Gadgetory

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episode 2 9 8 of the pocket now weekly recorded March 30th 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 myspace would never have spied on your phone calls i'm juan carlos back now contributing editor at pocketnow.com joined as always by plucky podcast producer mr. jules Wong out on the east coast how's it going sir I don't think I was ever on myspace trained for any period of time at all that was before I actually got interested in connecting with people online yeah there are definitely going to be some proto social media examinations histories the the Friendster era the classmates.com the maze I'm gonna go to geo cities and I'm just gonna hang out there 96 that was all of these things that sort of led us to the the current internet apocalypse that we find ourselves in today but we've got a monster epic huge baller show there was a ton of news this week some really exciting stories that we want get to and of course we want to hear from you if you want to join the conversation during the live broadcast join us on the Twitter's with the hashtag P n weekly and if you're listening to the show after the fact you can still use that traditional email thing it's an app on your phone or an app on your computer I'm sure we're gonna be answering emails the show saying we've got viewer messages that's exactly why we want you to join this conversation at podcast at pocketnow.com Jules I'm gonna turn it over right to you because even though we're actually gonna record a slightly longer episode this week we still have a ton of stuff to get to so let's get those headlines from pocketnow.com all right well let's get to the hardware section first plenty of devices that have been released this week the Huawei P 20 and P 20 Pro the spotlights March 27th event in Paris that has been the subject of everyone's arousal curiosity and well just amazement because the P 20 Pro in particular has those three cameras that it can wield with up to 63 megapixels of outputs they say or just almost 63 megapixels you've stuck them all in and with a the main camera sensor being a very amana chromedriver 40 megapixel sensor so it's a definitely something to be interested in at the XO mark has evaluated it with its mobile score of 109 points and the p20 not a slacker with in itself only having two main cameras on the back but it manages to score at 102 so and those have been the highest scores that we have seen so far more to come of course and we move on from there to the xiaomi me mix to s now this follows on from the - of course and it has been a very very pathfinding series as an exercise in reducing bezels and making it so that people can enjoy more screens obviously in 2018 this is the case with other phones - not just let me mix su but many others from the typical manufacturers so in order to differentiate its we'll say from the competition it has been able to improve its camera game dual cameras this time and DXL mark has scored it an overall of a 97 with a 100 wine photo subscore so that's time to be impressed with for any of those people who like basic metrics and just the basics I guess the the elements in terms of Apple and its education events we have the iPad 9.7 6th generation a lot of the same from last generation except for an update to the chipset the a10 fusion chipset so better graphics they are processing and so forth and compatibility with the Apple pencil the stylus that's supposed to well it's only been compatible with the iPad pros up until this point you still have to pay $99 for that but you get this with the iPad 0.7 at $329 in the US and it's supposedly the most affordable combination of the eye tablet and stylus that's out there or at least it's the most affordable iPad that in Apple is put out especially considering that other regions have are seeing this priced below last year's iPads not the US but other regions like Canada and Europe and finally as a counter than that but before that was released iPad was released we're talking about the Acer Chromebook 10 which is the first Chrome unless tablet bonafide tablet not convertible 2x2 one laptop that is a as a stylus natively and has been the same form factor nine point seven inch screen at the same exact I guess you could say we're at in a display going on right there and yeah $329 this is a definitely a very competitive field that we have going on in the educational tablets area here so I was just wondering where should we start here because the Huawei P 20 is going to be I mean yeah that was I was going back to my first point here was this kind of incidentally because we've already seen some tweets coming in from the pn weekly hashtag people asking for comparisons to the to the 1020 of course we're talking about the p20 pro the one that's got the the camera sensor at fat produce really excited to see an ultra high megapixel camera via a megapixel camera yes alright I even I messed up my own joke there the the I think the exciting thing about the p20 Pro and one of the reasons why we're seeing some of these higher scores from DxO isn't the megapixel count it's the fact that we're we're finally seeing a phone in 2018 that is including a substantially larger image sensor size that is going to provide benefits for photography there's a substantial benefit when you move to a standalone camera and it's got a much bigger image sensor then well they were having a lot of a comparative metrics here something like 60 percent larger than either the s nines or the iPhone tens sensors like you know when you increase the the micron sizes and just have more of them in general that you get more light and more information and more and it's not just and it's not just the the number of photo sites it's the fact that you've got a significantly larger surface area so for example I mean like you can look at panasonic g5 that's a very video focused Micro Four Thirds camera it has larger individual photo sights than what you would find on a nikon d80 but if we're talking about overall image quality the D 850 is still gonna be the Panasonic even though it has smaller photo sights it's because it's got a full-frame sensor it's a larger surface area to play with you get significantly more photographic and shallower depth of field naturally not with all of these software tricks and I think that's one of the things that lends a significant advantage to what Huawei is doing here and again why I keep pointing to always the spiritual successor of classic nokia a great partnership with a legit camera manufacturer willing to take experiments they've been ahead of the curve on things like software processing and software bouquet blur and manual photography features this this is looking like they're continuing to press their reputation as the photography phone and I don't see many other manufacturers really stepping up to compete in that conversation on terms of the many features that's like a and while we do have to offer I mean one of them was being able to offer the option of ISO 100 2004 400 which is that's how many stops is that now from the bait like so okay what the actual practical dynamic range of a camera like this is we've um we've been getting a couple of their questions like daughters is asking here that you have the PM weekly hash tag is is the DxO mark a good benchmark or are we just approaching a Dingell measuring comparison now I would have said a dongle measuring comparison now I just keeping it all in the smartphone family so I find DxO is entirely internally consistent with their testing procedure I don't believe that they value lifestyle aspects of photography as much as they should but I've never found fault with their testing protocol the biggest problem I have with DX I was trying to sum up the entire experience of using a camera under a 1 number score so even though the p20 Pro scores the highest score possible in the single score benchmark by the single grade benchmark it might have deficiencies in an area that you value and an iPhone 10 might be the right fit for you depending on how you like to shoot and what you like to shoot so it's it's substantially more valuable it's incredibly important that if you're trying to glean from DxO mark scores what you think you're going to like that you actually have to really dig into the sub scores into their sub scores yeah yeah and it's important to point out that they have rejiggered the mobile scale including like okay and a couple of other things into their considerations I don't think that's enough biased towards more consumer focus the feature isn't what not that they would like to include in their testing but I mean it's it's a good its basics and it's just it's very nice I'm glad to see that they did recalculate some of their scoring because I feel like when we were in the first generation pixel era they seemed to be very impressed with post-processing imagery while they also missed some substantial problems with lens manufacturing you know so so I feel like we're seeing a company that is approaching this conversation with a little bit more nuance I still feel that they miss a couple aspects of the field the operation the the integration the ergonomics of using a particular piece of gadgetry cuz all of that really does play into the overall photography experience but but that being said I feel that they they are entirely internally consistent and I feel they are a reliable resource once you get away from the final grade once you actually dig into all of the sub review bullet points that they've got I think you walk away with a much better understanding of what it is they are testing for now I'm not exactly sure how this actually compares with the Lumia 1020 obviously just on like the aggregate we're dealing with well actually I'm not sure because I didn't get to read that part of the spec sheet I was focused more on the Hawaii p20 we we delegated a lot of the coverage between me and Adrian but I never got this like the whole p20 pros like mass and whatnot as compared at least to the Lumia 1020 which was a third or one over 2.6 the 1020 image sensor size was a 2/3 inch it was a one over 1.7 one over 2.7 it was it was ever so slightly smaller than the 808 and like a hundred percent bigger than most of the other phones of its time which had third inch sensors all right I'm gonna look it up but like talk about just between the multiple like responsibility is of these sensors and whether or not these all these sensors are duly equipped to do their jobs we have a lot of metaphors that we can point to in the world of photography I mean I recently went back on my personal channel and did a comparison between the Lumia 1020 and the huawei mate 10 Pro and what we've seen over you know four years of phone manufacturing is a lot of the lifestyle aspects of capturing images and capturing video have gotten so much more fluid they're they're so much easier for people to interact with and that's what's impressive about capturing images with a modern smartphone burst rates individual captures logging RAW files really big chunks of data that are processed incredibly fast but that still means that they're these the there were these opportunities where a Lumia 1020 even though it was ridiculously slow was still able to outperform newer cameras today I did a low-light test just capturing the raw file and sort of dark in office lighting and the 1020 is more than capable of hanging with third inch and one over 2.5 inch not quite half inch image sensors it you know we haven't seen another phone from that era which can in any way shape or form compete with modern phones today and you compare it to a device which came out shortly after like the galaxy s5 and the performance is abysmal compared to what the designs when he could achieve so I always likened the 1020 to being the medium format version of a smartphone medium format is a type of image sensor in professional photography which is larger than 35 millimeter it's larger than a full-frame camera sensor but because that surface area is so much larger they're typically not the best at clearing information off of the sensor as quickly so you see them a lot in studio portraiture very controlled environments you're not gonna see a Hasselblad out on you know football field you know you're not gonna see someone shooting burst medium format shots to try and capture fast action and if consumers really want the the differences for that big size sensor I think one of the best examples of going up in sensor size as an example would be looking at the photography or the cinematography in the film The Dark Knight the the Batman film with the Joker because most of that film is shot in 35 millimeter but then we see a bunch of sections especially some really intense action sequences which were shot in 70 millimeter IMAX photography it was one of the things Nolan did which was really impressive wasn't that he shot 70 millimeter for the easy stuff he shot 70 millimeter for the hard stuff and you can see a remarkable difference in how that stuff is framed and how that the depth of field the focus everything sort of melts in a completely different way than 35 millimeter photography now getting back to phones that's what's exciting about watching a company step up here is because we're getting this substantially larger image sensor it should have much more surface area to pick up low-light in pick up in low-light situations it should provide a nicer softer background blur for your bouquet and more natural fall-off you know so you don't have as long a depth of field and then you you weigh all that up with modern processors you weigh that up with you know modern processing and hopefully we've eliminated some of those pain points that we had with the Lumia 1020 where you would hit the shutter you would capture the shot and then you'd have like a three-second recycle time before you could take another photo that that's what that's what will bring some excitement to this space from the photography perspective I think a lot of consumers are gonna look at this versus a galaxy s 9 plus and say the s 9 plus is fine it's good enough it does what I needed to do NBD but if you do care about the natural quality of light capture coming off of your chosen permanent companion camera the thing that's bolted onto the back of your phone and that it no longer comes with that huge Oreo disk the 1020 had out the back of the phone then this is potentially a very exciting move for for enthusiasts probably you're gonna pass by most consumers and it's also called the pro it's got a higher price tag it's gonna scare away some people but if you if you're really interested in capturing the best possible image you can from your phone I think Huawei has just made a phenomenal argument for why you should consider their products into unit I mean the Lumia 1020 was even ahead and like not just for the component reasons but for the actual discourse where the best camera smartphone or like on a smartphone you can have is something that you would want anyways in a more I mean they weren't that great back in 2013 2012 so you know just having all those megapixels what to work with at the very least you know you would be able to you know live your life a little bit better knowing that hey at least I can see my kids from far away at that audition or whatever the heck that their Nokia fans they got it you know even from the NA they were already working with substantially larger image sensors in their competition and if it hadn't been for Nokia rejoining the United States under the Lumia brand I don't think that we would have seen the the massive there was a tectonic shift in performance from the galaxy note 3 to the galaxy note 4 I think Samsung and Apple really started taking that stuff seriously when we saw what even like a lowly Lumia 920 could do let alone what the 15 20 in the 10 20 were all coming out with these really groundbreaking features many of which are still not on our devices today like surround sound audio capture 4k video recording on Qualcomm 800 series chipsets I mean they were so far ahead of the curve on so many of these points and we've been kind of treading water some of that is kind of the more esque not necessarily Moore's law but more s in terms of well we saw major advancements through s4 through up to the 800 800 800 one series and then start to trail off just because you know people were started working on dyes and I think we're on a second-generation 10 nanometer processes at this point in which you know given the rest how the rest of the software system systems have evolved it's just like well it's we're just trying to push out as much refinement and as much like little performance whatever slight little nuggets that we can so with last question here before we move on to the to the next topic because we probably should move on you know qua way we love you we've been talking about you for a bit here this is from from rohit naic i've probably mispronounced your name does having a bigger sensor make things better or is it that the optics have an important role to play in overall image quality and smartphones optics are critically important the quality of the glass that lets light in to hit the sensor is very important but and I mentioned this in my my personal Lumia 1020 versus may 10 Pro video if you look at a smartphone with an aperture of f-18 you have to take into account how tiny that image sensor is so if you compare that against a consumer grade DSLR an aps-c sensor like a Canon Rebel what what they rebel produces at f10 to f13 looks very much like what the smartphone produces at F 1.8 again as you know the most critical component in improving photography improving improving image quality is the sensor size the bigger the sensor gets the more photographic and cinematic our images get because we start getting to play with other aspects of light acquisition and aperture size depth of field and all the other goodies that come with having that extra real estate so with that last point made let's transition over to the Xiaomi me mix to s4 just a second I I'm just wondering what where this device is and where the device series is at this point in the conversation where things have evolved to 2x1 displays are even taller displays and are covering more the fascia of the device and now it's like okay so the me mix very pioneering in its time but that time was short-lived and now it's trying to iterate beyond what it already is I mean we're still dealing with generally okay you know like very thin bezels except for the chin below and you know people even want that gone so does it does it is this just the camera phone at this point is this just the camera upgrade I think this is still I think I think Xiaomi has made a good faith argument for for being the the out Appling Apple Android device right because we're gonna be talking about notches and stuff and and how there are a lot of companies that are copying some of these bad terrible bad ideas but doing it directly and I think Johnny looked at well what are what are some of the pain points involved in trying to make the bezel framing the screen as absolutely thin as possible we need to cut into the screen where do we need to cut into the screen that one question instantly delineates the me mix to from the rest of the competition which is going to just copy the center cut knotch that we see it almost seems like it was bought in okay we're gonna move everything down to the below section instead of having it on the typical kind of you know right center up facing thing now that does mean oh sorry go ahead you go ahead no I was just gonna say the bone conduction technology for the earpiece is going to have to be a thing and you know depending on how you feel about like having people listen in and your conversations it's you know it's innovative it's also perfect but I mean we've been doing that since the Kyocera brigadiere it actually works a lot better than you would think it would and tissue conduction can actually help minimize some of the impact on just farting your phone call audio out because you know how many times we've been out in public and you see people on a video call or on a speaker phone call and bone conduction tissue conduction actually does provide an extra point of audio contact that even a speakerphone can't so I've been a big fan of that tech and phones I'm constantly surprised that more companies haven't taken advantage of this if if we care about this forehead bezel having too much stuff then we can move some of those components center screen and that is a benefit to consumers it's not a compromise it makes the phone call experience better so you know like when I want to see change I don't want to see change for change sake I want to see change because because it's an improvement and because of the way that they ask those questions on where can we put some of these components immediately they win the discussion on the design above the companies that are just copying Apple instantly I want to give them a huge thumbs up for trying to find a different conclusion to the same questions that Apple and all these other companies are asking where do we put this stuff if we have to make the entire front face of this phone all screen and I think Xiaomi came up with a far more elegant solution than the world's number two smart phone manufacturer good and I think people might be able to live the facts that if or with the theory is that if shot me were to implement some sort of advanced 3d scanning feature like the true death camera and that maybe if it were placed on the bottom they went minded as much anyways just because that unintrusive there is the fact that you know it's not in the optimal position you'd have to hold it a little bit weirdly for selfies as why not a penny or two of white ya know shots but I mean it's it's fair enough I mean this phone to scan for your nipple they're just treating nostril scanning I always have that guide image of like a sphere or your head and like how you're supposed to train the phone and instead they like they give you the outline match up your nostrils with that's the one thing that won't change from when you are born we also call it grandma video video called view so we're supposed to tilt the screen back a little bit more or forward I'm not sure why I could only see your I can only see your trousers grandma it only works when you're also backlit bright sunny day out the window I love it no no I'm completely Being Earnest cuz we're gonna be talking about notch stuff more I hate watching companies arrived at arrived the companies that didn't ask how could we do it better they're just looking at how they did it the same and I don't believe it brings any benefits but we'll expand on that more when we get to one Plus discussion yeah Indian and I guess we could just love both of these together here so well no no I think I think you're right I mean we should we should probably detail we've got the apples refreshed entry because they just said it in the frickin summary and there's not much to write home about beyond but no this is actually something I just want to throw out to our viewers and if we get some good comments on it we'll read it now or if we hear get some good emails from you folks we'll use that or for future broadcast but we're watching the education market in a visceral three way fight Microsoft hasn't properly joined this conversation yet but we're seeing some really compelling hardware with Windows 10 running on arm chromebook is a phenomenal bang for buck platform very few compromises for the education market very well represented and now that they can use Android apps this doesn't feel like quite as limited a platform when it was more just we're gonna put a web browser into a laptop shell and that's all you really need my my fear because because Apple needs a good solution to reach consumers and while I think their branding is regressive and hideously insulting to teenagers you know a little girl wandering running around with an iPad going what we were over that I thought over that I think about that ad and it makes me bristle with anger every single time but Apple needs a good option to join that conversation they can't do it with OSX there is no MacBook which joins this conversation well it only makes sense to try and fight this fight with iPad $2.99 is a good price for a baller powerful iPad but my fear is they've priced themselves out because of the accessories if you buy a $300 Chromebook if you buy a $300 Chromebook you get a $300 laptop grade you don't need anything else if you buy a $300 iPad you kind of still do need a keyboard and you might need a pencil but you also might need a mouse or something else so best-case scenario no you have to get the pencil you have to get the pencil it's the new compatibility of this season it's hot it's fresh and I gotta tell you it's my 4 new egg we shot a whole segment on mobile content production not this last week's episode with the week before Android works so well with a bluetooth mouse I can't tell you like it's so silly connecting it to my phone but it works a little things so you know I'd be fine using an iPad with a mouse but even with the keyboard you're talking about if you know a 30 to 50% price increase over the competition and I feel that that largely takes Apple out of many middle and lower middle-class communities across the country so I'd really be curious to hear what our viewers have to say about that when in the same week we got this amazing news from an all slate Chrome OS device Android for tablets hasn't been particularly inspiring there's a point I'm getting to a point where I think I'd even want to see Chrome on a phone but Acer going Chrome for a slate for education this is a great idea IMO and and comes in below Apple's price point is a perfectly capable machine once you accessorize it we're kind of back up into nicer Chromebook territory I mean this this to me looks like a much better fit for geordie of school districts public school districts out there and I'd be curious to see what our viewers and listeners have to say about that yeah I mean even if Android is still kind of a hack on to Chrome OS I mean that still has the apps for stylus driven output and it definitely still works even yeah so and 329 you get the stylus with it takes out and and it's got a sight line like there's a hole in where the stylus goes so what you don't lose you don't it's it's better for those like fleet purchasers to like have and like be able to take account of all the kids the naughty little kids that stick their sinuses up their noses and whatnot but but even to the same token into your point there is if you're if you're in charge of a school district and and I hope our viewers will chime in on this do you look at this priced for classrooms $300 Chromebook tablet or do you look at the ecosystem of Chromebooks and see that there are some 200 and $300 full clamshell laptops style solutions also available and again it's it's we want to find those solutions that actually properly equip students to get their work done so I'll be curious to see what our what our our fans have and if you do want to go with the iPad rude like are you going to be able to make it so you know give them the full experience the full being you know full abilities with the $500 per students investment that there are some school districts that will absolutely pull the trigger on that but what we we suffered a pretty embarrassing crash and burn here LA Unified the LA some the LA school district school districts out here tried to front this iPad initiative and it did not work in the most spectacularly embarrassing way ever so there's huge room there is like the the general consumer market is pretty well Big Apple Microsoft Google everyone sort of has their team everyone's pick their side but what we're talking about is educating the next generation of consumers and in part edge educating them on how to be consumers and if they're gonna spend their child and hood and formative years on a Chromebook doesn't that make them more likely to be sort of invested into the Google ecosystem by the time that there are adults same thing Microsoft's same thing apples so this is a huge fight which doesn't have a clear leader right now and you can I totally understand why all three companies are fighting massively for some kind of mind share some kind of toehold to really start building some momentum with with school districts mmm and Eve so lots of battles to be had over the next several weeks and months to come in terms of that but not only that also just the Chinese outlook on the US and what they'll be able to offer in the US just because well allow them are being fingered for cybersecurity threats we'll get into that in just a few minutes but until then we'd like to take a moment here and talk about our sponsor yes this week a Google cloud platform what can your data and tell you with the Google cloud platform use machine learning at scale to build better products Google clouds AI provides modern machine learning services with pre-trained models and a service to generate your own tailored models our platform is now available as a cloud service to bring unmatched scale and speed to your business applications it predicts so your business can thrive click now to learn more about Google cloud platform or go to gqo slash get cloud AI and we thank them for supporting the pocket net weekly and we baboom like little rubber butt medicine ball all that goes buh-bam I don't know how to come from that how about we talk about some news more news lots of other news e news news things I guess yeah it is I'll have to freestyle it since the the yes I wasn't able to write Scripture all these things okay let's go for it though yeah ready do it okay for the week of March 26 2018 this is all the news that is fit to podcast this week it was revealed by some Facebook leavers who have been disgusted with the outlook of the Cambridge annika scandal that Facebook has been storing metadata of all the calls and SMS from Android phones the past several years and facebook says that's completely legal and that's it is able to do so because users actually gave their permission for it but there's some misleading going on here because first of all the Facebook app for Android has been targeted for the longest time to the lowest that the earliest version possible and it was back then that permissions were looser and they didn't have to be brought up by prompt to the user at the time of request so most users didn't really figure that this was happening and there was also some wording where in terms of the permission slates that Facebook gave to users of Facebook Messenger and Facebook light saying that only their contacts would be continuously synced and there was a some different text saying on other phones that excuse me that context or contacted data would be continuously uploaded and there's a whole bunch of a reading that we can get into that in just a few minutes so hang tight in the meantime Oracle has won its appeal against Google in its long-standing case for claims of infringement of Google just moving whole bunches of code from Java into Android for their development Google has long claimed that this has been a fair use exercise but apparently now we're going to have to how much how much in terms of damages that Google will be able to will have to pay up Oracle has been asking for about nine billion which was a year's worth of profits from Andhra plus a billion dollars so we'll have to see about that as that case rolls along and another several cases that have been rolling along since the late end of last year is and still continues to be the iPhone throttling lawsuits you may remember her back late last year that Apple confessed and apologized for not not disclosing its practices explicitly in the software updates that triggered this throttling be here but that has amounted to 59 class-action lawsuits against the company for that failure of disclosure in the first place and according to The Wall Street Journal there will be a possibility for those 59 class actions to eventually merge into one huge one and the process could take years overall to hack through so definitely something that we should keep an eye on especially as well this issue gets put to bed in terms of new hardware new software going over to Foxconn it has announced that it has a quiet excuse me it has not announced but it was reported that had acquired Belkin the peripherals manufacturer that also owns the brands link C's in terms of wireless communication equipment and MIMO and a couple of other smart home brands as well the purchase price was nearly 900 million dollars and the the cements fox khan's position as apple's biggest partner it was already the world's largest contract electronics assembly a manufacturer and now it could be working in two well they're already it already had owned sharp for a time being as a the Japanese display manufacturer can attest but this is going to be interesting in terms of the future of ipad accessories iPhone accessories etc moving on to are one of the big points of contention this week is one plus six and co-founder Carl pay talking with the verge about how its fans the company's fans should learn to love the knotch and it's been it's been a hell of a time trying to see how this has been going on in terms of the fan reaction it's just a whole bunch of complaints in visceral insults being thrown in terms of LG they seem to have handled this in a more classic way or at least found a way to do sell without too much damage to their brand they haven't leaked too much in terms of the g7 and there hasn't been much consumer excitement about that but they actually made a thread on the antbird subreddit and asked for some responses to that and they got higher quality conversations going on over there so there's that there's all the news I survived that's and somehow let's start back over in Facebook land because of course you know it's been the punching bag for and rightly so for a lot of privacy and security hawks out there i yeah and deservedly um sorry i'm trying to get back there it is I'm trying to get out of screen sir there we go no I'm I'm I I don't think I'm alone in being one of the people who's very glad that this is going down the way it is the current state of social media of making new services making new apps for consumers to interact with this is going to be the next major shift I believe in services is you make something cool you find some kind of traction with a certain type of audience you have your IPO then you need to start making money and you start cramming either ads or business practices which feel kind of nefarious into the mix and Facebook will hopefully show other people coming up in the space that that's maybe not the best way to go about conducting business with consumers anymore so I hope that this that this unraveling is public is takedown that people understand the value of their information the value of their data and that we can now start having because I kind of feel like up-and-coming consumers you know Millennials and younger are going to have a much better sense of what all this stuff is worth and if they're gonna have a different perspective on valuing their privacy than our generation and older or my generation and older do because right now especially with the current lawmakers that we have in place a lot of the stuff is just the frivolousness of social media and they don't take the actual impact of social media and online shopping very seriously so that's why we need to have some of these changes and they need to be changes of substance so Facebook has earned all of the ill-will that they're currently generating now what's left to be seen is whether or not companies and brands and consumers actually follow through on changing their behavior right now there's it kind of feels a little like a very specific South Park episode of the we're sorry we got Kotnis of Facebook's current current discussions a couple class action lawsuits where maybe Facebook has to pay a million dollar fine or something like that really isn't going to amount to much change but if we start to see an any move towards consumers pulling the plug on their Facebook accounts or their Facebook services we started to see a significant shift in ad revenue from brands that are feeling pretty slighted right now like you're not really getting the same bang for buck that you used to on Facebook even for how wildly extortionist Facebook policies are with the people who like your services that that's really breaks out all that data is free all that user data is free to them so we saw a significant drop-off in brand interactions through Facebook because of some of the issues facing them with the Russians so Facebook's business model is you set up a brand page and people like your brand page now the people who liked your brand page that's like subscribing to your brand page but none of them get to see your post unless you pay Facebook to reach the people who have already liked your brand now with the recent focuses on shifting over the model towards more family and friends content you're getting even less for your money in trying to reach the people who are already subscribed to your Facebook page let alone trying to reach out and find new viewers new users new consumers to take part with what you post on Facebook so that's that's what I mean it's like there's already a growing sentiment around companies that now's the time to stop putting all your eggs in the Facebook basket you already weren't making a great return on your investment and now it's gotten even worse so staying in the same Sandlot but just in a different corner focusing explicitly on the Android of honor I guess some would consider it a vulnerability but like the in terms of just the yapping about it of saying that iOS never really allowed this kind of background siphoning to happen and Google is you know just trying to play catch-up in terms of well it started to you know limit Play Store api targeting so that you know older versions can't be like developers can't write apps for older versions of Android like what do you think that kind of conversation leaves us because it might be one of the like niggling factors in the head when it comes to consumers by their next might phone but right now it doesn't I don't see it making a big sway well so yeah this is again this is why I keep coming back to what is it gonna take to appreciably move the needle on consumer behavior and I don't think we found that pain point yet right now we're in a conversation where I think general consumers are starting to get the idea that companies like Google Facebook and Amazon traffic and user data in a very different way than Apple does Apple still utilizes the information that they have access to you the information that they have on you in a way to offer up products and services or music recommendations things things that still generate income but the core of their business model and this is also one of the reasons why you know an Apple product likely has a contributing reason not the main reason but a contributing reason as to why there's a bit more of a profit padding built into an iOS product as opposed to a competitor's product a bit more Headroom there is because they're likely not making as much money on the back end data analytics on each of their customers so I do believe Apple still has a good faith argument to make in that arena when it comes to consumer privacy its consumer behavior and interacting with that information this is something that I feel like we're going to have a have to have a cultural shift in the regulatory agencies that are tasked with protecting us even from our own desired behaviors it feels good to be connected dopamine hits when you get you know likes and responses and you get into Twitter arguments or Facebook debates all of these things are highly addictive mechanisms at least it according to the human brain it sees a little difference from the researchers that I've talked to that ore is compared to like you know playing blackjack or hitting a slot machine so it's gonna take a while before the rational side of the consumer space really starts to say we don't like what Amazon does with our information or we really don't like how Facebook handles our privacy or Google might have too many holes for me to want to do business with them on a future product I right now everything's too tribal so if your team alexa vs. team you know google assistant then you're just gonna keep supporting the team that you're already a member of if your team galaxy and there's no way you'd ever own an iPhone well you're not really rationally considering your options for not only the device that's in your pocket but all of the services that have access to the wealth of information and behavior on you and that's worth talking about not necessarily that you're going to switch teams but at least to understand what your potential risk might be with any given manufacturer yeah I mean Apple for its part you know it says that I mean aiding trips you know both ways and whatnot for all the data that you sent to it and regarding Jory Apple music service or all your iCloud drive account or what because because you know we can talk about encryption so you can't intercept the information but I don't know that consumers fully understand that if there's an investigation and they've been utilizing the iCloud then Apple has to make a good-faith effort to work with law enforcement to give them information that's on their servers so you know again it's it's I don't feel these companies have done their due diligence and educating their consumers as to the how pervasive these services are and what what the potential for disclosure might be in regards to how some of these services have been used but this also means that there's gonna be an opportunity for someone to come in as a disruptor in the desktop space I'm I've been happy on the firefox browser I actually went back to Firefox about two years ago and it was sort of part timing both Firefox and Chrome and now one of the things that I really like and I hope that we see the same kind of Chrome add-on is Mozilla created their own Facebook sandbox plug-in so they log you out of every cookie and tracker from Facebook in the Firefox browser and when you open Facebook it stays in its own self-contained bucket so that it can't scrape any other user data from your other browsing habits and I want to see that extended to everybody III don't sign into Google Chrome on my phone I just haven't had this burning need to link browsers across every single glowing rectangle that I interact with and most of what I do is just sort of search anyway and Google's really good at that so I don't really bookmark things like I used to so if I could sandbox Google from itself from the rest of Android I'd be happy especially Amazon - I would love to have a way to completely sever my behavior from Amazon because it is really creepy when certain aspects like something completely unrelated to my shopping on Amazon will then start to populate purchasing recommendations on Amazon and again it takes a lot for a user to unravel how those cookies are implemented and how you can how you can separate yourself from that kind of browsing I don't want to have to do everything in incognito creeper porn mode I'd rather have you know my accounts logged in in very specific ways so that then I can control the flow of information to each individual service I don't think all consumers are gonna be that granular and how they want to approach this stuff but a couple better Auto mod tools would be a huge benefit for people who are generally starting to become better educated as to how their data can be compromised they're not as much as granular as they are glass you know just melted and when I just wanted that straight its convenience and it's you know just resigning yourself to the fact that data is data it's gonna be out there it's being traded freely and at some point I I think that you know the fact that privacy as a concept is just going to flow by the wayside and you know with you but the thing that I hope that we don't lose sight of and this is something that I think Americans will care about I think they'll care less about their their privacy then they will about the potential value when when a consumer figures out that their behavior their usage and their information contributes value to Facebook that they don't necessarily get a return on that's actually something that I think is worth joining the conversation on you know it's just as a transactional chip yeah YouTube do monetizes your video but it's still a benefit and it still enriches the YouTube platform well why why do you want to work for Google for free in making their platform better why not go somewhere else it's going to value your contribution as a content creator and you know you can build your own tools for trying to monetize your traffic you know those types of conversations matter to these mega platform because we think of Google Facebook Amazon as institutions but you know and whenever the market gets a little complacent whenever we get sort of an oligopoly where there's only a handful of players at the top that is a dangerous place for a company that's no longer going to innovate but is instead just gonna try and profit off of the investment that they've made because the disrupter can come in and show people a different way to go about doing business and that's left numerous companies ill-prepared for a future where their products are their offerings don't quite spark the same amount of imagination in in this current internet space that evolution happens fast I mean look at the difference between snapchat and Instagram over the last three years you know that's not a lot of time for two companies to be fighting this hard and for one to completely you know throw away most of their user goodwill yeah so speaking of user goodwill I think how we're going to stack all this next topic as general in general is that I'll just go through first two stories here just a little bit and then we'll transition immediately into one of the listener mails because like this please just roll into one point here so with one plus just trying to survive in the massive sea of leaks and clickbait as Carl pace says clickbait articles talking about these leaks he generated some noise about his own company and just button that users should learn to love the knotch now I understand they they're continuing to the be that aspiring company that wants to be in the mainstream and we're like the Apple iPhone 10 is kind of the thing and it's it's accepted and whatnot but not in its current state where the tech enthusiasts are like no aesthetics suck and it doesn't provide as much value as you think to us listen to us please do not ignore us and front like the freakin discourse on this is kind of just toxic but hit like it the same point is made and it's very very clear I so let me just give us a couple examples here and then cuz Carl pay deleted his tweet so we have this one from Siobhan Jesse hey Carl pay at get paid I think you have deleted your tweet about the knotch I just want to know why he tried he trolled Xiaomi when they deleted their tweet of the poll of users preferring pure Android to me UI so you should probably clarify this and I love technology so I ain't biased towards different companies you got this one from marina outs learn to love the knotch your company is a small fry in the smartphone industry Carl pay you should try listening to your audience and then there was this one I don't know if you had the article up the the one that I am but if you pull that back up and yeah there it is is from do IDO van doom the only acceptable reason for not a 1 plus 6 would be a bottle opener so I mean it depends on what kind of utility you're actually looking for in that design but so I mean obviously with the iPhone 10 being the only way to make a phone I realize we have been woefully inadequate ly serving our audience so from now on I'm gonna do iPhone 10 view because this is really how people want to look at video content on displays so this this looks great to me is into the screen and cutting into the display to make sure that you can put on a slightly better web camera don't you don't you have software to block that off I'd like to make sure that the whole I just want to make the entire the entire side to that point black well that's that's better it's cutting into the screen and it's basically kind of the same thing as like the megapixel warsi actually I'm gonna go back because I kind of like you know the Punisher the bad years it's that now we can count that as being part of the screen so so like the little ear here at the top that still counts according to Apple is part of your usable display area and that's why it's a 19 point 5 by 9 aspect ratio screen so even though it's a 5.8 inch screen it's still got way less or if it is not way less it's still got less surface area than the 5.5 inch screen on the iPhone 8 plus but this is still usable this is still totally usable this right here you can still use the quote-unquote awareness of cheating we're not lying when we say it's a 19 point 5 by 9 aspect ratio display all right so like I know but isn't isn't isn't the arguments though that 16 by 9 content is gonna like is the mass the majority of what we consume these days still gonna be just fine on the screen well no that's that it that is part of the problem is if you use the full display from Apple's perspective if you use the full display then it cuts into using the full display if these because that's what's that because just from a resolution perspective like if like it's 1080 wide just like if you fill it from the bottom in 1920 it should only reach the notch anyways like what's in you're getting the same resolution that's just it is when we're talking about media consumption we're only talking about sixteen by nine video if you watch a feature film on your phone that's usually 2.35 you know it's even wider than your it's even skinnier than the aspect ratio of your phone screen so it would take up the full length of your screen and still give you letter boxing on top but on one side because the screen is asymmetrical and we love ASA asymmetry like I could put a notch over here too but why why because this is great having part of one side of the screen completely chopped in so you mentioning that like if you want to bring it up because like one of the things that people have been imagining about the HTC you 12 plus is that you know they could do double notches for the boomsound totally and that would also be terrible design it it would be terrible design but great yeah the the main point that I'm getting to one the asymmetry does bother me but to until we come up with another metaphor for interacting with data in services the most important aspect of phone design is the screen through which we interact with our data that is the portal through which a majority of our interactions take place a majority of our content is consumed and cutting into that portal to deliver a better web camera is bad design now we can minimize some of the impact on that in in different ways you know we're looking at some of the the test mock-ups something like the p20 having just like a total strip so that that's dead space and we really just created a ditch bezel and that's fine but why go through these shenanigans to create a digital bezel space when we could have just put a bezel at the top of the phone it also is frustrating because we start talking about an all screen device that's not necessarily the best for the ergonomics on things like your keyboard I'm not impressed by people who complain about the dead space underneath the iPhone 10 keyboard you don't want the keyboard all the way down at the bottom chin and for me I really don't want six inch two by one aspect ratio screens with no space at the bottom for my navigation controls I don't like having to reach my thumb down to a tiny bezel this edge balancing a top-heavy device to try and interact with that as a daily driver device I I don't think that's good ergonomics and especially with an all screen all glass almost no bezel device these things are going to be more fragile there's less impact zone for these devices as you go about and you abuse them during your daily life so you but redefine the concept of usable space on a display like the ergonomics make as to make digital bezels for you so you don't forget that space in a bunch of usage scenarios and you lose some of your space if the apps coded for a knotch screen phone will cut it will cut the content around the knotch so so there are some apps and some games which haven't you know totally made that migration over to iPhone 10 understanding and so you lose a piece of that app you lose a piece of that game it interrupts what should just be a fluid visual aesthetic or a seamless design okay so I get your opinion about the knotch and I get everything that's going about it in terms of even do more notch see more notch is better Apple Apple did some notch we should do even more notch and that's how you out Apple Apple you don't ask different questions like Jamie did you don't try and find a different solution you just do the same thing that's how competition no no no here here's here's here's here's innovation you cut but you'd like you make the notch into a full bar and just have two screens on each side and that's gonna be its new form factor like that I mean that's innovation right there cuz what reibe does he just cut across the entire screen and you just have a four head bezel like Samsung did funny that seems to work really well I well if it were two displays maybe this could be the ax on em like the next Jim yeah and and I've I've gotten really cranky about that too I when we see some of the amazing work being done on an augmented reality by the time we get a good consumer durable practical example of a folding or roll out display it'll already be obsolete when you see some of them even like leap motion has been doing and one of their one of these other developers who did on consumer grade hardware wasn't like it was being run off a workstation but just like normal everyday computing stuff off a laptop and he was able to track his hand and pull out an interface which docked to his hand and was rendered in real time I'm not impressed with the current metaphor that we have for phones I look at this as just being the epitome of laziness companies who aren't really challenging themselves to come up with better solutions in their competition and this metaphor is quickly going to become obsolete in the face of Terminator vision style solutions and we seem oh my god the eye bezels that I've got to see the freakin I'll have to add a picture frame to my world view just so that I can feel like I'm using a phone again because that's what that's what makes things better you know but when you look at a major corporation like Intel getting into the ergonomics and the usage of augmented reality glasses that's serious dangerous competition for a company like qua Way or Samsung or any of these other smartphone manufacturers because then we're not staring at their little picture frame portal into the Internet we're letting Intel beam that stuff to correctly into the back of our optic nerve you know I don't even have to look at the Huawei branding on the front of my phone anymore it's just the information I want is freely cleanly displayed right in my field of view right in my vision and that's way less disruptive way less distracting and far more accessible than anything we could do with a foldable rollable transparent pocketable smartphone device that's going to be the future but going back into twenty eighteen times and just talking about oneplus I mean they so obviously for the right audience and the rates you know current accompany the this was a failure in terms of the discussion of the the knotch but how do you think LG handled it because you know reddit LG we handled the discussion way more gracefully tremendously more gracefully but now the danger is so so Karl pay isn't completely wrong in that a bunch of companies are just going to copy Apple and consumers are gonna have to deal with it because what if you're a oneplus fan are you gonna go get another phone no because your team oneplus and we feel that we've already locked you in and we've got your money and we deserve your money so we can put out whatever we want but there's also something kind of intellectually honest about that he's not backtracking well he deleted his tweet but it's not like they're redesigning the phone based on consumer feedback this is the path moving forward you can be on board or you can get some other device which your tribalism will probably emotionally prevent you from just jumping ship immediately from their perspective now a company like LG has put out a conversation they've they've garnered some phenomenal respectful feedback and if they take all that and just say now we still just decided to do a notch even though all the questions we asked people said that the notch was terrible then that's going to view their contribution that the discussion is disingenuous so there's there's a potential pitfall on both sides with Karl pay's solution of being forthright being kind of blunt and and sort of taking a part of his audience for granted because of the tribalism aspect then you you run the risk of turning off some of your heavy users and pushing them towards a complete competitors product with LG you garner goodwill up front but then every customer who doesn't feel like they get what they want runs the risk of feeling disenfranchised well I I wrote this great post on reddit - LG and then they went and did something that I didn't want them to do you know there's a good chunk of people who are gonna feel that way regardless that it won't matter they'll feel like they're their concerns weren't taken seriously so I understand that the potential pitfalls but I feel if LG really joins a conversation listens to the consumers that are talking to them then though whether this more gracefully than one plus did I mean it's already set for the g7 if what we believed to have seen from you know the leaks the MWC showing it's gonna have a notch so um you know the best you know it it's all about spin control and damage control at this point but but but I mean by one as we need to just do the podcast for you know like the iPhone iPhone 10 version of this podcast from now on I really didn't didn't take you know people's usage into consideration I I have to apologize to all the people that watch our stream that I I wasn't I wasn't taking you know notch them seriously obviously this is what people want and their spirit this is what people would actually want people want and scenes and things like that you know things that interrupt the screen and it's like that's what people want I will be happy to give it to them so so that's that's the jam and I'm really glad that people just don't want to look at my face so this is actually a good use for the I don't that's also why someone asked like why is one all framed rule of thirds and it's a terrible reason but I'm having fun with it so we're just we're just gonna abuse our cameras for a little bit just trying to cover it up in different things in ways that don't benefit the listener at all we have run out of the port I mention a you know the the p20 knotch and how it can be sort of you know hide the notch or have a default where it cuts into the screen and a lot of people like to bring up the v10 and the v20 ticker displays and that's not the same thing the ticker display on a v10 or v20 was and it was its if expand on notifications and to provide shortcuts and didn't cut into the active space that could be utilized for camera for the viewfinder on your camera for multimedia content streaming videos apps didn't have to figure out how to work around any kind of cut out into the screen it just provided additional space and shortcuts on top of it it's not the same thing now we would all agree that the v10 in the V 20 were charmingly ugly phones then asymmetry is a big deal when you have a ticker display that doesn't run the full length of the screen at the top but the main viewing area in the main interaction space on those phones was not hampered by having a larger webcam a selfie camera didn't alter my ability to fullscreen cinematically shot content or to view full screen YouTube content with a crop or to play some of my favorite older games which aren't resolution or aspect ratio aware doesn't touch on any of that so I ticker displays not the same thing as a knotch so there you have it III don't know how we can transition after this blow a piece of mail here at this point but you know what as well so in unto our March mailbag here talking about a whole bunch of other topics but we will stay on the topic for the notch with the notch for just a second goran petrovic asks you have any thoughts on emil proto Lansky's VentureBeat column on buying only phones with headphone jacks and no notches also can juan explaining exactly what are the benefits of USBC audio over 3.5 millimeter in theory and compare that with the rial the thanks guys gone so let's talk about the viterbi article here first the title is Probie yeh headphone jacks nay notches it's kind of sort of extremist did not not like actually being radical but in terms of like going to the ends of the scale here in terms of well if I want a phone these days I'm going to have one without a freakin notch on it because I hate that and I also want you know the analog audio that I've always been used to and you know it's these kinds of I'd again not to be pejorative but like regressive kind of you know yeah we have a link to that like in the show notes or at least on the YouTube video where people can catch that yeah it's it's in the it's in the this is I mean you know we're talking about an editorial and we're talking about I can't Amil proto Lansky proto Linda yeah a male's opinion on on the state of the industry and I think it lines up well with numerous enthusiasts and so people who are more likely to judge an individual device across the entire market further across the entire ecosystem so when like an Evan Blas and Evy leaks you know puts out a poll saying like you know what do you think about notches and 65 percent of the people that reply say they don't like notches we're not getting a representation of consumers we're getting a representation on smartphone fans who followed these kinds of conversations to the to the main point I agree until we get rid of the the smartphone screen as the main interaction space and what I want my phone to become is the brain the battery and the radios for an ecosystem of personal area networking equipment better audio better heads-up display tech better body sensors etc etc etc I don't want to have to keep looking at a phone screen for every interaction that I that I encounter when it comes to digital information I completely agree I would rather have nicer rectangle screens I'm not you know I'm not offended by rounded corners on those rectangles because usually that often falls into navigation space and it doesn't really impact my ability to see notifications you know the list of crazy notifications that I never clear from from the the notification shade on my phone it doesn't get in the way of the back home in multitasking buttons you know cutting the corners off in a battlestar galactica kind of way is far less offensive than cutting in to the main display the the problem is we're not indicative of the bulk of sales and so when we see a company like Apple sell a significant number of iPhone tens thousand dollar phones this phone sold really well don't let market analysts convince you otherwise don't let market analysts make you think that the iPhone 10 was a flop it just didn't completely Eclipse the iPhone 8 it's still one of the best selling phones of the last year when many other manufacturers see that you can disrupt the display to compromise the display for other sensors on the phone and associate that with that priced device they're going to say well we can do some similar things we can make our products less expensive and that looks like success so we can just copy it so unfortunately because of sort of this fashion brand fashion label tribalism you know if if Samsung were to do this tomorrow everyone who was complaining about the notch would grumble and still get their next Galaxy if Samsung were to get rid of the 3.5 millimeter jack next year a ton of people are gonna grumble and then they're still gonna go and buy their Galaxy I you look at like Nexus to pixel fans similar types of behavior and like oh well I learned to get you know get around it or I learned to deal with it or maybe it wasn't as big a deal as I thought it was that that kind of lobster potting is pretty clear across the entire market so I think we all just kind of have to get used to the notion that as enthusiasts the individual things we care about like removable batteries 3.5 millimeter headphone jacks unmolested screens are gonna go away because consumers outspend us meteoric Li you know it's just you know exponentially more sales from general consumers who are attacked into an apple samsung ecosystem then enthusiasts who care about a you know more representation across the entire industry and you should have the option and the chance to exercise that in terms of your purchases well it's the part we say vote with your wallet but that's awesome like do you want a flagship phone in 2018 how do you vote with your wallet to get a replaceable battery if that's if that's a feature you care about there is no more voting with your wallet because the bulk of consumers passed that by he didn't care about it enough to fight for it so what you want to do if your wallet is go to the cnc factory and just place an order for a few thousand shells take it to crowdfunding and see if we can make our own enthusiast phone and fight like every other smaller and upstart smartphone brand to try and bring I mean there is fearful now they have they're kind of replaceable good for the environment kind of thing going on for that we're like every part is replaceable but the people that again I don't think it ever would have been a major consumer hit but enthusiasts would love the idea of a truly modular phone replaced being able to replace the screen on your own being able to pick you know camera and sound components being able but that's just too much hassle for the regular consumer I don't want to have to deal with that I think it's too confusing for the general consumer but this might be a point where enthusiasts reclaim part of the discussion for themselves just like PC builders do you know like we keep saying you know we're in the post PC era the death of the PC and yet every year we see incredible things happen with gaming machines with laptops convertibles foldable machines blurring the lines between traditional computing and touch computing I yesterday on Newegg now we got to play with the Hades Canyon nuke the new ultra small form-factor PC from Intel we had nine displays connected to it we were running an HTC vive pro off of a box which is about of about half the size maybe even closer to a third the size of a Playstation 4 you know and it's a full-fledged baller powerful Micro PC I mean the we keep saying PC is dead this is the smartphone Eris is the mobile era and yet incredible things keep getting released in that space so there could be a company out there who could make a good faith argument to say you know we're working on some way of creating driver support for Android or maybe we'll go to Chrome OS we'll make a chrome phone because somehow maybe Chrome is better capable of detecting Hardware differences and then from there ultra ultra mobile pick out every component and go to town with exactly the hardware build that you want I'm just gonna port fuchsia on to my laptop and that'll be it yep but you know that's such a good a good point though is sorry kind of brain fart there and then derailed and I'm trying to get back on track um look it's look at the progress that's being made by Microsoft in supporting mobile chipsets there's an end run around the current smartphone industry that Microsoft could do this is way out Lee outside the league this is not supported by any corporate evidence that Microsoft might be working on something like this but if Windows 10 actually starts running well on ARM chip sets to the point where it's like seamless performance between a nicely decently spec mid-range laptop and a Qualcomm 845 it wouldn't take much to revamp the Windows 10 UI focusing on sort of the tablet touch mode that a lot of laptops have the Qualcomm 845 is already gonna come with LTE radios and Windows is already really good at detecting Hardware detected with knowing what drivers it needs to support a piece of hardware updates come directly from Microsoft we could eventually find ourselves in a position yet again where micro could make another play on the smartphone industry this is the worst way to do it and they've earned no goodwill no trust the way that they've handled phones in the past but if you want that truly modular I put it together myself this is the perfect device because I made it for me Windows 10 could be the best bet I don't know I mean I don't see it coming from Google everything that I see coming from Google is restricting customization and some of that choice and trying to rein in their manufacturing partners so the Android is a more unified platform you're definitely never gonna get it from Apple so who does that leave yeah a good segue by the way thank you for that with Zayn's sure baaji's email here hey podcast pimps do you not call us podcast pimps by the way I was trolling Android pecan because I called Vince now from now on it will just be podcast pimps Android podcast pimps I was trolling Android podcast pimps comment sections that doesn't sound like a good treat by the way and it seems like the vocal minority are up in arms over Android P what is your opinion on some of the changes like no rootless substratum the theming app that you could use to get to the overlay manager or quick-setting toggles being nerfed thank you and keep up the text Capades zing so there's been a change down org partition concerning this android custom overlay controversy and how oh it's where we're going after Adam Lynette listen ski who locked down this stupid little feature for no good reason at all so yeah talk about that for a second well this is exactly what I'm getting at and we've had some of these conversations in the past both on this show also when I've been on some other podcasts like like bored at work we've gotten to some pretty pretty brutal debates about some of these tactics on the one hand I think Google reining in Android is probably better for most consumers out there III think that's unfortunately the future we need to face where some of the wide open Wild West nature of Android is no longer charming the update situation on Android is is not good and we need to find ways to better distribute patches bug fixes security exploits and full operating system updates and we also need to start addressing the fact that we're making increasingly expensive devices that are kind of becoming more disposable not less too much material too much manpower too much money goes into the creation of these things for them to be like year and a half two year gadgets when consumers are trying to push their smartphone usage longer and I feel corporations are doing a poor job of acknowledging this trend in user frugal Ness instead making it more likely that your phone's gonna get damaged or need to be replaced or you're just not gonna get software updates and that's how you get the new software is to buy a new $900 phone that's not support that's a poor excuse for support and even our top players are guilty of some pretty pretty poor track records on keeping their customers protected and up-to-date so when it comes to these types of moves you know again we're looking at Google trying to pivot and trying to make Android less intimidating more appealing there's still a whole bunch of space where iOS can stomp on it and one of the ways that you do that is you reign in enthusiast features you rein in potential exploits and anything that requires additional effort to support enthusiasts it's probably something that's going to be on the chopping block over the next couple years so you make a good point that Google doesn't have any burning and any burning consideration for you know theming features that may be 0.05 percent of Android users are going to take advantage of how much developer resource and how much developer support should they extend knowing that of those point oh five they're also probably going to have to handle some support calls from people who somehow managed to screw something up you know you can never completely anticipate every user action or every user complaint and even minor things which take time suddenly starts to make that look less and less and less attractive to Google as an outlet so why have a dark theme you can kind of just match the wallpaper if they have a dark wallpaper then sure some elements of the phone will also darken up a little bit good enough that's all you need you don't need anything else it's touch square get app it's the exact same metaphor that we've used since Xerox invented sort of gooeys and you know look you don't have to touch touch square you can touch like a squirrel or like some beautiful like briefly draw an element that has vectors in its space and you don't have to actually like they and that's what these people are arguing fro now what I will say and it's just it's hilarious though that you said it doesn't have to be a square I I'm sorry this is a tangent it's not related to what you're talking about we'll get back on track my my V 30 finally got its Oriole update and so I run Nova Launcher and I customized all of my icons and I went with circles and for whatever reason Oreo even though it kept Nova Launcher as my launcher changed all of my icons to squares so it will be touch squared it will be touched and decided I was wrong for wanting circles on my Nova Launcher I digress apologize I didn't mean to do that no no no it's it it gets to the point here because silly and this you know right you know we talking about Android PE or Android Oreo post March just reverting all these changes as including the overlay manager service just the the one paragraph here from the change.org petition against Adam listen ski or a Ford Adams and whatever Google to reinstate the overlay manager service it is no small feat it's a constant running service in the background of your device to allow for resource replay was replacements on target packages stop right there background processes are getting a real good thrashing not just in you know Android when the whole of the you know mobile space but just because yeah it's not just it could be just for one service that's internal and whatnot but it could be hijacked for more elevated privileged information and other kinds of things to go on with your sensors and hardware and whatnot and given the concerns that we've had over Facebook and over other such like targets just being able to exploit these background processes including smart home or or the apps that record your voice and or record TVs and and like serve you ads based on what they listen to like that that's a big deal so like they don't have to say anything it's the even though it's the AOSP Gerrits they don't have to necessarily be open about the reasons for why they're doing whatever they're doing but like you take into consideration the whole of the environment and not just the fact that Android is free and we're waving or Heelys flag because that's the sign of freedom like it feels like the wrong the Liberty libertarians is like no in Google sandbox and so first of all the amount of effort and energy that went into creating even this change.org petition is gonna amount to nothing I don't believe petitions in the slightest sway corporate or political opinions from people who actually matter as decision-makers what we're left with and again because we we couldn't keep Microsoft in the fight I I shouldn't say it that way Microsoft couldn't keep themselves in the fight consumers were right to walk away from Windows Phone even if we enthusiasts found a lot to like there and I'm still gonna point to Windows Phone 8.1 as being one of my all-time favorite you eyes and just performance customization everything was so much better than the compromises you would have to make in Android or an iOS at the time but now we're stuck with two two players so you either get a Google or you either get an apple they're not gonna change their behavior they've got you know the majority of the consumer base locked up not until I mean it's saying vote with your wallet is entirely disingenuous because what what store are you gonna go to oh you don't like the customization options that we have on Android well you're gonna hate I owe s even more yeah like there's no safe harbor for you there your options are gonna be increasingly to do things like route and get into less consumer friendly ways of extracting the information or the the UI elements that you want and customizing them yourself and if that's a solution that's fine for you great but for the few consumers who were maybe maybe interested in some of that ability but didn't want to have to completely crack open their phones to do it they're just gonna move on they're just gonna get on with their lives it probably wasn't going to be as burning a concern for them and will increasingly entrench the tribalism of the Google users and the iPhone users and that's going to the word of the day is tribalism yeah part of the conversation for things over these last couple weeks in news in tech news and in entertainment news and so you know like voting with your wallet would mean like are you gonna go to Sailfish are you gonna go to some kind of linux are you gonna see firefox OS on a phone well no because instantly a ton of tech reviewer elites will say oh but it's not good enough oh it's not ready oh it doesn't do this oh you can't do that and you're never gonna jump on board if we had listened to the first generation reviews from the original Microsoft Surface the surface should have died it was a terrible product how could anyone like that no this is horrible in Windows 8 it's completely unusable I mean you can't do anything on it well it took like three years of losing in the marketplace of ideas for Microsoft to find footing with general consumers to say that the surface pro was a great idea and now look at the the insane number of variations on that same idea that we have today they had to ignore and lose in the market all that time to get there and I don't see any company with the fortitude to really make that shift right now everyone's trying to play it safe which is why we I feel we need to see some some more aggressive disruption away from the phone self the next time you see a are goggles and the next time you see a heads-up display the next time you see better voice interactions better headsets better audio I give it a shot because that's actually what's gonna pull us out of this tech malaise you know that's actually what's gonna move the needle on improving our interaction with data in services and not just holding in the same pattern that we've been in for the last four generations of smartphone maybe five if I can go back to a Galaxy Note 4 and still feel totally well served by that experience how far have we really progressed can I shoot 4k video do I have a Q a quad HD display do I have great battery life I don't have water resistance but I can replace the battery myself because I'm a grown-up and I should be able to do those things pen touch fine point controls great build quality ah it's fine that phone still holds up today so what are we doing what amazing advancements have we seen since the note 4 that really changed the discussion on how we use data in services and I I can't really point to many I don't have to tell you things are bad everything everybody knows things are bad I'm mad as heck and I'm not gonna take it anymore 4 you are messing with the primal forces of nature and you all right by the way we didn't forget gowron's second question here which is the benefits of a USBC audio over 3.5 in theory and in reality so so USBC audio is a double-edged sword right now it's not consistently employed so like some dongles like um this is this is one of the things that frustrates me I really like the mate temper oh I really do like that phone I miss having a built-in headphone jack but Huawei wasn't really known for the best headphone jacks like they were usually mid-pack at best sometimes even more mediocre but the thing that is super annoying about the main' temp' row is this dongle does not have a this dongle will not be recognized as a USB audio device on other technology products so I can plug this into the Thunderbolt port on my laptop or on another phone with the USB C port and this headphone jack does not show up that confuses the consumer market because this is a universal port because it has to plug into the bottom of the phone but it's proprietary to one line of devices I think this will work on a Motorola I think they used the same pin out so that the Motorola dongle and the Huawei dongle will talk to each other that's not a good ecosystem partner it's what's gonna be most compatible but what is frustrating is if you take Huawei's headphones huawei's headphones do have a DAC built into them so the dongle won't work on any other devices if you want to use your own headphones but you can take the Huawei and they use the really terrible ear pod style design you take that dongle and you plug it into my laptop or you plug it into another phone and it does show up as a USB audio device ultimately if we're going to get rid of the 3.5 millimeter jack there there's a give-and-take so prone con the con is we lose a great Universal phone Oh Jack this is one of the last true Universal standards it's a true standard that everyone could participate with and the licensing there wasn't any it's not like how you have to license a lightning connector from Apple to make your Apple accessories and there's just decades and decades and decades of amazing products that you can take part in you know headphones and speakers and different connectors and stuff that can plug directly into these devices and deliver truly fantastic performance when properly supported the flipside to that is this opens up the potential for audio manufacturers to take the discussion to consumers directly so let's say all you can afford is like a $200 phone but you scrimped and saved for a great pair of headphones chances are really low that that $200 phone is gonna properly drive your investment in a nice pair of headphones but let's say those headphones were from a company like Sennheiser if Sennheiser made a pair of USBC headphones it wouldn't matter what device you took those headphones to it could be a $200 phone it could be a thousand dollar phone but you would trust that Sennheiser had delivered the audio hardware to properly drive that experience and you could plug it directly into the bottom of the phone and you're good to go and and that that would have probably a higher longevity than Bluetooth because you don't have to worry about a battery it's powered directly off the battery of the device not having a like a Bluetooth wireless battery so you spend $200 on a cabled pair of headphones but with an amazing DAC tailor fit exactly to those headphones is a better solution long-term than having another wireless thing that you have to charge every night so again it's it's a little complicated still right now but it is getting better a lot of new USB products coming out are more Universal Google it was a step in the right direction the dongle for the pixel 2 is pretty good it's not nearly as terrible as the headphone jack was on on the first-generation pixel the dongle on pixel 2 is is noticeably better than the headphone jack on pixel 1 so pixel 1 more convenient you don't ever have to worry about losing your dongle but audio quality noticeably poorer so what do you want do you want the convenience of sound tracking then you want something with a built in a pixel with a built in Jack if you want a higher quality experience you go with the dongle lastly I should just sort of clarify again under sort of my personal escapades I've been trying to talk more about like lifestyle and fitness and health and things like that just adjacent to the world of technology and the last the beginning of this week I sat down with one of the top audiologists in the country and I have a recorded interview where I asked her some questions about recent trends in in teen young adult and adult hearing loss you know a trends that correlate the rise of smartphones over the last 10 years and we're seeing significant degradation at younger and younger ages from people who are heavy consumers of audio and I asked her point-blank about the different types of headphones that people can buy so like inner aural earbuds cans and ear pods style designs and spoiler alert the commentary on ear pod style headphones probably isn't the most flattering for a company like Apple as it pertains to how valuable you think your hearing is to you so if your hearing isn't worth more than the absolutely crap nearly disposable headphones that came included with your phone then you're fine if you just don't value your health or your ability to hear things into your 30s and 40s then you're good just keep using that but also keep your volume down and you'll be fine where you go it's a half hour conversation and you can find it if you search for my own personal stuff because it kind of goes hand in hand with some of the things we're talking about here so I think this helps join the conversation and it's not just me guessing what might be better or worse from you this is the the she has a focus in pediatrics she's one of the top audiologists in the country and she's the director of the audiology department at UCLA so there's there's enough you would hope that she's knowing respect that she's you know she knows what she's talking about and is something that I don't feel a number of companies have properly addressed you know we're gonna give you a pair of headphones Wow how convenient how great depending on what you're using how they fit and what you listen to and how you listen to that stuff you're just gonna train yourself to listen in ways which will permanently damage your hearing any damage done to the ear is irrevocable your ear does not heal it just feels better after it acclimates to the damage that's been done so this is not good for future generations of consumers because we're training them with these types of products to listen in unhealthy ways and we're cutting we're saying it's a benefit but I digress it's a half hour conversation you can catch it dr. Alison Grimes some gadget guy smartphones and hearing loss you can find me on your favorite podcast catchers right alongside the pocket now a promotion self-promotion and speaking of promotion I'm going to refrain from comment for this last email here which was truncated for length but Roland Ranade Laporte goes on to write Google is the one and only to blame for the fall and continuous syncing of Android here where LS this was from two weeks ago when a really aggressive debate about who was to blame for the collapse of Android where's popularity Google or the OEMs and it was taking the position of the OEMs where everyone else for right or wrong chose Google now we're not on the poor it has been on the Google side of things to blame and he continues on to say that you know how cool is the Wonder that's the one and only to blame and of the discussion keep up the good work King just kidding so and I full appointed a bunch of things here so I'll try and get through these quick I had a quali watch on for a day earlier this year and I couldn't believe what I saw that Android wear has been this has had the same flaws and shortcomings of when I Eve used it for the first time in 2015 the hardware was on point for me lovely design nice display and I can live with charging one more gadget every day the software is a disaster how it looks how it performs the possibilities of what I'm able to do the navigation everything is terrible well Google made it possible for Android oh Liam's to adapt excuse me adopt the android framework to their liking no one can deny that were basically that we've basically got TouchWiz or Bui Wars with the typical fight over software update schedules and bloatware traditional watch traditional watchmakers that have boarded the sinking ship are here because there is no other option they don't have the knowledge or the means to create and maintain a whole new ecosystem for themselves Samsung's Tizen framework might be closed for now but if they ever open it Google should watch out peace so yeah just the few more thoughts about wearables to digest as I've been trying to digest for this week like this this has been a very huge week for us here this week mm-hmm so we want to thank you for going through this with us and for you know keep us keeping us in your thoughts here as we discuss the major thoughts in things I can't even say things I've I've had troubled this week just trying to put my thoughts together and yeah that's all I'm going to say and I think on that note I we should probably just wrap this up because just realize we're we're getting on almost more than 90 bits then again this you can you can head on over to pocketnow.com catch all of the top stories here we'll have links to a lot of stuff and also we'll try and include the the viewer questions just so you can kind of get into some of the discussion yourselves I'll be really curious like I said to hear some of your guys's thoughts on the different conversations that were held between LG and one plus this week and and just like this was a kind of a controversial week for news in general so in the education market who do you think is is tackling the future of tech and education well and of course make sure you tune in to the PocketNow daily hosted by our our chief technologist hi mate Iveta he's got all of the the individual stories that you're going to want to talk about on tap every day just where you can you can catch all of the fun conversations that we're having in addition to reviewing the latest and greatest in smartphones tablets and we're so folks there you have it the pocket now weekly is done this week the show is over but the conversation continues where Jules is at point Jules and I'm humbly at some gadget guy on the Twitter's pocket now is around the web on Twitter Instagram Facebook Google+ YouTube all around that web our home site pocketnow.com and for Spanish speakers definitely check out yes pocketnow.com a shows like this cannot exist without your support sharing the weekly with your friends who love mobile technology and dropping reviews on iTunes stitcher Google Play wherever else you can review podcasts you know just kind of help us keep that ranking up there so more people can discover the show and join the conversation once again we want to thank this this week sponsors the Google cloud the Google cloud platform and the podcast breach they're helping us keep the lights on but ultimately there wouldn't 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 all kinds of delicious technology so make sure you tune back in what can your data tell you with Google cloud platform use machine learning at scale to build better products it predicts so your business can thrive click now to learn more about Google cloud platform or visit Chico slash get cloud AI