 Okay. Okay. All right. Yay. Hello. Hello, everyone. Hey, fam. Oh, I need to. Oh, wow, people be talking already. And I'm Android. Yeah, people been chatting away since since their first post was at 358 in the chat room from Sean. And then Frank at 637 logged in. And Steven at 727. And then Clinton. Wow. Unbroken. They're hanging out there. Impressed 750. Yeah, the preach, by the way, like this is what's emerged. The pre show, the pre show, pre show chat has happened now, where people are showing up. People are chatting before we go live before the pre show. The pre show is the chat. Oh, hey, how's it going? Good day. Yeah. Yeah. That makes me happy. They're super faithful. That's right, Matthew. The super faithful. I like it. Oh, yeah. Number 36 for for a perfect attendance, Clinton. I mean, none of us can say that. That's true. Everyone in the audience, tell us about our audio volume. Yeah, how are we going to all sound okay? Yeah, my setup this week is a bit scuffed because I'm going to be switching between three different window sources. So but your audio setup didn't change at all. That's why I don't say why you sound different. You notice a little look a little bit darker because I'm using the opal tadpole camera. Instead of usually I was using a smartphone as my webcam, which, you know, has incredible camera and convert to most webcams. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, so fun fact, I got a Android system update last night. And and I tapped on it. And I did it. And then I did the what's new and you know, whatever. And and sure enough, it's like AI features circle the search. I was like, still doesn't work. It is not in my settings anywhere. Like every tutorial I've seen of where to go to enable it, whatever it is not there. That's weird, man. I don't understand it. I don't understand either. Yeah. Apparently I sound a bit tinny. Yeah, that's what I mean. Like, you don't maybe you're like, I don't know if you have any control over the mic, but like, Jason, you know better than I what's the low end or the high end, the, the, the, the treble, the bass, like I feel like it's a, which, which, which are the frequencies? It's an EQ issue. Well, yeah, I mean, that is if there's even any sort of EQ that could be done to it, you know, you might not even have the controls on that. I wouldn't necessarily go there. Yeah, I mean, I didn't realize you were using a lot of a lav mic. Yeah, I do when I'm here in my in my other place, my other setup, I use the Blue Yeti. But I guess maybe eventually I should figure out some way to easily transport it between these two rooms. It's just a bit of a hassle right now. So I know I can actually leave it over there. I mean, in general, a lav mic is going to pick up more room just because it's down here further away from your mouth. So it picks up more air along the way versus a mic that you're talking right into. So does anyone have a pixel handy? I have a pixel. Okay. Yes. Go to settings. Go to settings. I pick a folder. I don't think I know. Okay. Okay. Search settings and search for hold handle to search. Hold handle to search. Should be under settings system gesture navigation. Then tap the menu for the gesture navigation settings. The gesture setting systems. Are you looking for circle to search? Is that what you're looking for? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So just yeah, gesture navigation is the menu. Okay. So gesture navigation. All right. So show me what you see. I don't know if it'll focus on this. Okay, great. Oh, that's a circle to search. Yeah. So you've got it? Nope. No, he does not. It is literally not there. I don't know why it hasn't put up on some devices. It's literally been possible to enable for months for like a couple of weeks, actually, at least. I mean, I cleared the cash on Google Play Services. Like I don't like I could tell you how to enable it. How do I enable it? If you're sending an ADB command. Oh, no, not right now. Daryl Hilson in chat says that Ron, unfortunately, there were articles published that Google admitted that the pixel eight non pro is not getting so close to search. Daryl. I'm on a pixel eight pro. That's not right. Oh, non pro. Okay. No, no, that's that's not correct. I think Daryl is thinking about Gemini Nano, which is not related to the circle. Right. That's different. Yep. All I know is I think it's Google trying to drive me crazy. That's what it is. It's working. We have said enough shit about them that maybe they just have they just have us on a T list. Apparently working. Yeah. Quick reminder to everybody in the chat, especially our friends over it. If you're on Twitch, you can use the command on the screen now to submit a title for the episode. If you're on YouTube, go to AF dot showbot dot TV, where you can enter them in manually at the end of the show, we will pick a show title, which is a fun thing to do. So it is a fun thing to do. Be a part of it. There's no circle to search on the pixel fold though, which is nope. Pixel fold. It's kind of mind boggling. Not to I don't understand that one. I'm very deep. Maybe I'll I couldn't even can I ADB it? I got ADB. I ADB all the time. I guess I can. No, Google, the Google app checks what device model you're using. You could enable it on other pixels, but they only let you do it if you have a pixel seven or pixel eight. Well, then it's a totally artificial lockout on other pixels. This reminds me of crap that happened when I was working for other Google partner companies. Just I don't understand this like, allow listing of certain. It just makes no sense. I hate it. It's fine. It's what people like to do. It's what companies like to do. Makes no sense at all. Someone in a conference management product development, someone in a conference segment case, and somebody didn't challenge it strong enough, right? It's like their exclusive. Yeah. I'm sure there's a technical reason and a business reason. There must be. I mean, like why would it just be arbitrary? Let's not have it on the fold. Yeah, okay. I like how you can use a little antenna to change his emotions like this. He's like curious. But this he's angry. This he's tired. Both down would be depressed or sullen sullen. That's a good one. Oh, I played a really so there's this YouTube video I watched last night, which I think is a fun game for I'm sorry again, our age group, but it's basically like this person put together a compilation of songs from 1955 up to today. They play you. I mean, it's basically guessed the song. We play six seconds. You got to guess the song. Yeah. And I was doing real good. Like, I actually was doing pretty good, pretty good, pretty good. And at some point, my husband looks over like, you know, once they get to like 2015 2016 were screwed, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yep. That was about it. We're like, Oh, yeah, this and this and this and 1920s and grand and like early 2000, just like what is this? What's that? And then like by 2020, we're like, yep, never mind. Just what but also the list had a very hard rock bias. So there was no R&B, no hip hop, which I was upset by. But yeah, it was it was really fun up until about 2000. That's funny. So but I thought I wish I had the video to play for you guys because it would it would have been fun, I think, our age group. That reminds me of the fun I had tonight at dinner because my five year old daughter discovered Google. Well, I it's my fault. I used Google Translate to make Google talk and say things. And then we were talking about Italian. So we're translating into Italian. And then she discovered the emojis and we discovered that the Google Translate will say that the emotion of the will say the emoji, right? So it will be, you know, and so now she just sits there and types in four lines of emojis and then presses the speaker and then Google Google says, you know, red heart be sad. Full moon, half moon pancakes, pancakes, pancakes. That's awesome. Yeah, very funny. All right, should we do a show? Yeah, I think so. You also Jason, I got like, you know, drink some coffee or something, but I'm not actually gonna drink some coffee, but I'm gonna drink some fake coffee so that I wake up a little bit. I'm feeling a little groggy right now. Okay, are you good controlling and doing the lead in or do you want me to do the controls or? Sure. Yeah, do the controls at the top. Yeah, so you don't have to worry about it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. So and think about that. All right. Think about that. Say goodbye when I'm going to we only heard a blip. I did the wrong thing. There we go. I did the wrong, you know, there's one button that does the same thing. I do. So careful. All right, you can hear me. Yep. All right, I'm going to do the overlay. I'm gonna go on mute and start the music. All right. Hello, everybody out there. All of you faithful Android users, also known as the Android faithful. We are Android faithful. You're weak and source for latest news, hardware and apps for the world of Android. I know I'm faithful. I'm Jason Howell. Oh, we got I am muted. I'm win. I wasn't expecting me to come up. I was like, sorry. And I'm Ron Richards. And I'm a Salomon. Oh boy, gonna have to do some editing on this show. I am really sorry, you guys. I am really sorry, you guys. Jason. That's okay. It's good to see you all. Good to be here for another episode of Android faithful on a very consequential week. This is a big week. Big week. A lot of stuff going on. Should we get right into the big news? Yes. Jason, are you ready to? Well, I'm really in the position to show everyone. Yes, we've been teasing it. Those of you watching the live stream right now or watching the video can kind of see it, but very excited to announce that Android faithful has got Merch. I am currently wearing the first Android faithful t-shirt to be available to the general public. It is called the Android Freak Android faithful frequency. And it's designed by none other than when thanks to the great work on our promo assets. And you can get this all over at Threadless or, you know, good buddies over Threadless offer great service. You can get it at Android faithful.threadless.com. And also they have a spring sale going on, where everything's like half off, you can get a t-shirt for 13 bucks, which is fantastic. But so it for our audio listeners, it is a, a our logo on a black shirt, although you can change the t-shirt color. But it's more of the darker tones because the design doesn't work well on a light on lighter tone shirts. But it's a little the outline of our logo with a little waveform and the Android faithful logo in white. And you can get it on a whole bunch of different styles. They've got regular t-shirts, tri blend, you can get it like a softball t-shirt, you can get it on a jacket and get on a skateboard jacket. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Goodness. Yeah, guys, I'm going to order everything. Yeah, literally everything. So lots of options. It is the first of many, many, many more Merch items to come from Android faithful. So head over to android faithful.threadless.com get yours today. The sale ends on March 25th. So you want to act fast. You're going to get a couple more a few more days for it. But yeah, we're super excited to finally be getting this rolling. So super excited. Yeah, we've got more ideas kind of around this coming up. This is kind of like the first design. Stay tuned. We had to go with the logo, right? We want to make it a little different from the patron t-shirt. So if you're a patron and you're getting a t-shirt, you're getting a different style shirt. And what I like about this shirt is that it's the it's our logo. But when did an amazing job for our social media promo assets, if you follow us on Instagram, you've probably seen and I was looking at one day, I'm like, that's a t-shirt too. And so totally. It is. Yeah. In essence, there's Jason in the t-shirt as well, because that is the waveform from the theme song. Like, I don't know. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Visual representation of our theme song. Now we just need a reader. So, you know, somebody needs to create an app that can that can read the visual representation of that waveform. So when they walk up to you on the street and you're wearing this shirt, they can hold up the app and it'll play that part of the song. That's a great idea. Oh, that I should all future shirts have a QR code to go to the website. That's a great idea, actually. Dang. All right, we're gonna do that. I wish I thought about that. It's okay. This is our first shirt ever. Yes. Well, actually, second shirt ever. But first available to everyone. So we're super excited for everybody who's ordered a shirt already. It kind of soft launched earlier today with we let the patrons know it was coming. But now the whole audience, we want to let you know, go to android faithful dot thread list dot com. And we're gonna put a link up on our website so you can get to it easily. And yeah, thanks everybody in advance for buying one. We all the money goes to support the show. And we thank you. So indeed, I'm jealous that I have one everything. I'm gonna have an Android faithful section of my wardrobe now. I'm just that I don't have one in time for Japan. But as Ron as Ron said earlier in one of our chats, I was like, well, you just got to go back again. So yeah, no big deal. Yeah, no big deal. Just return. Just return with all I know by then you'll have a number of different designs. And that's true. Well, and I know that this t-shirt is already helping you, Michelle with your wardrobe plans for this coming May because you got a big event to go to, right? I mean, I'm not the only one hopefully hopefully we'll all be there. Well, I mean, in case you all didn't know that it's that time of year where people saw puzzles. Oh, oh, oh, 15 levels of puzzles, not that if only if it was we don't we're not what's what this is the event where we don't get free gifts anymore, but we do get to find out what is going on in the world of Android in the world of Google in general. Yes, Google IO was announced. And if you really don't want if you if you want to solve the puzzle and find out for yourself, then mute for the next little bit. But if you don't really care and don't like puzzles, it's gonna be May 14. At least the main keynote for Google IO 2024 will be May 14. There are going to be live keynotes and on demand sessions for us dev folks as have been previous years. I will say though that I got an invite at the dev and even though the website says just the 14th, there is something for devs on the 15th. So and I only mentioned that just because I wonder, you know, we keep talking about, you know, Google IO being quite different than it was, you know, what in the pre pre handy days. Yeah, I'm quite right. But you know what I mean. I like that. Yes, I don't know that I've heard it before. Anyway, so I guess at least from our dev side, we wonder, you know, what is going to be on the 15th? We don't know. But obviously the things that, you know, most of us and especially probably the Android face will will care about will be on the 14th. And I mean, I'll I'll spoil it. I'm already going. Anyone else thinking about going? I think we're all thinking about it. We're all thinking about it. Thinking about going. We will see. Well, yeah. So so with the 14th being the keynote and the major kind of press attendance and stuff like that, the 15th probably being focused more on devs. Yeah, I'm definitely blocking out the dates if I have to go west. That's for sure. But I know we are all awaiting our official invitations from our good friends at Google. Right. So cross our fingers. We got a good feeling about it, though. Yeah, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful. We were there last year. They can't not, you know, like we got to we got to now we started a thing where we're we all four of us were together in those boxes at the shoreline. It would be it would be sad if we didn't repeat that this year. So I'm hopeful. A tiny bit of inside baseball I have like so last year, even on the dev side, it was the invitations were extremely restrictive. Like I don't even know how I got in last year. A lot of people didn't. And I will note that friends of mine who don't even do Android anymore, don't tell anybody got invitations. So that's not to say that they're just like giving out invitations like free candy, but I think they're opening and back up to people that they know have been in the past. So I can only hope that that means something for non. So if that's true, then that means more people. And when I'm thinking of last year's event, there was a lot of things open. Oh, yeah. A lot of seats open. It was just a forward box, right? Yeah. Most of the front area was full. The pit was full. The pit was full. And then we were in the press boxes and then all those seats behind us, they were open seats all the way up to the grass and the grass was open. Yeah, definitely. The grass was open. Yeah. Okay. All right. So they're opening up. Do we think now this is this, you know, this is another year of the one day event. Maybe Google's already said this and I'm forgetting it. This is just the way it is now. This is I.O. I.O. is a day, right? Well, at this point, it seems or it's two days if you're a developer. Based on what we said, you know, it's always been one day, right? But like they've always had more days for like developer secondary keynotes. And that's seemingly what they're going to be bringing back, although like they haven't announced what they're actually going to be talking about on the second day. Yeah. Oh, OK. So I missed that part because last year was just one day still, right? It was. Yeah. Last year was only one day. Yeah. This is slightly different side baseball. So but I mean, I can tell you that I was told also the 15th in my invitation. But yeah, who knows. And even I don't even know if they're going to have sessions like they used to have like almost classroom sessions where you tell them like session to session. I don't even know if that's going to be the case. Maybe. But sometimes they also do adjacent events where they have just a bunch of us in a room and they ask us our opinions on things. So I don't know yet. I just it could be more focused. It could be more. Yeah. It could be. Yeah. Which I think might be. I don't know. I'm just speculating now. No one's told me anything. Michelle, have you heard any rumblings about about any details of it or anything that second day? No. I don't know anything. Or the first day. You're. What's the whisper network? I mean, we're not. We know they're going to talk about Android 15, of course. But why wouldn't I know that is the keynote, Michelle? We know you have it, right? Well, he's going to tweet it. That's why he's going to put on Mastodon or something. Well, so when you're going to say, oh, no, go ahead. Well, one other question that we don't know might not be happening or happening or not. Like we said, we're hoping to go. We're hopeful to go. We're thinking about if we do go, maybe we throw a party, maybe. Yeah. We thought it's all four of us going to be together and so many of our friends are going to be there and maybe some of you listening are going to be there. We thought we're thinking about possibly throwing an event the night of May 14th there in Mountain View. But we'd love to know if you want a gum. So put up a little form. It's at bit.ly at bit.ly slash AF Google I.O. All one word that's bit.ly slash AF Google I.O. And just let us know if we threw an event, if you'd be interested in coming. And then if you do, if you do, let us know if you're coming or not. It'd be great to get your email so we can let you know details if it happens or not. We're putting out feelers. We're thinking about it again. We're we're not like Jason myself haven't been invited yet. We're not guaranteed for the short going. We'd really like to. But we're wondering if we do it'd be cool to all get together and maybe do a live podcast. Also, Jason, what do you think that would be? Well, I think yes, absolutely. It's like, look, I.O. is on a Tuesday. It's like Google is basically you know, they haven't invited us yet, but they're baiting us. They're basically saying, hey, would you please come out here and do the show from here if we decide to invite you? So so the big question though is that if we did this because it's going to cost money and there's going to be, you know, like there's a lot of stuff that goes into it. We're going to have to line up how we do a live show and all that fun stuff. So we just want to get a sense if you if anybody in the Mountain View area or the San Francisco Bay area would come to this on the night of May 14th, you don't have to go to I.O. It will be totally free. We don't, you know, like we want to make it, you know, so really like if we're going to get a spot to do this, we want to make sure people show up. Yeah. So that's the main thing. Yeah, exactly. So if you're saying yes, say give us your yes, that where there's some intention behind that where it's like, you know what, if you do that, I'm there. Yeah, that's what we want to know. If people are interested, would you actually come to something like this? Because because to be honest, I don't want to do all the work if nobody shows up. So totally. Yeah, we don't want to, like, go through the hassle of like letting how getting people to help us and then no one shows up. And then we're like, yeah, right. I'm a little embarrassing. But it'd be cool to, like, have a bar there. Get a drink. We could do a live show. Maybe have some surprise guests. We could, you know, like it would be fun. It'd be a fun thing. It would be fun. So we will see. So let us know again, that's bit.ly slash AF Google I.O. Let us know if you would be interested in that. And does the capitalization scheme matter with bit.ly? Does what? Does the capitalization of A.F.G. I.O. I hope not. We'll see. I'm trying to matter. I don't know. Anyways, if you're curious, check the video version or I'll put it in the show notes. Oh, see, you can click the link. Because it does. Yeah. So OK. So then for audio listeners, just so you know, bit.ly slash capital A, capital F, capital G, Google lowercase and then capital I, capital O. And we're going to put the link in the show notes on androidfable.com and in the feed. The religion is on the podcast and on YouTube. We will make sure it's all linkable that you can get to it. Sorry about that. When I said it up, I would have expected that. I would not have expected that to be a thing. Anyway, yeah, oh dear. So so yeah. So just let us know if you want to come. So no worries if you can't or no worries if you're not in the area. But yeah, this is a feelers. So it'd be so much fun. All right. Wow. And it's already I.O. time now. Now we know that I.O. News is going to be fast and furious for the next couple of months. Probably hearing a lot about Android 15. I don't know why we would hear about Android 15. Oh, wait, we will from you, Michelle, right now. Exactly. Why wait for Google I.O. when we talk about Android 15 right now. And one of the features that I talked about last week I wrote about for Android police is this feature that Google is working on called powered off finding. And this is a feature that will allow you to find select pixel devices even when they're powered off. So last week I talked about the find my device network and basically why it's being held back because of Apple. And this feature that I'm talking about when it launches, it will rely on the find my device network. Because right basically how the find my device network works is that Android devices will be broadcasting essentially Bluetooth beacons to nearby devices that are also part of the find my device network. And if those devices are in range of the broadcasting device, they can pick up that beacon in crypto location of the Android devices broadcasting and then upload it to Google server. So that only the owner of the broadcasting device or the people that have shared the encryption key with can decrypt the location. However, in order for a device to actually broadcast the beacon to nearby devices, it needs to be powered on or rather it's Bluetooth controller needs to be powered on and sending those beacons. That's impossible on most Android devices, but on select devices that have the necessary hardware to be able to power the Bluetooth beacon and continue broadcasting, even though the rest of the components and the OS are powered off, they'll be able to do this using the powered off finding feature. So what I've found is that Google is working on implementing support for this new system API and Android 15 that allows the Google Play services app to send pre-computed Bluetooth beacons to the Bluetooth controller so that it can store those keys in the memory of the Bluetooth controller so that when the device is powered off, it can continue broadcasting those beacons to nearby devices, even if everything else is shut down. And this is a feature that I have found should be supported on the Pixel 8 and the Pixel 8 Pro, which means it'll likely also be supported on the upcoming Pixel 8A, Pixel 9 series, etc. But it's seemingly right now not supported on the Pixel Fold or older Pixel devices like the Pixel 7 series. And the reason is likely because, like I said, this is a hardware. This relies on hardware support. You have to have a lane that powers the Bluetooth controller when the rest of the components are down. It's not something you can just patch the software to enable. There has to be something that's done in the factory to enable. And it looks like that has been supported at launch with the Pixel 8 series. All we're waiting on is the launch of the Find My Device Network and then the upgrade to Android 15 to enable this powered off finding feature. That's cool. I think that makes a feature like this incredibly like far more useful if it doesn't need to be on in order to be tracked. That's that's a really fantastic. I mean, that's that takes away the friction, right? Like that. Right. This is almost like how it should work regardless. Right. Yeah. So yeah, that's good. And hey, Michelle, it's Find My Device Network. That's it's your it's your bingo. Yeah, it's your bingo card. Oh, man, we should make a t-shirt of an Android faithful bingo card. Put it in the dock. But the idea is OK. That's a good idea. Hey, I just roll big in the middle. Oh, wait, no, we want to do that's like a freebie in it. Never mind. We can talk about this later. Oh, that's a great idea. Yeah, very good idea. Love it. OK. So we're going to see that in Android 15 potentially. Hopefully. Yeah. Because we still have no idea when the Find My Device Network will actually launch. Right. And this feature is not going to launch if there's no Find My Device Network for sure. What else we got? One feature that we that I do expect will be launching in Android 15 is built in support for app archiving. So if you're not familiar, Google Play has had an app archiving feature since last year. This allows you to automatically archive apps when you're low on space to free up some storage space that are taken up by those apps. So basically how it works is when developers submit apps in the Android app bundle format, Google's back end tool takes that bundle and it generates this really stripped down version of an app called an archived APK. And then when you go to archive an app inside Google Play, Google Play pushes this archived version of the app that's like significantly smaller and it overrides the original base installation, but it doesn't clear any of your user data. So that means you can archive the app. And then when you restore it, it downloads the original app installation files and then you're back to where you were. So as an example, in the Android Authority article that I did, I did a demo with the Uber app. Before I archived it, it took up over 300 megabytes of data. After I archived it, it took up about like 14 megabytes or like an over 90 percent size decrease. But after I restored it from the archive state, I was able to open back up into the Uber app without having to sign in again. So all my account was already there. I didn't have to log in, go through all that hassle. So this could save you some time. Maybe you could figure up some space from some heavy hitter apps, but then quickly reclaim it. And the benefit of this being built into the Android OS and Android 15 is that you can go to the settings app and you can manually archive apps that you want. Previously, this is all only handled automatically by the Google Play Store. So you were basically limited to whatever it decided to archive for you, but this is being done into the OS. So you can choose when to do it. And also this means that other third-party app stores could add their own implementation of app archiving and that would be integrated with the OS. Whenever app archiving comes up, I just can't think about how revolutionary it was when NextBit did it, right? Like the fact that it's taken how many years now to get to the point, to get the functionality to the point where NextBit had it like out of the box all those years ago. Yeah, I think one key difference is that the NextBit solution, they were, I think they were literally uploading your entire app plus data to their cloud, right? In this situation, your data never leaves your device. Sure, yeah, this is the way it should be. Yeah, this is awesome. This is great, but conceptually, I mean, like giving you that level of control. And just seeing the process and seeing the little icon kind of fade out and then come back and everything, it totally reminds me of that, too. And I can't help that because that's how it was implanted, you know? Yeah, very cool. But, yeah, all right, well, before we get to the next story, I'm going to revisit the Google I.O. thing, by the way. While Michelle was chatting, I quickly made a bit.ly with lowercase letters. So bit.ly slash af Google I.O., all lowercase, that works. It works. If you capitalize the AF and the G and the I.O., that works, too. So we're covering it either way. But why? I also want to remind and mention it again. You can come to this if you're no matter what, this will be open to anybody. So if you're going to I.O., you can come. If you're just a fan and you're a listener and you're not going to I.O., you can still come. So this is going to be open to anybody. So you don't need to be going to I.O. to come to this event, eventually, you know, the other thing. So if you want to make that clear. And if you have no, like, possibility of even going to I.O. or being in the area, don't worry about the forum. Like, we don't need to know that you're across the country and like, oh, well, I won't be able to make it. Like, we're really running this to know, like, of the people who could possibly make this, who would. Yeah, exactly. And that's what it's all about, anyway. OK. Thank you for that. All right. So back to the news. This is actually something that's been developing over the past couple of weeks. I've been tracking it. Michelle, I know you've been tracking. I saw you tweeting about it. But Andrew, one of the great things about Android and gaming and stuff like that was the fact that there have been Nintendo emulators available literally for years. Right, Jason, like how long ago was the first time you saw a Nintendo emulator on Android? That's, you know, that's one of the things that I loved about Android early on was the fact that, oh, wait a minute, that emulation thing that I could do on my PC. I can now do that on my smartphone and I can take Galago with me or whatever the random game that I spend 10 seconds playing, you know? But anyway, but so Nintendo, I don't know if you've noticed, is doing very well these days. They just they just announced another Super Mario Brothers movie coming in 2026. Oh, my goodness. Things are going very well in the world of Nintendo. And so as often happens, Nintendo is actually increasing their efforts to remove third party emulators of their systems from places like Google Play. They targeted Tropic Hayes LLC, which is the developer of a Switch emulator, Nintendo Switch emulator called Yuzu, Y-U-Z-U, which forced the settlement for two point four million dollars. So Tropic Hayes had to pay Nintendo two point four million dollars. And now Nintendo is focusing on other emulators. Jurassic, a Nintendo DS emulator, they changed their their app from being four ninety nine to free with a note that will soon be removed from the play store altogether. Skyline was a Nintendo emulator that was removed from the play store after Nintendo went after it and Citra, a 3DS emulator, was also discontinued. So Nintendo emulators are being targeted and might not have much life left to them. And Michelle, actually, I just remembered, I saw a tweet that you did that folks were using Yuzu like as a as a like a development platform, right? Weren't they like Yuzu was like just a I mean, one quick testing. Skyline Skyline was discontinued before any of this stuff happened, but the developers got out before this could happen to them. But yeah, like one thing, it's kind of like an unspoken rule among like tech reviewers, like if you want to push an Android phone to its absolute limits, there was like one or two games on the Google Play Store that might do it, like Genshin Impact or Honkai Style Rail. But if you want to really push the limits of the CPU and the GPU, you want to emulate a game using like Citra for 3DS, bumping the internal resolution to like 4X, seeing how crazy it can handle it or even Yuzu, which has gotten really, really good. And that's probably the problem is really good. You can use your phone to emulate modern Nintendo Switch games. So no wonder Nintendo is angry at that. Sure. Yeah. Because that's like taking money away from them immediately because as we all know, Nintendo Switch is powered by Android, which is my bottom line. Well, it's powered by an ARM processor, but not directly running Android. But yeah, like it's very useful. Like I have Yuzu installed on my devices and it's very useful to see how well it runs like on modern day hardware. And you even saw it like on Linus Tech Tips videos, like their reviews, they use it as like the one of their benchmarking tool. It's a benchmark performance of Android flagships and something I used to do on XDA when I did those long form reviews as well. Man. That's a bit. Oh, sorry. It's a bummer. I mean, and so you've got to wonder if it's going to be side loading future, like it's going to go back to a underground thing because you can't kill it, right? Right. People still have the APKs. Like you can still install them. The thing that's not going to happen anymore is continued bug fixing and for future development on a lot of these projects until some other team or project picks it up. But it's kind of like it kind of puts a lot of the unspoken value of a lot of these Android gaming handhelds into question because a lot of the things they would never directly market the fact that people are using them for emulation. But 90 percent of people were buying these things so they could use emulators on them. They were not buying them for games that you could download off of Google Play. I mean, with a few exceptions, but that was one of the very popular reasons why people would buy Android gaming handhelds. Just nobody really wanted to talk about it in the open. Yeah, right. So it's a bummer. But I mean, emulation on on Android, like it's a strength of the of the OS that you could even do this in the first place. And, you know, always was really surprising to me how actually very easy it is to find these things through the Play Store. There's a part of me that like I can see both sides because, like, you know, aging gaming hardware. Like I'm such a nostalgic person and I have, you know, a very strong connection to my childhood experience playing a lot of these games that you can't actually get anymore. I'm like, I'm not OK with those things just like fizzling off and dying forever. Like I want there to be a way for these things to live on into eternity. And in fact, I think it's important for history. But when you've got a company like Nintendo that has an insanely successful platform like the Nintendo Switch, still very current until they release their next switch, which is probably sometime soon, you know, that's that's modern. That is now. And then you've got these emulators that can basically do the same thing on this hardware that it used to be that hardware like a phone was underpowered for modern consoles. And in this case, that isn't necessarily the case. I can totally understand why Nintendo would want to crack down on this. It's in their rights. You've got to it's in the law that you have to to protect your copyright or protect your trademark, you have to enforce it. Yeah, right. That is true. It was also interesting, like a philosophical difference, like an enforcement difference between the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. Even though, you know, there are emulators available for iOS and iPadOS, you have to sideload them using like Alt Store or whatever other method they use. Like Apple never allowed them at all on their app store versus Google. Pretty much didn't really care. Like you had these emulators available for download through with the Google Play Store. You never had to sideload them for the most part. Because they weren't shipping with games. You know, they weren't they weren't shipping with a marketplace for the games. Even then, even Google could have banned them just like Apple did. There's nothing. Yeah, it's it's an interesting kind of like different perspective that each of the companies, I think, holds on that. Google's probably perspective is that they could, in a sense, hide behind the fact that, oh, well, yeah, OK, these could be used for that, but they could also be used for good. It's kind of like Kodi, right? Like the Kodi media thing, you can get that through the Play Store. And like I venture to say, like 80%, 90% of the people that get Kodi get it because there's pirated content galore all over the place. And it's super easy to use, right? But but there's that like 10% that like, oh, well, no, it's just it's just a media platform for anything. Yeah, sure, it can do that. But I want it for this and that's enough. That's enough for it to be OK. That's like Google's stance, I think, generally speaking. Oh, well, we can't have nice things. No, or we can until it becomes too much and the company decides to eradicate them. I'm surprised I didn't do it earlier. They've been cracking down on even like streamers for a long time. It's a different sphere. But Nintendo is just incredibly protective of their IP for better for worse. And of course, it's totally their right there. I have a very strong brand. It's a very old brand, so they want to protect it. But I do question sometimes. I don't know the lack of the loss of opportunity there. And as you said, Jason, like I don't think there's anything wrong with like maintain like there's there's there's there's such a nostalgia for Nintendo. I have it too. I don't know. I know it gets really dicey. But there's something to be said about in elevating the fact that people still have this nostalgia and want to kind of access that experience. Yeah. So I don't know. Here's here's my question, though. And so it's funny that we say this because I've got a basement full of consoles that I don't do anything with. Like I'm going to go sell my old Xbox and old Xbox 360 because I just don't use them anymore. But I'm keeping my Nintendo 64 because I want my kids to play Mario Kart and Goldeneye at some point. So here's my question and I don't have a switch and I'm so far beyond this. Does Nintendo makes the old games available now via they didn't they have that on the Wii and the they do. They have that. They do have a lot of games available on Switch, not everything, but they do make a lot of them available ones that they sell the license for, that they sell their games and stuff like that. Like you probably can't get Burger Time ported to Nintendo. And yes, right, because they didn't they didn't own that game, right? Yes. Right. But but a lot of ports also varies. Yeah. Well, that's true. And a lot of the original, you know, like Konami or whatever, these these kind of classic, you know, arcade or game franchise, whatever franchises are bringing back like mega collections and releasing them. And I mean, a part of that is because there is demand and there was obviously demand because people are willing to, you know, do the emulators and stuff. I would want the longest time. Those things just weren't available anymore. It was like, well, well, that's lost to the sands of time. If you wanted them, you had to do this. But now, ironically, ironically, a lot of those ports that are being released from modern consoles actually contain emulators that are used to run. Oh, totally. Yes. That's a slightly different. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I yeah, I would much rather play original Castlevania or Super Star Wars than the Super NES than any game on Switch now, because that's just where my head is at. I mean, as Matthew in the chat, I want to give you a shout out because he said I remember Burger Time as a kid on on on television. I still have my Intellivision in the basement. I'm not getting rid of that. I love it. Don't get rid of that. Intellivision was the best. So, yeah, it's all just wrong. That's why X-Men 97 is now a thing. I have a thing about that as a different show. All right. Well, real quick, all you amazing patrons out there. We love you for supporting the show the way you do. Patreon.com slash Android faithful. You enable us to do this each and every week. And for those of you who are not patrons, the Patreon, the patrons are supporting us so that you can watch it to and listen to it. So they're pretty awesome, right? Patreon.com slash Android faithful. And we every week, we put up a poll to give patrons the opportunity to vote for a story, a news story. And we did that this week. And we actually also are featuring the art that is sent in. Usually I generated, I guess now we have to do. We have to disclose this on YouTube now, I think. Anyways, who created this this AI image? So Joe Catskill from Loyal Patron. He submitted this little cartoonish version of a I'm assuming this is a bug droid reading the news on his own podcast. Oh, OK. And it's very colorful. I like the mix of colors. I like the big eyes as if he's got some startling news to share in his podcast and the microphone. So I like the the extra little wires of microphones pouring out of his body as if he's ready for other people to join him. They aren't there yet. I also like the news is about bugs. Like it's like a newsletter, like this week's bugs. And the other side is the fixes. Oh, Joe, for submitting that one. Thank you for that great. Yeah, please send your bug droid creations to contact that Android faithful.com. We've got a great we've got a pool of them to pull from already, but we need more. So send them in. Keep them coming. This is this is a great thing that we love featuring. So anyways, we put up three news stories for patrons to pick from. And let me see if I can scroll to them in third place. Nineteen percent of people voted for the Pixel 9 made debut Google's adaptive touch feature in second place. Forty percent voted for Apple reportedly exploring a partnership with Google for Gemini powered features on iPhone. And it was neck and neck. Like we actually had to kind of delay the call on this because it was so close. That was 40 percent. Forty one percent got the win. And it turns out that this is actually Michelle's article. So I'm going to throw it over to Michelle. But basically Android phones, Gemini Nano, getting a pretty cool feature that Google has offered, but on device instead of in the cloud. Tell us about that, Michelle. So basically a couple of months ago, Google through their search labs experiment feature in the Google app, rolled out a feature that lets you summarize web articles using AI. And if you enable this experiment, go to any article and then you'll see this like get AI summary button that taps. You tap on it. It shows like a bullet point summary of the article that you're currently on. And I found evidence that looks like this may be powered by Gemini Nano on compatible smartphones in the future. And the article basically just goes over the evidence. It's kind of tough to explain the evidence. But so I really reading the article if you want to see like what the evidence is. But the TLBR is that this feature may be coming to Gemini Nano powered devices that will still be available on other devices. Just be running on the cloud through whatever, you know, Gemini Pro model is running this article summary feature. But if you want the on device, maybe the privacy security aspect of it, you care about that. You can have that for you running on device on devices like the Pixel 8 Pro or the Galaxy S24 series. I will admit I've been using this. This first popped up. I'm Michelle popped up a couple of a couple of months ago, right? A couple of weeks ago or so in this year. And I use it quite frequently because so many articles have so much crap and bloat on the pages. And I don't want to have to scroll through and deal with the ads and stuff like that. So you give me a generated summary. And I get a little summary of the articles. I know what's what's coming and make the decision if I want to, you know, deal with that and do the deep dive in. So I appreciate this functionality. I think it's great. You get the cliffs, cliffs notes of the Internet. I'll take it. Listen, I'm a busy man. Just get to this, get to the real stuff. Awesome. Yeah, I think that would be a really, really useful feature. And knowing that that's on device. Yeah, I think that's going to get a lot of use. Big shout out to Mark Wansel to Jesse Bernoudi. I'm not sure in the last name. Kevin Valencia, three amazing patrons who are with us and supporting us through Patreon dot com slash Andrew Baple. We love you all. You're so amazing. Thank you for your support. And I can't wait to see who we feature on next week's episode when we do this again. And I will remind everybody that we live stream every Tuesday night at 8 p.m. Eastern 5 p.m. Pacific on YouTube dot com slash Daily Tech News Show and on twitch.tv slash Good Day Internet. And it is and it is worth it to either watch live or go to YouTube to watch the recording after it comes out to see when use OS X is the Mac OS is little like hearts that come out and thanking patrons. She knows all the tricks. Yes. I'm not upgraded during meetings so many times, you guys. You can turn it off. I keep telling you. No, no, no, but I think I think she's just embraced it at this point. Oh, it's great. It's it's part of the thing. It is. All right. Coming up, we've got some really great hardware news. All right, let's start with you and the hardware block, Michelle, because you've you've had the Zenfone 11 Ultra for a while now. What do you think? That's right, Jason. I've had the Zenfone 11 Ultra for about a month now. So they announced this last Thursday as we didn't get a chance to talk about it last week. But now that I've had it for a month, I can talk about it in full. And when they announced the Zenfone 11 Ultra last Thursday, it sparked quite a lot of discussion online about whether this is the end of small phones. There was even an article, there's even a video by Marques Brownlee that went viral about like small phones are dead. We killed them or something like that. And it's when you look at the Zenfone 11, it's a bit true compared to the the Zenfone 8, 9 and 10, which each boasted of smaller than six inch display. I think each were five point nine inches. The Zenfone 11 Ultra has a massive six point seven eight inch display. It's not only significantly larger, but also has the same overall design of the ROG phone eight minus the air trigger shoulder buttons or the USBC port on the side. And actually, I'm going to switch my camera over now to crossing fingers. Yes, there you go. And actually, before I show you the phone in full, let me just show you the layout quickly, since it has the same overall layout as the ROG phone eight, it also has this off center USB port, see port on the bottom, you can see it's like on the left. And this makes it a bit awkward to use with some Cardocs and many third party telescopic gaming controllers. And yeah, I that's one aspect that I don't like that it borrows from the ROG phone eight. And just just give you a bit of a perspective on how big this phone is. So here's on the left, I have the Zenfone eight and on the right, the Zenfone 11 Ultra. That is massive. It's significantly bigger, right? It almost looks like you're holding the ultra close to the camera. And like this is the Zenfone nine. You see the exact same size as the Zenfone eight and then the Zenfone 10 exact same size as the Zenfone eight and seven. So you read to that. The Zenfone 11 Ultra is just right. So this is really dramatic difference. You could fit the Zenfone 10 completely inside the Zenfone 11 Ultra. Like it completely envelopes it. That's how much bigger it is on all like it's wider and taller. That's crazy. And before I the reason I'm not going to show you like my actual Zenfone 11 Ultra without the case is because I didn't see and I dropped it and I cracked the back. So here are some photos of the phone before I did the OOPSY. Oh, remember when? It's quite a beautiful phone and I'm sad. I can't show you the actual back. But here's I feel like we need some heart when it's still looking to play over this. I'm glad you got photos of the smallest before you broke it. That's great. It was during this photo shoot that the incident happened, unfortunately. OK, so back to my sorry window. I've been there. I could only laugh. It happened. I know, I know. It happens. OK. So yeah, I'm pretty used to the bigger phones. The large size hasn't really bothered me. But if you are coming from the Zenfone 8 or Zenfone 9 or Zenfone 10, you might find this bigger size challenging or off-putting to use. But it being bigger actually has some material benefits as there's now room for a much larger fifty five hundred milliamp hour battery versus the forty three hundred milliamp hour battery in the Zenfone 10 battery life and charging for me. I've been pretty great, by the way. I've been averaging about five to six hours of screen on time each day. And because of the larger size, there's also room for a third camera. There's a thirty two megapixel three X optical zoom telephoto lens of OIS on board. And there's also a fifty megapixel IMX 890 sensor coupled with ASUS signature six axis hybrid gimbal OIS plus a thirteen megapixel 123 field of view ultra wide angle lens. And the Zenfone 10 also had a fifty megapixel main camera. I think it had a IMX seven something and it also had a thirteen megapixel ultra wide angle. So what's new is the three X telephoto. My overall impression of the camera is that it's just fine. Let me pull up my window quick of the photos that I took. All right. My thing is a bit scuffed here. So here we go. I made an Amazon photos album of all the photos that I took. And yeah, I took a whole bunch of photos at the Houston rodeo. Pretty fun experience. I'm just showing some of them here. Let me go back to. Yeah, I don't know if you can still see it. Well, we can see the half screen basically. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Let me. I don't mind my absence disappeared. Let me just go back to my video capture device. Mouse, where you go? Mouse, where you go? Where's the mouse? We've lost the mouse. We lost the mouse back mouse. Oh, no. All right. Well, maybe we should pivot to something else while he looks for the mouse. Here's the phone. Yeah. What happened on the side? And technology, that's what always happens. So, Michelle, what else can you tell us about the phone from getting hands on with it? OK. Sorry. There you go. I think you can see my. Video in your mouse. There we go. There we go. So my overall impression of the camera is just fine. I think I'll save you the time of going back and forth between the windows and I'll just share the Amazon photos link and the Amazon video link and just talk about the photo so you can look for yourself. My overall impression of the camera is just fine. Like the photos and videos that it takes aren't bad or stellar. And that's fine for me. I've never noticed an issue with inaccurate colors or out of focus objects for people. Although I do think the bokeh effect in the dedicated portrait mode looks noticeably fake in some of the photos that I took. The three X telephoto looks pretty good, like photos from it, except, you know, it does offer like enhanced zoom up to 30X, which I think is kind of unusable. I think standout feature, the Zenfone camera. And it's been good since the older devices is the stabilization. Even with the default adaptive stabilization mode, sorry, it's amazing. Like you can see if I'm going to the camera, you see there's an adaptive stabilization mode and it's also a hyper steady mode. Both are amazing. Like it's look like you're walking around with an gimbal on your hand when you're walking around taking vlogging style videos with it. If I had any complaints, I'd say that, you know, there's no consistent video recording resolutions. The low light video quality is not that great. Doesn't support Google's HDR, ultra HDR format and low light selfies, even though ASUS says they implied noise reduction algorithm to them to make them look better, I still think they don't look all that great overall. However, I do think the phone generally takes great selfies in good lighting conditions and the addition of the 0.8X wide angle mode. Here you can see the webcam that I'm using is a pretty great option to take group selfies. There are other AI camera features like AI portrait video, AI object sense, light trail mode, et cetera. I only tried out the AI portrait video which applies a bokeh effect to in real time to human and other pet subjects. I think it's a little gimmicky. It is kind of cool when it works though. Moving on from the camera, there's also larger dual stereo speakers. You have a speaker at the bottom and I think speaker is at the top grill. The screen to body ratio is like 95 or something like some crazy like that. So there's barely enough room for actual big speakers but it does work pretty well. And if you do care about that, there's also a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack at the bottom which is nice. To be honest, I don't really care about that anymore because it's been so long since phones dropped them. But if you do care about that, it's nice to have. The display though, it has a full HD resolution LTPO AMOLED display that goes up to 120 Hertz in most apps and up to 144 Hertz in most games. One thing that I don't like about the refresh rate is that in the default auto mode, for some reason Zen UI, like it loves to force the refresh rate down to 60 Hertz in apps like Reddit or an apps like Telegram or many apps that have like a web view that use like an integrated web browser. So it's kind of jarring to like use a lot of apps that I frequently use which are social media apps that have like web views that are scrolling at a stuttery 60 Hertz and then I open Chrome or some other app and like the settings of the launcher and it's a buttery smooth 120 Hertz. So typically I just like to stick it to 120 Hertz constant. I don't let the OS handle the refresh rate at all and I hope ACS kind of looks at that and fixes that. Rounding out the specs, there's an aluminum frame which I again, I can't show you here and an IP68 rating, 68.5 watt wired and 15 watt wireless charging and Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 paired with up to 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gigabytes of UFS 4.0 storage. As you'd expect with these specs the Zenfone 11 Ultra has no trouble whatsoever handling whatever I throw at it which as I mentioned before the amount of stuff you can do with a phone this powerful is kind of waning with the golden age of emulators winding down but there are some stuff you can do like there are some on-device AI features that this phone packs that I guess kind of do need this processing power. Like there's an AI transcription feature in the sound recorder app that I can show you quickly right here. It's basically, there we go. I had this recording. I just did this brief recording as a test and it just transcribed this in real time. There's also a generate summary feature that runs on device AI and it just summarizes it. There's like a quick five second clip by doubt and it can actually summarize this sort of thing. It also has an AI call translator in the dialer app, AI noise cancellation, VoIP apps like WhatsApp and an AI semantic search feature. So the semantic search feature basically like you take photos of people they can like recognize people they can recognize objects like food, sky, vehicle, plant, et cetera, things like that. The AI transcription call translator features rely on language packs. There's also a on-device. This one, I thought was kind of cool at first an on-device AI wallpaper generator. So if you're familiar with the Pixel phones you can generate wallpapers using the cloud. Well, this one's totally on-device using stable diffusion model that then is upscaled using a super resolution technique. I thought it would be useful at first and neat but unfortunately because it's all running on-device you're kind of limited in the quality of images you can get and also you have to download a three gigabyte model to even make this work. So I'm not as sold on it anymore. But if you like having all your data run on-device then I guess it could be useful. Lastly, the Zenfone 11 Ultra as you can see you run Zen UI on top of Android 14 with unfortunately only two years of OS updates and four years of security updates promised. It does pack some nifty features like built-in integration with Microsoft's link to Windows feature. If I could show you right here, link to Windows. This is integrated built-in which means that you can stream apps from your phone to your Windows PC, share your clipboard or use it as an instant hotspot. There's also ASUS's Glidex software which does much of the same thing but with ASUS devices. There's also a new video genie feature that offers additional controls when using media apps and for the first time in Zen UI integrated support for Google's live captions feature and their personal safety apps. So I really do think that Zen UI overall is pretty neat for what it has and I really like that you can customize it. It's basically like stock Android but with a lot of useful enhancements and the ability to customize a lot of the default settings. But there are still some annoyances like the fact that background app management is still enabled by default which could be why for me Gmail notifications has just been hit or miss. Like I've not been getting them on time. So I've had to disable manually a lot of the background app management settings. Now just to talk a bit about the setting, the price. Sorry. It starts at $899 US. It's not on sale yet in the US or 999 euros. It's kind of difficult to recommend this phone because sure it might be $100 cheaper than the Pixel 8 Pro or S24 plus at their respective MSRPs but both those devices frequently go on sale. They offer longer software support and they have more software bells and whistles. On the other hand, there's the OnePlus 12 which offers comparable specs and two more years of US updates plus an additional year security updates at $100 less. I think Asus had an incredibly compelling offering with last year's Zenfone 10 which had flagship tier specs and a compact form factor and a great starting price of $699 US dollars. It's a shame that wasn't more popular which may be why we have this hybrid Zenfone ROG phone in the form of the Zenfone 11 Ultra. Hopefully they have a smaller Zenfone 11 model in the works. Otherwise I think it's fair to say that the small phone experiment is only gonna be kept alive by niche third party OEMs and not big players like Asus. Cool. All right. And that's my review of the Zenfone 11 Ultra. I do think it's an overall solid device with a couple of AI bells and whistles. It's just a tough thing to sell considering the competition this year. From like, it's really hard to beat seven years of support and all the AI features when you don't have the kinds of capabilities and partnerships with Google that Samsung does or the kinds of in-house AI software engineering that Google does. It's a tough market right now for sure. But I mean, they're in it for a reason. They're an established brand. There's gotta be an audience that's loyal, right? We're 11 generations into the phone, right? So yeah, you're right. I mean, it is hard, you know, if a new user comes in and trying to compare the seven years of support or the other stuff, but they've gotta have some level of comp, they've gotta compete somehow, right? And so, you know, the best way they can do it is by making a really pretty phone and throwing in whatever features they can. So I credit Asus for putting together a compelling case with the phone for sure, so. Yeah, cool. Yeah, it's been a long time since I had like an Asus phone experience and talking to years at this point. So I was curious to kind of hear kind of how they're doing nowadays. It's a big phone. It's a big, big phone. It's a big phone. Chonker. I know indeed. Well, let's go in the opposite direction from that, though. And real quickly, because we are running long, but so Motorola's a brand that I've always, I've long time loved what they did in the mid-range and it looks like they've got another year of me continuing my appreciation because the new G series is really, really looking interesting. So the Moto G Power 5G, which sells for $299 and the Moto G 5G, which sells for $199, both have NFC, vegan leather back panels, which is totally a thing now, which is awesome. Totally a thing. I know, remember we joked about it years ago and now it's a thing? It's got a micro SD slot for those of you who need it, those of you who want it, it's got a courage port for those of you who still love it, I don't know why. So these are really good phones, like they look to be really, I haven't got my hands on one yet, but they look to be really good phones at a really good price. The Moto G Power 5G's got wireless charging at 15 watts, which is the first time and honestly, find me a mid-ranger or a low-end device that has wireless charging, right? That's pretty rare. Yeah, that's it. It's got a 6.7 inch 1080p LCD display that runs at 120 Hertz. It's running on the MediaTek Density 720 chipset with 8 gig of RAM. It's got dual cameras, 50 megapixel main with OIS and an 8 megapixel ultra-wide with autofocus that can double as the macro camera and it's got a 5,000 milliamp batteries. That's pretty solid. That's why it's got the power in there. And then the Moto G 5G is a 6.6 inch 720p LCD display with 120 Hertz, Qualcomm Snapdragon 4 Gen 1, and then with 4 gig of RAM. It's got two cameras, the 50 megapixel main and a two megapixel macro, which probably isn't that great. And no announcement about their commitment to updates. So, you know, whatever Motorola's been doing, I assume it's gonna be at least that, but we'll see if they jump on the bandwagon and finding more length of the devices, but $199, $299. These are very well-priced mid-rangers. And nice to see the mid-rate, like on the low end of price in the mid-range, but still delivering the spec. So way to go, Motorola. I would like to get my hands on these. So I need to chase down a contact with Motorola. So get in the wireless track. I'm still surprised that only these now, that this range of phone is only now is getting the NFC. And I only know that because one of my only other friends who has an Android phone who isn't a dev or engineer has a lower-end Motorola phone is like, yeah, I don't have NFC. And I'm like, what? How do you not have NFC? I just kind of assumed it was kind of like... Toad-quad-ness, right? Yeah, same. I'll tell him about this phone. Yeah. Like wireless charging? I can understand that not being in range or low end, but NFC, I just kind of assumed like, oh yeah, NFC. It's a component. That's just one of those things that's in everything now. Increases the bomb, right? Makes it more expensive, yeah. It is, but I don't know, especially with tap to pay being everywhere, and it just hit me weird. Like, what do you mean you don't have NFC? I was like, give me, I'm almost like, give me a damn phone. Let me see what this is. I'm like, yeah, anyway. I just think it's interesting. I just think it's interesting. But you know what else is interesting is, and especially for those of you who are SOC nerds, the Snapdragon 8S, not 8, 8S Gen 3 has been announced and we got a good idea of some specs. So this is really interesting because we've talked a lot about the Snapdragon, both 8 Gen 2 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 recently, both being, you know, various successful chipsets, you know, high performing, you know, a lot of good, you know, as a system on chip device reviews. And it's kind of interesting to look at this new Snapdragon 8S Gen, sorry, 8S Gen 3, and to look at it from both a kind of, you know, specifics of the configuration. I mean, we don't have to go into like real details, but the most important, I think the most, the thing that you should take away from it, it's really interesting because this is meant to be a cheaper SOC, but that still has premium features. And in terms of just like the configuration and the cores that use it, actually, it's like a blend of both the 8 Gen 2 and the 8 Gen 3, where it's actually using the same cores. And if I'm getting something wrong, I mean, yell at me because this is no longer my area of expertise. But it's using the same cores as the 8 Gen 3, but in a different configuration, also at lower clock speed. So it very much is sitting in a very interesting place in the middle. And it is meant to be kind of like a more affordable chip, but what is kind of one of the things that is, that they're looking to make the 8S Gen 2, sorry, 8S Gen 3 stand out is AI features because you cannot have a processor that doesn't have, AI specific functionality. And yeah, so what does, I guess, really distinguish the 8, sorry, I'm gonna keep messing this up, the 8S Gen 2. See, I messed it up again. Yeah, it's easy. Sorry. The 8s. The 8S, I'm just gonna call it the 8S. So what really is interesting about the 8S in that it is a bit kind of, I guess, lower spec than the 8 Gen 3, is that it does have on-device AI computation. So it is kind of like bridging that gap, because we really just, we recently just talked about how surprisingly the Pixel 8 won't get, is that right, Pixel 8 won't get Gemini Nano, right? And so if you think about that, whatever that gap is in the hardware, not saying that this processor in particular is plugging that particular hole, but that there is kind of something to bring AI and all of these new kind of AI computational intensive things to mid-range phones. So that's kind of basically what it seems like this 8S is kind of geared towards not Hondo P, high, high, high and premium flagship phones, but something in the middle, something a little more affordable, but that can still handle AI. It also supports the Wi-Fi 7 standard. It can support QHD plus displays at 144 Hertz and also 4K at 60 Hertz. The actual video it supports is a little bit down. So that's where there's gonna be some trade-offs. And some of that is like, for example, in the video support. But there's plenty of other nice premium features. If you're like an image processing nerd, there is triple 18-bit image signal processing paired with the hexagon neural processing unit, which actually could lend to very advanced features. They have this always sensing feature that should help with things like face unlock. Oh my God, my chair just decided to break under me. QR codes, oh my gosh, I'm sweating now. And also the combination of the image signal processing and this neural processor should allow kind of more midi-rangey phones, like lower premium phones, boost image quality and dark conditions and also do some out-painting, which you can think of, and which is the article explained as uncropping, kind of not like the opposite of enhance, where you get more on the outside. Anyway, AI features and also still allow a maximum camera resolution of 2,000 MP. I think I wrote, did I say 200, 2,000? I missed a zero. I think it was, it's 200, sorry, not 2,000, 200 MP. And still bring you some gaming beefiness with the Adreno GPU. So yeah, for all of you processing nerds out there, the 8S Gen 2 has some really interesting stuff. And I think it's really cool to see like trying to bring the fancy features and possess the AI to not just expensive ass $1,000 phones. So we'll see what happens and see what phones have this. There is already kind of like declared support for this, or rather kind of uptake of this SOC from brands like Honor, Realme and Xiaomi. So maybe we'll hear more about some 8S Gen 3 phones in the future. And I'm gonna fix my chair real quick. My God, that was scary. You brought up a really good question during that. We didn't want to fix your chair. What is it called when it expands the photo, right? Like, is that generative? I guess it's generative AI. Is that just what it is? It is generative because it's making the picture. Extrapolation. That's what it is. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. That's the correct term. Filling, outfilling is another. Because Google, Google for outpainting, yeah. Google outpainting, yeah. Google Photos did that to my, remember the video example I showed you where it extrapolated my daughter's arm and created it. That wasn't in the video, even though she does have an arm. But yeah, I was wondering, because you're right, cropping is one thing, but when you're adding to it, it's kind of generative extrapolation. There's gotta be a more. I actually did a live demo of the feature in question basically on the Galaxy S24 when we had that episode for that review. Like when I tilted, there's one image where I tilted it a little bit and then it used generative AI to fill in. Like when you rotated photo, right? It doesn't have the corners, like information on the corners anymore. It used its generative AI to fill in that bits of information and created a fully landscape photo again. Wow. That's amazing. Living in the future and now just not the premium phones. But yeah, but I will say like bringing AI to the masses, this is how it's gotta happen, right? It's gotta, you know, when you start seeing these features in the mid-rangers from not, you know, from other manufacturers, like this is how it's gotta happen. So, cool. Yeah. Time and time again, the elite premiums get it first and then it starts to, I don't say trickle down, but you know, it starts to, the technology gets cheaper and more apt for kind of the restricted resources of smaller phones. Okay. Right. Wireless charging coming to the Moto G. What about NSP, man? Right? Yeah, NSP, forget about that one, but yeah. So this is an interesting rumor. I will go ahead and preface it by that, but I will say before getting the rumor, the Apple Watch, okay? Very much steadfast when it comes to committing to the square slash rectangular design. You remember in the beginning, I remember in the beginning, it was a point of contention for a lot of people. It was like, oh my God, that watch doesn't look like a watch. It looks like a phone screen on your wrist. Like I want a watch that looks like a watch. And it kind of divided people into separate camps. If you remember early on Samsung, and I have one here to show off here, Samsung did the square thing. This isn't their first smartwatch that I have in my hand. If you're watching the video version of this show, this is their second. This is the Samsung gear live. And boy, is it a piece of junk. But anyways, these things have clearly come a long way in 10 years. Let me just say, if you saw this in person, you would absolutely agree with me. We could spend a whole other episode on why this thing is a piece of junk. But Samsung did the square thing, and then they switched to the round thing, which I've got the OnePlus Watch 2 on my wrist. It's round. A lot of my favorite wearables have been round. Rumor has it, according to Sam Mobile, that Samsung is considering a return to the Squarish form factor. Still very much a maybe, according to the source. So this is just kind of more like a thought experiment than anything. Like, should Samsung try this? And if Samsung does this, do we think Samsung's gonna be like, nope, all of our future phones are gonna be square? Or is this just Samsung saying, well, actually now at this point, things have kind of iterated and grown enough that maybe we can offer both. Give people options. Jason, do you remember the Gwatcher? The Gwatcher, yeah, I remember the Gwatcher. The Gwatcher was the watch, I remember. It was an LG. The Gwatcher. Oh, the Gwatch. LGG Watch, yes. The Gwatcher R. Yeah, the Gwatcher. LGG Watch R. Yeah, it's funny when this story hit up, I was just like, oh, there aren't Square. Like, Square makes sense. Like, I would wear a Square watch. I will say Square phone screens are probably easier to dev for than fricking scope circles. Oh, probably so. I mean, because UI, yeah, where do you put the UI when everything's circular? I mean, has that been a hindrance for wearables on Android? I mean, developers have obviously, they've learned over time because we're 10 years, 11 years into this whole wearable thing, I think. Maybe even longer than that. I think generally, yes. I think generally, yes, but there is, I mean, I'm just thinking about it off the top of my head. Like, yeah, I mean, just in general, wearables are such a smaller, have so much less real estate. It's gonna be hard in general. And that's part of it is just that, what features can you provide that have utility to someone on such a small screen? I think, to be fair, the use case, the difference between a small square versus a small circle is not trivial, but it's probably like the same. I think there's like a general challenge of, man, this is not very many pixels. But I do think there is probably something about circular screens. It kind of makes me think of the Motorola flat tire a little bit where, and this is kind of different, right? Because now circular, you know, wearables have the full screen, but that feels kind of like in the same genre of okay, like there are some like physical limitations that the UI has to sort of get around and play with. And I can't imagine that, you know, just like, you know, sloped or circular sides rather, just give you even less space. And then of course, it's not just, you can't just pick square or circle. You have to support everything and heaven forbid if someone comes up with a triangular phone, but that's not a bad idea. If someone wants to do that, I mean, I'll take a look at it. But, you know, that's, yeah. I just wonder, but I don't know, a square phone might be more, it would be marginally to moderately easier to develop for than a circular screen. I will say that. Interesting stuff. Yeah. I would like to see it. I was just like, more choice, more opportunity, I guess, right? Would you like to see a triangular watch? This is not a smart watch, but it is triangular. And I would love to see what developers did with that. Oh. That'd be so cool. That'd be a nightmare. That'd be very cool. Especially like, depending on how you orient it. Yeah. Oh my goodness. I'm sorry, I'm just imagining that. That would be horrible. Now I kind of want to do that just for funsies, just to make a triangular watch face. I was like, somebody's had to have just like, yeah, sure, I'll do the triangular smart watch so that we can be the one example that appears when people sort of don't. It'll always be talked about, right? Yeah, it'll always be the first. All right, well, the roundout hardware, we were talking about Google I.O. earlier in the show, and it's also the time of year for the Pixel A series to be coming, and we've had some leaks coming from the Pixel 8A. We talked about it a little last week. Pixel 8A is getting a little more leaky, which always means that it's getting closer. It's getting closer. The latest leaks are that the OLED display will refresh up to 120 hertz. Last year was 90 hertz, so they'll make it a little more buttery, right? I think that's the term you use there, Michelle. And then it's got 1400 nits, peak HDR brightness. We'll have a display port output, enabled in Android 14 QPR 3 beta, and running the Tensor G3, which is the same as the 8 series. So the 8A get a little more leaky, a little more real. So we'll see. I love that display port, so. All right. Go upgrades the camera says the article as well. No upgrades the cameras. The camera's always pretty, has been pretty spot on. And then more preparation coming for Google I.O. I only assume because the YouTube music team has been, the YouTube music product team has been very busy, it seems, seems lately. A whole bunch of stuff happened with YouTube music lately. First and foremost, the long awaited song search is finally coming to YouTube music. This is similar to a feature that rolled out late last year for YouTube. It's a dedicated button next to the search bar and it shows a voice or song choice and you can hum the song or play a song to find it in your library. Interestingly enough, also Google Play Music had much better song search than YouTube music does. YouTube music song search is not very good in the app and so I'm glad to see more focus around this to zero in on the song you wanna listen to. Also, YouTube music is getting a trim silence feature, according to our friends over at 9 to 5 Google, who looked at the APK of the app for a clue. And those of you who listen to podcasts know that trim silence is a feature that's often found in many podcast apps, much like pocket casts, my podcast app of choice. The code string says, quote, skip stretches of silence during episodes and you know, what else is called an episode other than a podcast? So I guess YouTube music is shoring things up for the podcast stuff. I hope to see a little more at Google IO about YouTube music, about the podcast support, about the whole product in general. So maybe it's starting to happen. Still a dedicated YouTube music user, Richard's. I'm still using it, it's just all there, I don't know. Yeah, you get used to it over time, I'm sure. I did just take, I still had the 100 plus gig of my Google Play Music takeout download in a folder on my desktop and I finally just moved that to an external hard drive. I clearly don't need this. I'm gonna get to it one day. I have all the screenshots and everything but I just need to get to it, so yeah. I have to run a div between what was in Google Play Music versus what is in my hard drive collection and then who's the time, so. Yeah, it is the time spent doing that. Is it really worth it? It might be, I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Feds on OCD I wanna get, but. Yeah, there you go, yeah, that's it. Well speaking of music, Spotify is doing apparently or probably going to do. No, this is launched. Doing what I hated YouTube music for doing, which was adding music videos. They're gonna be, they're launching a beta of the feature in select countries. US is not one of them, so not for now are you getting it in the US, but eventually you probably will. But there's gonna be similar to YouTube music. There's going to be a slider that essentially allows you to switch between, you know, the music version and the music video. But I also realized like my hangup on this was very particular to a certain reason and that's because at the time, my daughters were younger than they are now as we all are, cause time. And they're, they were much more likely to seek out the music device that we had for just music and use it as another conduit for watching a screen of some sort. That's my biggest problem now is that like I've got the nest hub in the kitchen and the kids yell songs and then it pulls up the music video and then they just stand there and watch the cartoon when like, where if it puts up the dumb song from Despicable Me, they'll dance around the kitchen and have a dance party as soon as the video starts, you know, so Spotify and YouTube Jason do not care because guess what earns more money? Video ads. Video ads have higher CPM than audio ads. This is the only reason why they're doing it. See, and I thought it was just like one of those. Yeah, I mean, that obviously makes sense from a business perspective, but I always just kind of thought like, well, music and music videos, they kind of do go hand in hand. And I mean, if you've got, if you're listening to a song and it's just as easy to also play the video that is attached to that song, then why wouldn't you? But your, your reason makes a lot more sense. Well, and like, and I'll challenge that also. And that like, as someone who grew up watching music videos who like my favorite bands, I found out about by watching 120 Minutes on MTV, yeah, 30 years ago, way too long. Welcome to the show, old man. The concepts, the paradigm of sitting and watching a music video is much different than listening to records or listening to a playlist or listening to a mix as we used to call it and that sort of thing. And they, they YouTube and Spotify treat them the same, which I think is not right and not accurate. But to them, it's monetizable. That's what it comes out to. It is funny when I would, when YouTube music first integrated videos and a lot of times also in that vein, music videos are a little more cinematic than the music and I'm doing a workout and listening to a song. All of a sudden I start hearing like car noise or street noise and I'm like, what happened? And it's because the music video version got like rolled into my playlist and I'm, you know, I'm in like the 32nd to two minute intro to someone's cinematic masterpiece that when I wanted the song, which is fine. Like again, that's like a different setting, right? I want like music, as you said, music and video are obviously and less obviously different experiences. So silly, but anyway, it's a very, very big complaint. Yeah, monetization. Good point. All right, round us out, Michelle. Yeah, so if you're not familiar, if you ever tried to download and import a pass, a digital pass that you've gotten in the .pkpass format, which is the format that Apple developed for its own Apple wallet system, you may have noticed that you've had to use a third party app to convert it so that you can import it into Google wallet. Well, soon you won't have to use a third party app anymore because Google wallet is finally rolling out a support for importing and converting digital passes that are saved in Apple's pkpass format. And one user on Telegram told me that they got this and they shared a video with me that shows them importing a generic pkpass file into Google wallet. And then other users chimed in, responding to me saying that they also see that on their device. I don't have this yet, but from what users are telling me, this is slowly rolling out and a lot of users are able to add passes in this format now. Now you probably don't see this format a lot anymore. Like it really depends on where you live, what services you use, what public transit systems you use, what airlines you use, like it really depends. There are still some services out there that don't support Google wallet. They only send you their passes in the pkpass format. And if that describes you, then you may find this incredibly useful. If not, you probably will never use this feature. Interesting. I don't know if I find that useful or not, but we'll find out. I've never encountered a pkpass file out in the wild. Neither have I. Even though I was looking, I was like, I was just looking to see like I've never heard of that format either. So yeah. Excellent. Cool. All right. That's app news. Now we got some feedback. Got some emails. Contact at androidfaithful.com is how you can get involved with us in the feedback section. And we'll start with you and what you got. Yeah. I have a really great tip from listener Linda. I just discovered the other day that you can pinch to zoom in Google messages to make the text bigger. I don't think I ever saw those anywhere. Makes a big difference to my almost 60 year old eyes and it may help some others. I don't know if it's just a pixel thing, but it works on my seven pro Linda from Long Island. And yeah, I do want to note this is actually, I love that you pointed that Linda. And it's interesting because like, I know you can like kind of zoom to, you can pinch to zoom on a lot of different content and apps like Gmail and Chrome or whatever, but usually what happens, often what happens is that the text itself will zoom, but the UI itself will not. And I think, and I did try to say that, but Google messages does a good job at kind of making everything kind of like, I don't know, just fit. I don't know. It just seems like a more fluid experience. Anyway, it's a really good tip. And yeah, it's done like very well. You don't have to go into your settings or nothing. So thank you so much Linda. I mean, it's another case of like, these are one of those things that I feel like, what is the percentage of features that are on our devices and on these apps that users don't know about, right? And like, you stumble on a by accident. Like that's the same thing. Like I did, once I did it by accident, I'm like, oh, everything's big now. And I quickly made it small again. But for someone who has poor eyesight or needs, you know, things bigger, but like, having that level of control is great. How do you popularize that? How do you get the word out about that? It's just, it's, you know, I find it, this is something that like I knew about, but like realize that not everybody does. And so it's always good to share these tips when we get them and little hacks and little things that we know our phones can do that the other person might not know about. So. Yeah. Yeah, my wife swears by that. And I think she stumbled on it too. Cause I wasn't aware of it when she discovered it. She's like, did you know that it did this? And it was like, she just accidentally did it. And then it's like, wait a minute, I can make this all bigger. Why not? Cool. Well, thank you. Long Island represent, you know. Thank you, Linda. All right, Michelle. And our, yeah, our next email comes in from Richard from Manchester, writing in, Hey all love the show. I have an issue with Google Maps. I wonder if you can help me with. We often go on walks in the city and I use Google Maps to help us get around. My problem is when I need to use two hands, push my wife's wheelchair, my phone somehow will get trapped accidentally and go into things like, sorry, tap accidentally and go into things like connection settings. So when I try and glance at my phone to see what turn to take, we have to stop and sort it out. Is there a way to lock my screen while using Maps to navigate it so it can not be accidentally tapped and take the random screens? Keep up a good work. Richard from Manchester. So this is, I thought this was a great question. I looked into it a little earlier because I'm not sure. Maybe I couldn't, couldn't quite figure out the logic, but I know you have control over when the display times out, but you also have control over when the screen locks. And by going into the settings for both display timeout and screen lock, you could do a kind of thing where the screen lock happens after 15 seconds, but the screen doesn't timeout for 10 minutes and therefore the screen is locked and you can still see the display. I don't know if that will work. I didn't test it and pardon me, it was worried that it might not work. But I do know, I did see that there are some apps out there that allow you to take more control over the screen. There's one called Screen Alive, Keep Screen On. And there's another one called, I think Touch Lock. Yeah, Touch Lock Screen Lock, which all lets you fuss with the settings to keep your display on and avoid the screen from being touched. The challenge here though is really a security issue because if you have locked, if your phone is locked and you can't interface with it, how do you unlock? You know, like it's, those are the kind of the challenges, right? I think what Richard is looking for mostly to keep the phone on the app maps app without navigating away to another app. And the one way you can do that is with the built-in screen pinning feature. It's something you have to go into settings and enable. But then once you do, you can swipe up to the Recents menu and then long press on the icon and tap Pin App. I think I forgot exactly what it's called, but you can pin it to where you have to like consciously do a combination of buttons to exit from the screen pinning mode so that you'll stay on the maps app no matter what you press until you do this combination of gestures. I didn't even know you could do that. Wait, so how do you do that again? So you're in the apps, in maps, right? It's, you have to enable it. You first have to go to settings. It differs on every OS. Like right now I have a Zen phone. So what I say now won't apply to Pixel. Okay, but he's on a Pixel 7, right? He's on a Pixel. It should be like an app pinning. App pinning, yeah. I went into, so yeah, so I want to make sure which one it is. So go to settings and search settings and just type in pin, P-I-N, and the first one that comes up is app pinning. And then go to the Recents menu and then long press on the icon. There should be an option to pin. Hang on, you're going too fast, Michelle. Wait, hold on. And after you're able to screen, after you're able to app pinning, swipe up to the Recents screen. Just wait, wait, you're still going too fast. So you tap on app pinning in settings and then what it'll do is it'll take you to the more security and privacy screen and scroll you down to the bottom and it will flash app pinning which is at the very, very bottom. You tap that and then you flip the switch to say use app pinning. And it will tell you when app is pinned, personal data may be accessible, pinned apps may open other apps, only use app pinning with people you trust. So hit okay. Once you do that, now, Michelle, what do you do? Now you swipe up to go to the Recents menu. You swipe up and hold, like Jason is showing on video. Then you long press on the app icon and then you tap pin. That's so cool. And that'll pin the app to your screen. So you won't be able to exit it until you perform the gesture. I forgot what gesture it was, you exit it. Unpin swipe up and hold. Oh, swipe up and hold. So if I try and swipe out, I don't want to show you that, swipe up and hold and that will release it. And so what that will do is that will keep that app pinned so you can't go to any other app, but if his phone gets tapped, it's still getting tapped within that app, but at least you're within there, right? Yeah, at least you're still in Google Maps. Like it's not gonna stop you from accidentally exiting navigation in Google Maps, but at least it'll keep you on Google Maps. Yeah, that's the solve. Way to go, Michelle, that's awesome. There you go. Very cool, I love helping people. What was the version of Android where app pinning was introduced? Because I remember that was a big deal. Was that Marshmallow? It's really old. Yeah, it is. It's a really old teacher. Oh man, yeah. That's too funny. All right, cool. Excellent. All right. Lollipop. Oh, Lollipop. The app pinning feature was introduced by Google. Lollipop. There you go. Lollipop, Lollipop. That's too funny. Do you remember Jason Lollipop? Anyway. Okay. So we got one more email. Which comes in from Chris from Washington, DC. And Chris writes in says, as a faithful user of Pixel phones, and before that Motorola, I am wondering what does one give up if you switch to nothing, OnePlus, Samsung or Motorola phones now? It is easy to compare the hardware spec differences, but I know Google offers things on the software level. For example, how does it feel to lose the spam call filtering and call screening? Are there any other software service benefits for being on a Pixel that are not replicated on the other devices? On the other hand, are there software service benefits to being on one of the other devices that are not obvious? Since each of you frequently change phones, have you noticed anything you missed when you have left one phone for another other than camera differences? And I thought this was a great question given the four of us, right? Because I've been riding the Pixel train for several years now, and despite loving the OnePlus Open, I was afraid to get off of it. When I know you've bounced between Samsung to the Pixel fold and that sort of thing, Michelle, right? I think you're driving the Zen phone lately as you're daily, right? So I'm really curious what you all think is to what are the pros and cons to not being on Pixel versus being on one of the other phones? I mean, I know it's Samsung, they've got this whole ecosystem you could tap into if you want to, right? Yeah, a lot of times the features are similar, just named different things. Yeah, but I do think that the call filtering, the call screening, those are features that I notice when I don't have them, when I'm on a different phone, because when I'm on the Pixel, I absolutely get that screening stuff and I don't on other devices and I appreciate having it. For most features, there's gonna be some equivalent or at least some functional equivalent that has most like 80, 85% goes 85 away there on what you previously had in your old phone. Some features just aren't available on other devices. Like for example, one of the annoyances that I've dealt with on the Zen phone 11 and actually most other devices that aren't Pixel is the fact that when I wanna select something in an app, right? On Pixel, it's easy. You can just swipe up to the recent screen and then it uses OCR. You can select anything on the app that you're in. On the Zen phone, I have to kind of take a screenshot of it, open it, that screenshot in Google Lens and then I can select the text that I wanna copy or highlight or whatever, right? On the Pixel, now on the Pixel 8 and the Pixel 7 or on the Galaxy S24, you can use Circle to Search to select text on screen, which makes it really easy. I do that all the time, right? Selecting text on screen because I wanna highlight something and save it in a note or share it with someone else. But it's a little bit annoying to do that on a Zen phone because it's just not available to do. It's so ironic, Michelle, that you said that's your example because here I am staying loyal to the Pixel now through like three generations and I still don't have Circle to Search on my Pixel 8 Pro. But it's... Yeah, and I mean, Ron, if you had a S24, you might have Circle to Search right now. Right, exactly. And I think it's interesting because especially now with some of those Pixel features, and as we're seeing, Samsung is kind of now partnering a lot more closely and kind of taking on some of these like previously Pixel exclusive features into themselves. So I don't know, like for me, like even less, I think my reasons for really enjoying being back on Pixel Fold are more dev-related. I like being... And more enthusiast dev-related. Like I like being able to be part of the QPRs. I like seeing what comes on first. And I like as a dev just having a Pixel phone because it is stock Android. And again, like because I can kind of get the betas, it allows me to do my job better. But there's so much on Samsung, even before all of the Galaxy AI features that... I don't know, I kind of miss now because it's highly customizable. So I don't... Not much at this point, especially with the way that things are going with the assistance in AI. So, man. Yeah, it is really... It is hard. There's so many features now on like Google's, whatever, they don't have a name for the OS and the Pixel. There's so many different features on Zen UI. So many different features in One UI. It is so hard to list all of them and say here's an equivalent in Google's OS. Here's an equivalent in Zen UI. You're gonna be missing out on some features. You're gonna have to go digging around. You're gonna have to like ask on forums and like watch reviews to figure out. You're just about the... One thing I really recommend, it's for some reason a lot of people don't seem to do. You get a new phone, just look through the settings. Go through all the settings one time. You'll find one or two things you didn't know existed. A lot of people just set up their phones and then just download their apps and that's it. Just go through settings sometime at least. You'll do yourself a favor so I have a lot of time down the line. True, yeah. Interesting stuff. So if you wanna weigh in on the pros or cons of being on a Pixel or on another manufacturer's device, email us at contactantandroidfable.com. We wanna hear from you. We've got other tips you wanna share with other listeners. Please email us in as well. It's always great to hear from everybody. We thank everybody for staying in touch with us. Indeed we do. Thank you everybody for sending in all your feedback. Thank you for watching and listening and sticking with us to the very end. We've reached the end of this episode of Android Faithful. This is the moment in the show when we dance. No, not quite yet. This is the moment where we talk about what we have going on. We'll start with you, Michelle, what you got. So if you wanna hear more about what's happening at Android 15, follow me on Twix, Mastodon, Threads, et cetera at Michelle Ramon and support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Michelle Ramon. This is a great time to join our Discord community because we have a lot of cool stuff coming up with respect to Android 15. And speaking of which, I'm actually doing a presentation tomorrow about what to expect at Android 15. I'm doing a presentation at the AOSP and AOS or Android Automotive OS March Meetup. So if you wanna hear more, you can go to this link that I'll send Jason right now. And you can hear me talk about what to expect at Android 15. I got this big presentation all ready to go. Gonna be happening tomorrow at, I think, it'll be 3 p.m. Eastern is what I'm gonna be on. The AOSP and the AAOS March Meetup found at meetup.com. Go there and search for that title and you can find it at the URLs very long. But yeah, it's on the Meetup site. Excellent. Cool. That's pretty sweet. Love that Meetup site, right? Yeah. Or a Meetup app, right? Friend of the show? Or behind the arrow? Yeah. All right, Wynn, what about you? Let's see. I am an Android developer. I do and have talked about technical things related to Android development. And you can find all of my talks and related content and code on my website randomlytyping.com. And if you wanna follow me on the interwebs and on the social media, it's your best shot honestly is Instagram at QueenCodeMonkey. But I hope I'm QueenCodeMonkey in most other places. And so that's me. But yeah, mostly Instagram. I'm sorry, y'all. But yeah, follow the show. Bye, t-shirt. Bye, t-shirt. Bye, t-shirt, please. I'm gonna buy one. I'm gonna buy all the merch. All the merch, all the varieties. Anyway. Thank you, Wynn. What about you, Ron? Yeah, just follow me at RonExo across Twitter, or not Twitter, all social media. I'm at RonExo in some way, shape, or form. And then I'm most active on Instagram these days. But reminder, go to androidfaithful.threadless.com and get an Android faithful t-shirt. There you go. You can make it your own. Thanks to everybody who's already bought one during the live stream. We've seen the orders coming in. It's amazing. Yeah, it's fun to play you guys. Androidfaithful.threadless.com. More to come. Very nice. Oh, and why not throw it in there as well? Bit.ly, we're giving you a lot of work today. Sure, yes. We appreciate the work that you do. If you would like to show your interest in attending a live Android faithful recording and slash party, go to bit.ly slash afgooglio, all lowercase, afgooglio. There you go. There you go. All right. As for me, just go to illagoldstudios.com. I am putting up, oh, that went full screen. I didn't mean for that, putting up new content. I've got, I'm finishing up my review of the OnePlus Watch 2. The reality is I've got so much, so much stuff to review that I'm like swimming in it right now. I have to catch up. It's gonna take me a couple of months to get through this stuff, but I've got a review of the OnePlus Watch 2 coming at least. So illagoldstudios.com, you can find out. You can also find episodes of AI Inside with me and Jeff Jarvis. The podcast, the video version anyways, hits the channel. And thank you for your support there. But we have reached the end of this episode of Android Faithful. We do this podcast every Tuesday evening. You can of course subscribe by going to our website. We do have one, androidfaithful.com. You can find all the information you need to subscribe in the many different ways. We've got all of our episodes listed there. It's a whole, it's like a playground for Android faithful fans. So go there, check that out. Also, if you wanna support us on Patreon, you can once again, patreon.com slash androidfaithful takes it there so you can support us directly. We appreciate it if you do that. And other than that, you know, really just look for Android faithful in all the different places online, all the social media platforms. You'll probably find us in one way or another. And yeah, just let us know what you think of the show. Contact at androidfaithful.com. Thanks so much everybody, have a wonderful night. Okay, fun times. I was very happy to be able to pull this little jet from the archives. Oh my God, that was amazing. My watcher is lost to the ages. I don't see that thing in years. You know what was so horrible about this? I wonder if I even have the charging thing. Oh, do you remember those horrible charging things? Oh God. Yeah, because they didn't snap magnetically. They snapped based on a plastic framing that would snap into place. And on this particular watch, I don't even think you can see it on this camera, but the little area where it was supposed to snap into, it was a tiny little prong that just broke off one time when I tried to take it off of the charger. And so it doesn't even snap onto the charger anymore. It just walks right off. Yeah, this thing's a... Well, all right, that'd have been a long one. Yeah, it was a long one. Much longer on Nintendo than I thought we would. I thought that was going to be a good one. Yeah, that's what we would. We don't have feelings about it. I think that's what did it, yeah. So... All right, let's pick a title. af.showbot.com, if you want to help us... Dot TV. Or sorry, yeah, dot TV. There you go, af.showbot.tv. And you can help us vote for your favorite titles of the ones that are shown there. Right now at the top of the tie between searching for circle to search and planning Android Faithful's Google iogala. Going very literal right there. In second place is remembering the pre-Pandy days. We've lost the mouse. That's what I was about to vote for. We've lost the mouse. Video killed the radio ads. A lot of video killed us something like that. Yeah, yeah. Uh, merch meetup and marketing. Merch meetup and marketing. That's a good one. Merch and dicing. Merch and dicing. Get a bucket A8 is leaking. I like that one. Get a bucket A8 is leaking. That watch is such a... Circle to nowhere. Circle to nowhere. Circle to nowhere. Good, though. Yeah, Ron's Circle to Nowhere. I don't know. Searching for circle to search just got more votes. Sir, I mean, it's a good one. Searching for circle to search. All right, let's do it. Let's do it. Cool. That works for me. Good job, y'all. Love it. Oops, that was the wrong thing. I'll just type it up there. Searching for circle. Jason, how is the Mac Studio? Great. You know, I'm still kind of going through the thing where like I'm using it and then I realize, oh, I haven't installed that yet. And, you know, I spent a lot of the weekend installing a lot of, you know, things that I needed to get onto it and so that I can use it. But yeah, it's fantastic. I hope that it means that this machine ends up working better than it had been because I was using it for so much and now it'll be more dedicated to just this. This stuff up here. So so far, so good, though. I did restart this machine right before the podcast. So you probably just need to do that every time. I didn't have any issues. It's just a pain in the butt because I have to sign in everything again and with two factor, two factor makes signing in. So why do you have to sign into everything again? You do. Is there like browser clearing all the cookies every time you? Oh, I think I've always had my browser deep. Oh, yeah. No, don't do that. That's probably why. Turn that off, dude. Oh, my God, dude. Yeah. The PC is staying at home all the time. You don't have to worry. Yeah, no, that's true. That's true. I mean, the computer grandma's come at night and then, you know, I don't know. No. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, I've just always had it set that way. I was like, oh, that's Max. No, yeah, turn that off, dude. You don't need that. It's like, God forbid if I could like, like I'm tired of logging into Google, right? Like I need to tell Google, like I am in a house. No one else is touching this. Like, yeah, yeah, keep me signed in, you know? I'm not on a laptop. I'm on a desktop for Christ's sake, you know? Like it's not like it's like I'm going to take it to the city and leave it or something like that. It's like, yeah, yeah. Like, is this a is this a private fixed computer? Yes. Keep keep me logged in for 30 days or whatever it is, instead of like every one is it three and a half days? Clinton asked a good question if if you all have plans for the eclipse on April 8th. I'm actually going to be driving up to Austin because Austin is in the path of totality. Yeah, cool. That day. I'm going to be chasing my children to try to get them to not look at it directly. I need to track down and get them for them. My sisters and my brother-in-law are going to Pittsburgh because they have family up there. But and I was going to join them, but I come back to 7th. I'm not getting back on a plane. So. Hmm. Oh, yeah, I'm going to be gone for the next two weeks, y'all, but I'll probably join as a listener. Totally normal audience number. That'll be fun. So yeah, you're out the next two weeks. Ron, you're maybe out next week. Is that right? I may be out next week. I might have a friend in town and she's pulling together a dinner. And if it happens, I would like to go. So, which means I'm going to miss our guest, which is one of my favorite guests, but he'll understand considering the legacy, Jason, of you missing him previously. So only turn about only turn about us for a turn about us for a play. Yeah, exactly. I'm sad I'm missing anyway. Yeah, no, it's very funny. Like I thought that I thought that once the other commitment aspect of Twitter went away that I'd be like, oh, I'll do the show whenever I want. But now I'm like, no, I have to like, like something came up on it. Something was coming up on a Tuesday and my wife was like, oh, but, you know, well, you don't have to do the show. I'm like, no, I want to do the show by choice. Yeah, yeah, there is more flexibility where it's, you know, there's four of us. It's all good. No, no, I know. That's why that's why when this dinner came up, like I can go. But yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Cool, y'all. Well, I certainly have a few edits to make here. It was the intro. It was the intro because my screw up and then there was the mouse thing, which I can add it around. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to throw you off at the top of the show. No, it's my fault. My husband happened to hand me a spindrift roll so quick and I thought I had the five seconds and then I kind of forgot to unmute. No, no, no, it's thinking of throwing you off balance. How's your chair? Like it's fine. So I just had the back and then it just hadn't settled into the height notch that I had it in. So as I was leaning on it, that's when it kind of went and I'm like, oh, OK, I'm more secure now, but it also scared the shit out of me. Took you by surprise. Too fun. I don't think there were any, any others, right? No, those are the only two. The only two months I had, yeah. OK, I would do that. Cool. All right. Good time, friends. Yep. Good times. Nice hanging out with you. Have a good couple of weeks when. Yeah, we're going to miss you. Yeah, Jason, let me send you the Amazon albums links so that you can just include them, I guess, in the show notes. Oh, sure. Yeah. And how funny do we include links in the show notes? We don't. You can. I used to. Yeah, you can. Oh, yeah. That's so funny. I've just been writing the names. I haven't been including the links. So you should. Yeah, the the the editor in a cast and then also on the website, both enable it. Like it. Yeah, you should be able to do that. No problem. So were you just doing it in a cast and then you copy it and paste it into the website? And no, the the RSS ingest includes the HTML. Oh, OK. So it should carry over. OK, I'll start doing that. Yeah. Sorry about that. No, I think it. The only the only place I would make sure the the survey link and the T-shirt link add those explicitly to the YouTube description. So. Oh, right. Well, yeah, because the YouTube description doesn't get the. No, yeah. So we're just copying and pasting that. So I would just explicitly read YouTube allows links, but they have to be fully written out. They can't be coded. You know, right, right, right. I showed the links in the private chat. Yeah. So just put just put just put them at the top of the show, too. Yeah, so. OK. All right. All right. The top of the like under the description, Jason and YouTube, just drop it in there. Got it. Yeah. YouTube. Cool. All right, well, let's let's say good night to everybody. Thanks, all everybody for watching and listening. Bye, everybody. Say here, copy these links. When are you leaving for Japan? Tomorrow at twelve thirty. Oh, my God. Yep. Jason, I just have a lot of you and this week at work was crazy. You know, I was.