 Coming up on DTNS, what is RCS and why should you care what Google Stadia won't be launching with? And the Razer flip phone is back and it's smart. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, November 14th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were just talking about Roger's gut feelings. We were having reminisces about South Florida DJs and music on Good Day Internet. If you'd like to hear that conversation and more, by goodness, you've got to become a member right now. Do it while you're listening. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Just pull safely to the side of the road. Pull out your phone and subscribe. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Facebook says it has a fix for the issue of its app actively using the camera behind the scenes. The updated app is now available in the app store. And once you install the update, Facebook should no should no longer activate your camera on a consistent basis. Or at least you won't be able to tell. Instagram has expanded its test of hiding likes from the public to a subset of its all worldwide users. Instagram started the test in April in Canada and has been slowly expanding its sense. The change lets users see who liked their own posts and a total count. Cannellus estimates the smart speaker market grew by 44% in Q3 to 28.6 million units shipped. The big winners are all in China. Baidu grew the most, 290% growth, launching them into the top three. Followed by Xiaomi and Alibaba, both raising their shipments by 78%. Amazon was no slouch, continues to lead worldwide. Shipments grew for Amazon to 65.9%. But all of this came at the expense of Google, it seems. Shipments of Google smart speakers fell 40.1% and Google dropped from second to fourth overall worldwide. Nikkei sources say that the parent companies of Yahoo Japan and the messaging app Line, Z Holdings and Naver, are in final negotiations to merge the two properties. The combination would have over 100 million users over a wide demographic range and expected to be a soft bank consolidated subsidiary. According to a soft bank executive, speaking to Nikkei, soft bank CEO, Masayoshi Son, wants to create a Japanese version of Alibaba centered around Yahoo. Stanford scientists who conducted a heart study sponsored by Apple have published a paper in the New England Journal for Medicine. 400,000 volunteers with an iPhone and Apple Watch participated. 0.5% of the participants got a notification that they experienced atrial fibrillation. When also wearing an ECG patch, the patch confirmed the notification 84% of the time. Which is apparently like a good percentage. Not a lot of false notifications. Apple released a standalone research app with support for three studies, the Apple Heart and Movement Study, the Apple Women's Health Study and the Apple Hearing Study. The app works paired between an Apple Watch and an iPhone. Users must opt into the studies and can leave anytime. The Heart and Movement Study is being done with the American Heart Association and Brigham and Women's Hospital. The Women's Health Study is done with Harvard and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Hearing Study was co-developed with the University of Michigan. All right, let's talk about bundles, Justin. Indeed, Tom. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and Jerry Smith report that their sources say Apple is considering a services bundle that could be available as early as 2020. It would include News Plus, Apple TV Plus and Apple Music. Apple reportedly included a provision in deals with News Plus publishers that would allow them to bundle the subscription with other services. Currently, publications get about half of the $10 a month that News Plus subscription costs, which might be lowered in a services bundle. Oh, how Apple of you, Apple. My first reaction to this was, okay, this is how you start to build up your services revenue, right? You're giving away Apple TV Plus, but if you can say, hey, but wouldn't you like a bundle? You can get Apple Music, Apple TV Plus and News, then you start to bring in some revenues. So super smart in that respect. The second thing I thought was this could actually raise revenue for News Plus partners because even though they get less of the share of a bundle, suddenly a bunch of people who don't want to pay $10 just for News Plus will be giving some money to News Plus because they want the bundle. Yeah. I mean, it's the bundle itself is like, well, I get a lot of stuff. It's cable subscriptions all over again, right? Well, I don't really want all these channels, but this is a pretty good price for all of these channels. So yeah, I think that in a roundabout way, the news publications actually do end up winning potentially. Well, all right. So here's the deal. News Plus isn't good right now. It doesn't have what people want the most and that is a skeleton key for newspaper paywalls every time or various site paywalls that every time you get that, oh, the flashes and then all of a sudden it goes away. That is very frustrating. The market really wants an easy and simple way that you can get through those. And for Apple to be that service, it needs numbers. What they want is to have a gigantic number associated with News Plus. So at a point where maybe these subscriptions and the paywalls are slowing down, maybe after 2020 when the politics would drive so much of these subscriptions, the places like the New York Times and the Washington Post, they start to recede. Apple can then gallop up on their white horse and say, all right, you didn't want to get in on the ground floor. That's fine. But now that we have this number of people that are on this gigantic bundle and you can now count on a much larger pile of money, are you willing to give up your sole control of the paywall? Because right now, both the Post and the Times, and those would be the two biggest, are very hesitant to go near it because they don't want to lose control of their list and the amount of money they bring in. Yeah, I don't know that this really changes that for those big publishers. Until you get a huge mass of people in the door, I don't know that you have pressure to bear on the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It's similar to what you see with Netflix saying we don't even want to integrate with the Apple TV app because we want to own that much of the relationship with our users. And they're big enough to be able to do that to say people will open the Netflix app. We're not worried about that. We're not worried about discoveries. So I don't know that this changes that, but it could bring in a big enough net that maybe it gives Apple News a chance to grow big enough. I still think that's a stretch, but this is the first time I've looked at Apple News Plus as having a future. Let's put it that way. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's a numbers game. You need to have a gigantic amount of people that you can say, all right, well, this is not us taking away. This is us adding to, you know, your readability and to your legitimacy. And also it's like they have to make a deal where both the post and the times see a value in dealing with them. And right now they don't. Bundling is the future of Apple services. I would expect to see more than just this bundle being considered, but bundles that include iCloud that include software and more. Keep a look out for that. Well, this might excite some of you. Motorola announced a new foldable Razer phone that unfolds into a 6.2 inch 2142 by 7876 OLED display. When folded, there's a 2.7 inch 800 by 600 quick view display with music controls, a clock, notifications, selfie mode as well. Inside is a Snapdragon 710 system on a chip, six gigs of RAM, 128 gigs of internal storage, a fingerprint reader, a 16 megapixel rear camera that's usable when the phone is folded, a five megapixel front camera, and a 2510 milliamp battery running Android 9. The phone also comes with a retro razor skin that emulates the T9 keypad, the original and a feature phone like App Launcher for people who, you know, like to live in the past. It's cool. The phone is available for pre-order on December 26th for 1500 US dollars and shipped sometime in January as a Verizon exclusive in the US. Clever launch date. Get people while they flush with gift certificate money from Christmas. Only 90s kids will understand. I still have my Motorola Razer in a box. It used to be my emergency phone, but I don't even have it for that anymore. It was the first phone that I bought because I wanted it versus, well, I need to replace my phone, right? It was a stylish phone at its time, so I think it will cause some nostalgia. Definitely, that skin is only for nostalgia. No one wants to have to suffer through the T9 keyboard anymore, but that's just a fun thing for them to put on here. And beyond that, I think Justin, I know you and I were talking about this before the show. This may be the best, most understandable use of a foldable OLED screen that I've seen yet. Yeah. I think that obviously there's an element of nostalgia, but, you know, that's a gag gift if it's just there for nostalgia. This, I do think, is it just looks cool. It just looks like the clamshell thing just, you know, makes it, you know, that viable to me. It actually seems like a cooler thing to do with that screen. Well, and at the same time, I mean, it's modern enough that it is a actual foldable phone. We're talking about the viability of foldable phones. Like, who's going to figure it out? The Galaxy Fold? Lots of issues. Razer, not exactly the same, but Motorola was like, hey, we've been working on this too. This is a form factor that I have always liked. I've always liked the idea of putting my phone away kind of thing, you know, and again, dramatically hanging up on people when applicable. But yeah, I mean, 1500 bucks, okay, that's a pretty penny. But it does look nice. Yeah, this is an early adopter phone. And Motorola probably knows it. This is not a highly powered phone that that Snapdragon 7 10 isn't enough. This is not going to be a flagship phone, but they'll get enough people try it that it'll probably allow them to make a second generation that then could be powered fully enough if they can solve those heat and battery issues. And also just having being the first to solve the foldable OLED thing in a success that people like does earn them. Google's cloud based game streaming service Stadia set to launch Monday, November 18th for people who bought the founders edition of the service and Google bravely conducted a Reddit AMA detailing many of the features that will not be there at launch, but will start popping up as soon as one week after launch. Director of product Andre Doronachev explained this as similar to YouTube starting with just watching video. Stadia is starting with play the game on your biggest screen. So with that in mind, here are the features that are missing or coming soon, depending on where you sit. PC Chrome gameplay won't support 4k HDR or 5.1 surround sound. That's coming in 2020. You can play it. You just can't play it at those high levels. Stream Connect, which lets you integrate your viewpoint with another player's stream coming in a game by the end of the year, won't be there at launch. State share, which lets you share your save files with the link coming next year. Crowd play, that's the one that a YouTube viewer could jump in and start playing with you while you're streaming coming in 2020. The assistant button on the Stadia controller really won't do anything until soon after launch, they say. Assistant support on PCs and phones during gameplay sometime else, they didn't really say. Family sharing early next year. Until then, you'll have to have a separate account for everybody in your family. Achievements listing in a UI somewhere that you can see that shortly after launch. So you'll get the achievements. You just won't be able to see the achievements. Chromecast Ultra units that weren't delivered as part of the Founders Edition soon after launch. Remember they're saying Chromecast Ultra is one of the only ways to do a lot of this stuff. Well, it's going to only be the Chromecast Ultra you bought as part of the Founders Edition that will do this at launch. The buddy pass, the chance to kind of give a three month trial to a friend about two weeks after launch, buying a game without using your phone like on the web or while using the Ultra, no date. So you'll have to buy and set up your games on the phone before you play them anywhere else. Mobile support for gameplay beyond the Pixel phones and Chrome OS maybe next year and wireless control on anything but that Chromecast Ultra, which until a couple of weeks after launch will only be the Chromecast Ultra you get in the Founders Edition, you won't be able to use wireless control on anything. And there's no date when that will expand beyond the Chromecast Ultra. A few other surprises, 4K gameplay with 5 points around is now estimated to take 20 gigabytes per hour, not the earlier estimated 15.75 gigabytes an hour. I'm not sure that that makes that much of a difference. If you were able to handle 15, you probably handled 20, but maybe some people were budgeting really close. So how does that make y'all feel about Stadia launching on Monday? I love the AMA excuse of being like, we answered all your questions. You can't just sit there being mad, wondering what's going on, you know everything. That said, there are a lot of things that have yet to be delivered. I don't get so much about this. I don't get why they haven't hunted this beyond 2020 or at least like the official launch beyond 2020. They are piled on for stuff like this. And if this is the stuff that they are saying to get out of the way to avoid being, you know, destroyed for it once they launch, who knows what the stuff that people are going to be mad at once the product launches and they find things that either go wrong or don't behave in the way that users want them to. I'm going to give Google credit here because they are launching something ambitious and that does take time. But holy smokes, do they have such a brand problem when it comes to launching something like this? Yeah, this is a messaging issue. If this was Google Stadia will be launching in beta and you'll be able to play it with a dedicated Chromecast Ultra that you buy from Google as part of a special program and play it on a big screen, people would be like, okay, that's interesting, right? But instead they made a big deal about all the things Stadia could do, didn't tell you a price, didn't tell you anything for a long time. They sort of moved backwards into this announcement. I think that's why you're seeing some people, some people are being angry and critical, but some people I think like you, Justin, are just confused like, well, wait a minute, why did you tell us all this stuff if it's not even there yet? Yeah. And why not bump it? Like, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I get why you want people to start playing it because you want to start testing it at scale. Sure. But it's so, I mean, bumping it is also a messaging thing. Like you want people to start playing it, but you called it the Founders Edition and you made it, you called it a launch. So it's a weird situation to begin. It's Founders Only. Congratulations. We're doing Founders Only starting Monday. Well, and they are. Yeah. Well, I mean, the company, I don't know, internally, there was probably a meeting where they were like, okay, what are the repercussions of us just pushing this thing? And they decided, no, no, no, because that'll make it seem like we really don't know what we're doing. So we're going to go ahead with the launch and just be really, really transparent about all the things that don't work yet. I'll give them that. They are being very transparent about this. Points for that. Yeah. Good luck. The Internet Society has sold the .org registry operator public internet registries to Ethos Capital. On June 30th, I can remove price controls from the .org registry. Ethos Capital is a new private equity firm led by Eric Brooks. You know, Brooks just came over from Abri Partners, which recently hired former ICAN president of global domains, Akram Atala, to run domain name registry Donuts. Donuts co-founder John Nevitt, left after the acquisition to become CEO of the public internet registry. Former ICAN senior vice president, Abastuza Yuri, is also at Ethos Capital. So two ICAN people left to go to other companies involved in this merry-go-round after they made it so that you can charge whatever you want for .org. Nevitt saying, we're not going to go crazy. But before they announced the sale, they said, we're not going to raise the rates. Now, Nevitt's saying, come on, we're going to be reasonable about that stuff. So I expect .org to go up. Maybe not buy as much as people are afraid of, but I wouldn't be shocked to see a price rise here. Seems like a bit of dirty pool, though. Possibly. Well, somebody who mispronounces things regularly, Google might have something that would work for me is launching a search feature that lets you test how good your pronunciation is. When you search for how to pronounce something, you'll get the usual visual pronunciation guide, play button to hear an example, that's already there. But you'll also now get a practice button that lets you speak the word into your mic. Then Google will kind of let you know how you're doing. It'll use an algorithm to analyze how well your pronunciation matched, what it expected you would say, and then give you syllable by syllable guidance. The feature is experimental, launching only on mobile for now. They work for American English, but will launch on Spanish soon. I feel like this is most useful for someone learning American English or eventually Spanish or whatever language they add it to. And eventually any language, right? Because right now it's a limited number of words too. I put in some place names and stuff and it was like, yeah, we don't know. I put in Xiaomi. It's like, that's not an English word. So it's not going to help you pronounce a lot of odd things, which would be more helpful to me. But if you're like, I just don't know how to speak this language and I want to know how to properly pronounce things, I think this is incredibly helpful. I wonder what the proper pronunciation is for data harvesting. Well, go on to mobile and type in how to pronounce data harvesting. And you'll then harvest your recording. And your app will crash. Yeah, this is definitely being used to train the AI. I would be shocked and I think it would be irresponsible if it wasn't. And I'm sure they're transparent about that someplace. But you are giving your voice recording to Google when you do this. And I eagerly anticipate the story that blows the lid off what Google is doing when you pronounce something to search. I mean, as somebody, you know, I dabble in learning other languages, French being kind of my current one. And I do things wrong all the time. This is something that will come in handy for sure. Yeah, you know, the collecting data, you have to either figure out if it's worth it for you. But if this works as advertised, it would be something that I would use. Yeah, put it this way. The word you searched on to figure out how to pronounce, you already gave that data to Google when you searched. So it's not like they're getting much more data other than you saying the word, which is probably only useful for helping train the AI on pronunciations. Yeah. And look, Google voice services is has been awesome. Like they are they are among the leaders in this kind of stuff for a reason, and they're going to get even better one syllable at a time. Well, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, go on and subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Do it now. RCS stands for Rich Communication Service. It is a successor to SMS, short messaging service. RCS supports things like read receipts, typing indicators, improved group chats, high quality images. It does not support end to end encryption. You may say, well, wait a minute, services like Signal and iMessage and WhatsApp, they offer all those things and a couple of those do end to end encryption. But those messaging apps run their own system, sometimes with a certain amount of integration with SMS, but sometimes not. They are not RCS. RCS relies on a technical standard called the universal profile. The standard defines a way to tell other phones that it can send and receive RCS. That's why SMS is different, because you don't have to have an app from somebody to use it. Well, now you're going to need an app from somebody to use RCS on your phone. Mobile carriers in the United States don't yet mostly offer RCS. Some infuriatingly offer a thing they call RCS, which isn't universal profile, and that's confusing and annoying. But Google is making an RCS chat as Android's primary texting platform in the United States. It's already available in the UK and France, but in the United States, if you're using Android messages on Android, which means you have to download it if your phone provider didn't give it to you, but like a Pixel phone definitely comes with it, most phones do, then you're able to use RCS, which means anybody else using Android messages will be able to do all of those things like type indicators and sending images and all of that sort of thing. Now, complicating this is the fact that Samsung's messaging app supports RCS, but only from carriers, not from Google. So if you're on Samsung, you're going to have to decide, do I want to wait for the carriers to get their act together or do I want to switch to Android messages, which means you have to go in the Play Store and download it, because Samsung wants you to use theirs. Google is running its own RCS servers with universal profile support. That's why they're able to do this. US carriers, we mentioned this recently on DTNS, have formed something called the cross-carrier messaging initiatives to support universal profile and RCS with a new app coming in 2020. Google is not part of this cross-carrying message initiative, but they should interact with it because it's the RCS standard. There are ways it could go wrong, but if all is done by the standard, your Android messages RCS should interact with all the cross-carrier messaging initiatives. So then your Samsung and Android messages would work together, but that's not here yet. In fact, they're just starting to build it. Thursday, the carriers announced that Synchronos Technologies and WIT software have been chosen as the companies to build the RCS network and app in the United States. These two companies have experience. They built Japan's RCS network, which launched way back in 2018. An Android app for CCMI for the carriers initiative is coming in 2020 with something promised for iOS. We don't know if it's an app or whether they're going to get integrated into iMessages somehow, but that's coming sometime later. So the reason I wanted to go into this is you're going to see like, oh, Android got RCS, Android got rich communication services, Android got typing indicators, but it's only going to be for other people using Android messages for a while, and then eventually the carriers will implement it, and hopefully it will work across those platforms, including with the Samsung Messenger, but it won't work with iOS until either Apple integrates it into Messages or this iOS thing that CCMI is creating comes to fruition. Man! Standards, am I right? Well, SMS, I mean, people are, you know, you're not old enough to remember most people, but SMS was kind of like this at the beginning too, right? You had to get all the carriers on board before it was used, and I remember in 2000, all the Europeans were like, what? You don't use SMS? We're like, no, I use Yahoo! Instant Messenger. Like, oh, but you get SMS in your phone. It's like, man, we don't, it's not really popular here, or if we have it, it's super expensive. It's not probably going to be super expensive for RCS, which is why the carriers want to make their own app, because they're going to figure out some other way to monetize you. In Japan, RCS is used for money transfers. So that would be an easy way I could see the carriers used to make some money off this. Yeah. Obviously, these things happen because big players make moves, and then other big players are forced to either catch up or adapt. So I am glad to see that there are, there is momentum here, because ultimately the value of something like RCS is what, it is the palette by which people can paint on top of and create new services and ways to communicate with each other. So the fun thing to do today if you have an Android phone is go into Android Messages, make sure it's updated, and then try to find a friend who also has an Android phone and has updated their Android Messages and look and see if they've got blue next to them, and then you can take advantage of some RCS. Oh, everybody had the blue text team platform. Perhaps. I don't think everybody who participates in our subreddit, whether you're an Android or an iOS or any other kind of user, we want your story submitted. Submit your own and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Also join in the conversation in our discord, which you can join by linking to your Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's check out the mailbag. Got a really good one from Kyle, who manages an IT department for a K-12 school. He says, it's chilly in New Jersey, that's where Kyle works. And he had some thoughts on Phil Schiller's comments yesterday that we talked about, about Chromebooks, Chromebooks being, you know, not that great. Kyle says, when looking into going one to one, meaning, you know, one device to one child, we saw Chromebooks as a mechanism that allowed the kids to more easily type essays and homework without the need of an add-on keyboard. Management was also a strong point for Chromebooks as well. It's all part of our existing G Suite for education, implementation, and all in the cloud. Apple's iPad management tool, profile manager is, in Kyle's IMHO, in his humble opinion, hot garbage, and fails on us at least two to three times per school year. Kyle says, most importantly, though, cost absolutely matters. The lower cost of Chromebooks means it's easier to replace when accidentally broken. We can get more devices in the hands of more students. And it means even with budget cuts year after year, we can still get new Chromebooks in the hands of incoming students. Finally, if you're using Chromebooks, if all you're using Chromebooks for is mandatory testing, you're using it wrong, Phil Schuller. Kyle finishes by saying thanks for the hard work. Love the show. Listen to it every morning on my way to work, which is a school. Thank you, Kyle. I love getting boots on the ground reports like that. Really appreciate sharing your insight with us. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Steve, Ida Darula, Mark Gibson, and Dr. Carmine M. Bailey. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young for being with us this fine Thursday. Justin, what's been going on in your world? Well, obviously a lot going on in the world of politics, which is why I would suggest that you sign up for my newsletter, free political newsletter at freepoliticalnewsletter.com. And I've been making the rounds on all the shows that I guest on. If you've not listened to the PX3 show in a few months, I would encourage you to give it a listen again. Not only because there's a lot of news, obviously we are heading into the 2020 race. Impeachment hearings are ongoing in public, but also the format's changed. And I think that if it's something that you gave a shot, but it wasn't quite your bag, you might like it now. So go ahead and check it out. Politics, politics, politics, wherever you find fine podcasts like this one. I rely on it to fill in kind of the sense of what's going on in the political world. It is essential to me understanding the gestalt. So thank you for doing it. And thank you all for supporting us. If you're listening to this on the public feed, sometimes you may have noticed there's an ad at the beginning. You can get rid of that. Just become a member, patreon.com.slashdtns. Only cost you like a dime a show and then no ads and get some other perks as well, including some bonus shows and things like that. In fact, right now if you sign up, we will send you a greeting card, a holiday card in December as a thank you for signing up. And it's got original artwork from Len Peralta on it. All you have to do is become a member or stay a member by November 28th at patreon.com.slashdtns. And if you have feedback for us, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is the email address to use. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2130 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com.slashdtns. Back tomorrow talking with Robert Herron. See you then.