 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thank you. If you're John Atwood, or Pat, or Mike Cortez, or maybe one of our brand new patrons, everybody welcome them in. Kelso and Kavisha, come on in. On this episode of DTNS, it's made by Google Day. Michelle Roman joins us to talk about the highlights of new pixels, phones, watches, and more. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 4th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Secret Punker, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us is freelance editor and some of you DTNS people may know him as a regular co-host on Android Faithful. Michelle, welcome back. This is actually my first time on the show. I mean, welcome back to the channel. To the channel. That has Android Faithful, but you're right. It's the first time on DTNS. We thank you as part of the fam. Exactly. Welcome to DTNS. It's great to have you, man. I know it's a busy day. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's been crazy. But I mean, what's one more thing to do? Thank you. Thank you for thinking about that way. I appreciate that. We got lots to talk about, including some non-Google stuff like Apple releasing that iOS and iPadOS 17.0.3. That's the one designed to address a confirmed overheating issue on the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max. That's the third-party apps had also apparently been overloading the system causing heat dissipation issues. So get that. Let's see what else is in the quick hits. Google event be darned. Just kidding. We will get to that in a second. But Samsung announced a new phone today as well. The Samsung Galaxy S23 FE, which stands for Fan Edition. These models run on the older Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip while preserving most of the features of the flagship version at a lower price. The S23 sells for $600 starting October 26th. Samsung also announced the FE versions of the 10.9-inch Galaxy Tab S9 FE for $450, the 12.4-inch Tab S9 FE Plus for $700, and Galaxy Buds FE for $100. Those all come to select carriers October 5th and from Samsung directly starting October 10th. The Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists who developed quantum dots. Quantum dots are the extremely small semiconductor nanoparticles that emit different colors based on their size. They're used in QLED displays if you've seen that on TVs and also in lots of other displays. All kinds of things like medical imaging and else. U.S.-based Russian physicist Alexei Ekimov is credited with discovering quantum dots in the 1980s. U.S. chemist Louis E. Brew found that they could be developed in a fluid and France's Mungi G. Bowendi created a method for making them. The three scientists will share the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Now, Dr. Nicky will be on the show tomorrow to talk about this and the other Nobel prizes related to technology. Microsoft announced that the Dolly 3 image generation model is now available in Bing Chat and for Bing image generator users. That's ahead of Dolly's announced integration into Chat GPT set for later this month. The company also plans to bring Dolly image generation to Microsoft Paint. Spotify announced Tuesday that it will now offer audiobooks to Spotify premium subscribers at no additional charge. Starting in Australia and the UK with other markets including the U.S. getting it later this year. Spotify has already offered audiobooks. If you're like, wait, I thought they already did that, but you had to pay for them individually. Now, a subset of those, so around 150,000 books, that's about half of what they have in the catalog, will be included for premium users at no additional cost. Audible does a similar thing. However, on Spotify, you can only listen to 15 hours of those books per month after which you have to wait until next month or purchase extra 10 hours in blocks of 10 hours, which most of the books I read are more than 15 hours. So I'm not sure how this is going to go down. Nintendo announced it was shutting down online services for its 3DS and Wii U eShops in early April 2024. No real details besides that, but this will make multiplayer features, online cooperative play, internet rankings, and data distribution no longer available on these platforms. And that will be the last non-Google Pixel thing we say for a while. Let's get into the announcement made by Google. Centerpiece was the Google Pixel 8. The Google Pixel 8 itself is a 6.1 inch phone, variable up to 120 Hertz refresh rate, 50 megapixel wide camera, new Tensor G3 chip, more on-device AI model processing, including Google's Foundation models. Then there's the Pixel 8 Pro, that one's a little bit bigger, 6.7 inches, has an LTPO OLED display, which can handle those variable refresh rates well, and that helps optimize battery life. The Pro also has a 50 megapixel main camera sensor, a 48 megapixel ultra-wide and telephoto sensors, night sight for video now, video boost, and a bunch of other features for the camera. Both phones have improved brightness 2000 for the 8, to go 2400 nits for the 8 Pro, which Google says should let you read the screen even in bright direct sunlight. Battery life for both is claimed to be more than 24 hours and both Pixel 8 models can scan temperature as well, which befuddled a lot of people I saw reporting on it. Both of them also get the seven years of feature updates, not just security, but also feature updates to the OS. Pixel 8 starts at $699, Pixel 8 Pro starts at $999, both for pre-order now, shipping starting October 12th. All right, first impressions, Michelle, what do you think? I definitely think this is Google's best bet in years to take on the iPhone. All the camera features in the Pro are features that you would never expect to see in another phone for a couple of years now, because a lot of these features, Google tends to release new AI features in their camera app on their Pro phone first, then maybe down the line, they release them as exclusive features for Google One subscribers in the Google Photos app. But right now, you have so many camera features, as you mentioned, you have the video boost that's coming soon, you have the night sight video, and also on stage, they announce something that's coming later, which is making the CSI enhance feature a reality. Oh yeah, right. Yeah. That's one of the things they said is possible with the new on-device machine learning capabilities on the Tensor G3 chip. And then also making the Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel 8 supported for seven years is a big, big deal, because previously, the Pixel 7 and earlier, we're only getting three years of OS updates and five years of security updates. Now you can buy a Pixel 8 and keep it for eight, seven years, which is a long, long time to keep a phone. I don't think most people, even like the casual person, is not going to be using a phone for seven years. But Google is putting this commitment forward to keep you on the device for seven years if you want, which is I think a big deal, because one of the reasons people tend to stay on iPhone is that there's that ecosystem walk-in. You buy an iPhone, you buy an Apple Watch, you're locked into that ecosystem. Now with the Pixel 8 Pro, you pre-order the device, you get a free Pixel Watch 2, you keep that phone for seven years, you're locked into the Google ecosystem. Maybe you start buying other devices, maybe you buy a whole bunch of so many apps that you're fully locked in, and it's harder for you to switch away from Android. So I definitely think this is a really important device for Google to start taking on Apple more seriously in the US and other markets. Yeah, and something that designing that censorship themselves certainly helps them be able to do. You know, among some of the AI stuff, Michelle, that was part of the announcement coming to the Pixel 8 camera app. Best take, that was cool. Kind of weird, but kind of cool. For anybody who didn't see the announcement, it blends multiple pictures together. Let's say you're at some family event. Everybody is smiling, but somebody's blinking or not smiling. You can then create the best photo of a bunch of people together. So that's kind of cool. We also have improved magic editor that can remove objects, shadows, and other things from an image. Audio magic eraser can identify distracting sounds in video and remove those as well. Zoom enhance can let you crop out any part of a picture, then use some machine learning to at least provide a higher quality version of that cropped image. Michelle, what stood out to you? I think in terms of AI features, the best take one is probably the most misunderstood. I think it sounds like to a lot of people that like Google is actually correcting the face in the image, which is not what's happening. Since your phone is already taking multiple shots, it's like a burst capture. If you have one image where one person has their eyes closed and another image where another person has a frown because they just happen to not get into the right smiling before the photo was taken, you can now pick and choose, I want this face from that photo and this face from that photo and make the best take, which is the name of the feature. Magically editing the faces to add a smile where there wasn't one before. That said, though, in Google's event, I was like, wow, this is kind of crazy. We are making certain moments different, and that's not bad necessarily, but yeah. I mean, you could do this on your own, right? You could take five photos, print them out, cut them apart to get like, oh, here's the one where Sarah didn't close her eyes, and here's the one where Roger looks good. Well, exactly, it's too much time. What this is doing is saying, we'll do that, we'll let you do that immediately. You pick the photos. So I don't think this is creepy. I'm glad, Michelle, that you know that point. Oh, I don't think it's creepy at all. Anything you could do. I think it's pretty cool, just to the point where I'm like, ah, you know, do we really know what the baby was crying and that, you know. Yeah. I think a lot of people jump to the conclusion that it's changing the photo somehow. It's just letting you crop different photos together to get the best parts. So you brought up a good point, Tom, that everything you're seeing here can already be done if you have a Photoshop license and you're skilled enough at using Photoshop, but many people, myself included, don't really use Photoshop that often or don't really know how to use it. So what Google is doing is they're making Photoshop features more accessible to the average user, and I think that's okay. They're not doing anything that you can't already do if you try hard enough. Now Zoom and Hans on the other hand is filling in data, so I can't wait to try that one, though, because there have been times when I've been like, ooh, I have this picture from a concert and I want to use this part of it, but it gets really grainy. If it can do this well, that might be worth it. Also, the new Pixel 8 phones will be the first to ship with the new version of Android 14. You get, among lots of stuff, an updated customization picker, which speeds up changing things like wallpaper. It includes support for generative AI-created images if you want them. You can also set custom lock screen shortcuts, and Google has some templates to get you started on that. The camera app now supports HDR images. It already did video. Now it does images. Users can pinch to zoom out to 100% in the magnifier tool and change the size of the magnifier. A couple other settings you can tweak with magnifier too. Quick settings lets you change text size and typefaces on the fly, and there's a dedicated hearing aid setup as well. Lots of accessibility features that they were talking about. There's also something called flash notifications that uses visual light to let you know there's a notification instead of just the vibrations and the sounds and the banners that come up, so it'll flash at you if you want. You don't have to have it do that. Request to share data will indicate whether or not that data will be shared with third parties right now. It's rolling out to Pixel phones now, although mine hasn't quite got it yet, but probably soon I will. Other Android phones will get it in the coming weeks and months. A lot of the stuff we already knew was coming, Michelle. What stuck out to you with this announcement? I guess the biggest feature that they announced the rollout of is the generative AI wallpaper, which is actually a Pixel exclusive feature and currently only available on the Pixel 8, although I did manage to get my hands on it early. It's a really neat feature that lets you just create entirely new wallpapers from scratch, because I know a lot of people love to change wallpapers, but sourcing them is tough. There's a lot of subreddits and a lot of communities and a lot of apps and stuff to get wallpapers. Me, I just open the app, choose a topic, choose a color, and then it creates six new wallpapers I can pick from. It's been really fun to play around with that feature, to be sure. Yeah, anything stick out to you, Sarah, as like, hey, maybe I will want to try some Android magic. Well, yeah, I mean, as my mom triumphantly told me, like, my iPhone 15 Pro Max is now shipping. I guess some people had some issues with that. Sort of like, yeah, I'm just not looking to buy a new phone this year. However, there are certain Pixel kind of bells and whistles, if you want to call them that, that are pretty cool. And they've been cool for a while. I thought that today's announcement really highlighted some AI stuff that, sure, you could say like, ooh, that's sort of scary, but I think it's cool. I don't know. I mean, if someone said, do you want a new Pixel phone, I would say, yes, I want this one. Yeah, they're good-looking phones, although they don't look that much different design-wise. Good-looking. I feel like all phones look the same. It's like how all cars look the same these days, unless some car manufacturer wants to be like kind of crazy and make the car look different. It all works the same way. But what's interesting is what's inside. What is under the hood? And I don't know. I thought a lot of stuff today seemed pretty cool. I think one of the more- Oh yeah, go ahead, Michelle. Sorry. Sorry. The Ultra HDR feature is actually kind of underrated, because that'll let you take a photo that can be displayed on both SDR screens, which still a lot of monitors and TVs are, as well as on HDR displays, because you're creating a JPEG file that has the HDR metadata embedded in it, so that lets you cater to both devices. Because right now, all the photos we take are SDR photos with some AI algorithm to make it seem like it's HDR, but they're not true HDR images. So eventually we'll start seeing higher quality images throughout the web and social media and whatnot. It'll take a few years, but we'll start seeing that hopefully. Yeah, hopefully. This is a good start. And Google has made itself the test bed for a lot of features with the Pixel, which I think is, it's a playbook that Microsoft uses with the Surface as well, but I feel like Google does it very well. Folks, if you have a thought about that or anything else we're talking about on the show, here's our email address. Send us your thoughts, feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Well, and it's made by Google Event. Obviously, the Pixel was the big deal, but the company also announced the Pixel Watch 2. Luminum body, smaller crown, added a body response sensor, skin temperature sensor as well, improved heart rate sensor that can switch between single and multi-path modes for better accuracy. Safety check, we'll let you set a time to check in with the watch. In the event, they used a mother doing a walk with a kid and said, you know, if something were to happen, I would like to have a button to be able to, you know, have people know that I need to have a safety check. If you don't, it'll activate emergency sharing, share your location, other data with emergency contacts you select as well. The new battery also lasts 24 hours with the always-on display active. Pixel Watch 2 is available for pre-order for $349 or $399 with LTE, shipping on October 12th. Google updated the Pixel Buds Pro with new features as well. Conversation detection is a new feature that automatically pauses playback when it thinks you're talking and then returns everything to the previous state once you're done. The Buds support Bluetooth super wide band and a background noise filter called clear calling. They say that should improve the quality of the calls. There's a low latency mode that kicks in when compatible apps, mostly games, are opened on your phone and some tools to monitor hearing health to help prevent hearing loss. Pixel Buds app is also coming to Chrome OS. If you've wanted to use your Pixel Buds and you only have a Chromebook, now it'll be easy to do that. Software update is rolling out to your Pixel Buds right now. Google Assistant also getting a boost from the capabilities of Google Bard, including searching for your own personal data. Gmail Drive for answers to your questions. It can handle a broader range of requests and deliver more intelligent and natural responses as well. For example, it can now summarize and translate web pages and read them to you. Voice typing is now twice as fast in English and if you change languages, it automatically detects that and switches that to that new language that you're trying to switch to. Call screen is supposedly better at filtering out spam and will come to the Pixel watch later this year. And another Google feature drop not coming to the new pixels, coming to the Pixel fold dual screen interpreter mode. This feature lets you hold the phone unfolded so the outer screen faces the person you're speaking to and the inner screen is facing you. It can then translate each speaker's words and display them to the other person in real time. Lots of little things got announced here. Michelle, what were some of your favorites that stuck out to you from this part of the announcement? Mostly the upgrades to the Pixel watch because the first 10 pixel watch kind of felt under half baked because like it had 24 hour battery life. It had a really aging processor. You know, it just didn't have a lot going for it didn't even have automatic workout detection. Yeah, like that's a feature basic feature you expect of smart watches. But the Pixel watch two has all that it has a much newer processor the snapdragon w five plus it has also 24 hours battery life. It has newer software where OS for let's you finally back up and like transfer your data from watches, which I know is a godsend for reviewers and we're all going to love that. So yeah, I'm most excited like hardware wise for all the stuff that's coming to the Pixel watch to but as you mentioned, there are also a lot of cool features coming to the Pixel Buds Pro, which you know, it's kind of surprising because they didn't announce the new pair of buds, but all these features are coming for free to people who have already purchased it. And that's really nice to see. I was actually really excited. I don't have Pixel Buds Pro, but I have a Chromebook. And so it got me excited to be like, Oh, I wouldn't have to manage it on my phone, I could manage it on on my laptop. And that's just those little conveniences like that when you're like, Oh, I don't have to go in the other room to grab the phone to manage something. I think they make a difference. Absolutely. Like I'm wearing a pair of Galaxy Buds to pro right now. And if I had to like one of the features that has is voice tech, which is similar to the conversation detection feature that just got announced for the Pixel Buds Pro, or like it switches to transparency mode when you're talking. And like before last night's Android Facebook show, I accidentally left that on. So I constantly heard it enter in transparency mode as I was talking. But fortunately, Samsung actually did make Windows app. So I was able to download that right before the show started and turn that off like before it could get on the way during the show. So like it is really useful to have an app that works across devices so that you don't have to like unpair, repair, change devices just to be able to change the settings or download some new features. They have it on. That feels that transparency mode is like a standard thing now because Apple has it on the AirPods too. And I had it on and then was walking my dog and realized just how often I say things to my dog because it kept pausing things. I was like, no, no, I gotta turn that off. I don't need that. Speaking of pausing, it's actually, I think the Pixel Buds actually does it a little bit differently where it actually pauses the media. Like on the Galaxy Buds, it lowers the volume but the music continues to play. And like, I actually like prefer the way that Google is doing it because it not only pauses the media, but in case you accidentally trigger it, you can just single tap the bud and it'll re-enable ANSI. Yeah. I also liked a lot of the Google Assistant stuff which also seems like where all of these are going. I'm sure we'll see Apple do it, but this is similar to what Amazon just announced not that long ago, which is bringing some large language-modeled magic into their smart assistant. And of course, one would imagine that Google's might get features a little faster since it's in-house, but you never know. Sometimes being in-house isn't that big of an advantage. Yeah, they're calling it Assistant with Bard. Who knows if they're going to keep calling it that? Who knows? Maybe they'll just rename it to Google Assistant. I don't think Assistant with Bard as a brand is going to stick around for very long. Everyone knows that Google Assistant is. Just use that brand. Yeah. It's training wheels, right, to remind people, like, this one's better. This one will understand you. This one will talk to you better. Yeah. This event was not jam-packed, right? It wasn't filled to the brim. And in fact, you could call a lot of this stuff fairly evolutionary. How did you feel overall that this did for Google what they want to do? I definitely think it, you know, they use the word AI a whole bunch. This was the AI Google launch event. Like, AI was infused into everything. I definitely think they are positioning their devices to succeed because, as you know, there's been a slump in smartphone sales, not only in the US, but around the world. Like, all these other brands are declining Apple, not as much as others, but Google has been one of the few to actually grow despite the slump from other brands. Like, they double their market share in the US, although it's only like two to four percent. They also, like, I think they overtook Apple or they are now competitive with them in Japan. Like, they're definitely doing something right. And I think they're on the right path to continue to succeed. They still have an uphill battle because you're going to need something special to overcome the Apple walled garden and the ecosystem they've built up. But Google is building something. There's still a few parts that are missing, especially because their PC side is them pushing Chromebooks on you. And a lot of people don't have Chromebooks. Like, where's all the stuff for us Windows users, right? Where's all the Android to Mac features, right? Like, of course, like Apple, Google doesn't want to sell you a MacBook. They want to sell you a Chromebook. So there's still some ecosystem stuff that are missing from that equation. Well, speaking of Windows. Yeah. Yeah. Microsoft would very much like you to upgrade to Windows 11. And in the process, wants to make it kind of fun. If you say, I don't want to do it. The company embedded the same secret surfing game that it had to do its edge browser three years ago, which was also paying homage to Microsoft's ski free, ski free skiing game that was released as part of its entertainment pack three for Windows back in 1991. So Microsoft is, you know, okay, we're recycling some games here. It may be limited to surface devices. Not everybody is able to get the games. Not all Windows 11 supported devices will as well. But you know what? Kind of fun, right? I mean, when was the last time you had fun upgrading? This is this is Microsoft doing its best. I feel like I needed this in the 90s when I was sitting there taking two hours to upgrade to Windows 95, right? My my upgrades these days don't don't usually take that long. But but it's fun. Yeah, I'm not I'm not gonna I'm not gonna uh disrespect the effort. It's a nice little thing and computer power is so ridiculous now that yeah, you can support a little little downhill surfing game downhill. I guess it's downhill. It's on the ocean. Yeah, because it's do it. I played it. It's doing the skiing thing where you're like, you know, going going faster and faster and trying to avoid running into other surfers and stuff. Michelle, did you find that to be fun? If you upgraded to Windows 11 device recently? I haven't upgraded recently, but you know, I'll take this over another place where they're trying to get me to use Bing because I am tired of all the notifications. There you go. There you go. Well, whether or not you use Windows 11 or you know, anything else, Michelle, we're so glad to have you on the show. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Yeah, if you want to follow me to find out what's new on Android, I'm on Twitter, mastodon, threads and telegram at Michelle Ramon. The handle is shown on the screen below. And if you want to support my work because it takes a lot of effort to do what I do, you can find me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Michelle Ramon. Oh, that's great. You have like just just support Michelle. I think that's awesome and people should do that. Yeah. Go find the link. We'll have it in our show notes as well. We have our own patrons here for Daily Tech News Show as well. And those of you who are patrons, stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. We're going to talk a little more about Android in general, the made by Google announcements and have a little extended conversation about that. And one of our patrons has a request for help. So we're going to put out the call, stick around. Oh, but just a reminder, you can catch this show live Monday through Friday at 4pm Eastern. That's 200 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back again doing it all tomorrow with a Nobel Prize Recap with Dr. Nikki Ackerman joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com.