 Hello, and welcome to another edition of Android Faithful. We are your weekly source for the latest news hardware apps for the wonderful wide world of Android. As always, I'm Ron Richards, and I'm joined by... Windwetdow, jamming to our awesome intro music. Excellent. And Michelle Raman. Hello, Michelle. How you doing, buddy? Yep, back home. Feel great. And we are so excited to add a friend of the show to the show as our guest, Mr. Juan Bagnell, that's some gadget guy. You know him, you love him. If you watch our old show, you knew he was a frequent guest. Welcome back, Juan. Welcome to the show. I'm glad to meet the back, you guys are talking to me. It's a podcast of friends, and I'm so happy. I was so, so emotional at the end of that other show. And I can't tell you how stoked I am that my friends are back. My nerdy lunch table, Android conversation is weekly again, and I'm so worked up about it. I'm really happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me, I'm chuffed. We're very excited to have you. You were on the short list of folks we gotta get on early on to the show, so we're glad to have you back. For those of you who might be new to Android Faithful and not aware, Juan Bagnell, why don't you tell everybody where you're from, what you do? Yeah, I'm a general technology commentator and gadget reviewer. I've got a storied history of working in Hollywood and casting and commercials and production, and that sort of rolled over into recording equipment and now really getting to play with a lot of toys. And obviously, sort of the core singular piece of all of that is the phone and the tablet and all of the computers that we get to play with. And you'll see me on a bunch. I'm a gun for hire for a number of other outlets out there, so you'll see my editorials and my videos and reviews pop up. And then for myself, it's somegadgetguy.com and some gadget guy across social media. So we just like to play with toys. We love it. And you're one of the best at playing with toys. So we're happy to have you on the show. All right, cool. But before we get into this week's news, it was funny because like we were playing on the show and all week I was bugging Michelle and went, I'm like, slow news week, slow news week, but we did have a bunch of stuff pop up. We got some great stuff for you. But first one to remind everybody, if you're new to Android Faithful, head over to androidfaithful.com. There you can check out our Nifty website and that's all the links you need to go subscribe to the podcast on Pocketcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple if you want. We've got people listening on Apple. You can listen, you can subscribe to YouTube. It's all there. And there you can also find a link to our Patreon and we really, really, really, really want to thank all of our supporting patrons. You all are the best. And if you sign up there, you can get an ad-free version of the podcast. You can get exclusive content. You get to pick a news story for us to talk about on the show, which this week's patron pick was pretty surprising. And if you sign up at the higher level, you get a t-shirt, which is pretty cool. So definitely go to patreon.com slash androidfaithful. We thank everybody who's done that. But first, let's get into the news. What do you guys say? So this actually was a bit of breaking news that happened earlier today. And actually TechnoMench, who watching live was in the DTNS Discord and the Android channel, was like, you guys are going to talk about this, right? And I was like, of course we're going to talk about it because the fact that Google Messages is now turning RCS on by default and launching group end-to-end encryption is rather a big deal for anybody in the messaging space. And I know we're joking about the Android faithful drinking game, but like RCS is like how many shots is that in the drinking game? I don't know. I mean, how hazardous do we want to be? At least one. I mean, for as much as Google has been talking about RCS, both kind of like at will or not at will, if you're Apple, like probably three. Probably three. Oh man, yeah. Or drain your cup that you get to. There you go. You hear RCS and you got to drain your cup. So there you go. Exactly. Well, so yeah, so basically Google announced today that RCS and the Messaging app is now quote unquote enabled by default for new and existing users, although some may be asked to agree to the terms of service provided by their carrier network. And it will stay disabled if you had turned RCS off and users have the ability to turn off anytime from the messages setting in the RCS chats window. And they want to go the extra mile to make sure that there's security in your messaging. So end-to-end encryption for one-on-one conversations that launched in June 21. They started rolling that out for groups in testing in January. And now that is moving forward. Everyone must have RCS enabled and it cannot be disabled. And unfortunately, Technomanche of our viewing audience, he's awesome. He or she is awesome. Also shared in the DTNS Discord that there are a lot of problems that came with it as a Google Fi user and also as somebody who uses an iPad with the Messaging app. It ran into some problems that if RCS is enabled, users have to disable back up to the web and RCS wasn't working in the web app, which means it won't work on the desktop or iPad. And Google Messages web app doesn't support push notifications for calls or texts on the iPad. And he was digging into that with Google support, a lot there to unpack iPad, Google, Android, things like that. But regardless, what do you guys think of this? What do you think of RCS now being completely turned on by default for users whether you like it or not? I'll go first. I just feel like this is yet another link in that chain of carriers getting involved in things that they shouldn't have delaying where we inevitably would have made it. And then now we're finally taking those steps where RCS should be sort of the standard that it might have been years ago. And like we've seen with payment systems and carriers getting involved with that. Now messaging systems and carriers getting involved with that. I kind of feel like for as many different Google stories as we've had about messaging, now it finally feels like we're taking that first step into this being legit, even though we've been talking about it for like eight years now, seven years now, something like that. Now we can finally take it seriously. So these types of moves, and I know there are gonna be a bunch of teething pains but these kinds of moves I think help validate that messaging services also have needed to evolve for a while. And now hopefully we've got some better cross communication tools to keep people in touch. It's definitely a walk in the walk. Michelle, I'm dying to hear what you have to think about this. I'm sure you've got opinions. Yeah, I'm more curious about how many people will actually like realize that, not that it's on, but like what they can actually do with RCS. Cause I know like when you first turn it on or you, it's presented to turn it on, there's like a little screen, but I think it's like a one page screen. And I'm, how many people are just gonna tap, got it and like move on and not realize all the things they could do that, you know, they previously complained, oh, I don't have iMessage on Android. Well, now you basically do, but do they even realize they can do all the stuff that you can do like higher quality messages, you know, see read receipts and all that stuff, right? Like I'm messaging a few people like my sister-in-law, like we have an RCS chat and I don't know, like I haven't asked her like, do you know about this feature or anything like that? I should actually probably ask her and see like- That's the thing. I feel like the right implementation of this is people don't need to know what the underlying technology is available to and they will discover it like the first time when they rolled out the emoji reactions and messages like, whoa, look at that, I can do that. So like, there's a certain amount of, it's great to have a brother or a family member who's your IT member who can tell you these things, but like a lot of users are gonna stumble on those facts and discover it as they do it because Michelle, really how much does your sister know about everything the phone can do, like the capabilities of like, I feel like the most average users don't know, you know, 75% of what their phone can do, so. Yeah, I mean, the flip side, oh, sorry, I was just gonna say real quick, the flip side of your point is we're hoping outside of the iPad issues and some of those iPhone and Google Fi compatibility issues, it would be the greatest victory if I went into one of my family group chats and no one noticed. That would actually be the right way to do this. I'm hoping we don't have too many of those other teething pains. But I think the other side to that is that we see this huge marketing push from Google. They're trying to convince Apple to enable RCS on iOS. And if users aren't aware that it's really a thing, you know, I think that's gonna hurt this push because if, you know, users, there's not a huge demand for it. There's the Apple is not gonna face much pressure to actually enable it. So I think we do need people to be aware. Not to drop there, but I also think it's a pipe dream that we think that Apple's ever gonna play in this pool. Like, unless, until the EU makes them, I don't think that's ever gonna happen no matter what Google does. I don't know, Winwin, what do you think about this? I do think, yeah, it's them putting their money where their mouth is finally. And while I have a lot of sympathy for, you know, like problems like technical mentions happening, you know, I think, and I've never had to roll out something as insane as like a, you know, a protocol chain for, you know, an entire ecosystem, like an entire ecosystem of customers. But this is kind of one of those like lose, lose, maybe win situations for a developer where you need to make a very specific change. It's something that everyone needs, everyone should have. But, you know, as you said, like a lot of laypeople, like they won't know, they don't, and a lot of people don't even like really even watch advertising or aware of even like the, the slightest, slight, the slightest techie news at all. And so I think, yes, it is on the onus of the developer to, you know, make these features discoverable. That's like something we talk about all the time in kind of like app world is like, can we make it discoverable? Especially for things like this, how do we surface it? Do we, how do we message people to let them know, hey, something's changed, but you're gonna like it or you need to know these kinds of things. So I'm very sympathetic to the, just rolling it out, basically. I'm very sympathetic to the strategy of like, hey, let's roll it out, support the best that we can, make things discoverable as we can. And sometimes you just gotta rip the bandaid off because I've been in projects where we kind of hope that people just meander to the new thing. And for whatever reason, whether it's resistance because it's really hard to change your tech, whatever, your tech environment, your tech thing that you like, or just people aren't aware. It takes a really long time. And for something like this, the faster that everybody gets on RCS, you know, the better it is, high tide lifts all boats. So we kind of just gotta throw everyone in the water with floats. And I thought it was fun. Yeah. But it is, I mean, like, I would say with my siblings and my mom and my dad, we're all on Android and we had our own little just family group text thread. And I want to say it was about a year after we were all on RCS before my mom kind of clicked and that she could do things in chat that she had been doing on her iPad with her siblings that are mostly on iOS devices. And that was such a joyful discovery. Oh, I can do this. Oh, and I can do that. And then it like caused this like chain reaction of like experimenting with other things that she could do in this thread on her phone. So I'm hoping that that kind of experience is a bit broad. When someone kind of stumbles into something or when they kind of discover something that really is a fun experience. We can't overlook that those fun experiences are often the ones that get shared. Even if they're not headlines on major tech publications that's the real grassroots stuff that I think helps spread something new like this. Absolutely. And the RCS is joy or like how the RCS revolution actually happens if it's televised or not. But like the thing is there's also a cost and when you're saying that and we saw Technomanche in our chat he's saying just wait till users realize that their techs no longer backed up because they were forced to change the RCS which is like it's gonna be like what they're going through it's gonna be a bumpy road for some people or they're not even gonna notice like Michelle's point. But we all know that it's the right direction and when you're dealing with users in the millions, you've got to just like sometimes you got to break some eggs in order to make an omelet. And from having watched the podcast and knowing the kind of people that are in the stream that's also where it's on us to be good tech ambassadors. It's infuriating and you're gonna smash your face into your keyboard but I've got a couple apps that I use to back up my text messages because I'm constantly switching phones and sometimes I've just got to do it brute force. Sometimes I've literally just got to copy every message on the phone, put that into a zip file, use another app and move it over. SMS backup, it is the ugliest app and it has not been worked so well, so perfectly. And then I've got gigabytes on Google Drive of an XML of all my messages. I can relive my dating from 15 years ago because they're all up there. I won't let go. I'm a digital hoarder like you run. I will not let go. Oh, it's too funny. I do like that ClockworkDG in the chat said WTF is RCS which I feel like is... Yeah, that's fair. It sums up what a lot of people might think. Totally fair. Correct. Yeah, anyway, stay for the after-show Clockwork. We can explain RCS for you if you want. Anyway, moving on to Michelle. We got some Pixel rumors milling about, don't we? Michelle? Yeah, so there we go. I was waiting for it to load up there so I talked about it as it showed up. So yeah, according to the latest rumor from, you know, that's being said around the internet, the Pixel 8 series will be stuck again at 128 gigabytes of storage for another year. So I think a lot of people are kind of disappointed by this news because a lot of other phones are getting to base model 256 gigabytes storage or they're even higher tiers of storage. But once again, the base model for these two devices will be 128 gigabytes of storage. And if you look at how large photos and videos are becoming and there were rumors earlier that the Pixel 8 series might even support 8K video recording, like how much storage base that will eat up just for a couple of minutes of 8K videos. And of course, that's just a rumor. We don't know if that'll actually happen, but you know, it is interesting to note that they are sticking with that tier storage again this year. I mean, does it, not to be devil's advocate, but does it matter? Like do you- I think it matters for certain types of users. Like, I mean, you two are digital hoarders, right? Like if you're hoarding a lot of data, you need space. I mean, 8K, 4K is like honestly four times bigger than 2K because two times two, that 8K is like two times, two times that, is like, I'm not gonna have any space left. I'm just not. Right, but what about the cloud? Right, 8K- Oh, you don't want 8K cloud. No, no, no, no, no, no. There are so few people that have that kind of cell connection where cloud and 8K can make any sense at all. But I mean like it matters, I feel because Google makes such a big presentation about the photography, and it's one of the main selling points on Pixel devices is, I mean like, I still hold it up. For all of the wacky phones that I love to shoot, you know, photos and videos on, when it comes to making recommendations to family and friends, pixels are always high on the list because of how good that point and shoot camera experience is. And you don't even think about how much content you just create every day on those. I kind of feel like not for like the A series obviously, or even maybe just for the Pixel 8, but at least for something like the Pixel 8 Pro, that might be one where you're already gonna be paying a higher price, you're already talking about different components, you're already talking about different cameras. To me, it would be, it's time to look at the Pro and say, it's already more expensive, so let's bump that up to 256. I feel like 128 is getting really claustrophobic now. I never thought I'd say that. I was just gonna say, think about where we were five years ago, right? Like, yeah. But if we're gonna do 8K, it's just like, yeah, and I kind of agree. I actually ran into this on my, let me sync. Actually, I'm in my Samsung, but even someone who's kind of like just an avid videographer, whether that's like for your kids, or if you're like to post things on Instagram, it's kind of crazy how quickly, if you shoot at 4K or even like HD, how quickly it goes. I think like I would record like my workouts and that's like 20, 30 minutes at a time. And there's nothing more frustrating than losing part of a video because you've run out of space, especially given how much we pay for flagship. So, yeah, it just, it, there's something. So, and your knowledge might vary on that as well. If you don't use video much, you're good probably, but I think especially as like flagship phones become almost like everyday cameras or like filmmaking apparatus, it's to kind of keep that kind of premium image and that kind of like lifestyle for all these cool stories that we have about, I mean, I guess it's Samsung that was like really, that kind of story needs to be backed up by a little more storage, just a bit more. It's fine, not a lot. Even without going to 8K, 4K at a very good bit rate or 4K the way that the Pixel processes that great HDR video, that takes up space. I mean, if you want that quality and you want that clarity, then even at 4K, 128 is starting to get a little claustrophobic. Yeah, it's not just video or like camera and photos. It's also apps, apps continue to get bigger and bigger. I think recently I saw the, you know, the really popular game Genshin Impact. It's 21 gigabytes in size now on Android. Oh my gosh. And so games and apps are just gonna continue to get bigger, you know, there's more compression techniques and like there's all these Play Store things that are helping with reducing space like that on apps that you don't need. But then this is bigger and bigger. Yeah. They're pushing the limits at the same time, which is true. YouTube now is like kind of, I think I turned on YouTube like the suggested downloads and I look and I'm like, oh, that's awesome, but also that's a lot of space. The YouTube like advanced downloading nonsense because my kids watch YouTube on the Google TV in the living room. And then like all of a sudden I'll be at work and I'll look down my phone and I'm like, it's downloading, you know, like, you know, Sesame Street and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I don't need this on my phone. And I'm sure I could set it up and turn it up. But like, it is amazing how much like advanced, like, hey, I've got a good data connection. Let me fill up your phone as possible for when you're offline, which is interesting. We are burying the lead though on the Pixel 8 that before we move on to the next story, Michelle, I just want to note that the colors of the Pixel 8 and the Pixel 8 Pro might be licorice, peony and haze for the Pixel 8 and the Pixel 8 Pro might be licorice, porcelain and sky. Those are all words. What haze? Yes. These are all very playful words. Haze is like, it's like an orange. I think it's like a, it's like almost like a wildfire, the sky during a wildfire. That's not the best. Okay. Google often has these like... Google engineers in California would be familiar. That's fair. That's life is fair. Drawing from... They have these really playful sounding names for like their colors, but it's kind of hard to actually guess what it's actually like until you see it. So, all right. Well, we got one more Pixel 8, right, Michelle? Yeah. So, the previous one came from the German publication, Win Future. This one is from Android Authority itself and it's by reputable Pixel leaker, Camilla, who has gotten so many things right in the past few months that... Can you pronounce Camilla's last name? Boy, I asked her. I asked her and she's like, it's okay if you butcher it because I'm pretty sure no Americans can like pronounce Polish last names. Wojakowska? What do you say? Wojakowska? Yeah, so anyway, Camilla is pretty awesome. All right, so tell us quickly about the watch. So, Camilla has discovered through her sources that the Pixel Watch 2 will be packing an ultra-wideband chip. So, for those of you who don't know, ultra-wideband is the radio technology that allows for super accurate or super precise positioning. So, like, if you point your phone at your car key, your door handle, if your car supports ultra-wideband, then, you know, some cars you can unlock it just by pointing your phone at it. And it's basically like allowing you to find things very precisely. And of course, like the Apple AirTag is a very good example of what you can do with ultra-wideband. Unfortunately, we don't know exactly what ultra-wideband on the Pixel Watch 2 will be used for, but we do know there are a lot of possibilities such as the digital car key example that I brought up, the tracker tag example that I brought up and there were earlier rumors that Google was working on their own tracker tag. So maybe that release could coincide with the Pixel Watch 2. And as, you know, he's run a scrolling through the article right now is a whole bunch of other details, like from this report. But I think the key one was the ultra-wideband one because there's some of the other details we had already known about, such as the switch to a snapdragon processor. There's also here a retail animation is showing off here. I was gonna say, don't bury the lead on the retail animation. I feel like that's the one I was gonna go with. No, but I mean, this is what you'll see when you walk into the store. Yeah, but, you know, like, the same bezels, like the same look and feel of it's gonna be pretty much the same, but like slightly larger battery. I mean, like, what do we expect from an innovative update to the watch, right? So. Yeah, I think the two biggest ones that we know of so far is ultra-wideband and the snapdragon processor. Those are the two biggest rumored upgrades. Yeah. Well, I don't know, maybe I'll get suckered in and try the Pixel Watch 2 when it comes out. And now the Pocketcast has the Wear OS app. I can find a list of my pockets. It's your year run. It's my year. Let me tell you, a little up, by the way, a little update on the topic of Android tech for runners. So when you might notice this, I sent my nothing ear sticks back to nothing to either get replaced or repaired because the audio was practically gone from the left ear and the right ear was starting to crackle and everything, like, and it was getting much more quieter. Are you sure that's not just your tinnitus? That's one that's a great point. And I spent, I can't tell you the amount of time I spent at home, like, putting headphones in, taking headphones out, like, listening. I'm sorry. That was totally dirty and underhanded. I know. I teed it right up there. No, but, and we talked about this of all that Android a couple of months ago. I literally thought I was losing hearing in my left ear because the left earbud was going so low, but then I put in another pair of earbuds and it was fine. I switched back to my Nexigo, you know, the little Nexigo, those ones, I switched back to them and it was so loud. Both ears were fine. I'm like, all right, something's wrong here. So I sent them back to the nothing ear stick. But then, so nothing has it. Hopefully they're repairing it or giving me a new one. We'll see. I got an email saying they received it. So I've been using the Nexigo, but then sure enough, I woke up this morning and the dumb Nexigo earbuds battery died overnight. Like all the problems I had with the Nexigo previously that the nothing solved with their little case. So I had to use this pair of earbuds with my little USBC to courage Fort Dongle and go running with that. And the number of times I hit the headphones and ripped it out of the phone and it stopped. I was so frustrated. I was so frustrated. Ron, are you turning into a lecture or something where your body is just consuming like a life force of like gadgets around you? Possibly, possibly. But yeah, it hasn't been fun. That's for sure. I'm sorry. I'm worried about mine now. Yeah. We'll see. I mean, I wear it exclusively to run. So I'm wondering if Sweat got into the earbuds and sorted it out. That's really tough. So the nothing ear sticks, those are open ear earbuds or are they inner oral? Open ear. Yeah, they're like this earbud that I use. I don't like things going in my ear. So they're like that with a little stick that comes out. And they've been great. But I realized I got them in October so they're under warranty. But when it comes to like soaking that kind of stuff, I wonder if those ear vents make it easier for moisture to kind of get in there. Every time I'm on one of your podcasts, Ron, I kind of feel like I'm the guy who's like, now, Ron, you remember to eat your vegetables now. I know, I love it. We love you. I really need you to try out some bone conduction for a long term test drive to see if that kind of like Sweat interaction when something closed happens to you again. And then also it would kind of leave your ears free. You could decide if you wanted to wear your plugs or not. But maybe offline, I have a spare pair. Oh, I'll call. At this point, Ron, you have done so many videos with me about talking about audio tech and Bluetooth audio versus headphone jacks and stuff. I feel like I just need to put something in a box. Yeah, I just say you go. Let's do it. We'll talk offline. We'll do it. So let's communicate because I think I might have something that could work for you. My other my other old man angry audio thing isn't related isn't related to the technology but to the YouTube music app because I am so sick of having my kids in the car and playing kids music. And if I and they're asking for the next song and I'm driving and I'm trying to search for the dumb song they want. And the moment you leave the play screen and the YouTube music, it stops the music as child protection. Yeah, but like I'm I'm 46. I don't need to be protected. And I meant to look to see if it's a setting that I can turn off. But I don't think it is because they're so worried about child protection. That's I'm derailing the show now. So I'll stop now because we've got hardware to talk about because Michelle. Oh, wait, wait, wait, you're right. I jumped you're right. You're totally wrong. It's totally fine because I also jump but it's time for the patron pick of the week. So every Monday at 12 o'clock, we put up three new stories for our lovely, wonderful patrons to pick from to vote on. And we we we talk about the winner. It was actually pretty close this week. We had QR code scanning over long distances. One plus one open the foldable that they're coming out with. Renders shows and significant design changes. And I was actually really surprised about this one. Best buy to offer Google Pixel repairs in store because I know our fam loves repairs. But the winner is QR code scanning over long distances because you all like your QR code scanning. So you know that trope in procedural police shows about enhanced and you know how it's kind of really yes because it doesn't really work like that. Well, I mean, to some extent you can kind of think that, you know, the ML Kit SDK for barcode scanning, you can I would let you call it enhanced and because now the latest releases of both the ML Kit barcode scanning, which is just kind of like the nuts and bolts API that allows you to do QR code scanning as well as the hold on the Google to the actual Google code scanner, which is kind of like a pre-built software experience that devs can just plug and play. Both of those are getting this auto zoom. So basically what happens is when you usually scan a QR code, right, it has to kind of fit within a certain size within the reticles that you see with whatever your QR code scanner of choice is. Well, now if the, you know, Google code scanner or the whatever, you know, app of your choice is that is using like kind of the updated ML Kit barcode scanner actually detects a barcode in the screen. It will actually zoom in on any QR codes that it finds. So if you are on the video stream, you can kind of see an example of how far away it will actually zoom in on QR code. So it's actually really scanning the entire frame seeing if there are any QR codes and just zooming in and actually having that QR code regardless of how small it is, I assume it still has to be recognizable as a QR code. And have it actually fill the reticle. So there you go, enhancing. I mean, zoom enhance very much. So it probably does use some, I believe this verge article did speculate or maybe Michelle, you mentioned that there might be some AI. That's the best part of this article, by the way, because first off, this article was suggested by friend of the show, Burke. And that's how it got into the patron pick. So yeah, thank you, Burke. But I love the articles as pointed out by Android expert, Michelle Ramon. And it's one of your tweets, Michelle. Did you know about this or? Did I know about, yeah, I'm the one who tweeted the news. That's why I'm using this article. No, did you know about this article? The verge quoted you. Oh no, yeah, I know about that, yeah, yeah. You're kind of a big deal and I need you to sort of ignore it. You're kind of a big deal. Oh, and Burke waves at all of us. Hi, Burke, thank you for the suggestion. Yes. One of the small detail about this news is that the Android QR code scanner that's in like your quick settings panel, that actually uses the ML Kit barcode scanner API under the hood. And Google is testing the integration of this auto zoom feature into that QR code scanner. So you don't have to use like a third party app to take advantage of this new auto zoom feature. It should be built into the Android QR code scanner and then your feature. Cool, all right. Well, there's your patron pick of the week. You can go to patreon.com slash android faithful and you can vote every week if you become a patron. It's a way how you can get a part of the show. So we love that. And now, and now we can go to hardware because Michelle has got some cool stuff to show us from the fine folks at ASUS, right? All right, there we go. Let me unmute myself. Yeah. So I have in my hands the ASUS Zenfone 10. I actually got this like while I was out of town. And so like I just came back and this is just sitting for me as like a happy little surprise. Like finally, I've been waiting for this for so long. All right, you're gonna unbox it live on the show, right? I actually opened it just so I could show you because it's kind of awkward to unbox it and change the camera. But I do have, yeah, yeah. I do have the Zenfone 9 on my, this is on my left, this is on your right on the camera and the Zenfone 10 on my right, which is your left on camera. As you can see, there's very little difference design-wise with them. I think one thing I noted when I did my hands on of the nothing phone 2 was that, you know, I loved the design of that phone so much that I wanted to use it caseless. But unfortunately, I ended up having to order a case because, you know, I just didn't like how slippery that felt. I feel the opposite with the Zenfone. Like this is the one of the best feeling phones in my hand in a very long time. You know, it's not like he, it's not the coarse rough feeling of like the old OnePlus Sandstone backs, but it's like a very soft matte back feeling. And it also just looks really cool. Like you can't really see it here because it's kind of like a black blurry, you know, picture thing. We can see it a little bit. You can kind of see it here, but it's very, it feels amazing. Like I definitely will use this phone without a case for as long as I can. It's got a good phone feel is what you're saying. Yeah, it's very, very grippy. Is it like that? It's like a slip out of your hand. Yeah, is it like that tacky kind of like Nexus 5 kind of feeling or evolved from that? Like you're probably too young for the Nexus 5, aren't you? I don't remember how it feels. I probably have it somewhere. I just don't remember how it felt. Yeah, but like you're not gonna slip out of your hand kind of feeling. No, no, no. It's not gonna slip out of your hand. It's not gonna start sliding around on the table. That happened with my nothing phone. It actually slid off my nightstand because it's just so slippery on the back. But other than that, this is again like a compact phone, you know, compact by 2023 standards, which is like a six inch phone. But compared to other beasts like the Galaxy Z Fold 5, this thing is definitely compact. And it has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor inside of it. So it's very powerful for such a small phone. It has wireless charging this time around with something that was previously missing on most Asus smartphones. It doesn't have an eSIM. So, you know, if you were looking forward to that, you'll have to wait for another generation. It still does have a headphone jack. I can show it right here. There you go. They got one very excited. The headphone jack. Yeah, yeah. So if you are one of the people who still want to use the headphone jack on your phone, you have a whole bunch of audio gear that requires it or needs it, this is one of the phones to consider. There are dozens of us. Dozens of us. Dozens of us. You're out there. I do want to call out their website in terms of their marketing by this... Calling out the mighty on hand Zenfone 10 that this just looks... Their website's got a very large hand holding the phone and it's hard to find. And the hand, it's a little too processed or something. It looks like AI. It looks like AI made it. Like you told AI to make a hand. Yeah. Yeah. Is it mighty on your hand or mighty on hand is in close by? I'm sorry. Oh, Zenfone. So, all right. So, Michelle, you're gonna put this phone through its paces and come back and report back on how it is? I'm gonna be using it. I think I'll focus more on like a pure software review because it's just too much. Like this phone's already been through its paces. There's many other reviewers and all. And I think, Zen UI, which is the software that ASUS makes for its smartphones is kind of underappreciated. It's one of my more well-liked Android skins that I think there's a lot that people don't know about what it can do. I like speaking of which, that's exactly what I did with the nothing phone too. I didn't do a review of the phone. I did a review of nothing OS 2.0, which was like over 5,000 words. So if you wanna interested in reading about the software on that phone, you can go read that on Android Central. Cool. All right, excellent. Well, thank you, Michelle. So Juan, when we reached out to you and said, hey, do you wanna come on the show? You said, oh, may I? Because you had stuff to share. So you've got these two little devices in your hand. Little pucks. I know, and I'm gonna get the popcorn for this. I'm very excited to hear this, but tell us what you got. So what we're gonna talk about real quick, two book-endingly polar opposite different solutions to power a face display. Real quick, I just gotta reiterate something that I've been talking about a lot on my own personal channel for a while. I feel one of the absolute best accessories that you can add to a family of gadgets is getting some kind of portable monitor. So if it's just like a regular sort of static screen that you can plug other devices into game consoles, tablets, phones, laptops, having one of these around the house is just super handy. And that can take a bunch of different forms. So like it could just be a regular screen like I just held up or a laptop dock. So it looks like a laptop, but it's sort of an empty shell just for the screen and the battery and the keyboard and the trackpad. And the most exotic flavor of this idea is a face display. So these are, these are- What do you mean by a face display? Cause that sounds weird. A face. It's a display you wear on your face. So now- Is this like a VR goggle situation? Or cause- No! Right, cause those looks like sunglasses. So there are four major players in the space right now. The companies I've been working with the most closely are X-Real, formerly N-Real, and they make the N-Real air. And then Rokid, they make the Rokid Max. And so these are two variations on a very similar idea. You've got these scooped birdbath optics that sort of sit behind a traditional sunglasses like front face. And they have little micro mini OLEDs in them, 1080p resolution per eye, but this is not like virtual reality. It's not supposed to be immersive where you can't see the world around you. And they're often called augmented reality glasses, but the core use, and this is why I kind of talk about them as being face displays, the core use up to this point has just been, you plug them into a computer, you plug them into a game console, and you'll see a big screen floating out in space in front of you, no matter where you look. So it just occupies the center of your field division. I'm having Google Glass PTSD. Well, so Google Glass, Google Glass, I mean, this is why I get really cranky because like Google Glass into Focals by North was more of like a smart watch interface kind of up around your eye. This is more the middle of your field of view is a 1080p display that, so here in my office, I've got a 50 inch TV and my office is about eight feet long on this side. And I get a larger image out of these glasses projected out in space in front of me. And I really like these glasses for doing things like if I'm on an airplane, I plug this into my steam deck and then I can sit as comfortably as I want. I'm not hunched over a tiny little game console trying to play. I can kick back and no matter where I look, I see basically a 70 inch or a 60 inch TV depending on what distance and measurement you're using. I just pulled up for our audio listeners, the Xreel website where they've got examples of people using their product. A lovely woman sitting in the back of a car looking out with the glasses and you see the movie that she's watching or a gamer on the floor. But those very poorly photoshopped depictions of what it's like, it's kind of like that, but a little bit more see-through. So is it a little minority report where you can actually see through it? So maybe what you're looking against matters? Yeah, so like right now I've got lights on and I've got like white walls and stuff. And if I were to just watch like this with the lenses open, that wouldn't be a great viewing experience, but your brain does something where it starts focusing on the moving parts of the image. And you start kind of canceling out the background information that you can see. But if you want, you can also get these shields that completely block off the lenses. So these are just the glasses. I mean, again, this is so unfamiliar to so many people and you kind of think you know what it's like until you really put these on your face and then you snap and like, okay, I see where I could use this as a portable monitor for my laptop and go to dual display, but I have like a privacy display that only I can see or I'm playing a game on my steam deck and I'm on an airplane and I'm the most comfortable I've ever been and I see this perfect representation or I don't want to bug my wife, but I still kind of want to watch this movie and I can lay in bed and I'm sort of staring up at the ceiling and I see this awesome view of the movie, but I don't have lights and sound on to bug my wife while she's trying to follow us. This is wild. It's really intense stuff, but you know, there's like the techie component of it where it's really unfamiliar, but these glasses do have sensors built into them for very rudimentary, they call it three degrees of head tracking. So it's body anchored. So with the sensors in the right piece of software, you can do some simple things like I can pull up a web browser and I can stick it over like my left shoulder and then it just stays there. And when I look away, I can see something undisturbed, but then I can look back over and I can see that web browser floating in space. It's kind of funny because a lot of the demonstrations that you saw on Apple's keynote for Vision Pro were things that mixed reality and these little face displays are kind of already capable of doing for about one-sixth the price. Well, that's, I mean, we got a question in the chat how much do these costs? So like, A, how much do they cost and B, how do they work? And you've got two of them. So what is, I'm sorry. So there are different solutions and they're, again, to kind of summarize this really, really quickly. The Xreel Air are a little bit older. They're now going into like a full year of production on this. This retails for just under $400. So the glasses themselves? The glasses themselves are just under $400. And then the Rowe Kids are a little bit newer. The Xreel, I mean, again, not to go down every single spec, but slightly narrower field of view typically used at around 60 Hertz and then just a very traditional glasses frame. The Rowe Kid Max have a wider field of view. The optics are a little bit broader. So the image you see fills a little bit more of your field of view. They have built-in diopters. So you can, if you're nearsighted, they have adjustments to the optics that you can kind of focus the image per eye a little bit more effectively. And then they can also ramp up to 120 Hertz. If you're doing anything high refresh, you can power it on these glasses and the image is just incredibly smooth. So that was a lot of talking just to explain the glasses because one of the major issues with these types of products is what do you pair them with? So many of our phones, if you have a Pixel, they're difficult to power on an iPhone. iPhones are really bad about kind of sharing video out and powering these kinds of displays. You know, like Xiaomi only just recently put USB3 and video out into their most expensive phone this year. If you're already on something like Motorola Ready 4 or the Honor Magic desktop or Samsung Dex, you've been able to use these in a brilliant way and having your own floating virtual desktop powered directly from your phone just plugged in on the USB-C cable. But you go and you read reviews and so many people are frustrated like, oh, you said these were compatible with phones and it doesn't even work with the Pixel. And you're trying to blame Google, right, sure, Xreel. And you're like, no, actually that is Google's bad because they don't put video out on Pixels. So both companies have made boxes to power the glasses in completely different ways. And this is what's exciting about sort of grassroots augmented reality is you kind of want both. All right, well, so, well, Michelle, you got, you have a thought first before you- Yeah, actually it's, you know, on the Pixel, I don't know if we talked about it on this show but there was a rumor that the Pixel 8 will finally support display output. So I'm really excited for that because I could finally use a Pixel with one of these external AR glasses. I don't want to be the negative Nancy because I absolutely adore Pixel products and I recommend them a lot. But one of the reasons why I don't use them is because of this like advanced functionality. And these phones are too powerful not to do other things with them. But we have heard these rumors before, like we picked apart some of the code in Android to look at desktop modes and like, oh, it's a beta on a Pixel. Maybe the next one will have video out. So I'm not holding my breath, but I'm so desperate that hopefully Pixel 8 will finally bring this to us. But in those situations where maybe you don't have a phone that can power these glasses or any number of mid-rangers, think about all of the mid-ranger phones that are stupid powerful but they don't have this kind of functionality. The two solutions, Rokid and Xreel, Rokid came out with something called the station. And I think this is a little bit easier to understand. This is basically a battery powered Android TV with its own little micro HDMI and just a USB-C for power. And it functions just like a Chromecast. So it's almost exactly the same as like a Chromecast remote. It pulls up the Android TV interface. Any Android TV app that you can install on a Chromecast or on a smart TV you can install here on the Rokid station. It doesn't do anything fancy. So all of the advanced head tracking and augmented reality and like the ability to change up the display size, it's not doing any of that but it's a 5,000 milliamp hour battery that gets you roughly six hours of streaming if you've got a data connection. And it's just to power the glasses and provide you I think one of the most streamlined big screen entertainment modes that can sort of fit in your pocket and then you use it just like any remote you're familiar with. So do you need a phone? I mean, do you need a phone? You need data. It's an Android TV. So imagine taking the Chromecast off of your TV and plugging it into a 5,000 milliamp hour power bank. Got it, okay. And that's kind of what it is. It's a more convenient way to sort of carry that around and then it powers the glasses. So it's meant to be paired the Rokid station with the Rokid glasses. So these kind of go together like that. I really wasn't expecting that to be that big of a deal. Between the two products, I kind of got both around the same time and I myself personally being the super, super nerd thought, okay, well, techies are gonna see this and go, eh, whatever. Just that notion of anywhere you go, you can take your Android TV. And then when you come home, you can plug this into a TV to use as your Android TV and just pair it up with another remote. And then when you leave, you take your TV with you with a giant screen that can fold up and fit in a shirt pocket. That's very cool. That immediacy made a lot of sense to a lot of people. And then I started digging in a little deeper. If you can do Android apps, it's really fun doing this with like Steamlink. So I run the game off of my big beefy workstation here in my office, which is roasting right now. And I don't wanna stay in this room if I don't have to. But then I can play on a screen that rivals the biggest screen in our home just by pairing a Bluetooth controller to this little Rokin station. So it really opens up a lot of mobility, a lot of portability to this idea, and you don't have to run down a phone battery. It can be a separate experience from what would normally power these glasses. So that's the easy one to explain. That's the easy one, okay. So what is the X-Rail Beam? So the X-Rail Beam is the complete opposite. This is not a brain to power content. The X-Rail Beam is, all of the horsepower of this little box is built to intercept the video from another device and add all of the augmented reality and head tracking to another product. So if I take my X-Rail Air glasses and I pair them to my little laptop that I'm sitting in front of right now, what I'm gonna see is a second monitor that just fills my field of view and everywhere I look, it's just statically right in front of me. It's kind of always in my face. So the Beam adds that three degrees of head tracking so I can pin a monitor where I want it. And so I'm looking down at my laptop, I can pin a second display, look over at it, and then look back and not have that in my field of view. So this is like a little translator for every video feed that you might wanna plug this into. So yeah, like on their website, they show a Nintendo Switch, right? So you can plug this into any device that has... Some kind of HDMI out and it's gonna help power that experience and make it a bit more accessible for some of these products that don't and it's also Miracast. So you can go wireless with everything except the Pixel. So Pixels don't support Miracast but again, you could have your Samsung phone or your Motorola Ready 4 phone. You could fire it up wirelessly. And then not only do you get a wonderful representation wirelessly, but this will also add all of the extra head tracking and all of that customization. So you can change the perceived distance. If you want it to feel like the desktop is further away like at the end of a table or opposite a desk you can change that up. They also have a picture in picture mode. So you can be out walking around. I mean, it's kind of silly to have $400 face displays on your face, but you can shrink it down and just have a little ticker window and keep watching the movie that you're watching and not have the movie up in your face as you're out in public. So this is not as easy to demonstrate or explain because it doesn't really do any of the content itself. X-Reel saying more apps are coming but the main purpose for this box is to solve a lot of the compatibility issues that these glasses have had with various devices. So wired, wireless, streaming, mirror cast, all of that head tracking. And it also does some really interesting image stabilization work that the glasses can't do on their own. So there's like a slight delay when you move your head so that it can smooth the transition as you're looking away from the content that you have pinned. And that's not something that the glasses can do themselves because there's no brain in these glasses. So it's really difficult to kind of like express that and show it in like in my video, I'm doing these really hokey like animations. So it's like, oh, let me move around my office. And this is three degrees of head tracking. But this is the next step in, I think a consumer accessible face computing environment. I don't know. That's it, you gotta trademark that term. I know, I'm very reluctant to say augmented reality glasses. These are AR glasses, but I think that comes with a loaded sort of expectation that a lot of us techies see stuff in science fiction like, oh, in another couple of years, we're gonna put contacts in and we'll have a full cyborg interface. Right, what was the Microsoft one? Remember the demo where somebody, HoloLens, is it where they're fixing the plumbing or whatever it is? Yeah, exactly. So I mean, HoloLens is still being developed and Microsoft has a ton of military contracts to make real augmented reality a practical battlefield. AR is huge in military, it's huge in manufacturing and factories and stuff like that. But I started playing with these glasses two or three years ago with some TCLs. TCL has a solution that's similar to these. And I got a bunch of comments, hey, we know Apple's gonna be doing AR and they'll do it right and they're right around the corner and they'll show us what real sleek glasses can do. And when we finally saw that, we got a $3,500 DevKit ski goggles that didn't really solve any of the mixed reality challenges that every other player's been playing with. They're coming with more resolution, that's cool. They're coming with some beefier internal processing, that's cool. But they're still at their core, the same mixed reality experience we've always been seeing. And I don't think we can really solve this issue of augmented reality in a practical consumer form at the top of the market. And that's where these glasses get really exciting. They're super basic, they're not as techy or as sexy or as exciting as the new HTC Vive or what Apple's gonna do with Vision Pro. But they're so imminently practical and they're so easy to use with a whole bunch of other things that you already own will learn more about how to use this stuff. And well, unless you have, unless, I mean, again, like I said, I'm not holding my breath, but I'm with you, Michelle. If Pixel 8 gives this video out, I'm gonna be so happy. So it sounds like roughly like $5 to $600 for the glasses and the device. If you had to pick- Oh, sorry, yeah. If you had to pick- Each one of these boxes is around $120. So you add $120 to these glasses and you're right, between $5 and $600, you've got some kind of wearable portable computer display monitor thing that you can fit in a shirt pocket or wear as sunglasses if you wanna take them out. Can you pair multiple glasses with the same box? Like, so if I wanted to watch with my husband, you know, we could have our own display. They call it a TV. They call it a TV. Well, I know, but we're both tech people and we watch stuff. Yeah. What I've been playing with is trying to find ways that you can use like HDMI splitters, but the problem is making that portable and properly powered across both displays. And unfortunately, it's just like a Chromecast. I tried to plug in better audio directly through the USB-C on my Chromecast and boy howdy did that Chromecast freak out and wouldn't put out any signal. So the second you start messing with stuff like that for established streaming sites, it just instantly breaks your DRM. So you don't get anything. If you're planning ahead, I've had some luck sort of splitting these video feeds and then using a service like Plex. So I've got like a shelf of like all of my absolute favorite movies. I never wanna look for them on streaming services. I bought the Blu-rays and then I made copies of the Blu-ray to play on my own Plex server. And that has kind of worked. The problem is the additional cabling, the splitter and then powering the splitter. So it complicates that chain a lot. But like you were saying, like it would be really cool if I could kick back with my wife and we could watch the same movie and have that same experience. We're starting to travel a little bit more. It's, I don't think we're quite there yet, but I'm hoping that we'll see, again, now that we've got some actual practical ways to power these glasses for consumers that aren't ridiculously expensive, those are those next steps. How do you share an experience? How do you make this more interactive? How do you get app developers to build head tracking augmented reality apps for these services? Talk about large displays, right? We've been talking about foldables and tablets now like that sort of thing. It's the right time to talk about this. This is the exotic version of looking at a foldable is I have a phone in my pocket and instead of sitting down and opening it to have a mini tablet that I'm looking down at, what if I sit down and I keep the phone in my pocket but I throw some glasses on and then I've got a movie theater screen sitting in front of me. So foldables are already facing competition from some very quiet but exotic options that are coming down the pipe. These glasses are the tip of the spear for some really interesting ways to change up how we interact with our phones. Yeah, so on the Android side of things, what I'm most looking forward to in the future is, there's a partnership between Google and Samsung who are working on an XROS which is based on Android. I'm curious to see if that's actually like a standalone OS for augmented reality smart glasses or if that's improvements to Android to improve the experience of outputting to augmented reality glasses. And if it's a ladder, I think that will have big implications for devices like these. Both sides actually have you because this stuff is the Wild West. I mean, it's so raw, there is no right answer yet. Think about, we were talking about headphones, think about how difficult it is to get a good pair of earbuds to fit comfortably. We don't have that nut cracked. Everybody's biology is different. You put a screen in front of your eyeballs, that difficulty increases, it's an order of magnitude more difficult than good earbuds. And we've been working on headphones for a century. Every company is trying to present their product as if this is like, this is the solution. We are taking our first baby steps. So those comments about like software and XROS, one of the things that breaks my heart is seeing how Google kind of gutted their, I forget what the project name was, but their augmented reality division. They had acquired, thank you. They had acquired a little mini company that I absolutely adored North. They made the Focals by North and they were these little heads up display glasses, not really augmented reality. It was just a smartwatch interface right up at eye level. And that's all it was, super, super simple. And they got all of that IP and then they kind of killed the division that was working on this kind of consumer practical heads up display. That's the kind of stuff where we really learn about all of the different faces and all of the different eyes and all of the different noses and all of the different skulls that make this stuff more accessible to everybody. If we start with like $1,200, $1,500, $3,500 ski goggles, we're not gonna learn that stuff. We're gonna leave a lot of people behind until we find a way to make it more accessible. Low cost and accessible. This is fascinating, Juan. Thank you so much. This stuff is awesome. So check out the Xreel Beam or the Rokid station. If you got $600, wanna get on board with it. I'm tempted. Honestly, the Rokid station looks pretty cool. I'm tempted by that. The Beam, I feel like the whole needs to connect to something but the fact that the Rokid station's in one thing seems pretty cool. I totally miscalled it. I really thought Techies were gonna be more interested in like, oh, this is the Swiss Army knife. It's gonna do all the head tracking. It's gonna do the AR stuff. And then I did the video on the station and people flipped out. Oh, I can really power it. Oh, I can really watch this stuff. Oh, I can play games from it. That's what got people lit up. So I was completely off the pulse there. I've been playing with both and I got to tell you like, I wouldn't want to give one of them up. Kind of like having both of you in front of me. It's good to have options, so. Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much, Juan. That's awesome. That's very cool. It's a corner of Android that I don't think it was on my radar, so that's awesome. All right, well, we're close to the end of the show. We got a couple of app stuff to share with you and then some feedback. And so, Wynn, I'll hand it to you for our first app story. Yeah, and for folks that loved, you know, the Gmail alternative that Google confusingly killed five years, almost five years ago now. Was it 2018? Was it the last year of Inbox? If you all missed that, the very four short years that Inbox was out in the wild and a lot of people really enjoyed it and loved it. And we're very sad that it was sent off into, you know, the killed by google.com app afterlife. Well, if you missed it, we did talk about a spiritual successor to Inbox on the ghost of shows past. Let's just find as many euphemisms for the old show as possible. So we talked about the, about a new app called shortwave. And after a year and a half of kind of a small, you know, group beta testers, it is now released in the Google Play Store. So if you missed all of your favorite Inbox goodies, like, you know, kind of a more get things done GTD style of achieving Inbox zero with things like pinning, bundling, snoozing, kind of triaging and kind of like a smarter way of doing email than maybe shortwave is your jam. So I, so I actually downloaded this two days ago and it's kind of hard because not unlike Inbox shortwave isn't just kind of like a magic, you know, a magic wand on your inbox to achieve Inbox zero shortwave is more an approach, right? Just like GTD and just like, in a sense, Inbox is where you kind of have to, you kind of have to work the method, which is it has two parts, which is basically triaging your inbox and then also automating your workflow. And the idea is that shortwave is providing you tools to do both of these things and kind of helping you triage, you know, whether it's pinning things that you got to do today so that you don't, you know, forget about it and you handle it, but then also allowing you to kind of, you know, really prioritize your inbox, snooze things and being able to do things like say, like maybe I like to take my Sundays to read all my newsletters rather than having to get them one by one and kind of missing them during the week, you can actually bundle things together, you know, by, you know, type by sender and have them actually scheduled to be sent to you when you want them. So there's a lot of these kinds of tools which of course get your drink cards ready are boosted by AI because of course, what is not these days. But if you are looking kind of for a tool that will help you, and that's just a tool but an approach to help you get to, I don't really like this achievable Inbox zero shortwave might be your jam. It is free to use at the free level, we'll call it. There's only 90 days of searchable email history but if you are liking it and you pay $9 a month you'll get unlimited searchable emails and a basically promised one business day turnaround time on support. And yeah, just go ahead and try to that if you need a little bit of help with your inbox or rather you missed inbox and you need a little bit of help help managing your emails shortwave. Just also shout out to Android Lee who is a founder of, is that right? I'm sorry, I should have looked this up before I even started talking. But we got a very nice ping from Andrew Lee who is a part of shortwave and just remember that we talked about them last year but now that they're out and published in production gave us a ping. So there you go. If you give a shot. Andrew Lee sent us a great email and at the bottom it says sent with shortwave which was nice to see but I gotta admit like I love email apps like it's one of my, it's my jam in terms of categories not only do I like the approach they did the responsible use of AI with those kind of generated summaries and things like that. But it looks nice. It looks different. It's nice. So used to email apps all starting to look the same but they really applied a great design sense to the whole app itself. So I'm gonna give it a test drive I'm gonna play with it. I've been riding the main Gmail app for a while so I've dove in with an email app so I'm excited to give shortwave a test run. Yeah I just started playing with it and it's pretty cool and it's real pretty. I'm actually kind of surprised that we didn't see more companies try to pick up where inbox left off. So this is kind of a fun revisit to sort of getting to done in your email. All right cool. So congratulations shortwave. I'm launching a inbox coming back from the grave. All right cool. So Michelle you shared a tip on Reddit recently. Can you tell us about that? Yeah so I just recently discovered that if you use the files by Google app and you select a folder you can actually initiate a nearby share on the entire folder and all the subfolders within it. And when you share it with your Chromebook your another Android device or a Windows PC it actually retains the folder structure which is actually kind of new functionality because previously if you selected a whole bunch of files or like a folder and you shared it through any other app like the Samsung My Files app it would just share all of those files and they'd all end up in your downloads directory. So like if you're trying to share like I don't know a hundred MP3 files or like a hundred memes from your pictures folder or whatever it would all show up in your downloads folder uncategorized. But now you can have all your categories and folders retained when you share it but only through the files by Google app at the moment. It's almost as if it like that. I mean, I use a Mac OSX laptop. It's only you know, you drag a folder from Finder into another folder and the folder structure happens, right? Like that's just all works. It's nice. It's nice. Yeah. Yeah, I was having to make zips whenever I would take like a group of files and I would zip it up and then share it that way. So this is a lot handier. Well, it's a good tip. Thanks, Michelle, for that. That's a good one. And that was posted in the Android subreddit, right? So that's where you're posting some of these tips when you find them? Well, I mean, I cross posted it to like five different platforms but that's the one that I submitted for this show. Cool, right on. All right, cool. Well, that's gonna round it up for apps. We're gonna get into our feedback. We got a couple emails but first we have a live response to last week's show from Mr. Juan Bagnell here. As we were talking about the update from Google on trackers as well as the update on the delay in the Find My Device Network. So Juan, you have the floor, sir. I'm gonna keep this short. I was rambling so much about other glasses and stuff. We don't have to stay on this too long. I wanted to reiterate and I just wanted to give a thumbs up to Michelle because the breakdown on that situation I thought you did a really good job of talking about this. And it's great that you were having me on because I was literally like starting to write out an email to reply to have read on the show. But Ron, again, in my role is the person who encourages you to eat your vegetables. My Jiminy cricket. Yeah, exactly. I don't feel a lot of people really appreciate just what this network really represents and what they're signing up for. And it's one of those situations where I'm shocked that we haven't seen some regulatory response to Apple's business practices and how they're pushing their network forward. The things they blew up and the potential damage and the potential harm that their air tags could have caused in how the whole rest of the industry is having to kind of fix Apple's problems. But Apple doesn't really seem to be contributing much to making the situation better and is still the de facto conversation in this tracker hardware. I've got frustrating emails from Cipolo and Pebblebee and some replies from Tile. I was planning a whole roundup of this hardware to cover it over the summer so we could talk about a more open protocol for using this kind of location tracking. And I just wanted to pick back on one thing that you said in last week's show where you don't use these trackers. You're not really, you don't have a horse in this race. But I wanted to ask Ron, do you use like find my device? Nope. So you do no GPS, you do no location sharing, you lose a phone, it's just gone forever. The key is you don't lose the phone. But I mean, you go out of your way to make sure that all of that stuff's disabled and you didn't opt in. No, I don't. It's all probably on. I'm totally BS. I'm like, yeah, I'm sure it's all on. Yeah, but I've never lost the phone, thankfully. So. Well, you're a luckier man than I as I look at this like a mountain of e-waves. Also, keep in mind, I barely leave my house anymore for the past four years. But to that point, I don't feel that these companies, and I feel like Google is doing a better job of this, but I don't think they're really sticking the landing in a way that I feel is responsible for consumers is that you can look up your phone and you can find your phone. And now you can stick a tracker to something and you can find it if it encounters another one of these devices. You are a part of this network. If you don't have a tracker, you're still contributing this location data. You're still a part of how all of this is going down. And I think it's grossly irresponsible of Apple to have put out this product that is so location powerful and is so communicative with everybody's personal data and didn't build these safeguards in. And especially for Apple calling themselves a market leader, this is the kind of journalistic pushback and the regulatory pushback that Apple really is kind of overdue. The brazen responsibility of the rollout, right? And like this is kind of where you want a third party to come in and I mean, cheese, I hate to say, but regulate that this whole kind of category. I know, Ron, I have had so many conversations with you. I know that that was acid in your mouth saying regulators getting involved in businesses, but we're to a point where the next reasonable and responsible move, and this is something that I hope all of us can kind of keep an eye on, keep track of and maybe even put a little pressure on so that it doesn't come to government getting in the way of business. Which we never want to see happen, but yeah. But if business can't police itself, we need it. But Google now needs to be responsible for taking everything that they've learned in fixing all of Apple's mess and they need to work directly with the Bluetooth special interest group. If Apple were a market leader, this would be a part of Bluetooth 5.3. Just like how we open up some earbuds and it auto pairs to our phone, we should have this kind of an alert for it. This is totally, this is pulling the thread on a sweater and we're already running long because like this ties back to the RSS debate and the narrow-sidedness of iMessage and Apple's whole messaging platform as a single solution versus using SMS which was a widely adopted protocol that was available to everybody. This is the same topic that we keep bumping up against and just driving crazy. And I know I'm preaching to the choir here on a show called Android Faithful and they're gonna, a lot of people from the outside in if they catch this kind of commentary, they're just gonna say we're angry Android nerds but this is the kind of journalistic response that I feel Apple has also been sort of overdue. I need to know. We're gonna roll back the video and take a screenshot of Winsor reaction just now. And he's like. But we know for a fact and this is something that I think Michelle, you did a really good job of commenting on last week too. We know for a fact, if Google had put out their own hardware tracker and they had ripped off Tile's business model and given their phones and their ecosystem preferential data that they never would have given to a competitor just like Apple did in ripping off Tile. And then there was a huge gaping hole in that tracker's potential for abuse. There would be no end of headlines about how Google is stealing your information and Google is coming after you and Google is watching your kids and Google's giving up all of this data. And Apple is still the de facto sales point for a tracker tag right now. They're still profiting from this. They're still doing business on this. And major news publications, major television channels. Well, I mean, that's like nerdy stuff. No one really cares about that. Air tags are pretty cool. You should just use those. Tim Cook's out there by your mom and iPhone, whatever, it's all good. And this is what's so galling is like we've had example after example after example of Apple breaking standards to make their competitors look like their products are the problem. And then never really getting the pushback or the oversight that they kind of need at this point. Open Pandora's box and just watch us all scramble to put everything back inside. Yeah, break it and then sell it at scale and then fix it if you can is a terrible strategy when you've got a $2.8 trillion market cap. You need to be more responsible than that. Well, maybe next time, Juan, you write that email instead of coming on the show. I told you, I put it in the private chat that you can skip it if you wanted to. I'm just saying. No, it's good, it's good. It's all good. Well, we thank you for that live response the last week's episode. I like the, it's like the, you know, back in the day on TV, they'd have people come on with a response to something that was saying, you know, like, I like that we should continue to do that. I just, the main response is, Ron, even though you're not in this, you're in this. Whether you want to be here in it, which I get, which is your part of it too. Fair point, fair point. Well, thank you Juan. If you weren't on the show, you could have emailed contact at androidfaithful.com and we would have read your email just like Ryzen to the top of the charts our number one emailer, Chuck wrote in again and when you're going to, you're going to share Chuck's email for us, right? Yes, yes. And Chuck from Thousand North California is here to talk to us about some Samsung. So you're wondering why people were faithful to Samsung here are my reasons in order of importance. Number one, I will get a $1,000 trade-in on my 18th, 18 month old S21 Ultra toward an S23 Ultra, making the net upgrade cost $200. Can't do that with Google. Number two, I love one UI. The customization is insane. Good luck is fantastic. Number three, the phones are rock solid. I've dropped my S21 Ultra at least 50 times in the last 18 months with nary a scratch. Number four, I'm a big fan of rounded glass sides. The less bezel, the better in my opinion. Number five, I'm a person that actually uses a stylus. It's the best method for screenshots allowing me to crop, annotate and modify screenshots before I save it. In fact, I don't need to save it if I want to share it. Number six, I've been a Samsung user since the Galaxy Nexus days going all through the Note series and now the S20 X S20 something Ultra series. What would it take to get my business from Samsung? Another phone with an extremely configurable OS, a great upgrade plan and possibly a built-in stylus. I could adapt to no stylus but the other thing would have to be exceptional or the other things would have to be exceptional. Notice I didn't mention the camera anywhere. Why? Every flagship phone has an excellent camera. I can't understand why Apple still pushes cameras in their marketing. It's no longer an advantage. Regards, Chuck in Thousand Loaks, California. Good email, Chuck. And it just shows the show that there's something for everybody in the world of Android and you found your home. I mean, he says the Nexus. Yeah, he's right at die. I had the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. I think that's my only Samsung phone I ever owned. I have it on that shelf right over there still. It's a museum piece. So yeah, I mean, these are all good points. It's funny, the camera point I think is interesting because it's like you wonder why Apple still promotes that but like the Apple audience think they have the best camera. So like they're, it's praying ignorance, you know? So, oh well, there you go. All right, well, if you have any thoughts or responses to anything from this episode, in fact, like we were talking about shortwave, if you wanna hear more about our experience with shortwave or email apps or other apps, I know people have been emailing in their suggestions for the new show. We wanna hear them. What do you wanna see? Please email us at contact.androidfaithful.com. Or you could do what I did. Just come on the show. Yeah, just come on the show. Yeah, we'll book you out. You just wanna ramble for like five minutes about like regulatory oversight. These guys are game, you should do it. All right, well, thank you for joining us Juan. On that note, where can people find more of your rants? I'm all over the place. Some gadget guy around the web. I'm spending a little less time these days on like the Twitters and the Facebooks and the Instagrams. I'm really digging the vibe over on mastodon and trying to kind of build up some of the federated interactions and stuff. But some gadget guy.com, some gadget guy on social media, some gadget guy on YouTube. And then I can't talk about it yet, but I might be doing some freelance work with another big tech magazine. So fingers crossed that we'll get some fun content out on some major sites again soon. Well, we will be there to consume it and hopefully have you on so you can promote it again. And you know, Juan, we love you. And we want, listen, Juan is on our list of potentially hopefully repeat guests that will be on more often with the new show. So. I am down. Again, thank you so much for extending the invite and reaching out and again, joining these kinds of conversations, it's really nice. There are a lot of us nerds out there that really value and cherish these, these weekly sort of round table chats. So I'm so happy to hear you back. Oh, you're going to make Michelle cry. Well, all the kind words. All right, so Michelle speaking, throwing the hat over to you. Where can folks find you? So if you want to follow me on Twitter or whatever it's called nowadays, Mastodon, Telegram, et cetera. All my usernames are the same. It's just my first name, last name at Michelle, Ramon. But I'm also trying out something new. Earlier today, actually, I literally just opened this up. I opened up a Patreon and this is a way for you to support me in my independent Android news coverage. Cause you know, I post a whole bunch of really good content for free on Twitter for everyone to consume. And I don't get a lick of it. I don't get anything out of it like monetarily wise, right? I don't know how long I can continue doing that, you know, for it to be viable. You know, I do post articles from time to time, but I think I want to continue posting content that people enjoy. So I'm opening this up as a way for you to support me and so I can continue to bring the kind of coverage that you know, you expect from me for the foreseeable future. And if you scroll down, I am providing some unique benefits. Like there are some exclusive details right now, like Android 14 release date potentially and some details on Android 15. So if you want to see some exclusive stuff and join my members only discord, you know, you can start supporting me right there. And also support the show. And by there you mean at patreon.com.com. Patreon.com.com. And of course also be sure to support Android Faithful. You know, this is a great show, you know, after all about Android, you know, discontinued its show. You know, it's great to have another place to talk about Android every week. Yep. And we appreciate everybody who supported us. And yeah, and go support Michelle three bucks, three bucks a month. That's less than a cup of coffee. I mean, it's the Sally Struthers bit, you know, they're in and of itself. So, so we thank everybody, you know, thank everybody for supporting Michelle and please support us over at patreon.com.com. And Faithful. And yeah, so that's awesome. All right, so when, where can folks find you? Yeah, so I mean, support your journalists, support your creators and support your desk. And I biased saying that because I am an Android dev. That's my day job. Been doing it for, wow, is it over 11 years now? But yeah, I speak about Android dev stuff. So if you're interested, you can check out my talks, code and associate video on my website randomly typing.com. And I am in social media places at Queen Code Monkey. It's, if you, if, if, if Queen Code Monkey is there, hope, I want to say almost assuredly, but hopefully it's me. If it's not, tell me, tell me. Got to look down the user name. I'm trying to, I finally got that blue sky, sky invited. So there's, I should get on. I had some. I would have totally hooked you up with the blue sky. Oh, it's okay. Regular audience member, Jason Howell hooked me up, but I- Totally normal, regular person. Regular, not special. I mean, you're all- I got on blue sky a couple of months ago and then like I had signed up to get in and like last week they said, they finally sent me an email like, you're in. Here's your code. I'm like, dude, I've already been in. Like, do you, do you doop your database? So anyway, lots of great segue because I am on blue sky. I am on mastodon. I am on threads. I am on Twitter, X. I am on Instagram. I'm Ron XO everywhere there. There might be some other stuff or the, I think I'm the Ron XO on TikTok because somebody has Ron XO, which is annoying. I don't post that much. Although you follow me on Instagram. I post a lot of music stuff when I go see shows and things like that. So definitely check that out. But thank you everybody for the support. Go check out my other podcasts over at ifanboy.com. Every month I'm on there talking about movies and TV shows that join Josh and Connor. They talk about comics every week. So it's fun stuff. And thanks for listening to this podcast. You are the best. And we want to thank Juan for joining us. Thank you for watching because that's going to bring us to the end of Android Faithful.com. And this podcast publishes every Tuesday evening. You can subscribe at androidfaithful.com. Email us at contact.androidfaithful.com. And we'll see you next week on Android Faithful.