am curious what - what you think about this though go for a motor yeah I think I mean it's kind of expected right if there's kind of any kind of lineup that would do away with the chin or be one of the first to do do away with the chin on Android it would be this lineup so I wouldn't be surprised if the leaks are accurate asks for kind of the spring-loaded mechanism so we're seeing I can't say I'm a big fan like III stuff like glass for example I'm super super cautious about sand and dust and stuff because I don't want my grass scratch I don't want stuff getting in between cracks of my phone and stuff I can see this being a problem especially we definitely a valid concern stuff yeah but um show me who's been doing good thing with these phones so that they definitely feel premium they definitely looked the part and I wouldn't be I wouldn't be shocked at all if the leaks are actually accurate yeah mmm oh my god now sadly I apologize I didn't read that part of the segment so my knee makes two S's of the draw it's in the it's in the other room that me much to us was my first experience with show me I have to tell you this much I do not like their software but I do like their hardware a lot I am very impressed and I am but I don't like their software but it took me a while to understand just how their software plays in the importance of the price tag that they charge for these phones so for me me mix 2's is not just about how beautiful the phone is and the fact that it's ceramic it's the fact that it's priced crazy aggressively and the fact that they use software in order to be able to subsidize the price tag through the services that they sell and so it took me a while to understand how their their economics worked I'm very impressed now I understand why they are so focused on the Chinese market because this is the place where they get the most amount of revenue their services don't work outside of China so I'm gonna tell you this much like I love the concept if this meme x3 is real I will definitely love to review it because one of the things that I didn't like about the me mix to us was that camera at the bottom and having to flip the phone around and for me that's just an added an added step that I felt to be you know I just I wish that they have like some sort of a way for you to flip the phone and for the phone to understand that you want to use a selfie camera I don't know something like that through software but that you know i i've been debating the whole concept of mechanical parts obviously i I worked in aviation and I know how servos work and just the whole just the mechanics that go into it I find that amazing and I like the fact that companies are are working in providing a solution to eliminating the bezel I would prefer that to which Xiaomi did with the what was the phone that they launched they look like in an iPhone like an iPhone 10 which one is the cross the reason one that it even brought the the March and everything he's talking about the me ate that one that would like for me that was like alright yeah that looks too much like an iPhone guys I I get that they that they use Apple for a lot of their inspiration and I love that they've provided their own unique approach to devices like the Phoenix to us so I'm I'm all for it whatever the company does so long as they continue with that perspective of providing amazing hardware because it is amazing it is a very well designed phone it's a very beautiful phone I will make a video on it I promise and so long as they do that and they I don't know I did they provide him and they retain the listen I don't mind if they launched those phones outside of China like if they launched the United States obviously their saw and be like alright fine we can't subsidize the hardware through software so we're gonna charge a little more but this there's this beautiful phone you can use and now it has stock Android I'm all for it but that would be me yeah definitely suggesting that I have is to check out Martin Bart's as video technology video explaining how Xiaomi works because it's definitely interesting it I mean including the fact that the CEO mentioned that oh we're going to limit ourselves to 5% margins on hardware sales from this point forward which is gonna be interesting as if and that's its goal and perhaps maybe its services side will need to take time to catch up at the very least if not well kind of associate itself all together I mean we are under this kind of a Red Scare in the u.s. at the moment a new Red Scare you could say Gen 2 of that so definitely interesting to see as Xiaomi kind of wants its own empire to grow as for trying to take the time say thank you to our friend Mario here from XDA is there anything that you're happening to be working on right now I'm just directing some articles behind the scenes mainly been trying to do a in beautifully directed creatively directing exactly trying to do something with the eraser phone so maybe some in-depth performance analysis of this I find that a 120 Hertz display is so good like it's like the most perceptible performance improvement that I've had on Android in a long time well probably since the pixel 1 but or maybe the Nexus 5 even the satphone was so smooth but I you know that I just want to see more 120 Hertz displays you know it's fun because I oh my god so I I said I have a razor throat I don't have it with me but I didn't really notice much of a difference like really cool it's cool but you know it's like scrolling every now and then which I think that's yeah that's the thing though like that's the feeling it's just very smooth scrolling performance in terms of like speed like okay it's not asked responsive as newer phones but just a scrolling performance and has to do with the adaptive sync that it's going on in the background which is is able to adapt the frame rate so that you don't actually get stutters like yeah you get lower frame rate some some load some kind of a workloads but but you don't see stutters and to me that's great like one of the reasons why even got started writing for XDA was because I was really frustrated with my Galaxy Note free and all the stutters and that's how I got started into this whole thing just by pointing out how terrible it was so I got started in parking now because I bricked the PDA I need to go under some I use er in XDA developers definitely yeah definitely breaking around it there was a time where I was I was very active an ex-dea that I'm trying to it was it back in the time of Windows Mobile and they have like the coolest solutions and then I switched to Android with the Nexus One those were good times huh indeed indeed I've been breaking phones since my entry into pocket now so yep our track record of that and I'm sure that you'll be talking those developments as we head into more production of the pocket now at the area oh yeah so first of all thank you everybody who subscribed to the Spanish Channel this has been a project that's taken six months to take off it's it's mainly because launching a YouTube channel from scratch is not easy and I guess for we were very worried about the the aspect of doing that and obviously you know there's that element of possible failure there's no guarantee if you have a popular channel on one end that you'll launch a second one they'll go well we've seen so many examples of colleagues that have tried and it's not easy and we really wanted to do the audio in a way that would not so right now you're just seeing the launch and therefore a lot of things are the fact that Sam who works with us is currently sitting on the other end you know just a training because like we do for example parking out daily and final cut we do the Parana while the audio in Premiere Pro so right now we're currently working with the same graphics package but that's about to change just the approach of how we do news is also going to change right now it's just you know sitting like it's funny how it it's so easy for me to report that it was in English but then when I do it in Spanish it's just the body who can tell you like you know in Spanish in Spanish like you don't do it as we say coming set up for t-shirt and an anteater they say I made out like I was like how's that you know it's you go to every single country in Latin America and there are so many different ways to say the same thing and so it's just that difficulty of finding like I'll give you an idea like recording a pocket out daily is literally five minutes of footage whereas if I record out the audio it's sometimes between 10 and 15 just because I'm like yeah I can't say that word yeah that word doesn't mean I'm like you know he just gets stuck with English sometimes it's the trick a lot of the terminology is in English but then how do you say it in Spanish like I got this comment the other day where it was like yeah but we say that I mean that I'm like yeah you say better meaning in Spain I get that but that I mean I love you look what if you look at the the descriptive definition of tedamy model it's just the computer that's hooked up to a server but it doesn't really have any it doesn't really do anything so I understand that this is what you colloquially say in your country but it doesn't necessarily mean that that's the correct definition of a device and so yeah going back to the topic it's been it's been a labor of love I'm just I'm so happy with the results I wasn't expecting it to have such a great response so quickly and I just I invite you to subscribe I we have a ton of unique content that's gonna go into that Channel and I'm happy that I we have the right team of people to get it done and it's just gonna take a little while to unwind the rest of the videos like the reviews and the comparisons that are gonna go there and there's gonna be a quick transition period where a lot of things are gonna look the same between English and Spanish but the idea is not for things to be that way so we'll keep you posted a lot is coming we definitely have a lot planned in store for you guys so definitely stay tuned across I don't think our fingers for some things to happen in to actuate but until then we're just gonna keep delivering the same quality journalism that you expect out of us were editorial content as well and of course the pocket now weekly which this episode of is ending but the conversation continues be sure to keep the conversation going by emailing us podcast at pocketnow.com we really want to hear the thoughts that you want to get out and the questions you need answered also we are all on twitter hashtag p and weekly for one mario is that tech young gun that is a CH y ou n G you and Jaime Rivera is at Jaime underscore Rivera that's j AI em e underscore and i'm on twitter at point jules pocket now is that pocket now on Twitter Facebook Google+ and YouTube where you can find the pocket now dearly every day with Jaime Rivera also the fuckin el dinero on our espanol channel I definitely butchered that pronunciation es that pocket now if you want to go and brush up on your reading skills in Spanish and we certainly appreciate reviews and ratings on Apple podcasts or wherever you happen to be streaming us without them we wouldn't have been making this show for the past six years for the team I'm Jules Wong and we shall see you as always next week